T. Boyle - T. C. Boyle Stories

Sancerre glances over his shoulder. “It’s all a charade,” he says. “Piccard has capitulated.”

Lunch is a triumph of negativity: the selfsame flying fish, baked to the texture of wood pulp, their veiny winglike fins dried to stumps and served in a crimson jacket of American catsup, with canned niblet corn and sweet gherkins desecrating the rest of the plate under a garnish of seaweed. Again I retreat to my berth, again an incensed mob seeks me out. This time Sancerre shepherds Borchardt, Pépin and Fasquelle into my presence, and by the time they leave, we are eleven.

And then the pièce de résistance, the straw that breaks the camel’s back, our ticket to freedom: dinner. During the course of the afternoon, Cousteau and Dr. Mazzy Gort have descended again, ever deeper, seeking their solutions in the eternal muck. The crew has worked doggedly beneath an unsympathetic sun, their wizened biceps and arthritic backs straining, stomachs rumbling, the taste of mutiny burning like some bitter potion in their throats. And I? I have made my slow deliberate way through the reefs and shoals of my saucepans, my cruets, my knives and sieves and whisks. For the first time in as long as I can remember, I am working from a recipe, a curiosity from a thin volume left behind ten or fifteen years ago by a scientist from a place called Missouri: The Show Me State Cookbook. I do not have the butter, the crème fraîche, the milk, the champignons or the Parmesan, but the tinned tuna, the yellow wax beans and the packets of egg noodles exist in a sedimentary layer at the very bottom of the larder in a box labeled Emergency Rations.

Fair enough. I wouldn’t want to spoil the thing with any hint of flavor, after all. The sun slides across the porthole. I whistle while I work.

It is past seven by the time the bathyscaph is back on deck and Cousteau and Dr. Mazzy Gort have extricated their cramped limbs from its bowels. The crew steps lively, working furiously to secure everything against the night, lurching across the deck on aching feet, their noses turned optimistically to the air in the hope of catching a whiff of what the prandial hour promises to bring them. I overhear snatches of conversation, Cousteau’s voice raised in giddy triumph — they’ve found something, but not the bottom, not yet — and as the sun swells on the horizon the first cigarettes are lit, the first glasses of wine circulated. This is the hour when an air of festivity prevails aboard the Calypso , a time when labors are set aside and the mind drifts toward the simple pleasures to come. And so it is tonight, and yet, as bits and pieces of hushed dialogue float in through the open porthole and as this man or that sticks his head in the galley for a premonitory sniff, I can sense the tension underlying it all, the nasty nagging collective memory of that unforgivable breakfast and the obscenity of a lunch that followed it. They tread lightly. They are afraid. Deeply afraid.

This time I stand my ground. With a grand flourish I set the three big steaming pans down in the center of the table for each man to serve himself: the moment of truth is at hand. I note the sly, guilty looks of my co-conspirators as they suck at their wine glasses like condemned men, resigned to going hungry, and it props up my resolve. A lull falls over the conversation, hands fiddling with cutlery, with napkins, reaching out for the salt shaker, the pepper, the quietly oozing pans of my chef d’oeuvre. And now I have eyes only for the head of the table, where Cousteau sits absorbed in talk of the deeps with Dr. Mazzy Gort, Falco and Laffite. They retract unconsciously into the shells of their bent heads and bunched shoulders; their noses sniff the air warily. Steam rises. The first pan is breached, then the second and third, and all but the conspirators dig in.

Laffite is the first to react. “Good Christ!” he explodes, coughing up a mouthful of the stuff.

“I’m poisoned!” gasps Falco, and all round the table men lurch back from their plates in shock and horror. Even the Captain, whose taste buds must have withered and died long ago, lifts his head to give me a look of astonishment. Only Mazzy Gort seems unaffected, feeding the mucilaginous paste into the slot of his mouth as unconcernedly as if he were at a hot dog stand in some fantastical place like Peoria or Oshkosh.

Through the general tumult that ensues, one voice begins to take command: Laffite’s. “Murderer!” he cries, leaping from his seat in a frenzy. “And what do you call this, this, this shit?! “

I am a rock, a pillar, the statue of a man in a crisp white toque, arms folded across my chest. “Tuna noodle casserole,” I announce, and the place erupts.

Later, after the walls of the main cabin have been scrubbed down and the belligerents separated and sent wheezing to their bunks, Sancerre appears in the doorway to the galley to inform me that the Captain would like to have a word with me. Poor Sancerre. His dried yellow fig of a face is as mournful as a Greek mask, but his bloodied nose and the flapping rags of his eyes show that he isn’t licked yet. “What happened?” I ask, not bothering to look up or offer him a portion of the sausage I’m feeding into my mouth, one compulsive slice after another. “I thought you said we were eleven?”

“Son of a bitch,” he mutters. “It was Piccard. Did you see him?”

Only too clearly. Piccard stood with the Captain when the fight broke out, and when the food began to fly it wasn’t Cousteau who took the brunt of the abuse, but me, as if everything I’d done wasn’t for the general good and benefit of all. “What next?” I want to know, my voice a miserable croak. “I’ve given it everything I have.”

Framed in the doorway like some ghost of the larder, Sancerre replies in a voice as miserable as mine. “Give it time,” he says. “The men can’t hold out much longer. They can’t.” He steps closer, eyeing my sausage, his hands spread wide in extenuation. “They’re sucking on hard candy and drinking wine like it was gravy, they’re cracking jars of peanuts, raiding the emergency supplies in the lifeboats. They’re in an ugly mood, Bernard. I tell you, if it wasn’t for the wine—”

Suddenly we lock eyes. The wine. Of course: the wine. Deny a Frenchman his bread and he is angry, deny him his foie gras and his truffles and he is savage, but deny him his wine and he is nothing short of homicidal. Sancerre is grinning, and his grin has a country village in it, a kitchen garden, fruit trees, rabbits on a hook. I am grinning too, and my grin contains all that and more. “The wine,” I repeat, and though Cousteau awaits and my stomach plunges and everywhere the stink of fish infests my nostrils, I find myself laughing, laughing till the tears begin to stream down my face.

“Bernard,” Cousteau intones, and there is nothing left of his face but nose and two huge and liquidly suffering eyes, “I am chagrined. And puzzled too. It almost seems as if you’re deliberately trying to provoke the crew.”

We are in Cousteau’s cabin, a dark void rocking on the night of the sea and lit only by the subaquatic glow of the TV monitor. Finned legs kick across the screen, fish appear. Coral. The deeps. There is a plea on my tongue, a plea for our thirty years, for understanding and compassion, a mon vieux and a mon ami , but I kill it. “That’s right,” I say. “I am.”

“But what are you thinking?” Here the nose becomes a slash of shadow, the eyes luminous with the reflection of the screen — in this moment he looks like nothing so much as a fish himself. “Don’t you realize that we’ve almost reached our objective?”

“I don’t care.”

“Don’t care? But what of the kaleidoscopic wonders, what of the fishes in their undersea grottoes?”