Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin Page 5

  Even if your name in the index turned out to be unconnected to an indictable offense, it usually meant that in the author’s memory you had said something stupid or embarrassing and he had come back with a wickedly apt rejoinder. When I read about myself in those books, I usually thought I hadn’t said exactly what I’d been quoted as saying, but I could never remember the conversation well enough to be sure. I don’t know how all of these memoirists held on to such precise memories of casual water-fountain conversations that took place in 1965 or 1973. I’ll admit that in those days I never thought of patting them down for wires.

  For many years, I didn’t give any thought to writing my own book about The New Yorker. I couldn’t remember many truly mortifying things people had said to me or many clever things I had said back. Whenever my wife read a New Yorker memoir, she’d ask if it was possible that I had actually never uttered a wickedly apt rejoinder.

  “I wouldn’t say ‘never,’ ” I told her at one point. “When we had that go-around about having a dental plan, someone who thought writers shouldn’t concern themselves with such petit bourgeois matters said to me, ‘Dostoyevsky didn’t have a dental plan,’ and I said, ‘Yeah, and did you ever get a load of his teeth?’ ”

  “Can you remember any that didn’t have to do with the dental plan?” she asked.

  “Not offhand,” I said. “But it doesn’t make any difference, because I don’t want to write a book about The New Yorker anyway.”

  Lately, though, I’ve been getting a little edgy about that policy. It’s now clear that I could eventually find myself in the position of being the only person with any connection to the magazine who hasn’t discussed his New Yorker experience in excruciating detail between hard covers. It has occurred to me that there could come a day, many years from now, when my grandchildren, lacking documentary evidence issued under the imprimatur of a major publisher, refuse to believe that I ever worked for The New Yorker at all.

  I see us all on the porch of our summerhouse in Nova Scotia. My wife and I, ancient but still quite alert in the middle of the day, are rocking to the best of our capacity in our rocking chairs and these so-far-hypothetical grandchildren are sprawled in hammocks and deck chairs and cushions around us. My wife is saying, “When Gramps was writing those pieces around the country every three weeks for The New Yorker, and your mothers were just tiny little …”

  “Gidoudahere,” little Siobhan says. “Gramps never wrote for The New Yorker.”

  I start to smile, in a way that I think combines fond forbearance of Siobhan’s mistake coupled with appropriate modesty, but then I hear the voice of little Deirdre (in this fantasy, for reasons I can’t imagine, all of my grandchildren have been given Irish names that I’ve always had difficulty pronouncing). “My friend Jason’s grandfather worked at The New Yorker,” little Deirdre says. “He wrote a book all about it.” She tells us Jason’s grandfather’s name, as if intoning the name of some rock star she’d been fortunate to catch a glimpse of in a restaurant.

  “To paraphrase what A. J. Liebling once wrote of Hamlin Garland,” I say, “Jason’s grandfather couldn’t write for free seeds.”

  “Did you know A. J. Liebling, Gramps?” little Seamus says.

  “Well,” I reply.

  “Because my friend Timmy’s nana said in her New Yorker book that she knew A. J. Liebling!” little Seamus says.

  “In her dreams!” I say, not realizing that I’ve raised my voice a bit. “In her goddamned dreams!”

  My wife shoots me one of those not-in-front-of-the-children looks, and then says, brightly, “Gramps once met J. D. Salinger. Tell us what J. D. Salinger said.”

  “I can’t remember exactly,” I say, “but it may have been ‘Nice to meet you, Calvin.’ ”

  “Was that in a book?” little Siobhan asks.

  “Well, no,” I say.

  Little Siobhan nods, as if her worst suspicions have been confirmed.

  Then I hear the voice of little Moira. Until now, we have had no reason to believe that little Moira is paying any attention to the conversation. She is, after all, only three and a half. But she is definitely addressing a question to me.

  “Grampy, did you ever have dinner with Mr. Shawn?” little Moira asks sweetly.

  “Well, we did have lunch once,” I say. “After I’d been at The New Yorker only nineteen years. And I have reason to believe that if he hadn’t retired before another nineteen years had passed, it would have been quite possible that—”

  “My friend Ethan’s bubbe used to have dinner with Mr. Shawn all the time,” little Moira says. “She wrote a book about it. Do you want to hear some of the things Mr. Shawn said to Ethan’s bubbe?”

  “No, I do not want to hear some of the things Mr. Shawn said to Ethan’s bubbe,” I say. “I think I’d rather hear Al Gore’s rendering of Finnegans Wake than hear some of the things Mr. Shawn said to Ethan’s bubbe.”

  “Granny,” little Moira says to my wife, “why is Grampy talking in his angry voice? Is he mad at Ethan’s bubbe because she wrote for The New Yorker and he didn’t?”

  “Wrote!” I shout. “Wrote! Is that what you call what Ethan’s bubbe was doing, Moira? Wrote!”

  “Please don’t shout at Moira,” my wife says. “At least not until you’ve learned how to pronounce her name.”

  Little Moira starts to cry. Little Siobhan is looking at me as if I’ve just nicked her lunch money. As I look around at my grandchildren, I’m starting to wonder whether or not I could come up with enough wickedly apt rejoinders for a book about my life at The New Yorker.

  2000

  TALES OF A CLEAN-PLATE RANGER

  “When helicopters were snatching people from the grounds of the American compound during the panic of the final Vietcong push into Saigon, I was sitting in front of my television set shouting, ‘Get the chefs! Get the chefs!’ ”

  Alice

  Now that it’s fashionable to reveal intimate details of married life, I can state publicly that my wife, Alice, has a weird predilection for limiting our family to three meals a day. I also might as well admit that the most serious threat to our marriage came in 1975, when Alice mentioned my weight just as I was about to sit down to dinner at a restaurant named Chez Helène in New Orleans. Chez Helène is one of my favorite restaurants in New Orleans; we do not have the sort of marriage that could come to grief over ordinary food.

  Without wanting to be legalistic, I should mention that Alice brought up the weight issue during a long-distance telephone call—breaking whatever federal regulations there are against Interstate Appetite Impairment. Like many people who travel a lot on business, I’m in the habit of calling home every evening to share the little victories and defeats of the day—the triumph, for instance, of happening upon a superior tamale stand in a town I thought had long before been completely carved into spheres of influence by McDonald’s and Burger King, or the misery of being escorted by some local booster past the unmistakable aroma of genuine hickory-wood barbecuing into La Maison de la Casa House, whose notion of “Continental cuisine” seems to have been derived in some arcane way from the Continental Trailways bus company. Having found myself on business in New Orleans—or, as it is sometimes expressed around my office, having found it my business to find business in New Orleans—I was about to settle into Chez Helène for a long evening. First, of course, I telephoned Alice in New York. I assumed it would give her great pleasure to hear that her husband was about to have enough sweet potatoes and fried oysters to make him as happy as he could manage to be outside her presence. Scholars of the art have often mentioned Chez Helène as an example of what happens when Creole blends with Soul—so that a bowl of greens comes out tasting of spices that the average greens-maker in Georgia or Alabama probably associates with papists or the Devil himself.

  “I’m about to have dinner at Chez Helène,” I said.

  “Dr. Seligmann just told me today that you weighed a hundred and eighty pounds when you were in his office last week,” A
lice said. “That’s terrible!”

  “There must be something wrong with this connection,” I said. “I could swear I just told you that I was about to have dinner at Chez Helène.”

  “You’re going to have to go on a diet. This is serious.”

  It occurred to me that a man telephoning his wife from a soul-food restaurant could, on the excuse of trying to provide some authentic atmosphere, say something like “Watch yo’ mouth, woman!” Instead, I said, “I think there might be a better time to talk about this, Alice.” Toward the end of the second or third term of the Caroline Kennedy administration was the sort of time I had in mind.

  “Well, we can talk about it when you get home,” Alice said. “Have a nice dinner.”

  I did. It is a measure of my devotion to Alice that I forgave her, even though my second order of fried chicken was ruined by the realization that I had forgotten to tell her I had actually weighed only 166. I always allow fourteen pounds for clothes.

  1978

  What Happened to Brie and Chablis?

  What happened to Brie and Chablis?

  Both Brie and Chablis used to be

  The sort of thing everyone ate

  When goat cheese and Napa Merlot

  Weren’t purchased by those in the know,

  And monkfish was thought of as bait.

  And why did authorities ban

  From restaurants all coq au vin?

  And then disappeared sole meunière,

  Then banished, with little ado,

  Beef Wellington—Stroganoff, too.

  Then canceled the chocolate éclair.

  Then hollandaise sauce got the boot,

  And kiwis stopped being the fruit

  That every chef loved to include.

  Like quiches, or coquilles St. Jacques,

  They turned into something to mock—

  The fruit that all chic chefs eschewed.

  You miss, let’s say, trout amandine?

  Take hope from some menus I’ve seen:

  Fondue has been spotted of late

  And—yes, to my near disbelief—

  Tartare not from tuna but beef.

  They all may return. Just you wait.

  2003

  Chicken à la King

  Americans have a strong vision of the Midwest. It includes mother in the kitchen baking bread or putting up vegetables from the garden. As it happens, my own mother for thirty years served her family nothing but leftovers. I was out of college before I begin to think: leftover from what? We have a team of anthropologists in there now looking for the original meal. But in general, mother in the kitchen baking bread or putting up vegetables from the garden. Fields of wheat and corn and soybeans across the prairie, with great storage silos visible on the horizon. The Kiwanis meeting at a café on Main Street every Wednesday at eleven-thirty for lunch—chicken à la king.

  At least it used to be chicken à la king. A few years ago, I realized that chicken à la king had disappeared. This country was once awash in chicken à la king. I used to go to a lot of Kiwanis meetings as a reporter—so many, in fact, that I knew all the words to the Kiwanis song, “Oh I’d Rather Be a Kiwanian than in Any Other Club”—and we always had chicken à la king. In fact, I even made up a verse of the song about it: There’s nothing can defeat us / whatever life may bring / cause we can go and eat us / some chicken à la king / oh, I’d rather be a Kiwanian than in any other club.

  And it wasn’t just a Kiwanis dish. Chicken à la king was a multiregional, multi-class dish. On the north shore of Long Island, old-money society people used to eat chicken à la king at their parties. I know some of you are wondering how I would know what old-money society people ate at their parties. Well, it happened that I went to Yale at a time when old-money society people were thick on the ground. Most of them had three last names. My roommate was named Thatcher Baxter Hatcher. They never actually used those names, of course; they all had nicknames, like Mutt and Pudge and Chip. My roommate was known as Tush—Tush Hatcher.

  And Tush took me along to some coming-out parties at some of those fancy clubs. The food was awful. It was at that time, in fact, that I realized that when it comes to food in clubs in this country, the tastiness of the food is in inverse proportion to the exclusivity of the club. If you’re someplace and the hors d’oeuvres come around and it’s a piece of Velveeta cheese on a slice of day-old Wonder bread, with the crusts cut off, you’re in a fancy joint. I finally figured out the reason that these people serve food that tastes like balsa wood: They associate garlic and spices and schmaltz with just the sort of people they’re trying to keep out of the club.

  Anyway, very late in the evening at these parties, they’d serve what they called supper—although this was a full eight hours after people at home had had their supper. (In Kansas City, we generally try to get everyone fed before dark.) These snotty-looking waiters would come out bearing great silver bowls, and in the bowls: chicken à la king. Not as tasty as Kiwanis Club chicken à la king, but still chicken à la king.

  In fact, according to one theory, that’s why some people from that background talk without opening up their mouths, in that marvelous way. The theory is that the glop that chicken à la king floats around in—particularly when it’s allowed to react chemically with silver, particularly when the silver has been in the family for five or six generations—causes the teeth to bond together.

  Of course, they still talk that way, and chicken à la king has disappeared. I think about that a lot, particularly when I’m back in the Midwest and I’m driving through those fields, with the silos miles away on the horizon, and I think, “What do we really know about what’s in those silos?” Maybe a lot of things that seemed to be everywhere and suddenly disappeared are stored in there. Maybe there are silos full of Nehru jackets and silos full of CB radios and silos full of beef Stroganoff. And way out there somewhere, dozens and dozens of silos full of chicken à la king.

  1985

  Missing Links

  Of all the things I’ve eaten in the Cajun parishes of Louisiana—an array of foodstuffs which has been characterized as somewhere between extensive and deplorable—I yearn most often for boudin. When people in Breaux Bridge or Opelousas or Jeanerette talk about boudin (pronounced “boo-DAN”), they mean a soft, spicy mixture of rice and pork and liver and seasoning, which is squeezed hot into the mouth from a sausage casing, usually in the parking lot of a grocery store and preferably while leaning against a pickup. (Boudin means blood sausage to the French, most of whom would probably line up for immigration visas if they ever tasted the Cajun version.) I figure that about 80 percent of the boudin purchased in Louisiana is consumed before the purchaser has left the parking lot, and most of the rest of it is polished off in the car. In other words, Cajun boudin not only doesn’t get outside the state; it usually doesn’t even get home. For Americans who haven’t been to South Louisiana, boudin remains as foreign as gado-gado or cheb; for them, the word “Cajun” on a menu is simply a synonym for burnt fish or too much pepper. When I am daydreaming of boudin, it sometimes occurs to me that of all the indignities the Acadians of Louisiana have had visited upon them—being booted out of Nova Scotia, being ridiculed as rubes and swamp rats by neighboring Anglophones for a couple of centuries, being punished for speaking their own language in the school yard—nothing has been as deeply insulting as what restaurants outside south Louisiana present as Cajun food.

  The scarcity of boudin in the rest of the country makes it all the more pleasurable to have a Louisiana friend who likes to travel and occasionally carries along an ice chest full of local ingredients, just in case. I happen to have such a friend in James Edmunds, of New Iberia, Louisiana. Over the past twenty years or so, James’s visits to New York have regularly included the ritualistic unpacking of an ice chest on my kitchen table. His custom has been to bring the ice chest if he plans to cook a meal during the visit—crawfish étouffée, for instance, or gumbo, or his signature shrimp stew. On those trips, the
ice chest would also hold some boudin. I was so eager to get my hands on the boudin that I often ate it right in the kitchen, as soon as we heated it through, rather than trying to make the experience more authentic by searching for something appropriate to lean against. In Lower Manhattan, after all, it could take a while to find a pickup truck.

  Then there came the day when I was sentenced to what I think of as medium-security cholesterol prison. (Once the cholesterol penal system was concessioned out to the manufacturers of statin drugs, medium-security cholesterol prison came to mean that the inmate could eat the occasional bit of bacon from the plate of a generous luncheon companion but could not order his own BLT.) James stopped bringing boudin, the warders having summarily dismissed my argument that the kind I particularly like—Cajun boudin varies greatly from maker to maker—was mostly just rice anyway.

  I did not despair. James is inventive, and he’s flexible. Several years ago, he decided that an architect friend of his who lives just outside New Iberia made the best crawfish étouffée in the area, and, like one of those research-and-development hot shots who are always interested in ways of improving the product, he took the trouble to look into the recipe, which had been handed down to the architect by forebears of unadulterated Cajunness. James was prepared for the possibility that one of the secret ingredients of the architect’s blissful étouffée was, say, some herb available only at certain times of year in the swamps of the Atchafalaya Basin Spillway. As it turned out, one of the secret ingredients was Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom soup. (Although crawfish étouffée, which means smothered crawfish, is one of the best-known Cajun dishes, it emerged only in the fifties, when a lot of people assumed that just about any recipe was enhanced by a can of Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom soup.) During ensuing étouffée preparations in New York, there would come a moment when James said, in his soft south Louisiana accent, “I think this might be a good time for certain sensitive people to leave the kitchen for just a little while.” Then we’d hear the whine of the can opener, followed by an unmistakable glub-glub-glub.