Seducing Harry An Epicurean Affair

1 "The road to good intentions is paved with hell." Variation on Murphy's Law Cocktails at Five The minute I met Eclaire I wanted to bump her off. There was something about her that exuded what I detest most in a woman: perfection. She had that sleek, well-pampered look that came from years of self-indulgence. Then there was her husband, Harry, who just happened to be the leading plastic surgeon on the upper East Sidea husband who, when he wasn't removing fat from the thighs of the rich and famous, was salivating over a rack of lamb or a creme brulee in a restaurant that was Zagat- approved and lived up to his culinary standards. No wonder Eclaire was a vision of loveliness. Harry left no laugh line untouched, no wrinkle un-Botoxed. Eclaire was a walking advertisement of Harry the Miracle Maker's masterpieces. But I digress. Before Harry came along I was moving at my usual clip, married to Parker Harding, living in our house in the burbs, and conducting a nonorgasmic sex life that guaranteed a large dose of ennui would kick in as soon as we hit the sheets. It wasn't that Parker wasn't a good man. God knows he provided me with a lifestyle that bordered on extravagant. I was free to indulge myself on all levels. Parker asked no questions. He wanted me to be happy, and if happy meant my blowing a wad of money on incidentals, he was more than willing to comply. One might say I had it made: During daylight hours I wrote my humor columns for our local paper, The Seaport Gazette, which paid me a pittance for trying to evoke a laugh from thirty thousand of Seaport, Connecticut's finest residents. Each week, I sat at my picture window, looking out on our three acres of lush lawn, composing satirical essays on any subject that happened to move me at the time. If Parker and I argued, if my twenty-year-old daughter, Eliza, drove me to distraction, if a conversation with a friend seemed particularly amusing, it showed up in my column the following week. I had free rein to toy with other people's lives as I deemed fit, and while I usually tried not to overstep the bounds, I would stop at little to be perceived as a droll and witty writer. And so, when I was asked by my editor, Gillian, on a bright, sunny day in May, to cover a story on vegetables, I was puzzled. "Coco, we want to do a piece on La Chaine des Rotisseurs," she said. "And you're the perfect person to do it. Our focus is vegetarian." "I'm a humorist," I said. "Vegetables aren't funny." "Make them funny," she said. "Your assignment is to do dinner and mingle with some of the finest diners on the east coast, many of whom will be present at the Chaine banquet on Friday evening at the Briarwood Club in Greenwich. You might want to brush up on its history." Clearly, there was no arguing with her, so all week I buried myself in research. After all, if I was going to be hobnobbing with the culinary greats, I had better know what I was talking about. La Chaine des Rotisseurs is an international gastronomic society founded in Paris in 1950. It is devoted to promoting fine dining and preserving the camaraderie and pleasures of the table. The Chaine is based on the traditions and practices of the old French royal guild of meat roasters, whose written history has been traced back to the year 1248. Today, the society has members in more than one hundred countries around the world. In the United States, there are nearly one hundred and fifty "bailliages" (English "bailiwickMarks-White, Judith is the author of 'Seducing Harry An Epicurean Affair' with ISBN 9780345492388 and ISBN 0345492382.