Seduction Read Online Free PDF Page B

Clef d’Or. I was going to learn the right way to cook, even if it was repulsive and took forever. And no shortcuts.
    That was another thing about Hattie’s Kitchen: We hadn’t been that fussy about making everything from scratch. Hattie’s grilled cheese sandwiches were made from processed American cheese. The chefs at the Clef would probably faint at the thought of that, but to tell the truth, those sandwiches tasted really good. When you’re sick, there’s nothing like grilled cheese on white bread with a bowl of canned tomato soup.
    We made real tomato soup at school. First we roasted the tomatoes, then put them through a Foley mill, cooked a lot of vegetables for stock, sautéed shallots and garlic, and then sprinkled in dill, which we’d grown in pots. If I’d been sick, I think I’d rather have stayed hungry than go through all that.
    Anyway, speaking of hungry, I was. Usually at the end of class we got to eat whatever we’d made that day, but after all the horrible things I’d done to my poor bird, all I wanted to do was give it a decent burial. My stomach started growling on my way home.
    Except for my morning croissant and coffee, consumed standing up at the zinc bar near the school, I hadn’t eaten anything all day. I hadn’t sat down all day either. So, throwing my dirty chef’s coat over my shoulder, I took a stroll down the treelined avenues of the sixth arrondisement, where the school and some of the more comfortable Parisians could be found, to look for a café where I could buy myself a special dinner.
    Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein,James Baldwin, Mary Cassatt, Ben Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson had all walked these elegantly cobbled streets before me. They had looked up at the tall windows showing glimpses of gilt-paneled rooms and chic salons. They, too, had followed their rumbling stomachs to the finest food the world had to offer, available on every street corner.
    Unfortunately, my meandering route took me past no restaurants that weren’t American burger joints. I was about to give up and order a Blimpie’s special when I spotted a street sign reading Rue des Âmes Perdues .
    It rang a bell. Fabienne had said her mother lived near the school, and that she herself would be in Paris before long. She’d even given me her address on a card I’d stashed somewhere in the backpack I used instead of a purse.
    On impulse, I scrambled through my things until I found it. There it was: 24 Rue des Âmes Perdues. I checked the house numbers around me. It wouldn’t be far, I realized, five or six blocks.
    It occurred to me that I really wanted to see Fabienne. I’d been in Paris for weeks, but I hadn’t made any friends at all. I certainly couldn’t count Margot the snooty middle-aged Canadian. The other students in my cooking class seemed all right—some of them were actually my age—but, being French speakers, they understandably preferred to be around people they could talk to. My grasp of the language was still limited to statements like, “We get bird chop head?”
    I hadn’t spoken a word of English, except in my dreams, when someone promised to love me for a year and a day . . .
    Witches called it handfasting . That was when two people promised to stay together faithfully for a year and a day. Itwasn’t marriage, but it was more than dating. Handfasting meant you loved someone, and wanted to look after them and would never hurt them.
    Peter and I were handfasted, although I didn’t know if that meant much to him anymore.
    I walked more quickly, trying not to remember. The sun was beginning to set, a wash of pink and blue over the stately grays of the city.
    Then I saw the house, if you could call it that. Number twenty-four was a magnificent three-story mansion shaped like a gigantic horseshoe behind a tall iron gate. There was a courtyard in front with green grass and a lot of pretty flowers, entrances at both ends of the horseshoe—one for people and one