Lunch with Tolstoy

by Constance G. Konold

May 1, 2002

Within minutes of his arrival in my French village of Boury for lunch on this May First holiday, he claimed his territory like an amiable Golden Retriever, pushing his nose into every corner, sniffing out the familiar (old clocks and a Burmese kalaga) and lingering hesitantly over the unexpected (the "blob" fountain). Somewhere between emphatically and dictatorially, he asked me to turn off all the living room lights. No need to waste electricity in the middle of the day … This rang a familiar and unpleasant bell with me from a not-so-distant past life at the side of a parsimonious French viscount. I don't think anyone has clued in France's "ancienne noblesse" that the cost of electricity has been vastly reduced since WWII. Unless they're all ecologists.

As he started up the stairs without a hint of asking my permission, I was grateful for having had the foresight to straighten up my upstairs office. I had also removed his two books from the bed pane, placing them more prudently on the bedside table already shared with other writers, if not would be suitors. As he sat in front of my computer trying to read an e-mail in English, I began to wonder if I should also have sorted out the drawers and closets. One never knows the limits of aristocratic license.

And they certainly don't start in the kitchen. Against my protests, he managed to extract an ice tray from my chronically overstuffed freezer without setting off an avalanche of hoar-frosted leftovers. He then refilled the tray and replaced it in the freezer. Gape-mouthed, with the Red Label poised over two tumblers, I struggled to determine how many fingers of whisky were safe for this encounter. I motioned for him to sit on the kitchen stool but he was already hauling in a high-backed chair from the dining room. Our chatter was cloudless as I warmed our meal.

This command-performance lunch for a White Russian exiled count (well, not really, because he was actually born in France, but it's hard to get a Tolstoy out of Russia in one's mind) consisted of sautéed calf's liver and mashed potatoes "with a little well in the middle filled with gravy", requested two days earlier, when we had first met. Like an idiot, I had stayed up until midnight peeling potatoes, as though the instant variety was unfit to serve this demi-god of literary descent. The authentic purée was then garnished with "au jus"-wilted watercress, preceded by steamed green asparagus with fresh Hollandaise sauce and followed by strawberry shortcake with REAL whipped cream. His voice took on a tone of hushed reverence as he opened the bottle of Saumur-Champigny and said, "Je vois que tu t'y connais en vins". (Bless my local chatelains for sharing with me that little aristocratic oenological secret for the landed poor!)

I wondered if I would make his short list of favorite kitchens, if not preferred bedrooms.

In a rare act of fealty, I gave up my usual seat at table with the view of the street. I wanted him to enjoy this window on village culture. He expressed admiration that I had set a smart table and then apologetically picked up the asparagus in his fingers, eyes effervescent with mischief. I imagined the old couple across the street selling admission for the view through my uncurtained window.

But the outer world soon receded and it became apparent that the universe need be no larger than my dining room table. Tall, big and handsome, with a high, well-tanned forehead, an artistic ruff of graying hair, and seductive blue-green eyes, he could have passed for Ernest Hemingway's more handsome brother. He wore a smart leather-buttoned mustard-colored sports jacket over a white T-shirt and beige linen trousers. On his sockless feet, very expensive Swiss moccasins. I wondered if this was the latest trend or if the aristocracy was also economizing on socks these days.

Unafflicted by the kind of egocentricity such as I might have expected of this scion of Great Books, a fine writer himself, he radiated a presence full of intelligence, humanity and above all keen lucidity concerning himself. Mind you, we did not speak about me. As I plied him with all the indiscreet questions that only Americans (or aristocrats) can get away with in this country, he reproached me for not having read his autobiographical book "Comme un Poisson dans l'Eau" ("Like a Fish in Water"), given to both my cousin, who had introduced us, and to me two days earlier. I responded that I preferred first getting to know him through his fiction - the short story collection "Contes de la séduction" ("Tales of Seduction") - rather than through his autobiographical "history" of the Tolstoy Family's Life Without Leon. In the end, he asked me to bring his volume of short stories to the table. From then on, he read excerpts from his book in guise of replies to all of my queries.

"You see", I smiled triumphantly, "I was right about my literary preference."

And this obviously is a literary being. Several months prior to my first meeting with Tolstoy, my American cousin had picked him up on a trans-Atlantic flight. Tolstoy had wiled away the airborne hours by reading Maupassant short stories to her when he wasn't recounting his famous African hunting adventures with Valérie Giscard d'Estaing. My cousin, enchanted with her new find but too entangled elsewhere to be romantically interested herself, had then lured me with not-very subtle matchmaking intentions to her Parisian apartment for drinks and dinner so she could spring him on me because I had already – sight unseen – declared him "definitely not my type". I did not know at that point that they had connived an elaborate system of "bells and whistles" for him to let her know if I rated further pursuit or not.

Innocently, I had opened the door that night to a near-legendary figure, to my cousin's mind at least, and he had taken me aback by instantly using the more intimate "tu" with me. With my cousin somewhere in the background busily micromanaging her own love life in hushed tones on the telephone in a nearby room, we two strangers had been left to our own devices to make each other's acquaintance. Turning around each other like two leaves on the wind, we eventually found our way to whisky, glasses and ice cubes in an unknown habitat and settled animatedly into a "pavane française ". This consists of toe-dancing on the sharp edge of the sword of social protocol, waiting to see who will be the first to slip into the impropriety of frank, natural, honest, soul-felt expression. After we had both pirouetted sufficiently without disgracing class or intellect, there was a deep, shared gleeful moment of recognition, "on the other side of the wall". In a wink, it was "grands amis depuis toujours".

It was only later during our dîner à trois with my cousin that I noticed that the more formal "vous" had become entrenched between him and my lovely younger cousin – a strange quirk for, after all, the two of them had spent eight trans-Atlantic hours together several months ago while I was just a newcomer on the scene. I don't think either of them even noticed. Certainly it was not a reflection of any lack of warmth or affection between the two of them, for it was obvious that he took great pleasure in having two blondes on his arms.

He was not impervious to my cousin's charms, though he admitted during our May First lunch that he found her singularly "curious" as a woman. How, he asked, could any man get involved with a woman who professed to believe in every religion on the face of the Earth? (My cousin is a Bahaï.) Certainly not this French-born great-grandson of Leon Tolstoy; not this grand hunk of a 64-year-old lady killer whose long convalescence of the heart after the death of his wife of 40 years had left him cured of things metaphysical. About this he was almost apologetic, for his consternation over my cousin's unconsumed romantic telephone turpitudes left him with a burden of guilt for not being the ready white knight to rescue her from the arms her long-distance would-be-but-maybe-not-in-this-lifetime lovers. As he said, she couldn't have picked better stereotypes to have non-affairs with than an Italian and a French surgeon.

His taste in post-mourning relationships run to the uncomplicated and comfortable, preferably not powered by Ideals, Morality and Profit Sharing. He admitted having made his wife suffer, though not because of his extramarital affairs, about which he claims he was successfully discrete. Touching self-delusion. The couple's altercations had served as a pretext for his passing flings. It was their "game", he said. The more she put pressure on him to stop smoking, to straighten up his office, or not to stay out until 5 a.m. playing cards with "the boys", the more he rebelled and fled the nest. Thus was born the Great White Hunter, the legendary sport fisherman that has put his name up in neon in the world of blue marlin deep-sea competition fishing. Since his wife's death, he revealed, he does almost everything his wife would have wanted him to do. The irony is not lost on him. Romantically, he is now ready to start all over again but on a new basis. No games. No altercations. But maybe NOT no cigars.

When the inevitable cigar question arose, I was quick to suggest I would follow him out to the "fumoir" in the street. With stogie in mouth and a proprietary hand on my shoulder, he encouraged me to show him the village and to feed him the details of any and all local gossip, about which I was not intentionally vague but it did occur to me that anything I might tell him would wind up in a short story. Therefore, I was quick to point out, as we rounded the last bend into the dead heat of What Happens Next, that my cousin's matchmaking designs, while well intentioned, were sadly ill-timed on my side, given my present commitment of the heart. To this, he responded with a true Gallic gentleman's flourish of well-dosed understanding and protestation. And a query about what I was doing the next Saturday.

That, I would find out, was the signal to my cousin that I had passed the test.

But this is one magic carpet not to step on lightly, at least not without an emotional parachute. Definitely not an alternative I was tempted to fly with.

As it happened, Fate stepped in like the Bolshevik Revolution, scheduling work for me on the only day he had free before leaving for a three-week blue-marlin bonanza in Cameroon. Upon his return, I would be be off in the U.S. for three weeks. When I returned to France, His Legendary Excellence would be off starting a new life in Uruguay because, he claims, the French just don't know how to live.

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