The Pat Conroy Cookbook Read Free Page B

protagonist, Jack McCall, wrote cookbooks and restaurant reviews. A woman from the
Washington Post
conducted a delightful interview over the phone, and during our conversation, I mentioned that I had taken Nathalie’s course in the cooking school she ran in the old Rich’s department store in downtown Atlanta. The woman called Nathalie after our interview, and Nathalie tracked me down to report on the nature of their conversation.
    Nathalie’s voice is deep and musical and seductive. She possesses the rare ability to be both maddening and hilarious in the course of a single sentence. Her character is a shifting, ever-changing thing, and she reinventsherself all over again every couple of years. In one way, she seems the same, yet you are aware she is in the process of a complete transformation. When she tells about her life, you could swear she was speaking of a hundred women, not just one.
    “Pat, darling,” Nathalie said on the phone, “all my working life I’ve been scheming and plotting and dreaming of ways to get an interview with the food editor of the
Washington Post
. You can imagine my joy when I heard that the food editor of the
Post
had left a message on my answering machine. And I thought, Yes, it’s finally happening; your prayers have been answered, Nathalie.”
    “That’s great, Nathalie,” I said, not quite knowing where she was going with this. You never know where Nathalie is going with a train of thought; you simply know that the train will not be on time, will carry many passengers, and will eventually collide with a food truck stalled somewhere down the line on damaged tracks.
    “Can you imagine my disappointment when I found out that they wanted to interview me about
you
, instead of about
me
. I admit, Pat, that after I got over the initial shock, it turned suddenly to bitterness. After all, what do I possibly get out of talking about you when I could be talking about my own cookbooks? Naturally, I did not let on a word about what I was really thinking, but I did suggest, very subtly I might add, that she might want to do a feature on me and my work sometime in the future. When were you in my class, Pat?”
    “In 1980,” I said.
    “I don’t remember that. Did you really take my class? Who else was in it?”
    “My wife Lenore. Jim Landon. George Lanier. A nice woman who lived on the same floor as my dad in the Darlington Apartments.”
    “It doesn’t ring a bell for me,” she said. “Was I good?”
    “You were wonderful,” I said.
    “All my ex-students say that. It must be a gift.”
    “You were a great teacher.”
    “And sexy. I won’t be happy until you tell me I was also extraordinarily sexy.”
    “I could barely cook I was so aroused. All the other men in the class felt the same way. It’s hard to make a perfect soufflé when you’re rutting.”
    “Pat, you know the way to a young girl’s heart,” Nathalie said. “But I want you to know that I’ll always be perfectly furious at you for getting into the
Washington Post
food world before I did. That’s my bailiwick, not yours.”
    “It will never happen again, Nathalie,” I promised. “All your bailiwicks will be safe from poor Conroy.”
    When Nathalie taught her cooking class at Rich’s, I learned new lessons about insouciance, style, and lack of preparation. Always, at the last minute, Nathalie’s worthy assistant, Kate Almand, would move in to provide a missing utensil or bag of flour or loin of veal that Nathalie had misplaced or left in her car. The joy of watching Nathalie’s cooking shows on television has always come from her artless displays of confusion and disorganization, and her sheer bravado when she actually makes a mistake. Unlike Martha Stewart, Nathalie often looks beaten up when she completes a segment of her show. She can be covered with flour up to her elbows after baking a loaf of bread, can drop her perfectly roasted capon on the kitchen floor, or can garnish her pumpkin pie with cooked