Lunch in Paris, by Elizabeth Bard »
Could be sweet:
“When le dessert finally arrives, it looks like an innocent upsidedown chocolate cupcake, accompanied by a small cloud of freshly whipped cream. But when my spoon breaks the surface, the chocolate center flows like dark lava onto the whiteness of the plate. The last ounce of stress drains from my body. I feel my spine soften in the chair. The menu says Moelleux au Chocolat ‘Kitu’.
‘Kitu is a pun,’ says Gwendal, with his best Humphrey Bogard squint. ‘It means which kills.’
I have discovered the French version of ‘Death by Chocolate’.”
* * *
Could be bitter:
“But the questions just kept coming, and I had only one exasperating answer. Because I’m not in New York, and things just don’t work like that here. It’s hard enough trying to build a new life in another culture without having to explain the process to everyone back home. The journalism was coming in at a very slow trickle - I seemed to spend eighty percent of my time pitching ideas to editors, twenty percent actually writing. I found that travel articles tended to be written by staffers on vacation rather than freelancers on the ground. I was getting a piece of art criticism here and there, but mostly in London or New York, so I spent my fees going back and forth to do interviews and see exhibitions. My mother decided that to pick up the slack, I should start a museum tour company. Start a company? How could I make her understand that just going to the post office in Paris was sometimes an all-day project? There were days when each step I took was like wading through a room full of cold mashed potatoes. The idea of diverting what little energy I had left into a business that was not my ultimate goal left me wanting to curl up into a little ball and cry.”
