“I ate this…as a child. When I came here, I would insist on eating this all the time,” he said. “When there was a good day at the shop. Or a bad day. Or an average day. My dad would just say, ‘Everyone to Salvatore’s,’ and we would take the table there”—he pointed to the largest table, which was by the fireplace and had mismatched rickety chairs—“or if it was hot, on the terrace…” He broke off. “Hey, Salvatore. Do you still have the terrace?”
“Would you like to move?”
“Of course, it’s terribly hot in here, isn’t it?”
Salvatore shrugged—he had obviously lived in this environment all his life—but he lifted the plates and Marina grabbed the glasses before we had a chance to help her, and they disappeared through a tiny door at the side I hadn’t noticed before. We followed. I could feel the pain in my toes as we ascended a tiny spiraling staircase three levels above the restaurant, past what was clearly their private apartment. Eventually we came to another door and popped out of the old building like corks.
It was bigger than my little sliver of balcony and completely different. Here, the buildings, so old, bulged over the side of the island and over the water, so it felt as though we were curving over. Marina had brought a candle, which she put in the middle of the solitary table, and fairy lights decorated the balcony edge, but there was no other light, just the swiftly flowing darkness of the river and the blaze of brightness from the Left Bank that felt completely disconnected from us, far away, a different world from the ancient rocks of our old walls. Ivy had been roughly trimmed from the side, which gave the building an added feeling of being a fairytale. And it would, I thought grimly, have been a fairytale, if I wasn’t feeling so absolutely rotten about everything.
Salvatore and Marina, with some giggling, left us the bottle of wine and vanished. It was oddly quiet up there, away from the everyday noises of Paris enjoying itself in the summertime. Laurent ignored me for at least five minutes as he plunged his face into his meal, eating at a startling rate, with a huge appetite and evident pleasure. I waited a moment, then, seeing as he was never going to notice me, started in.
I wouldn’t have admitted it under torture, but I’d never eaten risotto before. I’d had a Pot Rice, but clearly that wasn’t the same thing at all. I think if I’d mentioned it at home, my mum and dad would have stared at me, and Dad would have said, “Aye, maybe we should try that,” and Mum would have said, “Oh, no, it will be too difficult, I’d get it wrong, it’s a bit foreign for me, love,” and put on a fish finger sandwich quickly before I asked again. And I could cook a little bit—I could make a roast, and a pie, but this would never have occurred to me. And I knew, the second I had had my first bite, that I would never learn to make risotto; that it would be completely and utterly pointless because it would really require being born into a family who did little else; to spend years learning every fine detail between the different subtle balances of wine and aged parmesan and melting translucent onions and mushrooms precooked in a huge furnace with stone floors and walls so they came out perfectly sealed and slightly crisp and absolutely the most meltingly flavorsome mushrooms I’d ever had, and in fact, as I would learn later, they would be picked fresh and wild in the fields around Versailles by your own extended family every week near fine grass grazed by the finest of organic cows and an original medieval forest, so in fact you didn’t have the faintest chance of even getting your hands on them.
Tasting that exquisite, extraordinary risotto made me understand, understand properly for the first time what Frédéric and Laurent and Thierry felt about their chocolate. That there was a right way and a wrong way and that was that. As the first risotto I had ever tasted, it seemed very unlikely that I would ever taste another that could approach its perfection; that I could work half the rest of my life simply trying to approach it. As someone who had worked for eleven years at Braders Family Chocolates, my palate had gotten used to the substandard. But now, at last, I understood.
“Oh,” I said, after a few mouthfuls. Laurent’s plate was already clear. “How can you eat it like that?” I said crossly. “It’s all gone!”
“I know,” said Laurent, looking regretfully at his empty plate. “I just couldn’t help myself. God, I missed it.” He glanced at mine.
“Don’t think it,” I ordered. “I am going to eat every bite and savor every bite and then I am going to lick the plate. And then I am going to lick the plate again.”
He grinned suddenly, wolfishly, and topped up our glasses.
“You like it?”
“I think it’s the nicest thing I’ve ever put in my mouth.”
His eyebrows went up at that, but I didn’t care. I knew what I was to him, so I could ignore him. I could concentrate, from now on, on enjoying what coming back to life had also bought me. Recovering in Kidinsborough, I had eaten my food spicier and spicier, desperately trying to awaken my taste buds into caring about something—anything. There was no new flavor of chips so stupid that I wouldn’t give them a whirl. As a strategy, I now realized, it had been a real failure, adding only inches to my waistline and a sense of slight stupefaction.
I mopped up the juice with some of the wonderful bread set in a tiny basket in front of us. I could barely see what I was eating in the candlelight. A bateau mouche passed below us, and I saw the flashes from cameras going off, taking pictures of the cathedral that would come out, I suspected, a bit blurry and disappointing.
I looked up to see him staring at me.
“What?”
“Nothing,” he said.
“You’re not having any.”
“It’s not that…it’s just… It’s nice to see a girl eat. I don’t know any girls who eat.”
I chose not to answer that with “because I bet you go out with really scrawny French girls who are all bendy and in the circus and stuff,” but instead wiped my face with a napkin. I’d obviously missed a bit; he took the napkin from my hand and rubbed away on the other side of my mouth, looking at me intently.
“I like girls who are hungry,” he said.
I looked out over the water. In any other circumstances, I thought, this would be so sexy. And in fact, there was a bit of me thought he probably would. He looked tired, and I knew he was sad over his father; he probably would have let me take him home.