Nostalgia

This could be the spot, the same place. It looks the same. No, no, it doesn’t look the same at all. How do I put it? Time has happened, life has intervened. I don’t recognize anything, except the tag end of the street which forms a T intersection—and that looks the same or maybe just reminiscent. There was a restaurant there, beyond my means at the time, that served seafood—and for all I knew then and know now that was its name. The blue script on the sign that stretched the width of the restaurant’s front simply read Fruits de Mer. I saw it all the time because the high-class dump I was staying in at the time was just before the end of the street, and if I turned right, there it was. Rich and poor really jostled one another in those days. If I walked toward it and turned right again at the intersection, there was a little row of tatty stores from which I could piece together a meal of bread here, terrine and a green-bean salad three doors farther down, and a bottle of wine on the way back next to, or maybe two doors over from, the seafood house, and all on the same side of the street. I remember the wine best. It was not good, not that I would have known. It most likely was awful, not a subject of notes and nose, but it is memorable all these years later because the deposit on the bottle, which was modest, was a franc more than the wine inside it, and so I learned something about value. I always returned the bottle.

The cheap hotel I stayed in is still there. No, it isn’t either. The building is there, but it has become offices, and the expensive palace of fruits de mer is still a restaurant and must be the same building, given its width and placement at the head of the intersection and the difficulty of tearing down anything these days in Paris. It is no longer beyond my means, but given the menu by the door it’s beyond my patience or even curiosity, appearing to serve expensive compiled food, meals made elsewhere and by others and merely arranged on the plate. It is cold comfort food, like four different plats of smoked salmon, all kinds of charcuterie which I suspect is trucked in from a suburban factory, carpaccios, steaks tartares from various four-hoofed animals, and sushi. I imagine the kitchen is a fridge and maybe a sharp knife.

The stores to the right are unrecognizable—bigger, as if every two neighbors united in matrimony or a solemn pacte civil de solidarité or maybe just acquired girth with middle age. Their fronts are quite splendid, and in a contemporary style with shiny surfaces that bring out the magpie in me, but still wink with little hints or quotations from another time, Art Nouveau, naturally, or a footnote citing Art Deco. One of them is still, or again, a wine shop—pardon, it’s a cave and I’ve stopped rudely wondering aloud how wine cellars can be at street level and why they heat them in winter.

The old wine store had a sign with Vins in red and a jolly, red-nosed Père Something-or-other sitting on a cask that charmed me at the time, but may have been the logo of the supplier who unloaded barrels of cheap wine here and in a few dozen other working-class neighborhoods once or twice a week. The proprietor looked old—but at my age then everyone looked old—and seemed to maintain a three-day growth for weeks at a time. I don’t think he ever stood up, having mastered pointing and reaching his hand out for the money and making change without even turning his torso, let alone lifting his rear end off his stool. He was not jolly and didn’t have grape leaves wreathing his brow. When I let him know I was amused that la consigne pour le verre was more than the wine, he told me to stop being stupid.

The salesman in the shiny new cave today would never call a customer stupid. He is a tower of snooty patience and superior empathy, civil as a scalpel. His knowledge of wines is the same as yours, really, no different, except he has it all on the tip of his tongue—well, after all, it’s his métier, he does it every day, and there are so many wines, one can forget or confuse them, too many names being so much alike, and the pairing of the meal and the wine is beyond complex. And thus the mild little Slavic couple he has been waiting on happily tuck a bottle of a southern Rhône wine into their bag to have with the roasted chicken they’re eating with friends tonight instead of a Muscadet. Wine stewardship is in safe hands this morning.

He turns to a man who has been standing by a counter to his right and who I see now has been tasting some wine. There are three open bottles. He has a look of immense seriousness—or his habitual expression is a frown. He is too well dressed for this early in the day, and monogrammed cuffs have as much to tell me as a bumper sticker. He sniffs one of the wines in a glass and puts it down. The vendeur asks him what he thinks.

“No, I don’t want any of these, not for my collection.” When I was in graduate school, a man of about my age complained he couldn’t get any work done because he had just returned from Europe, but his library hadn’t. His library, I learned, was maybe three hundred books. In the fourteenth century, that would have been a library. In the young scholar’s day, it was a bookcase. I feel the same way about people who have wine collections. Do they hang them on the walls? Hire curators and conservators? Bequeath them to the nation when they die? How do you collect something perishable—and drinkable? No matter, he doesn’t want them, he explains in American English. The clerk asks him what he does want to add to his collection, also in English.

“Only the best. Price is not the problem. I have thirteen thousand bottles. They’re all very good—at least a ninety-five rating from Robert Parker. You see what I mean?” Yes, he sees. I do too, maybe. If he drinks a bottle a day, it would take him thirty-five years and a few months to finish his collection. And he’s still buying. If he spent as little as twenty dollars a bottle, hardly likely, he’d have more than a quarter of a million dollars, liquid. Not to mention the deposits. And he has banked on Robert Parker, the numerical wine oracle, to guide him and to show him where to draw the line—north of ninety-four. Wine by the numbers—and such big ones. What the clerk sees is something else, a customer with too much money, and suggests several wines, most unknown to me, but a bottle of the one I think I recognize costs as much as a very good pair of shoes. The answer is still no, no again, or I have two cases of that or it’s the wrong vintage or the wrong producer or the wrong phase of the moon. He talks of producers and vintages the way art dealers talk about craquelures and provenance. Still you’d wonder, since he has spent so much time learning pedigrees and lineages of wine, if he’s ever had the time to drink any—but then you wouldn’t drink your Rembrandt or Gutenberg Bible, either. He says goodbye too curtly and walks out. The clerk looks at me, trying to keep a straight face, which in his business must be routine, but the collector has put him to the test.

Not so long ago—too recently, really, for me to be anything but ashamed of myself—I would have said something nasty about the collector. Maybe it’s the tolerance or the patience or those doses of je m’en foutisme that we tend to ingest in little snorts and nibbles as time goes by that enables me to shrug at the collector’s pretension: what dog? what fight? Anyway, it would be more amusing to see if I can make the vendeur show some expression on his face, which he is still composing, with all the muscles from his cheeks to his lips to his jaws visibly bubbling furiously. I smile and with a glance in the direction of the collector’s exit say aloud this time, Wine by the numbers. He does not get the reference, and as I solemnly begin to explain how painting by the numbers was once—still is?—a serious American art form, I realize that he is losing the battle to achieve facial blankness. He is aghast, not amused, but the fraternal-twin idiocy of the collector and now me is trying him sorely—and I’m afraid he will hurt himself unless he lets it out, just allows himself a pocket-sized smirk, forget a laugh and a slap on the thigh. I could ask him the prices of his simplest wines, his vins de table—you understand, plonk, le bon rouge qui tache. And by the way, how much is the deposit? You know, for old time’s sake.

© Joseph Lestrange

Photo Credit: Flickr Creative Commons/P. Keigan

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