Charles Newman - In Partial Disgrace

At the bottom was an asterisked dish (“For guaranteed success in courting fair ladies”): sliced bear’s paw atop pork filet stuffed with chicken liver and rolled in bacon slices, garnished with truffles, onion rings, and pickles.

The Professor was about to order this intriguing dish, but once the woodcock had disappeared, the courses were simply brought without order, timing, or explanation. He had little idea what the dishes were until each new joy was consumed; then he could make out various layers, fragrances of unusual clarity superimposed on one another like a fugue, which made him want to live forever. Nor could he discern the various wines which were automatically poured, as the wine list was not only in an unknown language but an alphabet he had never seen. At one point he glanced up to the only art in the room, an embroidered pennant which announced:

THE USE OF BOTTLED ESSENCES FOR

SEASONING IS FORBIDDEN AND WILL

LEAD TO INSTANT DISMISSAL.

The White Wings, Black Dog had a calculated double ambience in its strategy for exercising goût . The front rooms gave off to a courtyard hidden from the street where men and women sat whispering at tiny pearwood tables large enough for only a drink and an ashtray. Further inside were a series of pine booths arranged at angles to an enormous walk-in fireplace, partially lit even in August and hung with various kettles of stew from which one could serve oneself with a large, enameled tin plate. Occasionally a serving girl would slip out the back door with a huge knife, and after an incredible series of shrieks and squeals, something spitted and juicy would be turning over coals where just five minutes before a pot of chrysanthemums sat.

At the center of the room was a long bar in the shape of a quarter-moon where only first-time visitors stood, surrounded by a series of long common tables. Depending on the evening, here one might find an Astingi gelder, animal blood still fresh on his hands, in deep conversation with a befurred and bechained Foreign Minister Zich, his shooting break and his grays both emblazoned with a cadmium orange “Z.” Or the village doctor with his head in his hands. Or Öscar Ögur, passed out in a corner. Or Catspaw, trying and failing to make conversation with the most beautiful girl in the world, dressed in pink and white, and not once elevating her eyes from an edition of The Count of Monte Cristo . Aged Chetvorah, disdaining any scraps not given them by hand, stood arthritically on guard, displaying the white whorls on their chests like veterans’ medals.

The walls bore etchings of fossils found in the local sinkholes — wolves with broken backs, birds with every vertebrae of the wing exposed in a fan — and indeed the locals referred to the front rooms as “Utah,” in honor of the oldest known dog fossil found in North America, and the back room as “Arizona,” because no one knew a single thing about it except that it was pretty.

The front rooms, with their tobacco-colored curtains and sensory simplicity, had harbored every discreet silence, every tragic conversation, and every historical form of rowdiness, insult, and affaire d’honneur . To ask for water with one’s coffee were fighting words. Men were known to take a crust of Black Dog bread on their travels and sniff of it of an evening, should their thoughts take a melancholy turn. But no matter how savage or despairing the serial personal confrontations, if one stepped back to the bar, the general atmosphere invariably seemed comedic, if not exactly gay.

The Brainery, on the other hand, was not only more expensive and exclusive (anyone asking for a reservation was told it had closed for renovations), but devoted to reversing the historical sensation of Utah. Everything up close was comic, but toward the perimeter of the room the sense of loneliness was overwhelming, even though it held some fifty diners. Somehow the space had been acoustically devoted to changing the terms of conversation itself. Sentences curled about one another like smoke. If you paused for reflection, another voice finished or inverted your thought. Across the table, though his lips were moving, you didn’t hear a word your colocutor said, while your own voice came out of nowhere, from the wings, as it were, a stage whisper. As the courses progressed, it seemed one was going blind, the precondition for all real sensuality, until you could make out only the dim outline of your companion’s face. Two silent men with their mouths full might enjoy snatches of conversation not strictly their own. A lady might allow her partner to put his foot where he wished, but she would never ask to share his dessert or offer even a forkful of her zebra-eye salad. Indeed, one was never quite sure what was said, half-said, previously remembered, or later reflected upon. One could manage a seduction or an apology in the Brainery, but never win an argument or make a deal.

The effect of this irony-resistant fugue was calming rather than irruptive. Although most people in the room were unknown to each other, an unforgettable solidarity carried them into the night.

The two men ate conscientiously rather than with fervor, as if to arrive at ultimate conclusions only after complete evidence had been submitted. They ate without gulping, without flinching, without fatigue, drinking a new wine for each dish with perfect sang-froid.

The conversation slowed, though all subjects were permissible, save the events of the morning, and all manner of expression, excepting that of a low mood. The wine had done its work and their brains ceased to be machines for argument-winning, and our talkative species began a conversation galante.

Throwing back his head and showing his Adam’s apple, Felix announced, “We are gorillas.”

“Dangerous gorillas!” the Professor toasted with his knife.

“Dangerous and ill-adapted,” Felix chorused.

“Our back isn’t right, tails in our trousers,” the Professor riposted gleefully. “Below the hips we are a mess, particularly women, and we clank when we walk!”

“We were almost extinct,” Felix assented vigorously, “and we have never forgotten it!”

The Professor suppressed a burp with his napkin and apologized. Felix waved the gaffe away. “It’s the lizard in us that does the breathing.”

And when they finished, there was no fanfare, no flinging of napkins, nothing but a slight settling back in the tenderly green banquettes. There arrived a small cart with various cheeses, ratafias, eau-de-vie , and cigars in an ingeniously ventilated box which exuded the scent of burning creole corpses.

“You will never hear me say a word against hunting again, my friend,” the Professor sighed, “of that you can be sure.”

Father smiled warmly but said only, “The forcemeat lacked half an onion and two sprigs of chervil.” Then he bit into a piece of soft cheese, but only halfway through. Taking the entire piece from his mouth with his fingers, he showed the indentations to his comrade. “ This is who we are!”

They were a third of their way through their cheroots when there was an enormous crash of china and a serving girl’s astonished shriek, neither remarkable in the front room of White Wings, Black Dog. But the Professor noted that his host had removed his cigar, slightly elevated his nose, and opened his nostrils. There was further commotion in the outer rooms, as well as a tremendous muffled breathing, and then the Professor, too, his palette cleansed, noticed a delicate acid note in the air: tannins and singed fur. Then a dark flash against the pale yellow and a sound like a snare-drum as Rubato and Nimbus, matted with every seed, vine, and scum of the forest, tails raw, tongues lolling, whiskers twisted, ears bleeding, eyes protuberant, coats disheveled, stormed into the Brainery, and after circling the room and vaulting a wine cart, skidded to a stop before the banquette with a convulsive collective flounce, as if to say, “My God, what a pair of masters, eh!”