Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim

Who's the Chef?

"MY BOSS HAS A RUBBER HAND," I told our Parisian dinner guests following my one and only day of work. The French word forboss is our word forchef, so it sounded even better than I'd expected. A chef with a rubber hand. You'd think it would melt.

The guests leaned closer to the table, not sure if I was using the right word. "Yourchef? Since when did you start working?" They turned to Hugh for confirmation. "He has a job?"

Thinking, I guess, that I wouldn't notice, Hugh set down his fork and mouthed the words "It's volunteer work." What irritated me was the manner in which he said it — not outright, but barely whispered, the way you might if your three-year-old was going on about his big day at school. "It's day care."

"Volunteer or not, I still had a chef," I said. "And his hand was made of rubber." I'd sat on this information for hours, had even rehearsed its delivery, double-checking all the important words in the dictionary. I don't know what I'd expected — but it definitely wasn't this.

"I'm sure it wasn'tactual rubber," Hugh said. "It was probably some kind of plastic."

The friends agreed, but they hadn't seen my chef, hadn't watched as he thoughtlessly wedged a pencil between his man-made fingers. A plastic hand wouldn't have given quite so easily. A plastic hand would have made a different sound against the tabletop. "I know what I saw," I said. "It was rubber and it smelled like a pencil eraser."

If someone told me that his boss's hand smelled like a pencil eraser, I'd shut up and go with it, but Hugh was in one of his moods. "What, this guy let you smell his hand?"

"Well, no," I said. "Not exactly."

"Okay, then, it was plastic."

"So, what," I said, "is everythingnot held directly to your nose made out of plastic? Is that the rule now?" One of our joint New Year's resolutions was to stop bickering in front of company, but he was making it really hard. "The hand was rubber," I said. "Heavy rubber, like a tire."

"So it was inflatable?" The guests laughed at Hugh's little joke, and I took a moment to think the worse of them. An inflatable hand is preposterous and not worth imagining. Couldn't they see that?

"Look," I said, "this wasn't something I saw in a shop. I was right there, in the room with it."

"Fine," Hugh said. "So what else?"

"What do you mean, 'what else'?"

"Your volunteer job. So the boss had an artificial hand — what else?"

Let me explain that it isn't easy finding volunteer work in Paris. The government pays people to do just about everything, especially during an election year, and when I visited the benevolence center, the only thing available was a one-day job helping to guide the blind through one of the city's Metro stations. The program was run by my chef, who'd set up a temporary office in a small windowless room beside the ticket booth. It wasn't my fault that no blind people showed up. "Listen," I said, "I just spent six hours in a storage closet being ignored by a man with a rubber hand. What do you mean, 'What else?' What more do I need?"

The friends stared blankly, and I realized I'd been speaking in English.

"In French," Hugh said. "Say it in French."

It was one of those times when you really notice the difference between speaking and expressing yourself. I knew the words — blind people,election year,storage closet — but even when coupled with verbs and pronouns they didn't add up the way I needed them to. In English my sentences could perform double duty, saying both that I'd reported for volunteer workand that Hugh would be punished for not listening to the single most interesting thing that had happened to me since moving to Paris.

"Just forget it," I said.

"Suit yourself."

I left the table for a glass of water, and when I returned, Hugh was discussing Monsieur DiBiasio, the plumber hired to replace our bathroom sink.

"He's got one arm," I told the guests.

"No, he doesn't," Hugh said. "He's got two."

"Yes, but one of them doesn't work."

"Well, he's still got it," Hugh said. "It'sthere. It fills a sleeve."

He's always doing this, contradicting me in front of company. And so I did what I always do, which is ask a question and then deny him a chance to answer.

"Definean arm," I said. "If you're talking about the long, hairy thing that hangs from your shoulder, okay, he's got two, but if you're talking about a long hairy thing that moves around and actuallydoes shit then he's got one, all right? I should know. I'm the one who carried the sink up three goddam flights of stairs. Me, not you."

The guests were getting uncomfortable, but I didn't care. Technically, Hugh was right, the plumber had two arms, but we weren't in a courtroom and there was no punishment for a little exaggeration. People like mental pictures; they give them something to do besides just listening. Hadn't we been through this? Instead of backing me up, he'd made me out to be a liar, and, oh, I hated him for that.

Once he'd destroyed my credibility with the one-armed plumber, it was pretty much over as far as the rubber hand was concerned. The guests weren't even thinking plastic anymore, they were thinking actual working hand, made of flesh and bone and muscle. The mental picture had been erased and they'd never understand that a hand is denned by its movement rather than its shape. The chef's had fingernails, creases — you probably could have read the palm — but it was pink and stiffish, like a false hand you might use when teaching a dangerous animal to shake. I don't know how it attached or where, but I'm fairly certain he could take it off without too much trouble. While sitting there, just the two of us, waiting for blind people who never showed, I imagined how the hand might look positioned on a bedside table, if that was where he kept it. There was probably no point in wearing it to bed, the thing wasn't particularly helpful; the fingers didn't open and close. It was just a deception, like a hairpiece or a false eyelash.

The dinner conversation staggered on, but the evening was already shot. Anyone could see that. In another few minutes the guests would look at their watches and say something about their babysitter. Coats would be retrieved and we'd stand in the hallway saying good-bye again and again as the guests made their way down the stairs. I would clear the table and Hugh would do the dishes, neither of us speaking and both of us wondering if this just might be the one to do it. "I hear you guys broke up over a plastic hand," people would say, and my rage would renew itself. The argument would continue until one of us died, and even then it would manage to wage on. If I went first, my tombstone would readIT WAS RUBBER. He'd likely take the adjacent plot and buy a larger tombstone readingNO,IT WAS PLASTIC.

Dead or alive, I'd have no peace, and so I let it go, the way you have to when you're totally dependent on somebody. In the coming weeks I'd picture the hand waving good-bye or shooting into the air to hail a taxi — going about its little business as I went about mine. Hugh would ask why I was smiling and I'd say, "Oh, no reason," and leave it at that.