Read The Dinner for Free Online

stick-in-the-mud, someone with all the charisma of a sheet of cardboard, suddenly turns out to cook splendid French meals at home in his free time; the next weekend supplement of the national newspaper features him in full colour on the cover, his knitted oven mitts holding up a casserole filled with Provençal meat loaf . The most striking thing about the stick-in-the-mud, besides his apron with a reproduction of a Toulouse-Lautrec poster, is his completely implausible smile, meant to convey to his constituency the joy of cooking. Not so much a smile, really, as a fearful baring of the teeth, the sort of smile you wear when you’ve just been rear-ended and have lived to tell the tale, and which above all communicates relief at the simple fact that the Provençal meat loaf has not burned to a crisp in the oven.
    What exactly had Serge been thinking when he chose wine as his particular hobby? I’d have to ask him sometime. Maybe this evening. I made a mental note; this wasn’t the right moment, but the night was young.
    When we were still living at home all he ever drank was cola, huge amounts of it; he had no problem knocking back an entire king-size bottle at dinnertime. Then he would produce these gigantic belches, for which he was sometimes sent to his room, belches that lasted ten seconds or longer – like subterranean thunder rolling up and exploding from somewhere deep down in his stomach – and for which he enjoyed a certain schoolyard fame: among the boys, that is, for he knew even then that girls were only repulsed by burps and farts.
    The next step had been the conversion of what was formerly a messy walk-in closet into a wine cellar. He bought racks to stack the bottles in, to let the wine age, as he put it. When guests came to dinner he began to deliver lectures about the wine being served. Babette viewed it all with a kind of bemusement; perhaps she was the first to see through him, the first not to completely believe in him and his hobby. I remember calling to talk to Serge one afternoon and getting Babette on the line. Serge wasn’t there.
    ‘He’s tasting wine in the Loire Valley,’ she said: there was something in her voice, something about the way she said ‘tasting wine’ and ‘Loire Valley’ – the tone a woman uses when she says her husband is working late, even though she’s known for a year that he’s having an affair with his secretary.
    Claire, as I noted earlier, is smarter than I am. But she doesn’t blame me for not being her equal. What I mean to say is that she never looks down her nose at me, she doesn’t sigh deeply or roll her eyes when I don’t get something right away. Obviously I have no way of knowing how she talks about me when I’m not around, but I’m very sure, I have absolute faith in the fact, that Claire would never adopt the tone I detected in Babette’s voice when she said: ‘He’s tasting wine in the Loire Valley.’
    Babette, in other words, is also much smarter than Serge. That’s not saying a hell of a lot, I might add – but I won’t: some things speak for themselves. All I want to talk about here are the things I heard and saw during our little get-together at the restaurant.

 
9
     
    ‘The lamb’s-neck sweetbread has been marinated in Sardinian olive oil with rocket,’ said the manager, who had by now arrived at Claire’s plate and was pointing with his pinkie at two minuscule pieces of meat. ‘The sun-dried tomatoes come from Bulgaria.’
    The first thing that struck you about Claire’s plate was its vast emptiness. Of course I’m well aware that, in the better restaurants, quality takes precedence over quantity, but there are voids and then there are voids. The void here, that part of the plate on which no food at all was present, had clearly been raised to a matter of principle.
    It was as though the empty plate was challenging you to say something about it, to go to the open kitchen and demand an explanation. ‘You wouldn’t even