I couldn’t help but think of how my father, who was a practical and eminently thrifty man, would have responded to the news that I intended to fly to Paris for a dinner. “For dinner,” he would have said—not exactly asking a question but restating the proposition, as if trying to make certain he could possibly have heard it correctly. “To Paris.”
“Well, two dinners, actually,” I would have said, figuring that attending two events in the same city would make the trip sound something on the order of killing two birds with one stone.
He would have been nodding his head by then—the nod he customarily employed while receiving any confirmation of his old fear that I might turn out to be too goofy to find my way in out of the rain. Implying that a trip to Paris is necessary because it involves two dinners rather than one, I should have realized, would not impress a man who, having been brought to western Missouri from the Ukraine as an infant, was able for several years in the ’50s to stave off my mother’s European-tour aspirations with a succinct “I’ve been.”
“I’m going on business,” I would have explained. “Sort of.”
My father—who spent most of his business life as a grocer, getting up at four in the morning six days a week to go to the market to select his produce—wouldn’t have even bothered to answer that one.
I suppose I would have then said something about the fact that one of the dinners was a birthday celebration for someone I had known for several decades, R. W. Apple, Jr., of The New York Times—also the son of a grocer, I might have added, although Apple’s family, who owned a chain of supermarkets in Akron, presumably delegated the predawn produce run to others. I met Johnny Apple, as he’s universally known, when we were college-newspaper editors. Much more recently, I’d published a magazine profile of him. It discussed, among other matters, how, after decades as a remarkably productive foreign correspondent and political reporter, he’d managed to transform himself, before our very eyes, into the Times’ roving gourmand, still headquartered in Washington but increasingly attracted more by foreign tables than by foreign wars. Since Apple had always been known in the trade for managing to live the good life even when he found himself in unappealing environs, the transformation had not come as a surprise to his friends, some of whom openly admired his expense accounts even more than they admired his dispatches.
Apple is someone who seems equally famished whether he’s sitting down to dinner at a three-star French restaurant or at a crab shack; he is what A. J. Liebling would have called, admiringly, a feeder. Despite maintaining an energy level that makes some of his colleagues sigh, he is now, by my rough estimate, the size of about two and a half Parisians. In the magazine piece, I’d imagined that people who meet him for the first time—somehow, despite Apple’s best efforts, there are still human beings on the planet he doesn’t know—“might assume that some time-travel production of The Man Who Came to Dinner had managed to land Sir John Falstaff for the role of Sheridan Whiteside.” After the piece was published, Apple began referring to me as his Boswell. I began saying of Apple, “I put him on the map.”
So when a letter came inviting me to Apple’s 70th birthday party, to be held at Chez L’Ami Louis, in Paris, I accepted with alacrity. A lot of other people did the same. When Apple said he was touched that so many of his friends were willing to travel all that way to celebrate his birthday, I felt called upon to remind him that there was no way to know how much of the affection reflected in the high acceptance rate was for him and how much for Chez L’Ami Louis and how much for Paris. He had neglected, I pointed out, to put together a control group of people invited to celebrate his birthday in, say, the dining room of the third-finest commercial hotel in his hometown. The entry for Chez L’Ami Louis in the Paris edition of the eponymous restaurant guide published by Tim and Nina Zagat (two of Apple’s birthday guests, as it turned out) does, after all, include reports from readers like “the best bistro in the world.” It also includes the phrase “geared for ‘trenchermen on high doses of cholesterol-lowering drugs’”—meaning that a lot of the invitees must have sent in their acceptances only after resolving to observe a personal Ramadan in the weeks leading up to the big event.
Not long after I’d sent in my own acceptance, I remembered that I was Apple’s Boswell, and I decided to demote myself from legitimate guest to working press. After that transformation, I told Apple, I began to feel like the pool reporter at Yalta. Then I thought of another dinner in Paris I’d been wanting to have, at the home of an American couple I know there, David Jaggard and Nancy Li. David and Nancy are serious eaters who have always devoted an impressive amount of energy to trying to find superior Chinese food in Paris—a task that has, at times, seemed about as promising as searching for a decent chicken-fried steak on the Upper East Side. Nancy has, among her other talents, the ability to read the wall signs in Chinese restaurants. This is an ability I have always coveted, even after the first sign she translated for me, in a surprisingly good Chinese restaurant on the Avenue de Choisy that she and David led me to half a dozen years ago, turned out to say “Big Intestines in Salty Water.”
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