Fic: The Quintessential First-Timer's Cookbook [The Social Network][5/5]
| The Quintessential First-Timer's Cookbook |
Recipe 5
5. coq au vin avec creme
Translating to "chicken in wine with cream," coq au vin avec creme is perhaps the simplest dish for a chef new to French cuisine to try. The versatility and flexibility of this dish is, of course, the main key for the inexperienced cook.
1. Place chicken breasts in a pan and coat with a pinch of salt, a pinch of pepper, and seasoning of your choice (suggestions include rosemary, thyme, bacon, and/or chili flakes.) Drizzle with 2 tablespoons olive oil. Heat oven to 430 and roast for 20 minutes.
2. Add 1 1/14 cup white wine. Be liberal. Return to oven for another 20 minutes.
3. While the chicken is cooking, sautee some mushrooms and garlic, again to taste. Make mashed potatoes, whip with a knob of butter, 1/2 cup milk, and pinch of salt.
4. Serve the potatoes/mushroom mix and add the chicken on top.
It takes three hours to get to Tours from the airport if you go by bus, give or take an hour or so, depending on how excruciating the traffic is coming out of Paris.
They sit for twenty minutes at the toll, and Eduardo leans his forehead against the bus window, pulling his legs up onto the seat with him. The bus idles, rumbling underneath him, making the pane of glass vibrate against his skull. On the other side of the toll booths, the noise reduction walls are covered in layers of graffiti too numerous to make out individual signatures.
He closes his eyes and lets the rising sun warm them, steadily breaching over the walls, a coal-colored glow on the insides of his eyelids.
He wakes up again when the bus groans with effort, turning into a parking spot at a rest point. The driver cranks the door open and calls back, "quinze minute!" before he drops down the steps, tapping a pack of cigarettes against the heel of his hand.
Eduardo stretches out, uncurling his arms above his head and his legs out under the seat in front of him, before he gets up. There's a tourist family clustered a couple rows ahead of him, and he lingers in the aisle while they orient themselves and the nest they've made of their belongings. The wire connecting the youngest kid's Discman to his headphones snags on the arm rest as he goes by, and absently, Eduardo reaches out to unhook it.
The boy flashes him a quick grin, stuffing the Discman into the kangaroo pouch of his sweatshirt. "Thanks, mister!" he chirps, and then corrects himself, "I mean, um. Mercy. Uh, merci, yeah."
Eduardo smiles back, amused.
(The boy's name is Charlie Dockweiler, and at this moment in time, he's twelve years old. His screenname on Neopets is Villain1995 and he's thinking about asking people to start referring to him as Charles, because Charles Dockweiler sounds like someone out of James Bond. He doesn't think anything at all about the man who follows him down the steps of the bus, other than his hair swoops out from his forehead like the back end of a duck.)
Walking from one end of the parking lot to the other to get the circulation going in his legs, Eduardo goes back to linger by the front of the bus. They're well into the countryside of central France; he shades his eyes, looking out over the poppy fields, the bright red heads bobbing in the breeze. He can just make out a farmhouse on a distant hill.
The driver stands close-by, cigarette dangling between his fingers. When Eduardo catches his eye, he tilts his head and asks something with a smoker's rasp. He has eyes the yellow-green color of a summer storm.
Eduardo just smiles politely for a beat, before the words register in his mind and he can pick out the important components. "Where" and the "you" form of a verb were both present -- where are you going, maybe? He should definitely know this. He's bilingual, and has been since the day he first learned to talk, but it's like his brain froze after the age of five. He's atrocious at picking up new languages. German was his lowest grade in high school, and sure, Portuguese shares the same Romantic language root as French, but it's more of a hindrance than a help, because he just wants to switch back to what he knows.
The driver bends down to drag his cigarette through the gravel, tucking the remaining half back into the box.
He looks at Eduardo like he expects an answer, so Eduardo casts his eyes out across the poppy fields and answers, "Tours. Chez ... ah, chez moi. Home," he adds, quieter. "I'm going home."
-
On the brochure, Tours is a moderately-sized city on the banks of the Loire with a history that dates back to the tenth century. The houses that were built in the Dark Ages are still standing even today, clustered around the main square in the shadow of a gothic cathedral. It's a major selling point for the tourists that stop by on their way down to the coast or up to Paris.
The sidewalks in Eduardo's neighborhood are so narrow there's only room for one person walking at a time, unless you turn sideways to slip by each other like minnows, and the buildings are so close together that the sun only touches the puddles in the street at high noon, and the tenants can string their laundry across to each other's windows.
Above his head, white bedsheets billow with a hard wind, catching against the blue sky easy as artwork. A car snakes its way down the street, passing close enough to Eduardo that he feels the breeze it leaves in its wake.
The twin boys from the apartment below theirs have a complicated set-up of Pokemon cards spread out on the stoop, and they frown down at them with intense concentration.
Amy had to have been looking out the window at the exact right moment to have seen him coming down the sidewalk, because the gate to their apartment building unlatches and she spills out onto the sidewalk in a hurry, barefoot and in jogging shorts and practically having to leap over the twins not to disturb their game.
Clapping eyes on him immediately, she squeals, "You're back!" and Eduardo manages to set his briefcase and garment bag down in time to catch her as she launches herself at him. Her legs go around his waist as he swings her around in a circle, her "you're back, you're back, you're back"s chorusing loud in his ear.
He sets her back down, close enough that their toes overlap, and her fingers clamp down on his shoulders, holding him still so she can frown at him with sudden realization. "Why are you back?" she demands. "You're back early! You're not supposed to be back yet."
"Right," Eduardo acknowledges. She has hair caught in her mouth, so he pulls it loose and tucks it behind her ear. "The depositions have been suspended for fourteen days pending someone bail Mark out of jail, so I figured that was enough time to come home."
Amy's eyebrows leap spiritedly up her forehead.
Eduardo grins at her, because this is going to have mileage and he knows it. "Mark got arrested for assaulting someone at a corporate event. Apparently the guy made some racist crack about his girlfriend, so Mark punched him."
"Mark punched someone? Like, the dude was actually hurt?" Amy goes, incredulous.
Coming up behind her at a much more sedate pace, Dustin asks simultaneously, "Wait, someone threw a racial slur at Christy?"
Amy twists her head around, making a very loud and pointed noise low in her throat. Realizing his slip, Dustin claps a hand to his mouth in horror, eyes going comically wide.
Eduardo looks between them, amused, and shifts his hold on Amy so that he can hook his index finger into the loose collar of Dustin's cotton shirt, the one that says "Zombies Love Nerds With Brains," pulling him in to press a kiss to his mouth in the middle of the street. "I think it's funny," he murmurs, as Dustin cants into him for a longer kiss. "How you two live under the impression that I somehow don't know the CEO of Facebook is dating my ex."
"It's just funny because she's taller than he is," Dustin returns, mulish.
"Trust me, I'm perfectly okay with it. They're so alike that they work so much better with each other than either of them did with me."
"We're glad you're home," Amy inserts diplomatically, pressing her face against the shoulder of his suit, which is wrinkled from travel.
"She missed you," Dustin tattles. "I don't have the arm strength to hold her up against a wall or carry her to bed, it's pathetic," he demonstrates, flexing his arms and pulling the corners of his mouth down when they don't bunch up like Popeye's. "A girl's got needs, you know."
"Glad to know the real reason you love me," Eduardo says to Amy, who claps a hand over his mouth and murmurs shut your face, her voice so laden with affection it's like she's saying something else entirely.
-
The superintendent, an elderly woman named Rosemarie, always has lipstick on her teeth and her head wobbles near-constantly whenever she's upright.
Fifty years ago, she married an American pilot with a handlebar mustache -- this is usually the very first piece of information she volunteers about herself. They were married for two years before he died: how, Eduardo still has no idea, but there's a real kind of pain that creases the corners of Rosemarie's walnut face that tells him the memory of it is still searingly tragic. She never married again.
She speaks English on the level that Eduardo speaks French, which she uses mostly just to ask Eduardo wistful questions about New York City: she has the kind of romantic idea about the city that bears absolutely no resemblance to the reality. Amy, who speaks French so fluently the words sound like water coming out of her mouth, has to come to the rescue a lot, or Eduardo and Rosemarie will just stand there forever, talking past each other.
She knows all her tenants by the sound of their footsteps on the stoop, so by the time he gets the gate unlatched, she's standing in her office door, watching him with a smirk curling the corner of her mouth. Sometimes in the summer, she'll come to hover in the doorway wearing nothing but a sheer pair of nylons, suspended by garter belts, and absolutely nothing else. Rosemarie's sagging breasts are the kind of thing Eduardo could have lived a long and happy life without ever seeing.
She just clucks her tongue and makes a comment about prudish Americans who blush too much.
Dustin calls her "Rosemary and her drying herbs," which doesn't make sense, but the name sticks.
The apartment building they live in overlooks the street on one side, the courtyard and sundial on the other, and has a roof the pigeons like to sun themselves on in the lazy part of the afternoon. The tiles are streaked permanently white, and their cooing gets so loud at times that most of Eduardo's afternoon naps often feature an indistinct sensation of being suffocated in feathers, since the bed is right underneath the window.
It's the perfect place to nap, sun-warmed and rumpled, and the perfect place to tug each other down to the sounds of people milling on the sidewalk below, a breeze stirring along their bare backs. It's the perfect place to sleep, too tangled in each other to get up easily.
Eduardo's favorite place in the world is probably their bed.
When they first rented the place, Rosemarie handed over the key, looking from Amy to Dustin to Eduardo and back again. She smirked in that way of hers and said something in a quiet undertone. It was the first and last time she ever complimented them.
"She says we're all too stupidly nice," Amy translated. "And we're going to get grotesquely taken advantage of by everyone we'll ever meet."
"I think we'll deal," said Dustin, wrapping his arms around her waist and burying his nose in her shoulder. Eduardo smiled at them from across the room, his heart feeling two sizes too large for the ribs that bound it.
-
The language barrier is a bit of a bitch sometimes, and if he's away from home too long, Eduardo finds himself getting homesick for the sound of his own language. It's an odd feeling. ("Only you, Thork," Trevor sighs, the first time the two of them try that new video-chat program together, Skype or whatever it's called.)
Someone once told them that the French believe the perfect breast is one that can fit into a wineglass -- the martini kind, obviously, not the tulip-shaped ones. Naturally, that meant they all wound up in the kitchen five minutes later, needing to test this hypothesis by attaching their wineglasses to their chests like toilet plungers.
"Hm," Amy had said. She was too big for hers.
Dustin and Eduardo, being neither anatomically female nor the Rock, didn't even come close to filling theirs.
"Well," Dustin had sighed. "There goes our hope of citizenship."
Their next-door neighbor is a young Iraq veteran with very blue eyes, who likes to sit out on the landing, folding little paper origami animals for the twin boys who live downstairs. He's working on a novel -- a hodge-podge collection of stories from fellow soldiers of his who didn't come home. Everyone is a patchwork quilt of the people they love, the people they hate, the opinions they could never quite shake, and the stories they told to other people.
The soldier has dozens and dozens of strange, silly, and sometimes heartbreaking stories he collected over in the Middle East.
"Why did you volunteer?" Eduardo asked him once, because to him, the war's still relatively new and, like most Americans, he wasn't really sure what was going on or why they were doing it.
The neighbor had shrugged back at him. "Your boys in the government asked, so I went. Everybody should have somebody to stand with them when they need it. I want to live in a world where that's the only thing we do, no explanation needed."
He says things like that a lot, because of the novel, like somehow he's become a channel for the men and women he served with; all the things he's trying to remember about them, the important and not-so-important bits of themselves that they couldn't recognize in themselves but could be recognized by those around them.
"Everybody's just waiting for everybody else to get their heads out of their asses," he says.
"Isn't that the truth," Eduardo murmurs back, thinking of the war first, and then thinking of What do you mean, get left behind?
He met them while they were standing in the middle of the apartment courtyard by the bubbling cherub fountain, surrounded by walls and the curling iron trellises on the windows; Dustin and Eduardo each had their arms wrapped around each other like an awkward three-legged race, Amy sandwiched under their armpits, her fingers hooked through their belt loops for balance.
Catching him watching them, curious, she smiled and said warmly, "Hello, I'm Amy. This is Eduardo, and this is Dustin."
"She saved our lives," said Eduardo by way of introduction, feeling Dustin's emphatic nod go all the way through the places they were connected.
"I did not," Amy said by rote. And then, even quieter, she murmured, "They saved mine."
-
At times, it feels like he's been stuck in the bureaucratic cogs for so long that he doesn't even remember why he's suing Mark in the first place. The justice system of America moves so infinitesimally slow; this lawsuit's been the background hum to Eduardo's life for almost three years, and they haven't even gone to court yet.
At one point, Eduardo just stopped in his tracks and said, "What am I doing? This isn't even going to -- what do I think I'm going to accomplish, he's too powerful now to ever --"
Next to him on the boardwalk overlooking the Loire, city street lights gleaming through the evening fog like fireflies, watching Dustin sit on the wall and do quick five-minute sketches of the passerby and thinking idly that it's not long before they're allowed to get Dumb Thing 1 and Dumb Thing 2 out of international quarantine, Amy reached out and flicked his ear with her fingernail.
"Shut up," she said, giving him her most deeply unimpressed look as he rubbed his stinging ear, scowling at her. "His shit stinks as much as yours does, okay, and one day, he'll be so old that when he laughs, the tears run down his leg. And then you're going to feel ridiculous that you ever let him get to you like this."
Which is ... actually one of the most useful pieces of advice he's ever gotten.
It certainly helps him through the Winklevosses's deposition, standing at the water pitcher and listening to Mark bridle and snarl and quip across the table and thinking, someday, you'll be an old gasbag with farts that smell like garbanzo beans and then what the fuck will your condescension mean, before he had to duck his head to hide his grin.
The thing is -- he can forgive Mark for the dilution. That's not the hard part, since he half-saw it coming, anyway, and was really just waiting for the guillotine to fall since the start: maybe even as long ago as Caribbean night, when he unceremoniously and excitedly dragged Mark into his news about the Phoenix Club like Mark wasn't just about to deliver the most important speech of his life.
So, yes, Eduardo can understand the business bit of it, and whatever, they both sucked as partners and as friends, and isn't it a good thing that it's not the last time they all get to act like jerks?
Mark's not an asshole because he willingly cut Eduardo out of the company he helped found. He's an asshole because of it's probably a diversity thing and he's an asshole because of I'll keep that in mind the next time I'm feeling selfish and overwhelmed by the shallow vapidity of my life.
That's what Eduardo will never forgive him for.
And maybe ... maybe someday.
Maybe someday he'll meet Mark on his own merit, as a man with his own accomplishments, backed by the people who love him.
Maybe then they can talk.
-
(What he doesn't know, and what he will never know, is that Mark Zuckerberg tried to apologize to Eduardo Saverin exactly once.
Not because he thought he was wrong, but because his need to talk to Eduardo the way they used to back when they were best friends momentarily outweighed his pride in his decisions. It was a moment so flooded with purpose that he felt lit up from the inside, the way people do after reading a reality-altering book, or after watching a really good movie, or eating the best breakfast on a beautiful day.
Mark pushed himself away from his chair and started across the room with the full intention of talking to Eduardo.
But Eduardo, with the instinctive yank in his gut familiar to everyone who's ever seen someone they really didn't want to talk to in the hallway, turned away and pulled Amy into a conversation with a blinding non-sequitr, because it was just that kind of day and he just did not want to talk to Mark.
The moment passed.
It didn't come around again.)
-
It's not perfect, and it's never easy.
It takes time to find a balance, because they're always going to want to play favorites, they're always going to unintentionally make one of them feel like the others' third wheel.
There are days when the only thing Eduardo wants is to wake up to Amy's legs traipsing back and forth across his field of vision, the old wooden floors creaking under her weight as she waters the plants on their windowsill out of the small-boob wineglass, her hair mussed in the back and a hickey standing out plum-colored on the high arch of her neck; Dustin's presence is almost superfluous to that vision.
And there are days when he's almost annoyed with Amy for not having been there at Harvard, because it'd just be nicer if she could understand the jokes Dustin and Eduardo have without them having to explain it to her, like that time Dustin fondled Eduardo's backside in full view of the Bible group handing out Are You Going to Hell pamphlets on the steps of the Harvard business college.
And he knows there's years of history between Dustin and Amy that he'll never be a part of.
They are completely at ease with each other. Amy falls asleep in Dustin's Threadless hoodies, even in the hot part of summer, the wrists stretched out from where she's always shoving them up her arms, and there's something so comfortable about the way Dustin props his chin on his hands and tells Amy that the unhappy man who sells stamps to tourists at La Poste really, really, really likes Sugar Babies candy, so maybe they should fill his mailbox with them, just for fun.
"Like the ballet teacher from Pier 39 who really liked Neco wafers, remember how they all poured out onto her feet at once?" he goes, and Amy looks up from her itinerary and smiles, and Eduardo feels the exclusion clench hard at his gut.
He's just ... not as comfortable. He wants to be, but he doubts he's ever going to shake that initial instinct to politely look away whenever Amy slips her bra out her sleeve at the end of a long day, or when Dustin comes out of the shower with everything hanging loose. Rosemarie is right, he kind of got into the habit of being a prude.
It's not just him, either. Sex isn't exactly the equal, three-way act they all assumed it would be going into it.
For one, Dustin does not like oral sex.
Eduardo doesn't actually mind being on his knees, either with his hands on Dustin's thighs or Amy's knee crooked over his shoulder, but there's something about putting his mouth on somebody else's genitals that makes Dustin cringe full-body, gag, and pull back to say, "Nope, can't do it, you pee out of those things."
He likes receiving it just fine, which is probably part of the problem, and Eduardo and Amy joke about how he's just trying to get out of reciprocation for a day or two before they clue in that no, Dustin actually really does feel guilty that he's creeped out by the thought of giving head and that they're missing something vital from their sex lives because there's something he can't perform.
Eduardo's always considered Dustin's thick skin to be one of his greatest evolutionary advantages, but it takes a long time for it to sink in that whatever he does and does not want to do in the bedroom is perfectly fine. Amy and Eduardo love him, they love him something awful, and he needs to know that's not conditional on how he is in bed.
Because for them, feeling left out is something they take more seriously than a heart attack.
The important thing to remember is: what brings them together is far, far, far more important than what sets them apart.
Amy's talking about getting her PhD here.
Dustin's getting starry-eyed about a new business venture; a company run entirely via texting, aimed at answering any and all questions that get texted in.
Eduardo's going to grit his teeth, and he's going to fly back to Palo Alto once Christy bails Mark's ass out of jail for trying to be her white knight, and he's going to sue for every last cent of the $600 million he's asking for, and he's going to do it for the way Amy says I did not every time he tells people, elle m'a sauve. La vie, elle m'a sauve. He's going to do it for the smile on Dustin's face when he thinks Amy and Eduardo can't see him, like he thinks there's no way they could be real.
He's going to do it for every act of kindness, for the dumb dogs, for every single time they've made him feel like he's the only one in the world who's ever been in love, for every time Dustin walked in to find Amy and Eduardo naked, their arms around each other, and declared, "fuck yes, this apartment is now clothing optional!" and dropped his pants like he's allergic.
It's difficult.
But you learn. It's a lot like cooking, you know, love is. You don't have to be very good at it, but everyone has to learn sometime. It's just necessary for survival, and the nice thing is that other people are usually always willing to help.
-
"You know," declares Amy, setting the tin down on the stovetop with a clatter and stripping the oven mitts from her hands. "Someday we'll get the hang of this."
"Hey!" Dustin protests. "We do quite well for ourselves, thank you!"
The three of them look at the coq au vin, shifting around pathetically in its seasoning and white wine marinade. Outside the window, the pigeons are making a racket, and somewhere in the distance, the cathedral bells are tolling loud and somber.
"Well," Dustin amends. "We get by."
There's another long pause.
Then, cheerfully, he offers, "You know, how about we forget this nutrition thing and have sex instead? We're really good at that."
"Okay," says Eduardo readily, pushing away from the sink, simultaneous with Amy's "yes, please!"
They get as far as the bedroom before Dustin starts wondering if you can blow balloon animals out of condoms.
Nothing productive gets done for the rest of the afternoon.
-
At this moment in time, Amelia Ritter is twenty-four years old, Eduardo Saverin is twenty-three, and Dustin Moskovitz is twenty-two. They live in a sunny apartment in Tours in the heart of France with two dumb labradors and an introductory cookbook.
Their favorite thing in the world is each other.
-
la fin
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note: once again, this fic could not have been possible without the support of salvadore_hart or her fantastic contribution. So go over to her art masterpost and tell her how amazing she is!