The Love Children Page 29

  “Artur’s, right?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  “You’re getting well-known. The restaurant and you.” He smiled down at Isabelle. “But I don’t know this young lady.”

  Isabelle bristled. She hated to be called a young lady. It signaled a demand for formal deportment.

  I put my hand on her shoulder. “This is Isabelle.”

  He bent toward her. “Hello, Isabelle.”

  She pressed her face against my leg. “Isabelle would say hello if she weren’t hiding,” I said, ruffling her hair.

  “She’s a beautiful child. Your husband is a lucky man.”

  “I have no husband,” I said in a frigid tone.

  He flushed. “Sorry. Stupid of me.”

  I stood in cold silence. I didn’t like the intended compliment. It sounded as if he were praising some man for owning such fine property as Isabelle and me. I said this aloud.

  He changed color again, to white. “Terribly sorry.” But his voice was cold too.

  I nodded.

  “I was trying to say—actually, I had a pang of envy for whatever man was in your lives. Yours and Isabelle’s,” he said.

  “No serious harm done,” I said, relenting.

  “Just minor harm?” he asked.

  “Let’s forget it and start over,” I said.

  “I can’t—I have this need to defend myself. I have to insist, to tell you what I was trying to say: looking at the two of you does give a man pleasure. This man, anyway.”

  “Okay,” I said dubiously. “I guess that’s different. Thanks.” Then I added, “I guess,” and laughed.

  He laughed too. He was standing, arms akimbo, between the door and me and for a moment I felt trapped by him, with him. He was tall, much taller than I, and full bodied. And I had Isabelle. But he moved slightly to one side, waving me before him, and my body eased.

  “Shall we go?” he asked.

  I tried for a lighter voice. “I want to warn you, I’m totally ignorant about mushrooms. Eager to learn though,” I added.

  “Most of us in America don’t know about mushrooms,” he said. “We still have a frontier palate, frozen by the Depression; we eat Corn Flakes and beefsteaks, Wonder Bread and Velveeta cheese. We know nothing about wine, cheese, fish, herbs, or vegetables. But I hear you are an herbalist and serve great vegetables. That’s your reputation.”

  “Oh.” My face became warm; I was afraid I was blushing. But it thrilled me to hear that I had any reputation at all, that people actually talked about me, especially in such a way.

  We left the house and walked toward some large sheds. They were two across and three deep. Around them was open land—room for expansion, I deduced, and beyond that, along the perimeter of the property, deep woods, evergreens that cast their shade across much of the plot and helped to keep the sheds cool.

  He continued, “When I was fourteen, I spent a couple of years in France with my grandparents. They lived in the Périgord and would go walking in the countryside, picking mushrooms. They’d take a bottle of wine, a baguette, some saucisson, and fruit. We’d meet other people doing the same thing and compare notes. My grandparents knew every type of mushroom they saw, including the poisonous ones, and they taught me as we went. It wasn’t like learning in school, it was just conversation, you know? Afterward, we’d go home and make mushroom crêpes or mushroom omelets or mushroom soup or just sauté them. Delicious! We’d have that with great French bread and a hearty red wine for Sunday dinner. It was a happy time for me.”

  “So you decided to grow them yourself,” I said.

  “Not right away. I did time in a corporation after college.”

  So he was a dropout too.

  “You didn’t like corporation land?”

  “I have no objection to the idea of business,” he said, somewhat pedantically. I wondered if he always pronounced on things. “But I do have objections to big business. People say it’s more efficient, but to me it’s more oppressive and inefficient and slow. Slower even than small businesses can be. And I object to the fact that in this country small business is becoming impossible. In a small business, you know your customers and they know you and trade is a fair exchange. But the way things have evolved, you have to do things in a big way or you can’t survive.” He laughed a little, without humor. “The big fish swallow up the little fish, or drown them.”

  “Yes. I know what you mean,” I said. “I had a little plot of ground, you couldn’t call it a farm, it was too small. I grew herbs and vegetables, just enough to stock the restaurant for a couple of months of the year. But it was costing me too much to keep it.”

  “You raise vegetables and cook in the restaurant?”

  “Well,” I admitted ruefully, “I was paying someone to help me plant, weed, and water. That was part of the problem. I couldn’t do it all. Too much work, and it didn’t pay.”

  “It never would have been worth your effort if you didn’t have the restaurant,” he guessed. “You had your own distribution network.”

  “Yes. You’re right.” I laughed, thinking that distribution network was a ridiculous name for my tiny operation. “Artur and I love what we do, but we earn barely enough to live on. I’m sure I don’t earn enough to live on: I live with my father and have a low overhead.”

  “Poppop,” Isabelle chimed in.

  My guide perked up. He leaned toward me a little, as if he was making an intimate statement. “I understand. If I’m going to survive in my business, I’ll have to expand.”

  “Yes, probably.” I understood that he was telling me something that he felt mattered, to me.

  Isabelle was looking around with alert and interested eyes. She rarely spoke on these outings but she noticed a great deal and would comment and question afterward. She’d say, “Man have funny eyes, Mommy,” about someone whose stray eye I’d barely noticed, or, “Lady fat, Mommy” about a pregnant woman.

  We reached the first concrete shed. I could hear the roaring of a huge fan that must have been mounted around the corner on the outside of the building. There was another fan just above our heads as we entered. I looked at it questioningly.

  “The shed has to be airtight. Air is pushed in by the big fan, and out by a smaller one, so there is always too much air coming in. When it is pushed out, that seals the building. There can’t be insects or other contamination. Mushrooms are very demanding. A lot of varieties can’t even be raised; they only grow wild—cèpes, for instance, and chanterelles.

  “They have to have light.” He pointed to the fluorescent lamps mounted on the ceiling. “The temperature has to be maintained at around seventy degrees and the humidity at 90 percent. The air has to be cooled in summer and heated in winter. They are one pain in the neck.” He laughed. “But I love them. Like having a baby, I guess,” he said ruefully.

  I smiled at him. His expression was sweet, unassuming, a little self-deprecating. Nice.

  “These are portobellos and cremini. They grow in compost and soil. I make the compost myself of horse manure and chopped-up straw.”

  I saw raised boxes full of mushrooms, row upon row of broad, flat, brownish mushrooms and beyond them, little golden ones. The shed sprawled at least seventy feet.

  He walked forward and picked one of the brownish ones, which he cleaned with a damp rag taken from his pocket. He handed it to me. “Portobello.”

  I broke off a piece and tasted it. Isabelle watched me in the utter horror of children in the face of strange foods. One would never imagine that for the previous year, she had put absolutely everything she encountered into her mouth. “Delicious,” I said, and offered her a piece; she recoiled.

  “I predict they’ll become very popular,” Jacquet said.

  We walked down the long center aisle toward the other mushrooms. They were shaped like button mushrooms but had a golden color. “These are cremini,” he explained.

  I tasted the sample he gave to me. “Good. Much tastier than buttons, moister and with more flavor.�
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  He smiled with great pleasure.

  Isabelle watched me warily. I didn’t offer her a piece this time.

  “Want to see some more?”

  “Of course!” I was enthusiastic now. Oh, what I could do with those portobellos! They tasted like steak, chewy and juicy and meaty. A whole mushroom would provide a small meal. A first course. Sautéed with butter and maybe some scallions and cilantro, on toast, its juices seeping into the toast . . . It would be a sensation!

  We left the shed and walked to another one next to it. It was open sided, its roof supported by uprights. Inside were logs stacked crosswise; mushrooms sprouted from the logs.

  “I make holes in the logs, which have to be replaced every two years,” Jacques explained. “I plant spores in the holes. These are oyster mushrooms.” He pointed. “And over there, those are shiitake. The oysters mature in four weeks, but the shiitakes take eighteen months.”

  We went through the tasting process again. I found the flavors haunting. The mushrooms were each a little different and would lend themselves to different treatments, I thought.

  The next shed was open too and was filled with plastic bags about two feet high, stuffed with straw, with mushrooms sprouting out of tiny holes in the sides. These were oyster mushrooms also, a lesser quality, he said, and black poplar mushrooms, which he grew in limited quantities.

  The last shed contained button mushrooms, his biggest seller. He broke one off and offered it to Isabelle this time. She hid her head against my leg again, so he popped it into his own mouth, then picked another and offered it to me. It was okay, just an ordinary mushroom. A letdown after tasting the others.

  “You sell a lot of these?”

  “That’s all most places want. They’ve been selling well, especially since I discovered a new marketing wrinkle—I wipe them down and sell them clean and white, wrapped in plastic. Worst thing in the world for mushrooms, plastic. Makes them go bad really fast. But people snap up those clean mushrooms in plastic, I swear. Americans like their food clean.” He laughed. “They care less what it tastes like.”

  I didn’t tell him that I stored mushrooms in plastic.

  As the afternoon wore on, Isabelle became whiny and clingy, a real pain. She finally started to cry and insisted on being carried.

  I think she comprehended that she had now encountered competition. I picked her up and whispered in her ear that I had to work and if she didn’t calm down, I would put her in the car. It was warm enough for her to sit in the car and I had brought along some toys, a thermos, and a cassette tape of some music she liked. But in those days, for her any separation from me was banishment to Siberia, and she shut up and let me get on with what I was determined to do.

  “So, Mr. Jacquet . . .” I began, “should we talk about quantities and prices?”

  “Sure. But let’s go back to the house, it’s more comfortable. And my name is Philip. My friends call me Philo.”

  My heart stopped. Philo. “I have a good friend named Philo.”

  “Really?” He seemed incredulous and maybe a little put out. “It’s an unusual name.”

  “Yes.”

  “Come on back and I’ll make us some coffee. Maybe Isabelle would like a cold drink and to watch television.”

  Isabelle’s face appeared from its nesting place in my shoulder. She studied him.

  He gazed at her with a slight smile. “And if Mommy allows, we could even dredge up a cookie,” he said. She stared, wary but tempted.

  “Do you think you can walk, Isabelle?” I was tired of carrying her. She was big to be pulling this routine, but I always figured she knew what she needed better than I did.

  She nodded her head, still not speaking, and I put her down on her feet. Together, we followed Philip—Philo!—out of the shed and back to the house. We walked through the front office. Philo slid open an oak pocket door, which opened to a living room with a fireplace. He asked if I wanted coffee or tea and what he could give Isabelle. I okayed cookies and milk, and he turned on the television set that stood in a corner and fiddled with the dials until he found a show about animals. Then he disappeared through a swinging door.

  Isabelle floated to the floor and sat cross-legged (as she always did) in front of the TV. I studied the room. The furniture was old and varied, comfortable. I saw nothing screamingly ugly, nothing cutesy (suggesting a female occupant) or macho (suggesting ego problems). While he prepared our snack, I did some accounting. On the negative side were his sexist assumptions. They might not be serious. His pedantry could have been aggravated by nervousness. It might be permanent, but it was probably something I could live with, albeit with constant criticism. Stacked against the current I felt emanating from him and the responding current I felt in myself, the intense heat I felt radiating from his large, musky body, and the response my own made to it, these were minor objections. Was the sexism accidental, and could it be eliminated?

  I continued my examination of the room. A bookcase held a hundred or more books, many on mycology, others on history and politics—no novels or poetry. Too bad, and maybe not remediable. There were a few sculptures I recognized as Inuit. Excellent. Prints hung on the walls, most of them careful depictions of mushrooms in muted pastels. Good if not great. But—some artistic taste. You couldn’t expect everything, could you? But I knew I wasn’t at my most alert: my heart was beating too fast, too hard.

  Philo came back with a tray. He was clearly used to doing this; he probably did it for all his customers. He was easy and comfortable now, even with Isabelle; he had dropped the pedantry. She watched him as he handed her a snack. In a tiny voice, she said, “Thank you.” I could see exactly how she was going to be with him: stubbornly hard to win but seducible, and once won, fiercely attached, as jealous of him as she now was of me. I smiled grimly, privately, at her perverse little heart. Not so different from mine.

  “So,” I began, when he was settled in the chair opposite me, “how long have you had the mushroom farm?”

  “It’s three years since I opened it. It took a year before that to get it going. The hardest four years of my life, but I’ve loved every day of it.”

  “You’ve done this all alone?”

  “Yeah.” He sighed. “I started out with my girlfriend . . .”

  Heart swoop.

  “Debbie. We met when we both worked for Crumper Strauss in D.C. after law school. Crumper Strauss—I don’t know if you’ve heard of it—it’s a huge law firm, hundreds of attorneys. We did wills and estates. God, did we hate it! It was so boring. The three years I worked there were the most miserable time of my life. Hers, too. We both started having daydreams—me about mushrooms, her about theater. But somehow mushrooms seemed more possible than theater; a mushroom farm was more tangible . . . She’d acted in some undergrad productions, but she hadn’t studied acting. She wasn’t even sure acting was what she wanted. I think my enthusiasm for mycology sort of swept her up . . .”

  He was sipping coffee from his mug as he spoke, and I was staring at him with intensity. I was surprised at what was coming out of him, and yet I wasn’t. He was telling me this personal stuff as if I had a right to hear it, as if he knew I would care, and he wanted me to know it all. I did care, I did need to know it all, but how did he know that? In what exchange of looks had that been settled between us?

  “We earned great salaries for this deadening work, and both of us saved it right from the beginning. We knew immediately that we’d have to get out. On the third anniversary of our being hired, we both quit and took off for France. We went to Paris, to the Sorbonne. I spoke French fairly well, but hers was shaky. I signed up for a course in mycology; Debbie wanted to learn French well and immersed herself in French culture.

  “During the year we were there, my grandmother died—my grandfather had died some years before—and left me her house. Real estate values in France were horribly low but it was a gorgeous big old house in an area where tourists were starting to come, and I was able to sell it fo
r a good price to a group that wanted to open a hotel. I couldn’t have afforded to keep it up, and I thought my grandmother would have loved that I used her house to buy a mushroom farm.

  “I came back and looked around. Debbie stayed in Paris a while longer. I have a cousin who lives in Rutland. He urged me to look around this area because property was relatively cheap here, and the land is rich. It’s so rocky that it hasn’t been farmed much, and it has retained its nutrients. I was going to strain it anyway, to put it in boxes, so the rockiness didn’t matter. Anyway, eventually I bought this house and land and built the sheds. There were a lot of expenses—the seeds and spores, the automatic overhead misting system, the huge fans, the heating system—and my inheritance and my savings together didn’t quite cover it. I had to get a bank loan for some of it. I’m still paying off that loan.

  “Debbie came back when I started operating. I don’t know what she thought mushroom farming would be like: I don’t know what I thought it would be like, for that matter.” He laughed. “We knew it wouldn’t be like real farming, where you’re utterly subject to the weather and the work is backbreaking. It seemed safer, more protected, somehow. But it was very hard work—planting, harvesting, they’re laborious, but you know that.” He laughed wryly.

  “Debbie didn’t care for it. She liked Vermont, the trees, the greenness. But I was occupied with building the sheds and planting and worrying about soil and nourishment and water and humidity, and she hated all that and refused to participate. And once winter came—well, it’s tough up here, you know that—she began to hate it.

  “She’d met some people in Paris, Americans involved in a national theater based in D.C., a couple of gay men she liked very much. She called them and asked if they knew of any job she could fill. They’d liked her—she’s smart and witty—and told her to come down and they’d find something for her. She went. She said she’d come back every other weekend, but I sort of sensed . . .

  “Anyway, by then . . . It’s funny, I don’t know if you’ve found . . . if you have enough differences with someone, even if you still love them, you don’t mind parting from them, like you’ve had enough despite the love . . . Or maybe I’m just a cold bastard.” He eyed me hard. “What do you think?”