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was back home, unsuccessful.
    “Closed,” I said, shaking the snow off my hat.
    “What now?”
    At this point, I had The Idea.
    To open a jar, one ran hot water over the lid, which made it expand. So obviously, if we heated the exterior of the lock cylinder, it would also expand, releasing the key.
    We didn’t own a blowtorch, but I had a butane torch, used for melting the sugar on crème brûlée . It roared satisfyingly as I lit it up, producing a clear blue flame.
    “It won’t set everything on fire?” Marie-Do asked dubiously.
    “Like what? The lock housing is steel.”
    Turning the flame on the lock, I gripped the key with our pliers and tugged so that the moment the cylinder expanded, I could extract it.
    This didn’t happen.
    Instead, the lock casing, which clearly wasn’t steel, softened and tore, like uncooked pastry. Not only the key but the whole cylinder came loose, with the key still inside. It left an irregular, smoking hole.
    Hemingway wrote, “A man can be destroyed, but not defeated.” For the moment, I couldn’t recall his thoughts about making a complete ass of oneself.
    A n hour later, I stood in the empty apartment, nursing a mug of coffee and staring out over the snow-covered roofs.
    Marie-Do was on her way to Richebourg in the car, carrying what food we’d already prepared. The question of cooking the geese remained to be resolved.
    As to the lock, it was Marie-Do who floated the option that we’d shunned so far.
    “There’s the card on the fridge.”
    We all have such cards. Headed “Useful Numbers,” they materialize on doormats every few weeks. Just a list of numbers useful in an emergency: ambulance, fire service, hospitals. At first glance, they seem a generous gesture—until halfway down the list, where the nature of the services becomes less public-spirited. “Poison Hotline” is followed by “Blocked toilet?” “Water leak?” “No electricity?” and “Broken door lock?” In each case, it assures us help is at hand. But nobody ever rings these 24/7 plumbers, glaziers, or locksmiths, since their prices are extortionate. In France, and probably in the rest of the world, to employ these sharks was to mark yourself forever as a dumbbell—in Parisian slang, a plouc.
    Calling the number, I half expected a recording advising us to call back in January. Instead, someone picked up on the second ring and promised to be there in an hour.
    While I waited, I thought about California, where I’d lived before I came to France. Had this happened there, a neighbor would have fixed it in ten minutes. There was much I didn’t miss about the United States, but one thing that I did miss was the American skill with things : the legendary “good old American know-how.”
    The foundation of this was Shop class. I never learned what constituted Shop, except that being good at it implied you were hopeless at everything else. Neither schools in Australia, where I was born and raised, nor in Britain, where I’d lived for many years, offered anything so practical. (It’s conceivable that some male students at British or Australian schools learned such skills in other ways. I just assumed the tough kids spent recess behind the toilet block smoking and comparing the length of their penises. Maybe they were actually exchanging information on how to cut dovetails and thread pipe.) But because of Shop, most U.S. drivers carried jumper cables and spare fan belts, and a toolbox was standard in every home.
    “ They wouldn’t melt a lock with a cooking torch,” I said to Scotty. He mewed, and rubbed my leg. He probably only wanted food, but I took it for consolation.

Chapter 5
Two Geese A-Roasting
    First, catch your hare.
    RECIPE FOR JUGGED HARE, Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management, 1861
    H ot and stuffy, the car smelled of Four-in-One and Guerlain. The oil came from the clothes of my brother-in-law, Jean-Marie, whose car it was. He restored old motorcycles as a hobby and trailed the