"Two coffees please," Madeleine said, smiling. "And my husband would like some apple pie with a slice of cheddar cheese on top."

They went to a café for breakfast. Leonard was on his best behavior, pulling out her chair, buying her a Paris Match from the newsstand, offering her a brioche from the basket.

The speed with which he left the railways office and went about buying provisions for his trip was like that of someone making a getaway. He bought bottled water, mandarins, a chocolate bar, a package of biscuits, and a hunk of strangely crumbly cheese. He still ahdn't had lunch, so he stopped at a restaurant for a bowl of vegetable curry and parathi.

Throughout this discussion Mitchell busied himself with buttering toast and dropping cubes of raw sugar into his teacup. It was important to scarf down as much toast as possible before the waiters stopped serving.

The restaurant on the corner, catering to backpacker tastes, served banana pancakes and hamburgers made from water buffalo.

"Saltwater taffy is always pastel," he commented. "Why is that?"

This time Heidi didn't respond at all.

"You know what I think it is, Heidi? I think pastels are the palette of the seashore. I'll take these pastel green ones, which are the color of dune grass, and I'll take some pink ones, which are like the sun setting on the water. And I'll take these white ones, which are like the sea foam, and these yellow ones, which are like the sun on the sand."

He brought all four bags to the counter, then decided to atke a few other flavors. Buttercream. Chocolate. Strawberry.

At a resturant across the street Mitchell ordered a carafe of restina and a plate of feta cheese and olives, not even trying to speak a few words of Greek, just pointing.

They wandered the narrow beehive streets, listening to the muezzins' emotional cries, and drank bright green glasses of mint tea in the town square.

"What do you recommend today?"

"What do you mean 'recommend.' Cheese! Same as always. The best. Who's your girlfriend`"

"This is Madeleine."

"You like cheese, young lady? Here, taste. Take some home with you. And get rid of this guy. He's no good."

Yet another revelation about Leonard: he was friends with the old italian cheese maker on Federal Hill. Maybe that was where he'd been going when Madeleine used to see him waiting for the bus in the rain. To visit his friend Vittorio.

They started leaving the apartment. One day they drove to Federal Hill to have pizza. Afterward, Leonard insisted that they go into a cheese shop. It was dark inside, the shades drwan. The smell was a presence in the room. Behind the counter, an old white-haired man was busy doing something they couldn't see. "It's eight degrees out," Leonard whispered, "and this guy won't open the windows. That's because he's got a perfect bacterial mix in here and he doesn't want to let it out. I read a paper where these chemists from Cornell identified two hundred different strains of bacteria in a tub of rennet. It's an aerobic reaction, so whatever's in the air affects the flavor. Italians know all that instinctively. This guy doesn't even know what he knows."

"How about couscous?" Larry said. "Mitchell, have you ever had couscous?"

"No."

"Oh, you have got to have couscous."

Claire made a wry face. "Whenever somebody comes to Paris," she said, "they have to go to the Latin Quarter and have couscous. Couscous in the Latin Quarter is so encoded!"

"You want to go somewhere else?" Larry said. "No," Claire said. "Let's be unoriginal."

The Pleshette's refrigerator was the first place Maitchell had encountered gourmet ice cream. He still remembered the thrill of it: coming down to the kitchen one morning, the majestic Hudson visible in the window, and opening the freezer to see the small round tub of exotically named ice cream. Not a greedy half gallon, as they had at Mitchell's house in Michigan, not cheap ice milk, not vanilla, chocolate, or strawberry but a flavor he had never dreamed of before, with a name as lyrical as the Berryman poems he was reading for his American poetry class: rum raisin. Ice cream that was also a drink! In a precious pint-size container. Six of these lined up next to six bags of dark French roast Zabar's coffee. What was Zabar's? How did you get there? What was lox? Why was it orange? Did the Pleshettes really eat fish for breakfast? Who was Diaghilev? What was a gouache, a pentimento, a rugelach? Please tell me, Mitchell's face silently pleaded throughout his visits.

Madeleine [...] nibbling all the treats, the nice-smelling fruit candies, the meaty drumsticks, as well as more sophisticated offerings, the biscotti flavored with anise, the wrinkly truffles, the salty spoonfuls of olive tapenade. She'd never been so busy in her life.

She kept her glasses on, left her hair loose, and walked over to Leonrad's apartment on Planet Street. On the way, she stopped at a market to buy a hunk of cheese, some Stoned Wheat Thins, and a bottle of Valpolicella.

Madeleine had the book in her lap. With her right hand she was eating peanut butter straight from the jar. The spoon fit perfectly against the curve of her upper palate, allowing the peanut butter to dissolve creamily against her tongue.

"You don't? Never had a little slice of Wisconsin cheddar with your apple pie? I'm sorry to hear that."

[...]

Finally, the waitress came over. Madeleine ordered the cottage cheese plate and coffee. Leonard ordered apple pie and coffee. When the waitress left, he spun his stool rightward, so that their knees briefly touched.

"How very female of you," he said.

"Sorry?"

"Cottage cheese."

"I like cottage cheese."

men det er kanskje ikke så mye man trenger til en tur i rommet? rent undertøy tannbørste negleklipper pass, kanskje noe å spise noe å drikke noe å puste

Den Gang når jeg var Pige

Statsministeren sier det stortingsmannen sier det professoren sier det direktøren sier det radiofolk sier det mannen i gata sier det:

NÅR

jeg spiste middag i går fant jeg et hår i suppa.

DA

jeg var ung, sa vi ikke det. Vi sa bare

NÅR

hvis vi fant et hår i suppa h v e r g a n g vi spiste. Så det blir jo en liten forskjell. Men det ordner seg nok

DA

vi får en ny språk-komité,

"Sometimes I get so excited thinking about my morning coffee," Mr. Söderblad said, "I can't fall asleep at night."

Finally he abandoned the Italian idea altogether and fixed on the only other lunch he could think of - a salad of wild rice, avocado, and smoked turkey breast. The problem then was to find ripe avocados. In store after store he found either no avocados or walnut-hard avocados. He found ripe avocados that were the size of limes and cost $3.89 apiece. He stood holding five of them and considered what to do. He put them down and picked them up and put them down and couldn't pull the trigger. He weathered a spasm of hatred of Denise for having guilted him into inviting his parents to lunch. He had the feeling that he'd never eaten anything in his life but wild-rice salad and tortellini, so blank was his culinary imagination.