My roommate, Chantal, was from Switzerland. I tried to describe her in the diary: “Cropped hair the color of a calm fire. A face like Audrey Hepburn’s, neatly arranged bones, eyes quick. Lean as a soldier, with a tattoo along her side and half her lower back.” It was 11 p.m., and I’d eaten nothing all day but a greasy croissant from the hotel’s minimalist breakfast buffet. She was meeting friends for dinner. Would I come?
In the maze of the old quarter, we sat at a table outside, on stone stairs descending from another century. Her friends were all Swiss but kindly spoke English. Here they are, spilling from the diary’s pages: Olivier ducking to disguise his height, talking about all the things he wanted to do with his life, and all at once; Lukas with his grazed head and face long and serious behind fine-tuned glasses, pausing to search through words, wanting only the precise ones; Sasha, burly and cheerful, expelled twice from school for pranks — including throwing a chair out a window, on a bet, because he needed lunch money — whose dream was to buy a camel for the commute to work; and Mark, who was quieter, so I had to lean in as he talked about riding a motorcycle from Thailand to Myanmar, and who was handsome enough to make me nervous.
The restaurant was unexceptional — plastic chairs, coarse tablecloths, low-guttering candles — and perfect. I ordered salade de chèvre chaud, a careless toss of greens under rounds of goat cheese with the sheerest veil of bread crumbs, gently crisped in a hot pan. The greens were fresh and cool, and the cheese was still warm. We talked for hours. They drank three bottles of wine; I sipped. When the bill came, they told me, “You owe nothing.”
How did they know how to live like this, giving themselves to the moment, this murmur of voices, these reflections off glass, with no need for it to lead anywhere? Always I had this longing for plot, motivation, story — some shimmer to chase through the night. I wondered if this was the American in me, a compulsion to conquer. I did not understand simply being in the world…
I like to think I learned something from them. How to be at ease with the present; to drink wine just for its lightness on the tongue; to linger over an ordinary, unfussy meal; to not want, want, want without end.
https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1024570-green-salad-with-warm-goat-cheese-salade-de-chevre-chaud
