Chapter Two

BEAUNE AND THE LUBERON

Soon after I arrived in Beaune, after the stay at Rue du Lac, it became clear that great food and great companionship wouldn’t always present themselves so easily. For the better part of a week, I had cooked the kind of fancy-ass recipes prepared in the most celebrated European kitchens. I’d had my hand held, my head patted, and my stomach filled by a man who was amused by my glaring lack of finesse. Robert Ash, to his credit, loved the whole absurdity of teaching a dilettante how to cook. He insisted that it gave him great satisfaction, although it was no different, I suppose, from training a dog to fetch. In any case, his pleasure seemed genuine. And when he dropped me off at the train station in Mâcon, there was a look of triumph in his eyes.

There would be no such fuzzy reception in Beaune, the capital of the Côte D’Or wine region in Burgundy. A friend from Louis Jadot, the great wine negociant, arranged for me to have a stage with the chef at Jardin des Remparts, but when I arrived at his door, he fixed me with a ferocious stare and demanded to know where I had cooked.

“Well,” I said, smiling feebly, in a manner meant to disarm while appealing to his dormant generous instinct, “just my own kitchen, really.”

He stood blocking the entrance to the restaurant, pretending not to understand a word of my broken French. His eyes were squinched into obscure crescents, very dark and stony under the pleated toque.

“I’ve come to learn,” I said, making a kind of idiotic whisking gesture. Just in case he’d forgotten, I mentioned our mutual friend from Jadot.

At the reference, an eyebrow shot skyward. Ah, yes, it seemed to say, I must have a word with that…friend.

He bent very close to my face and lowered his voice to a near-whisper: “Just in case you were unaware, M’sieur, this happens to be a fine-dining establishment. The day-care center is somewhere on the other side of town.”

Back at my hotel, I struggled to salvage the situation, working the phone in a last-ditch attempt to locate a more agreeable sponsor. One of the directors at Jadot knew of a restaurant on Place Malmedin that he was certain would cooperate on such short notice. “The chef is an artist,” he said, “but I must warn you that he is crazy.”

As it turned out, I would only have the opportunity to substantiate half of that assertion. The chef, a bearish, cleaver-wielding man right out of Central Casting whom I was prepared to adore, chased me halfway up the street, screaming, “I will have no fucking American anywhere near my kitchen!”

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the quick glint of his blade, somewhere just above my shoulder, and without hesitation I turned on the gas. Luckily for me, the French smoke like fiends, so he eventually gave up after hurling a few choice expletives my way.

The source of his anger was disturbing, and his fury was even more so. The fact that I was a novice and had no business being in his kitchen went without saying, but the anti-American business was an issue I hadn’t anticipated. I was still living under the post–9/11 conception, however fleeting, that everyone in the world wanted to be an American. You have to wonder how I could have been so foolish. Six months earlier, the right-wing faction in Congress had blamed the French for not joining in the Iraq madness and decided that from then on, French fries should be known as freedom fries. (We’ll show those French!) To make matters worse, they convinced their half-witted sympathizers to pour vintage Bordeaux down the toilet—and, just in case no one noticed, the press obliged by photographing the folly. This coincided with a campaign to discourage Americans from vacationing in France, while Bush and his merry band of flamethrowers never missed an opportunity to disparage French culture. Why didn’t we just bomb Paris while we were at it?

Nothing had prepared me for the backlash. Everywhere I went, a cloud of estrangement hung in the atmosphere. The French usually were good enough not to raise the issue, but you could see shadows of it in their expressions. One thing was clear: Anyone who stood in the way of the brash American bully did so at a grave price. My experience in Beaune certainly underscored the estrangement.

Instead of bolting for friendlier territory, I spent the night in Beaune, determined to visit the Saturday-morning market, which was famously bountiful. There my love of air-cured sausage would be consummated. My plan was to wander along Place Carnot from stall to stall, tasting the paper-thin tranches of fennel, cèpe, duck, thyme, wine, or blood sausage, each studded with knots of fat that melted on the tongue. Despite a spike to my already lofty cholesterol, I wanted to try them all. The only drawback was the market’s brief duration. “It is open from seven until eleven,” advised a receptionist at my hotel, “but get there before nine, when the tourists invade, otherwise everything…” She kissed her fingers and snapped them in the air.

It had been almost twenty years since my last visit, but the moment I set foot inside the ramparts, I knew exactly where I was. Beaune is that type of intimate town, every street pulling you farther into its embrace. There are no boulevards, no skid rows or Chinatowns. The walls that rim the old medieval quarter seem to guard against the times.

Visitors are seduced by the town’s enviable debt to the past. The uneven streets and doorways are full of history. The buildings lean against each other like disabled war heroes. At any moment, I expected to see musketeers with swords drawn bolting around a cobblestone corner and up one of the dim passageways that reach like tentacles through the quartier. Unfortunately, there are crowds and everyone has discovered the Nike brand. When Napoleon promised to drive the enemy beyond the frontier, he forgot this sorry sect. It is a shame there are no ordinances against those sneakers and nylon sweat suits that pour off the tour buses in a cloud of Obsession.

To their credit, all head straight to an eminently noble attraction. Unlike other whistlestops on the Côte d’Or, Beaune wasn’t built around a single church. The focal point, just off the corner of Place de la Halle, is the awesome Hôtel-Dieu, which sits in a square facing the town’s tourist center. The building, better known as the Hospice de Beaune, was founded in 1443 by Nicolas Rolin, chancellor to the duke of Burgundy, who viewed it as his ticket into heaven. If first impressions were enough, it would be easy to defend his gift of this charitable hospital complex. But generosity wasn’t one of Rolin’s virtues. He was a despot by trade, the kind of consummate villain France does so well, and the hospice was his hair shirt. Built as the last earthly stop for Beaune’s desperate poor, it catered specifically to those whose land Rolin helped pillage after the Hundred Years’ War. Even Louis XI couldn’t hold his tongue upon hearing of the project, saying, “It was only fair that a man who made so many people poor during his life should create an asylum for them before his death.”

Evilness aside, it doesn’t diminish the terrible beauty of this architectural masterpiece. I sat in a café across the square, mesmerized by the immense arched timber roof on which a plague of pigeons sunbathed. There was nothing modest about its magnificent design. The signature of local artisans is registered by a play of intersecting diamond-shaped tiles painted in green, black, brown, and gold that shimmer like jewels in the Mediterranean sun.

“Someone had their petit blanc dosed with acid when that roof went up,” said a woman sipping wine at the table across from me.

She was squinting up at the kaleidoscopic pattern, sunstruck, shading her forehead from the glare, and when she eventually glanced my way, the color of her eyes startled me. They were an astonishing pale gray streaked with green, as though they were the handiwork of a Flemish portrait artist. Framed by a mane of dark-brown gypsy hair, they gave off an eerie effect. She milked it, too: staring, smiling, smoking, serene.

“You have to wonder what they were thinking,” I said, trying hard not to look away.

“It’s an age-old story. Some guy at the local lumberyard suckered a contractor into taking a load of tiles off his hands.”

“Hot off a boat from Mesopotamia,” I said. “Except I don’t think boats went to Mesopotamia.”

Her eyes smiled at me as if they were powered by a hidden generator. “Actually, Mesopotamia was on the Dardanelles,” she said, turning up the juice.

My luck, Olivia was a teacher from Illinois—a history teacher, to be exact—with more than a little knowledge of the Ottoman Empire. One of her great-uncles had even died at Gallipoli. With the summer off and her two kids in camp, she was weathering a recent divorce by hopscotching around Europe. A friend had joined her for most of the trip, but she was traveling solo for the final two weeks. In fact, she had just driven to Beaune from Rouen, which was a very long way off. “It was pretty bleak, but the time alone was essential,” she said. “I’m just trying to figure out what the future holds.”

It was a familiar refrain. There seemed to be hundreds of Americans all over this continent trying to resolve the same thing. Everywhere I went, there were attractive, middle-aged people either strolling or sitting alone in cafés with the weight of preoccupation on their faces. You could easily spot the ones getting over a broken relationship. They had pumped themselves up to expect an exhilarating recovery and had to work especially hard to hide the loneliness and alienation. No matter how they persevered, it was always a letdown. One night alone brought everything home to roost.

Of course, in some small way I was guilty of this myself. Just a few years earlier, I had been content, steady-on, untouched by upheaval. No one prepared me for a change to the arrangement—to the extent that, at forty or forty-five or fifty, I’d still be trying to figure out what the future held. Relocating myself. It seemed inconceivable that I’d wake up one day, in my fifties, to discover that things hadn’t gone according to plan. Now, suddenly, here I was, alone in Europe, giving the once-over to an attractive stranger in the same leaky lifeboat.

I couldn’t help but wonder what that said about us as a race.

“Only that we’re human,” Olivia said, over a salad of sliced smoked magret studded with duck sausage and a tomato concassé. We had gravitated to dinner at La Cibollette, a little storefront bistro on the Rue de Lorraine, in the shadow of what a neighborhood woman described as “our own little Arc de Triomphe.” “And that,” Olivia continued, “unlike penguins, we don’t mate for life.”

That may be so, I thought, but there was fallout from such behavior. There were consequences only now becoming apparent to me.

The restaurant was quaint in a way that seemed forced and unnatural. The two small rooms were given a provincial polish: white plastered walls, a selection of mismatched antiques, and low-slung ancient rafters that came from a building much older than this one. The wooden floor was heavily distressed, or, rather, made to look that way by a zealous decorator. Otherwise, as far as I could tell, the place was a family affair; the father cooked and his wife took orders, while their daughter served and bused an extremely restless full house.

The tiny kitchen seemed to be working way over its head. We shared plates of the daily Burgundian specials recommended by the girl—some pan-roasted sweetbreads and slabs of seared quail marinated in a tart balsamic glaze—followed by the chef’s way of preparing Bresse chicken stewed in a grainy mustard sauce, which came in a big clay casserole and drew the kind of stares models get at a swimsuit competition. It was everything chicken should be, substantial and richly flavored but straightforward, without any pretension. And when the chef sent out a potato gratin blistered by bacon fat and reeking of rosemary and garlic, it was hard to argue with his process.

It felt good to eat a well-made meal that I hadn’t prepared. The same could be said about the company of a woman for whom I felt a strong physical attraction. Olivia was smart, delightfully witty, and very much on the make: a hothouse flower. The sexual aspect of that equation led us directly back to her hotel, where we played a scene right out of the Single Lover’s Playbook.

All the time, walking back, we had been rehearsing our lines. We talked politely about our itineraries and the difficulty of shipping wine back to the States and how it might be fun to meet up in Nice later in the summer. But eventually we found ourselves facing each other, sighing awkwardly, followed by the requisite searching stares. My heart was beating like a kettledrum. This was awkward for me. I had been a devoted family man—a devoted husband—with no designs on other women, much less dating again. I was a mess. Olivia’s next line, on cue, would be the dependable: “Would you like to come up?” But as we lingered by the front door, a slow artificial smile creased the corners of her mouth.

“Nothing is going to happen tonight, is it?” Olivia asked.

I shook my head sadly. “No, I’m afraid it’s not,” I admitted.

“I thought so. The realization occurred to me over coffee.” She looked down at the room key that dangled in her hand. “You’re in love, aren’t you?”

“Yes, I am,” I said, wondering if a smile would be too much. “Chances are that it’s a one-way proposition, but as long as I’ve come this far with it, I intend to see if it can work.”

“Perhaps all you need is a better offer,” she said suggestively. “A night off might give you some clarity.”

“Clarity would be good, if I didn’t feel so much like Mickey Mouse,” I said, watching confusion cloud her splendid smile. We stopped talking and sidestepped the doorway to allow another couple room to enter. When they had passed, I leaned a hand against the wall and continued. “When I was a kid, there was a famous cartoon in which Mickey was faced with an ethical dilemma. I don’t remember exactly what it was, but in any case, an angelic Goofy popped up over his shoulder, reminding Mickey to do the right thing. Then a moment later, he popped up over Mickey’s other shoulder, only this time he had horns and was carrying a trident. ‘Go on,’ he’d say, ‘take her upstairs. What are you waiting for, you chump?’”

Olivia nodded, laughing. “I actually remember that one.” She folded her arms across her chest; in the process, a hand casually brushed against mine and, momentarily flushed, I pulled away. “So which Goofy shows up here tonight?”

“The virtuous one, I’m afraid.” I put a hand out, which felt strange. “This has been a lovely evening. You were great company.”

I walked listlessly back to my hotel, neither satisfied nor disappointed. The sky was awash in glossy light, giving me no cover. On both sides of the street, the café terraces were full of loud, ebullient tourists who scarcely glanced my way. I felt profoundly alone. The electricity between Olivia and me had been real, and I had no doubt that a night with her would have been memorable, free of all the tensions that exist between longtime lovers. But in a way, I was relieved by the outcome. Desire was thrilling, as anyone knows, but it could be conquered. For inspiration, I pounced on the computer for a message from Carolyn, but none was waiting for me. An automated email, however, alerted me that her plane was in the air.

The next morning, I hit the market early, as the vendors were still unpacking their carts. It was exactly as I had heard: an embarrassment of sausage intermingled with freshly farmed vegetables and the usual African leather bazaar. I was in heaven. Everywhere I looked, there were lengths of gnarled, air-cured saucissons hanging from hooks. The taste of sausage, for me, was still a little exotic. When I was growing up, my mother had kept a kosher house, which meant that pork and all its derivatives were banned from our mouths. Of course, once I left for college everything changed. Tasting cassoulet was similar to discovering the Catholic nursing school; every sinful impulse in my body came rushing to the surface. I couldn’t keep my hands off porchetta stuffed with thyme and softened garlic. My pizzas got buried under mountains of sweet fennel sausage. I especially craved the saucisson de ménage, coarsely ground, hand-chopped pork, loaded with diced fatback and whole peppercorns, and often seasoned with brandy. If I could have figured out a way to eat it with Rice Krispies, I wouldn’t have wasted a moment deliberating. Friends said I was making up for lost time, and perhaps they were right, but by mid-morning in Beaune, I was suffering from a serious sausage overdose.

I laid the blame squarely on a swarthy, hatchet-faced man in overalls pressing samples of his sausages on anyone who gave him a second look. He was working the crowd exuberantly, like a used-furniture salesman, finishing with one customer while reeling in two others. By my third time at the bar, he recognized me for the freeloader I was. Slicing open a new block of duck sausage, he skipped me when offering a taste. I was going to have to buy something in order to remain in the loop.

“Je voudrais…,” I hesitated, uncertain what to select.

He sashayed over and got right into my face. “Votre choix, M’sieur?” Staring menacingly at me, he pointed the tip of his knife blade somewhere south of my belt, where a variety of sausages lounged on a wooden board.

Wordlessly, I pointed to the rosette, the no-frills crude sausage favored by the local peasantry, and I could tell by his eyes that he was pleased. It was like someone ordering a drink at a serious coffee roaster’s shop and passing over the hazelnut and cappuccino for a cup of the house blend: “Just black.” A minuscule piece of the rosette was very dear—twelve euros. I quickly bought a baguette and a nectarine and sat on a nearby bench devouring my swag.

I ate like an indulgent child. The meat, as I had expected, was anything but crude. It was simple and savory, exactly what I’d craved. But after a while, it got to a point where I couldn’t put another bite in my mouth. The pork was ridiculously rich, but there was something else, something incidental to sausage affecting my appetite.

Absentmindedly, I gazed at the cobblestone square across the way, suspended in ancient history, just as the gods had left it. Figures, formless, moved in and out of the frame. It took a few minutes until I brought it into focus. Olivia was seated in the café, wearing a lime green sweater over black leggings, her face turned into the sun. She was pointing at the roof of the Hospice de Beaune. Her other hand slid across the table to where a man with shallow eyes sat smoking a meerschaum pipe. I could almost read her lips, painted today a soft shade of plum, looking varnished, as if rubbed with lip gloss. Someone had their petit blanc dosed with acid when that roof went up, they seemed to be saying.

I knew the rest of the script almost by heart.

An invitation to the cooking school in Maussane came through my friend Julie in St.-Rémy, who knew a woman who gave semiprivate classes in her own kitchen. Madame’s reputation was that of a grumpy virtuoso, a no-nonsense teacher with the warm-and-fuzzy quotient of Imelda Marcos. “She’s not going to give you a big hug or anything,” Julie said, which did not deter me from applying for a place. The opportunity to cook with an expert in a private home in Provence seemed too valuable to pass up.

We’d exchanged a number of emails until she was satisfied I was serious. Later, upon my arrival, I learned that the Internet helped her to weed out undesirables, the ones she regarded as soccer moms and Hausfraus. “I communicate quite a bit with anyone interested in cooking here, to get an idea of who they are,” she told me, “so if I don’t like the feel of them, I simply say I’m fully booked.” Somehow, I managed to slip through her shit-detector. There weren’t any weeklong sessions scheduled that month, but if I showed up on a Sunday, as instructed, there would be time for me to cook with a couple from California arriving later that night. “You are welcome to stay here for a few days,” the woman said, which was extremely gracious. “I have a charming farmhouse in the country that you will find agreeable.”

I already knew that Provençal food agreed with me—la cuisine du soleil, with its emphasis on fresh ingredients such as olives, tomatoes, anchovies, zucchini, and lots, I mean lots, of garlic. I couldn’t wait to wade into the classics: bouillabaisse, brandade, aïoli, daube, tapenade, ratatouille, pissaladière…the lineup was tantalizing.

The drive from Avignon—right into the midday sun—was hair-raising, over the rough, steep Alpilles plotted with enough switchbacks to give a fellow whiplash. Every time I swung around one of those treacherous corners, I said a silent prayer, hoping the law of averages would preserve me from another French lunatic determined to pass on a blind curve. I relied on blind faith and worked the gears like a joystick in a daredevil arcade game.

Up and down I went, keeping to the road’s narrow shoulder, which was the only thing that separated me from a sheer plunge down the slope into the deep canyon. The vegetation was almost like a prairie, covered with bramble and random boulders of limestone that had lodged in the valley floor. You could see the heat rise from between the rocks, which is why the locals referred to it as the Val d’Enfer. On either side, a veiny weave of roads was etched into the parched countryside. It looked empty and forbidding, not at all reminiscent of the light that had inspired Van Gogh.

Off to the right, the ruins of the village of Les Baux clung unsteadily to the jagged sweep of cliff, as pale and illusory as a desert mirage, and beyond it, where the landscape leveled out into terraced rows of grapevines, the first shy glimpse of Maussane peeked through the trees. It acted like a sedative after the nerve-racking trip. I cranked down the car windows until they were flush with the frame, letting the dry breeze air out the fear, and fixed my mind on a few days from now, when I would once more be with Carolyn, in Nice.

Her absence was more profound right now because there was no doubt in my mind that Carolyn would have loved Maussane. It was a dozy little Luberon village about the length of a sigh, with some lovely matchbox shops, a few cafés, and an unerring sense of romance. A row of tall plane trees lined the main drag. Their branches fanned out overhead, forming a thick green shade that gave the town, from one end to the other, a deep, tunnellike appearance. Wisteria hung from trellises above the doorways, and baskets on either side were nested with freshly cut stems of lavender. Their sweetness, combined with the sultry gust of open-door aromas, gave the place its own identifiable scent.

It took more time than I’d expected to make my way through tiny Maussane. On Sundays, after lunch, the street was an obstacle course, forcing my car to a vigilant crawl. Traffic flow, just past the Place Langier de Monblan in the heart of town, was a matter of feet and inches as opposed to blocks, but no one appeared to be in a rush or compelled by the sudden standstill to flip the finger at a fellow sufferer, as I might have done in New York. Every now and then, of course, a cyclist could push motorists to the brink, an epidemic everywhere that summer. They hogged the roads with an infuriating sense that they were somehow entitled to the right of way because of their noble preoccupation. But even in Maussane, they fell victim to the throng of dizzy tourists. Happy drifters tided along the crumbling sidewalks, zigzagging lazily from one gallery to the next in a kind of aimless procession, and at any moment a sightseer, lost in a convenient trance, might wander into traffic as if it would detour obediently around him.

Just when I feared that my cool would give out, the congestion dissolved into a jaw-dropping expanse of vineyards and olive trees interspersed with the occasional villa, and within a few minutes I arrived at the gates to Moulin de P_____.

From where I parked, it was hard to see what kind of place this was. Madame, looking slightly perturbed, greeted me in the driveway as if I were a handyman or some kind of vagrant. Without an ounce of subtlety, she gave me the once-over, pricing my sport coat, sizing up my car, examining my bloated suitcase, all in an effort to place me on her social scale. Her eyes studied my face, which I kept discreetly impersonal. I honestly didn’t know what to make of her. In all fairness, she wasn’t at all what I had expected. She was the kind of handsome woman you see on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, well put together with a high aristocratic polish that took some serious money. If I had to guess, I’d say she was in her late fifties, dressed casually but with considerable flair and conscious of the statement it made, as though she were promoting the new line at Sak’s or Bergdorf’s.

Madame, as I learned, didn’t run a cooking school per se. From time to time, as it so happened, people would write to inquire about taking classes with her, at which point she might invite them to cook with her, for which she charged a fabulous sum. It was a capricious kind of arrangement, scheduled for whenever the situation suited her, otherwise I got the impression that she didn’t cook much at all. She was the eldest daughter of an international coffee tycoon who had moved often around the globe, dragging her through Indonesian rain forests and a succession of French finishing schools. There was always plenty of time to kill in strange institutionalized kitchens, where she watched the action like a spectator on a film set.

“I’m pretty much an instinctive cook,” she said, without a trace of apology, “and the guests have to keep up with me. When I’m ready to go, we’re ready to go. There’s no shuffling of feet, no coffee break, no potty time.” Because of her no-nonsense style, Madame was careful about who enrolled in her classes. Couples were fine, even though husbands usually got bored after a day or two and puttered around the house like zombies. But she absolutely refused to take three single women, because they never could agree on anything.

“Once, I had three housewives from Florida. Two of them bonded, and I came downstairs to find the third crying her eyes out in the laundry room because the others went to dinner and left her here. And I don’t take any children between the ages of six and sixteen. Americans get very comfortable here and go out and leave their kids. It’s okay if you’re running an orphanage, but the next time that happens, I’m putting them up for adoption.”

Everyone who seemed undesirable was referred to Patricia Wells, whose name Madame uttered with cranky disdain. There had been more than a lot of buzz that summer about Wells’s new cooking school with its fancy location, a hilltop retreat outside Vaison-la-Romaine, and well-known instructor. “I mean, the woman doesn’t cook!” Madame cried, her eyes flashing like sparklers. “If anything, she’s a critic and she wasn’t even that when she started writing her columns. Now, she’s got this so-called cooking school that starts at $4,000 a week, and on top of that you have to find your own place to stay.”

On the way to my room, on the second floor at the back of the house, my head kept rotating, trying to take it all in. Somewhere along the way, I had been sold a colossal bill of goods. The “charming farmhouse in the country” was a spectacular 12,000-square-foot old mill, once a badly scarred beauty with enough of its rock-ribbed skeleton intact to suggest onetime grandeur. Madame placed its origin around the late 1600s, and over the years it had languished in frightful disrepair. The agent who sold the place to her thought she’d taken a white elephant off his hands. At the time, the roof was completely caved in, the crumbling walls were useless. No doors or windows remained, and the interior was overrun with wild fig trees and blackberry brambles.

But money—lots of money—had turned it into a veritable palace. No expense had been spared in the house’s miraculous renovation, which had taken more than ten years and an infusion of talent from the best French artisans. The rooms were huge, rather like what you’d expect to see on a Hollywood soundstage; they were filled from top to bottom with museum-quality antiques. Madame’s husband, a poor big-city boy from the Midwest who had made a fortune in Internet technology, was an incorrigible collector who hoarded anything that amused him, like someone afraid of losing his shirt in the next downturn.

“Get a load of this,” he said, steering me toward a glass-paneled bookcase in the dining-room hallway. “We have the entire collection of Michelin guides, dating back to the very first one, including the 1945 paperback wartime edition.” They also had every issue of Gourmet and the complete National Geographic series bound in hand-stamped calfskin. Several good etchings from the European modernist movement hung in well-lit frames. And somewhere, hidden, I presumed, in a vast temperature-controlled cellar, were the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of bottles of important wine he’d been buying at auction.

In the kitchen, which was astonishingly spacious, treasures filled every inch of wall space: five rare cast-iron stoves, a display case with more than a hundred antique molds, shelves jammed with precious crockery, unusual antique pitchers, hundreds of cookbooks, and, on one wall, the framed, signed menus from each of the Michelin three-star restaurants, as well as every important restaurant on the Continent.

Madame and her husband reveled in the blessings of wealth, which they had bequeathed in a fashion to their spoiled daughter. According to their description, she was a gorgeous thirty-five-year-old ex-model, and ex-everything else, who had spent a year or two on a sitcom, jilted a well-heeled fiancé before dumping a French pop star, and now killed time in the Miami Beach scene, painting and going to parties. “She’s living the life of a girl who has very rich parents,” her father said, with something less than approval. “You never know, you two might hit it off.”

There wasn’t a chance of that, I thought, imagining the kind of nightmare she would be. Curiously, there wasn’t a photo of her anywhere in sight, not that that would have convinced me otherwise. The last person I needed in my life was a professional heartbreaker. She was expected to turn up midweek with a likeminded girlfriend from the States, and I made a mental note to leave before their arrival.

Anyway, what I was looking forward to, in my usual fashion, was dinner. Madame had prepared an informal meal to welcome her new guests. It was a kind of strategy on her part to see how we’d interact. I was more than curious about her cuisine, of course, wondering if perhaps it would measure up to my expectations. I needed a lift after Beaune, something to offset the sour weekend, like an antacid, like an act of kindness.

By the time we were halfway through dinner, however, I knew my hopes were in the crapper. The food was ghastly, a fricassee of local rabbit in a mild cream sauce with fat bosky morels and the kind of garden herbs that required a machete to cut. On looks alone, it would have won the Miss Congeniality award. It smelled heavenly, as if someone had scattered sage and thyme around the room, but it was overcooked and absolutely bland, as was the wild rice served alongside it. I stared forlornly at the plate, feeling my appetite ebb away after the first bite.

“This is exactly the kind of dish I want to learn how to make,” Doug cried, licking every scrap of meat off the bones like a Mandinka warrior.

Doug and his wife, Didi, were veterans of Moulin de P_____. They’d come here for three summers running, so that Doug could cook with Madame, mastering her Provençal recipes before trying them out on his friends back in a California ’burb, where he was renowned for throwing lavish dinner parties. To what extent he was talented, I never fully learned. He certainly talked a good game. He recalled specific meals he’d made the way friends of mine reminisced about an important ballgame. His over-the-top descriptions left no doubt in my mind that Doug enjoyed food.

He was quite a big man, bulky and broad-boned like an overfed Lab, but he moved with surprising grace. He was good with his hands as well, but there was something about the way he held a knife that made him seem dangerous. His eyes also made me nervous, drifting off somewhere midsentence, as if he were unable to focus for very long on any one thing.

But all that mattered, for the moment, was that Doug had come to cook. From what I could tell, there was nothing more pressing on his mind. He spoke animatedly and with passion about his culinary exploits chez Madame, although I got the impression that he was a handful in the kitchen. Every now and then, Madame would roll her eyes and grimace when he rhapsodized about a dish they’d made in the past. After listening to him recount their chocolate soufflé fiasco, she shivered with all the starch of an Ibsen matriarch and muttered, “It’s a wonder you didn’t burn the house down.” It was endearing, though, because they seemed genuinely to enjoy each other. I looked forward to sharing the stove with such a gung-ho guy. But I couldn’t help wondering about Didi’s involvement.

Madame seemed to imply that Didi had the kitchen instincts of a houseplant. If past experience was any indication, Didi wouldn’t touch so much as a teaspoon. She parked herself at the counter, paging through magazines, not really reading them but looking at the pictures and ads, which allowed her to maintain a running dialogue during the lessons.

“She never shuts up!” Madame warned me, which turned out to be a remarkable understatement. Since walking through the door, Didi had kept up an endless yap-yap-yap in a tiny Valley Girl voice that finished each sentence a decibel higher than where it began, and with a question mark tagged onto the end of it. It was a funny kind of chatter, as if David Mamet had written it for Lindsay Lohan, running on and on with segues that defied all logic. Madame was amused by it at first and occasionally prompted her, subject by subject, but usually it was a one-woman show, with useless stories about Survivor and her niece and designing clothes for cats and how to cheat at Monopoly…anything that crossed her mind.

In no time, it drove Madame mad. Madame even began smoking again after a few months on the wagon, but nothing galled her as much as the woman’s eating habits.

As we all sat down that first night, Madame’s husband made a rather grand presentation by opening a bottle of rare white Burgundy covered in a fine layer of cellar dust. It was one of those Napoleonic wines that never come up for sale, let alone get served as an aperitif. Over our chorus of oooohs and aaaahs, Didi chimed, “I’ll have a Coke? No, no, make it a Diet Coke? Yes, a Diet Coke, and with ice? I love ice. You know, if it’s not cold enough, you might put some ice in that wine?”

“Oh, I forgot to buy the Coke,” Madame said with scathing dryness. “How about a glass of water, dear? I’ll be happy to put some ice in that for you.”

But any beanball glanced right off Didi, who simply plowed straight ahead the way a sedan moves through an automatic carwash.

“I don’t eat rabbit?” she said, wrinkling up her nose as the casserole passed in front of her.

Madame tensed a bit but otherwise seemed undaunted. “There’s a delicious cauliflower purée and plenty of summer squash on the stove.”

“I’m not really a vegetable girl?” Didi said.

“Do me a favor,” Madame said, while topping off Doug’s glass, “remind me to pick up some Cocoa Puffs for your wife.”

As it turned out, cereal and soda would have done nicely all around. Madame’s food, to put it bluntly, was a bit of a snow job. It was flat and unimaginative, which wasn’t really her fault because the recipes, for the most part, were lifted straight out of magazines. I should have guessed as much after our first goofy lesson.

We discussed the menu that morning on our way to the market. “How about if we grill some fish with olive oil and herbs?” Doug suggested.

“Fish is good,” I agreed, “but we’re in Provence, you know. I’d hate to waste the time grilling. Is there any way we could give it a local twist?”

Madame knew just the thing. Bourride, a type of rustic fish soup using the catch of the day, was a Provençal specialty, one you could find on the menu of almost every corner bistro. I’d had it in Paris a few times, usually made with monkfish—or lotte, as the French call it—and wondered how anything so spiritually uplifting could originate in a soup pot. There was no argument from any of us about learning to make a respectable bourride, or the opportunity to pair it with a tomato granité and, for dessert, coeur à la crème.

When we got back, Doug and I began preparing the granité, with Madame dictating the recipe step-by-step from a brand-new cookbook. “This just came in the mail,” she said, folding back the spine with a sickening crunch. When I asked if she’d tried the recipe before, the warm notes drained out of her voice as she said, “We’re going to try it together, if it’s all right with you.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Doug slip her a little Siamese smile and felt the cold, sharp pang of betrayal. My reaction seemed silly, considering I hardly knew this guy, but it seemed that we were teammates and therefore bound together in a sort of sympathy that necessitated our pulling for each other. I hadn’t bargained for any competitive nonsense, and there didn’t seem any point in promoting a rivalry. Suddenly, I got a bitter taste in my mouth, and when they decided to take a break for lunch, I went back to my room instead of sitting there and feeling even lonelier in their company.

It was a sultry afternoon, sticky with humidity, typical of the Luberon, which is landlocked and somewhat immune from breezes. From my window, there were olive trees as far as the eye could see, and their branches sagged, almost groaning, from the burden of ripe picholine, verdunc, and gros ânes (or “big jackasses”), which are the size of young figs. A dense crown of leaves shaded the room from sunlight, for which I was grateful. I splashed some cool water on my face and rather gingerly lifted the lid of my laptop as if opening a treasure chest.

I stared at the status line in the email from Carolyn for some time before clicking on it. The memo said, “Dear Bob,” and without even opening it, I knew what the message held. Dear Bob…. She’d had a change of heart, as I’d expected, and would not be meeting me in Nice—or anywhere else. “I know we would have had a wonderful time together in France, but I just don’t think it would be fair to either of us. My life is going in a different direction from yours….”

I didn’t even bother reading the rest of it. A different direction…after all this time together, she couldn’t even tell me in person. Somehow I knew that I was probably better off. Lately, friends had urged me to move on, to save myself. Apparently they had known something I didn’t.

Even so, I was brokenhearted, utterly brokenhearted. I sat down hard, as the hopes I’d been safeguarding emptied out of me. There was a pounding in my chest I could not eliminate. Where was my trusty coat of emotional armor? Carolyn had been my lover and my muse and a large part of my dreams, so the wave of nausea curling through my stomach was altogether well earned.

I sat on the edge of the bed for a long while. If anything, I felt resentment, the resentment a man might feel toward his boss, his ex—someone who has driven him to his worst. Resentment was an unsteady state of mind for me, but I felt a strong pull of survival. After a long time—I’m not sure how long—I ran out of sorrows to dwell on, and I forced myself to think about France. France was too spiritual and beautiful for resentment to prevail, I told myself. I tried to shift my mood from the flash of anger, glancing over images and memories of France so irrationally dear to me.

No one, I tried to convince myself, was going to ruin my adventure. I had hoped the trip would be a way to have fun with Carolyn, perhaps more. Now it would become something else, something more difficult. I decided I’d have to throw myself even more completely into something that I could still feel passionate about, the embrace of the kitchen—in part to heal from this cataclysm, to rescue myself. I would strive to create something sublime. The experiences ahead would have to help me to put Carolyn out of my thoughts. I didn’t know whether that would be enough to take my mind off of loneliness. I knew I might wind up dragging my sorry ass home with a repertoire of fussy recipes and nowhere to serve them but the bowl of Wink, my faithful dog. Unless he’d dumped me by now, too. All I could think to do was to plunge ahead. I’d rescued disasters in the kitchen before. It was time to improvise.

Sometime later, after a respectable period of self-pity, I went down to join the work on the dinner. Nothing was said about my disappearance or the fact that I walked through the lesson without saying ten words to anybody. I was not about to share my personal life with this crew. Insensitive fools, I thought furiously. You should notice, you should see how hurt I’m feeling….

The dinner did little to distract me. The bourride was nothing more than an improvised fish stew, the same one I made at home, with cod, shrimp, squid, scallops, and some sautéed vegetables in a water base that begged for character. Madame dismissed as “absolutely useless” my glum suggestion that we make a fumet to intensify the flavor. Not surprisingly, it tasted pretty bland out of the pot. It needed salt, of course, which was one of Bob Ash’s golden rules, but Madame looked at me sharply when I attempted to add more than a pinch.

“I don’t love much salt in anything,” she said.

When her back was turned, I defiantly began adding salt…and adding salt…and more salt, trying to bring the stock around. I might have been preparing the tub for a muscle soak. After everything had steeped for a while, I asked Madame to taste it. “See,” she said, “it’s getting there on its own.”

When no one was looking, I also put in a few grinds of pepper.

Her “secret ingredient,” as if I couldn’t have guessed, was a half-liter of cream added just before serving to give the stew some depth, but even that couldn’t rescue it from the dead. It was as far from a bourride as chili was from pot-au-feu.

I managed to stumble through the next day. The same disappointment happened that night, with an herb-stuffed leg of lamb that we cooked in a sea-salt crust. It was an eye-catching preparation that was all the rage in Paris. A lot of it was pure spectacle, of course, in the way that it was presented at the table. It arrived straight out of the oven looking like an igloo, which was then cracked open with great flourish, using a hammer and chisel. The tricky part was forming a shell with enough salt. We used four and a half pounds of it, mixed with some egg white to give it a papier-mâché–like consistency. It is important that the roast be completely encased to keep it moist. But after an hour in the oven, I noticed that the shell was cracking.

“It’s ruined,” Madame declared, blaming the failure on Doug and me. She felt we should have monitored the cooking more carefully, charging in like vigilant Zamboni drivers to spot-repair the surface. But even if we had, it wouldn’t have made much difference. The meat was overcooked, tasteless, and tough, like my mother’s brisket. (Sorry, Mom.)

I found it disturbing that such a presumably well-respected cook chose to teach so carelessly, and I was disappointed by the results. I had expected more of an effort, if not a higher degree of creativity. The whole setup lacked a kind of eloquence. From what I could gather, Madame had no formal training as a cook. For her, this was a hobby, not an expression of art.

“She’s a facilitator,” Doug agreed, when I expressed my concerns. We were sitting on the patio, working our way through a bottle of extremely flinty Sancerre, while muting our voices to a conspiratorial whisper. Above us, a cough sounded from an open bedroom window. “She provides the house, an incredible kitchen, and fresh ingredients, and she shares her favorite recipes.”

“If you ask me, some basic instruction wouldn’t hurt.”

Doug contemplated me coldly: “Man, you are one sorry fucker.” He didn’t know the half of it. “Just take a look around. This is an incredible place, and we get to come here—no, we’re privileged to come here and learn how to make very special food. What more do you want?”

“I’d like it to taste good, for starters. And I’d love a little advice, a little how-and-why. So far, I haven’t heard anything that broadens my understanding of cooking.” I glanced up at the window, sensing an unseen presence hovering. My voice became so faint that I hoped Doug could read lips. “Were you there when she made the salad for our lunch? I asked Madame to show me a dressing, but she said, ‘Oh, I just shake up some olive oil and vinegar in a little plastic container, and that does it.’ Hell, I could have done as much with a Good Seasons bottle.”

Doug shrugged, reluctant to agree. “Then you should propose another option instead of griping about it,” he said. “Why don’t you look through her recipe file on the kitchen counter. Maybe you’ll find something in there that will make you happy.”

I wasn’t optimistic, but there was nothing else I could think of that would salvage the situation, or at the very least upgrade it from disaster to shipwreck.

A half-hour later, after paging through dozens of recipes, all familiar enough to suggest they had appeared in cookbooks I owned, I compiled a short list of candidates that seemed unusual, challenging,…and authentic. A mushroom “tarte Tatin” sounded especially promising. When I asked Madame about it, she looked curiously at me, as if I had somehow read her mind. Grinning, she led me to the refrigerator, taking my wrist the way a mother does with a child. She took out a shopping bag, which balanced awkwardly on the counter. She looked at me again, for effect, before tearing the bag open. A cascade of wild mushrooms spilled across the counter like diamonds.

The delight on my face amused Madame, who held up various specimens to the light. The cèpes alone looked big enough to topple tenpins, the chanterelles were as leathery as a Coach bag, the girolles and porcini meaty enough to grill. I had never seen such perfectly plump, bronze-colored mushrooms. It seemed a pity to slice them, and I think I said as much to Madame, although she assured me the result would be worth it. Doug gave me the eye, which was his way of telling me to keep my mouth shut.

Apparently he never employed a similar tactic on his wife, or it didn’t work. As we brushed some residual dirt from the mushrooms, Didi stood over my shoulder, examining the quality of my work. “There are a few smudges on that one?” she said, poking at a chanterelle with her finger. Wordlessly, I picked up the culprit and burnished its silky surface, gritting my teeth as a safety measure against the escape of a vivid obscenity. “There’s some stuff on that one, too?”

“I’m not done with that one yet,” I snapped, unable to conceal my displeasure.

Didi didn’t miss a beat. “Oh, don’t mind me. I always stand behind Doug and watch over things, kind of like his quality-control guy?”

“Then maybe Doug can benefit from your help, but I can’t cook that way.”

“But that’s my job?” she insisted.

“Not here it isn’t, sister. Unless you’re going to cook, you have to stand on the other side of the counter, where you are out of the way. Just over there.”

Instead, she tiptoed a few feet east to where her husband was working and stood flush against his back, massaging his shoulders. Pouting. Giving me—the eye.

Madame, who had followed the action with enthusiasm, put down her chef’s knife and said, “We have a few good videos for you to watch, Didi. Come with me. I think there’s a copy of Pretty in Pink in the parlor.”

After they had gone, Doug and I began assembling the ingredients for the tart, whose recipe, I was told, came from a famous restaurant outside of Aix. It was a rich, jammy concoction of mushrooms, shallots, walnuts, garlic, and parsley, all of which were sautéed in sweet butter and then baked under an impossibly light layer of puff pastry. I doubt that a famous restaurant would have resorted to commercial puff pastry. Ours was store-bought and, to my eyes, every bit as elegant when it emerged from the oven.

Vegetable tarts are always a good side dish, given the minimal number of ingredients and the relatively short time needed to prepare one. When I was younger, with limited skills and less respectful toward the marriage of taste and texture, I became infatuated with churning out crude zucchini tarts, which were baked in a fluted metal pan lined with pastry, a schmear of Dijon mustard, mozzarella, and plenty of garlic. It was pretty to look at, and tasty enough, but it had all the consistency of a Ray’s Pizza.

This version coaxed as much flavor as possible out of every ingredient and was capable of bringing an unemotional man to tears. In fact, crying would have been an improvement over the near-silence that permeated the kitchen. Muzzling Didi had just about eliminated the last good vibes that remained. I didn’t dare bring it up to Doug, who crouched low over his cutting board in stony sufferance, tight-lipped. His body language was empty of grace. Several boxes shoved aside, their lids strewn across the counter, separated our workstations. He had thrown up a barrier between us, daring me to cross, and it was hard because of the utensils we shared and our common goal. But somehow we managed to cooperate on this beauty:

TATINauxCÈPES

2 lb. assorted wild mushrooms, wiped clean

3 large shallots, minced

large knob (2 Tbl.) of sweet butter

salt and pepper

¼ cup parsley, stems removed

3 cloves garlic

1/3 cup finely ground walnuts

walnut oil

10 oz. puff pastry

1 egg yolk

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees.

Slice the mushrooms thinly and sauté in a skillet with the shallots until golden in a couple of tablespoons of melted butter. If there is any accumulated liquid, reduce until mushroom liquid has cooked away, then season well with salt and pepper, and arrange the mushrooms along the bottom of a buttered 9-inch tart dish (not one with a removable bottom).

Finely chop the parsley and garlic together (this is called a persillade) and sprinkle over the mushrooms. Afterward, sprinkle with the ground walnuts, then drizzle a little walnut oil over the mixture.

Carefully lay one sheet of puff pastry over the top, tucking it under around the edges. Brush with the beaten egg yolk and bake 20 to 30 minutes, until the pastry is golden. Run a knife around the edges to loosen any pastry that might have become stuck to the sides. Carefully invert the tart onto a serving dish. Serve warm, with walnut oil drizzled over the top.

Serves 6

Madame had done little more than provide the recipe and offer about as much real help as you’d expect from a backseat driver, but she had been redeemed by the outcome. The first bites from the near-perfect tart made us gasp. The dense slurry of shallots, caramelized by the butter, married perfectly with the mushrooms, whose meaty heft buried the pastry underneath two inches of sweetness. We were all, including Madame, a bit stunned. Even Doug, clutching an oozing slice in his fist, looked up from his plate, grinning, and gave me an exuberant thumbs-up.

The bounce was short-lived.

The tipping point came at dessert. After we finished the main course, Madame pulled out printed directions for a chocolate soufflé and asked for our input. Doug and I looked at her in panic. Soufflés, as a rule, are an exact science, their nuances guarded like the atomic launch code, and no one fucks with the recipe. Duels have been fought over less. To make matters worse, I happened to know that Doug prided himself on being something of a soufflémaster, a distinction earned during some perilous moments on previous stints in Madame’s kitchen.

He said, “Let’s try it with strawberries. That should be enough of a challenge for everyone.”

Almost perversely, he reminisced about soufflé experiments that had ended in soggy disasters. Several were just trashed, and I could tell by his condescending manner that he didn’t think I was up to it.

“You need to concentrate; it takes plenty of finesse,” Doug told me. “On the nights when I prepare a soufflé for friends, I don’t even drink wine.”

I had already consumed half a bottle of Côtes du Rhône, and he knew it. Nevertheless, I was determined to pull off a perfect soufflé—and then serve it to his wife. Madame had already made a soufflé base, the appareil, which was needed to draw out excess moisture when adding fruit or a liqueur. By the time I was ready to use it, the base was already cool, but its formula, as I learned later, was a pretty straightforward affair:

SWEET SOUFFLÉ BASE

4 Tbl. sugar

¾ cup milk

3 Tbl. pastry flour

1Tbl. unsalted butter

¼ tsp. vanilla extract

Sprinkle 2 tablespoons of the sugar over ½ cup of the milk and bring it to a boil in a medium saucepan.

Combine the other 2 tablespoons of the sugar and the flour in a medium bowl. Whisk in the remaining ¼ cup of milk. Gradually whisk in the boiled milk and return the mixture to the saucepan. Cook over medium-high heat until it boils. Continue to boil 1 ½ minutes, whisking constantly as it becomes thick, then remove the pan from the heat.

Immediately strain the mixture through a fine sieve into a bowl, using a spatula to press out any lumps of flour that may remain. Stir in the butter and the vanilla.

Cover the surface with plastic wrap (the wrap must touch the surface of the base to prevent a film from forming on top), and cool at room temperature. Refrigerate until needed.

The rest of the preparation required some fancy footwork. Madame gave us her version of the tao of soufflés: Sift this, beat that, whisk here, fold there, hold your breath, click your ruby slippers three times. It was like a religious rite. She thought it would be helpful if Doug and I worked individually, making separate soufflés, since the finished product would reflect our creative imprints. If you asked me, it would have been preferable ordering one off the Internet. I wanted to cook something I had the chance of pulling off, not split the atom.

Doug washed his hands like an obstetrician preparing to deliver triplets. “Are the eggs room temperature?” he asked, holding his palms out so Nurse Didi could dry them.

“Oh, please. Let’s get these babies moving,” I grumbled.

My spirits lifted somewhat as we separated the eggs and beat the whites with a pinch of salt into frothy peaks. A half-cup of sugar sifted slowly into the mix brought out a high gloss and forced them to ribbon outward like angel’s wings. Eventually, the peaks stiffened like hair gel. Watching the beaters whir through the mousse conveyed the impression that the air’s power was unlimited, and if the process continued for long, it might be possible to balance a stack of books on top without the peaks caving in. I became mesmerized by it—so much so that before long I had meringue.

“You need to start over,” Madame said, above the din of machinery.

“It seems like such a waste.”

“It has to be done. The egg whites need to be soft peaks, otherwise the oven’s heat won’t expand the air bubbles in the froth. That’s what gives the soufflé its lovely lightness and makes it rise.” Madame reached over and tipped my batter into the trash. “This time, stop beating as soon as the whites mount.”

I felt my cheek flush under the discipline. Across the counter, Doug acknowledged the scene with a slight smile. This stuck in my craw as I wiped out the bowl and began separating a new set of eggs. Given the chance, I would have jacked his hand mixer into overdrive.

This time I was more attentive while beating the eggs, beginning at a fairly slow speed, as one would a serious walk, and gradually working up a full head of steam. When the slime developed its own fine froth, I let the salt slide from my fingers and watched as the magic happened: peaks rose from the foamy depths. As I added the sugar, the peaks took on that special glow and started to stand at attention, at which point I put on the brakes.

No one, I was certain, had ever produced stiffer, softer peaks. They looked like shaving lather, and I fought the urge to slap some on my cheeks.

Without waiting for Madame’s approval, I whisked a teaspoon of strawberry jam into the soufflé base, followed by a cup of fat berries that had been stemmed and hulled and diced, then a splash of vanilla. Now came the tricky part: stirring a third or so of the egg whites into the base to lighten it and then quickly folding in the rest so that everything barely combined. I remembered what Sandy D’Amato had once told me, that the secret to a soufflé was its structure, finding the right balance between flavor and texture. “The more egg whites you have, the less flavor you get,” he said. “If the soufflé is stable—really rich and strongly flavored—you can add the egg whites and it will still be delicious.” That was why chocolate complemented the recipe so well; it thickened the egg whites without sacrificing taste, whereas with Grand Marnier, you often tasted only the egg whites. “It’s easy to make a soufflé, then split it open and pour crème anglaise in the middle,” he added, “but all you’ll really taste is the crème anglaise. A real soufflé should be able to stand on its own.”

I stirred another tablespoon or two of jam into my base, for good measure. As gently as a midwife, I helped the entire quivering mass slide into a well-buttered ramekin, then I set it on a trivet like fine sculpture.

I glanced over at Doug, who had arrived at the same procedural point but was whipping the mixture like a jockey down the home stretch. I suggested he might want to fold in the whites a little more gently.

“I’ve done this a dozen times,” he insisted, fixing me with dagger eyes.

My shrug said, “Have it your way,” but the words stuck in my throat.

“No! No! No!” a voice broke in from the other side of the room. Madame emerged all atwitter from behind cupboard doors. I thought she was coming straight at me, arms flailing, but she elbowed past, grabbing the whisk out of Doug’s hands. “You’ve got soup! You idiot!”

I worried that she might rap his knuckles. Instead, she turned her back and shuddered, poking clumsily at the sticky mess without looking up, until Doug skulked from the room.

“Are the eggs room temperature? I’ve done this a dozen times.” The evil Goofy was chanting in my ear.

For a moment I felt vindicated, until I realized that Madame’s honor rested in my hands. She looked blank-faced at my soufflé and nodded almost imperceptibly at the masterpiece. Carrying it the way one would a newborn, or a live grenade, I placed it gingerly in the oven at 425 degrees.

How long we stood there I cannot recall, but it was a considerable length of time, maybe twenty minutes or more, and neither of us said a word. For my part, I had retreated into some private place, pushing everything else far away. Only now, these months later, can I remember how I spent that time. My mind spun through the succession of myriad slip-ups that had marred the last week. Beaune was a washout, from every point of view. And Madame—well, she had hardly lived up to the expectations I had had for a mentor in Provence. Compared to Bob Ash, this experience was strictly improvisational, although perhaps the soufflé would, to some extent, exonerate her. Of course, my cooking mates from California might have thought otherwise, but they were an unpleasant pair. And just in case I hadn’t suffered enough, I’d been dumped by my girlfriend, and by email, at that.

“Maybe when the soufflé comes out, I can put my head in there for a while,” I thought, not realizing at the time that I had said it out loud.

“You’ll do nothing of the sort,” a voice said crossly. I blinked a few times and Madame looked at me tactfully, with an uneasiness I had never seen in her before. Worry seemed to rise off her in little wispy vapors, like rain on hot asphalt. Perhaps it was a maternal instinct, or something as close to warmth as she could muster. I must have looked doomed, because as I tried to laugh it off, she reached out and threw her arms around me. It was as awkward a hug as I’d ever experienced in my life, much like one at my college graduation, when my physics teacher kissed me. Madame had a dishtowel in her hand, and afterward she held it out to me as a way of indicating that the moment had passed.

Obediently, I reached into the oven and took out my soufflé. Her eyes followed my face, which I kept as deadpan as possible.

“I think,” Madame said significantly, “you have just conquered Everest, my friend.”

For a second her face seized with pride, before settling into a professional mask. There was only so much she would show me, even though I knew I had pleased her in a vague and complicated way.

I set the dish carefully on the counter and stepped back to admire my handiwork. It was about as beautiful a result as I had ever managed to produce. The spongy crust, delicate and swollen, rose above the rim of the crenellated tureen and puffed out in a beautiful fawn-colored crown that was jeweled with bits of strawberries, like the hat of a high priest. I gently laid a finger on the center, unable to control my excitement. It trembled under my touch, and I knew it would be creamy, like an omelet, with what French chefs call a babouse, just a slobbering. A crack appeared in the surface, releasing a mist of aromatic heat.

“Quick,” said Madame, “we have to eat it before it falls.”

She called the others and insisted they come to the table, which I didn’t think was such a good idea. To their credit, seemingly unruffled by the setback, they smiled at my picture-perfect soufflé. I felt sorry for Doug and told him it was beginner’s luck; that I didn’t have the nerve to make one for dinner guests, as he had done. I started to say something else to bolster his ego, but Madame interrupted, reminding us that every cook had a soufflé disaster or three—or eight—on his resumé. It came with the territory. Then I saw Doug look at Didi, rolling his eyes toward me. Or was I imagining it? I couldn’t help myself. I felt an intense antagonism toward him.

I glared at the two of them until I got their full attention. My eyes screwed into tiny points. I drew myself up, ready to give them a piece of my mind. But I held back, managing, in a brief moment of clarity, to recognize the absurdity of two grown men getting into a dick-measuring contest over who could produce the pouffier soufflé.

Madame looked cautiously between us and pushed helpings of the soufflé in three directions at once, mumbling, “Maybe this will brighten things up.”

It sounded absurd, considering all the tension in the room, that I burst out laughing, a strange sound that must have seemed menacing the way it rumbled on too long.

As a way of ignoring my behavior, Madame, Doug, and Didi began eating. They put their heads down and attacked that soufflé, more out of necessity than desire, knowing they’d eventually have to render a favorable opinion. It smelled sinfully delicious, but I didn’t touch my fork. Nor did I wait around for forthcoming compliments.

While the others were absorbed, I got up and wandered out to the courtyard, where the air was moist and heavy with hibiscus. I couldn’t believe I was letting such a petty dispute throw me. It didn’t seem to matter who it was—my ex-wife, a lover, some two-day acquaintance in a cooking class—I couldn’t seem to cope right now with anyone who turned from ally to antagonist.

Gratefully, I inhaled the liberating night. Across the road, the vineyards appeared infinite, their cornrows camouflaged in the moonlight like armies at night. Even in the darkness the view was something to admire.

Squinting, I followed the trajectory of a path between the vines that seemed to beckon halfway up the hillside, then disappear in blackness, leading, as I imagined, to the edge of the universe. I stared harder, hoping to pick up its outline. Then I began to run.

Lunch the next day was like a scene out of a Pinter play. We had spent the morning wandering the local market in Tarascon, a particular favorite of the town’s heavy concentration of North Africans and therefore flush with the kinds of spices considered exotic even by French standards. Tarascon shared nothing with the expanse of markets in Lyon or Bresse. The crowds were congested, unruly. The cramped stalls, teeming with immigrants, competed with traffic rolling through the main square, masking clouds of exhaust fumes with saffron and cumin.

Eventually, the fumes prevailed. Our only hope was to go toward the river, where the air would refresh our spirits, or at least our vitality. Directly across the Rhône, in the port town of Beaucaire, we found a shabby little lunch joint, Au Nord au Sud, that served moules frites twenty different ways. We settled at a table on the riverbank terrace.

While we waited for our food under the broiling noon sun, no one exchanged a word. The menu was discussed, orders were placed, but aside from that, we had nothing left to say to each other. Even Didi found it prudent to turn off the chatter. A carafe of rosé was poured in silence.

To stem the awkwardness, I excused myself and meandered around back, to the kitchen. It was nothing more than a hole-in-the-wall, a squalid little room at the base of an old office building, where two shirtless African men sweated over a commotion of steaming pots. Their skin was slick and shiny and very black—not shades of brown like most Americans but darker, like ebony that had been polished to a high gloss. How they managed to last more than a few minutes in that brutal, foul heat was a miracle. Everywhere there wasn’t steam or grease or garbage, there were mussels. They were piled in huge burlap sacks against the wall and under the counter and on plastic oil drums and on shelves. Broken shells, probably days old, were strewn across the floor.

The smell came at me hard and I reeled back. I must have gagged, because it drew their attention. One of the men looked up and grinned, his teeth as large as piano keys. “How ya doin’, boss?” he said in broken English.

On a filthy cutting board, he chopped a fugue of carrots, celery, and onions, sweeping them with the back of a hand into an old iron casserole. A fistful of lardons hit the pot with a sizzle, followed by minced garlic and hot-pepper flakes. Mussels went in next, along with a chopped tomato and a few olives. The man was in a groove, on cruise control. There was a stylish mechanical efficiency in the motion of his huge hands: finding the salt, then enough white wine to cover the contents, stirring, grinding pepper, adding butter, more butter, more, tilting the pot just enough to coat everything, before blessing it with a clutch of parsley. He plunked a cover on the casserole and turned up the flame.

For a moment, I felt hungry. There are few things more satisfying than a bowl of mussels steamed in a simple wine broth, and a side of crisp fries. If they are fresh—that is, if the mussels have been harvested in cold, clear water and cleaned properly and not overcooked—they will taste like the sea. Otherwise, they smell fishy and become as chewy as rubber. There seems to be no middle ground. I’ve known people who can eat several pounds at a clip, then hit a bad one and be off mussels for years. But if they are fresh, as I have said, and cooked in a savory broth, the combination of flavors is unbeatable.

I’m a sucker for moules frites. Lily and I eat them whenever we’re stuck for a dinner idea. We’ll go through my entire range of recipes without finding anything that catches our eye, until, suddenly, Lily’s face will light up and she’ll say, “Hey, Dad, what about moules frites?” and we’ll break out laughing at the obvious. It’s also the perfect lunch, light enough but substantial, especially in France, where the preparation is as sure a thing as terminal bureaucracy. If only my curiosity hadn’t intruded….

The cook stepped back and steadied himself against a wall, wiping a swash of perspiration from his face with the back of an arm. He hiked up his pants and flashed that brilliant grin.

“How ya doin’, boss?”

I muttered, “Pas mal,” and almost meant it. He had put the dish together with such seamless effort; it was really quite beautiful to watch. And instructive. I would prepare mussels for my daughter in this exact manner once I got home. But the kitchen, if you could even call it that, was an unholy mess, and I doubted that anything from it would make its way down my throat.

A few minutes later, Doug wolfed down his mussels, proclaiming them the best he’d ever eaten. Then he helped himself to my share, which lay untouched in the casserole. I complained of the heat and the effects of Tarascon’s exhaust fumes, but the vivid backstage business had been enough to kill my appetite.

Faithful to Madame’s agenda, we discussed dinner during the long ride back. There was some debate about making an herb-crusted pork roast that I’d seen in a magazine on her desk, but it didn’t seem like much of a challenge to me. It would not be anything I would ever make again, either. The ratatouille would be all right…the usual eggplant, zucchini, and tomatoes blended with capers and herbes de Provence, but nothing unexpected, nothing out of the ordinary.

I was frustrated but said nothing to the others. It must have been on my face, though. For the last few days, a general malaise had developed in which I more or less sleepwalked through Madame’s cooking classes. I showed no enthusiasm whatsoever for the recipes that were presented. Aside from the soufflé and the mushroom tart, the lessons had been a waste of my time. And that must have irritated the hell out of Doug, who was psyched up for each lesson.

“Oh, look what the mistral blew in!” Madame cried, as the car turned into her driveway.

We pulled up to the guest cottage. On the front steps, two women in short little skirts were sitting with their long legs stretched out and bottles of Champagne waving in their fidgety hands. For all I could tell, they might have been outside a dance club in South Beach. Drinking straight from the bottles and chatting as if they were the only two people on the scene, they ignored us as we got out of the car. The glossy blonde, of course, was Madame’s daughter. She was an unnaturally thin woman, with too much makeup around her raccoon eyes. The introductions were awkward; neither girl bothered to acknowledge any of us, even as outstretched hands were offered. They may have been too tired, or too drunk, or too ill-mannered—it didn’t matter. Madame promised them an outstanding dinner, courtesy of her two “prize students,” which I assumed meant Doug and me, but they weren’t interested. On the patio lay the remains of our gorgeous platter of cheeses that had been gouged and ripped apart, as if animals had gotten to it; a knife had been stood upright in a sorry little chevre.

I stared at the scene and tried not to laugh. It was sad and vulgar and entirely out of context. I tried not to look at Madame, who was twitching with delight. This very proper woman, who otherwise might have assassinated someone for even thinking about such behavior, had turned into Supermom, all giggly and desperate to please. It was an amazing transformation. I hoped my face revealed nothing, but it would crack like a New Orleans levee if I stayed there another minute.

On the way to my room, I bumped into Doug and Didi. They were off in a corner of the parlor, heads close together, and I had a damned good idea what they were talking about. As I passed, they looked up and shook their heads grimly. I nodded once and winked.

Upstairs, I took a shower, scrubbing myself very hard. Then I opened my suitcase and packed in a slow, methodical way. Earlier, I had laid the groundwork for a hasty escape. I had no regrets about leaving early; it seemed pointless to spend any more time in Madame’s kitchen. And now Doug would have the limelight to himself.

As I loaded the bags into the trunk of my car, it began to rain. Across the yard, on the patio, I noticed the two girls had disappeared but the contents of their suitcases lay in a heap by the door. When I went back inside to say my good-byes, no one seemed surprised that I was leaving. Doug shook my hand as if he were sorry to see me go, and for all I knew, that may have been the case. But he was on his own from now on. And Madame could go back to being the kind of cooking teacher he needed.

As I backed out of the driveway, Didi burst through the front door and ran toward the car with a newspaper over her head. She leaned in my window and pressed a tiny piece of paper into my hand.

“If you’re ever out our way, this is how you find us?” she said, and then leaned in the car to give me a peck on the cheek.

I drove slowly through the village and up into the hills. Once I’d crept over the pass, I rolled down the windows, letting the fresh air wash over me. The rain had chased the afternoon heat, leaving an exciting boggy smell. The effect was dreamlike, invigorating: free at last. At a crossroads before descending into St.-Rémy, I stopped for a moment and looked back into the valley, stretched out flat like a giant fresco. Wisps of silver cloud had settled over Maussane, blocking it almost entirely from view. The piece of paper Didi had given me was still in my hand. Their information was written in big rounded script, with a little smiley face dotting each i in her name. Wasn’t that just like her, I thought.

Then I folded the paper into a tiny square and stashed it in a corner of the glove compartment, where it presumably remains.