The Crowded Grave

rhythms, neither getting in the other’s way.
    “Then we’ll make the pork the usual way, in red wine with the dried cèpes?” she asked when the shallots were done, the potatoes parboiled and dried and set to sauté in the duck fat.Bruno grunted confirmation as he bent to the delicate task of slicing the raw foie to just the right thickness. She warmed the shallots on low heat, added the dried mushrooms and a glass of wine and joined Carlos to watch Bruno’s next step.
    “No fat for the foie?” Carlos asked as Bruno put a jar of honey alongside a heavy black iron pan that had been heating for some time.
    “It contains all the fat it needs,” Isabelle said.
    Bruno laid slices of the foie in the pan, so hot that the surface of the foie was seared to keep in the juices, but its own fat seeped out steadily into the iron pan. Carlos looked up as he noticed Bruno humming to himself.
    “That’s how he times his cooking,” said Isabelle. “It takes Bruno forty-five seconds to sing the ‘Marseillaise,’ and thirty seconds if he stops before
‘Aux armes, citoyens.’
Steaks get the full version, but the foie needs only thirty seconds a side.”
    Bruno turned the slices of foie and began humming again, using a spatula to keep moving the liver around the pan. As the first tendrils of smoke began to rise, he stopped singing to himself, removed the pan and poured out the excess fat into a waiting jar. He slid the foie onto a hot serving dish and then took a bottle of balsamic vinegar and poured in a couple of spoonfuls. The spatula scraped back and forth with the heating vinegar to cleanse the bottom of the pan, and then he added three large spoonfuls of honey and swirled it into the thickening sauce.
    “So simple,” said Carlos. “Yet it smells so good.”
    Bruno took the toasted bread from the grill, quickly scraped a clove of garlic over each slice and put them on the warmed plates. Onto the toasts he draped slices of cooked foie and then drizzled the honey-vinegar sauce over every portion. Isabelle took the plates to the table as Bruno put the
enchaud
into the red wine and shallot sauce and left them on a very low heat alongside the potatoes. Finally he took an opened bottle ofMonbazillac from the refrigerator and four fresh glasses and joined his guests around the big table that took up one side of his living room.
    “A glass of this with the foie,” he said, pouring out the rich, golden wine of the Bergerac. “And bon appétit.”
    “I always thought of foie gras as a pâté, something you ate cold,” said Carlos. “This is amazing, not just smooth but silky.”
    “
Putain
, but this is good, Bruno,” said J-J. “I never heard of it being done this way with the honey and vinegar, but the fat balances the sweetness. You’ve got the foie crisp on the outside, and this toast with the juices …”
    “I used to sauté the foie with a tiny knob of butter,” Bruno said. “But then someone with a stall at the night market in Audrix made it this way and I liked it so much I watched him and learned how to do it.”
    Bruno briefly left the table to turn the
enchauds
and the potatoes and came back to sip at his Monbazillac when he saw Isabelle raise her glass to him across the table. She was sitting in the wheelback chair she had always used when they were together. She had bought it for him as a gift, soon after they had become lovers, at an antiques market where they had spent a happy summer afternoon. Seeing her there, he might fleetingly imagine that nothing had changed. From the corner of his eye Bruno noted Carlos observing the interplay and history between them.
    She looked down to where Gigi had been waiting patiently at her side until she fed him the final morsel of her toast, rich with the juices of the foie and its sauce. J-J used his bread to wipe his plate clean, and the others followed his example as Bruno brought in the
enchauds
. Carlos’s Rioja, a Torre Muga, was sampled and pronounced excellent, and Bruno watched with pleasure at the scene around the table. Entertaining his friends in this house that he had built, with food that he hadgrown in his garden and cooked at his own stove, gave him a deep satisfaction. J-J was an old friend, Carlos seemed to be a promising new one, and Isabelle—well, Isabelle was special in the way that only an old lover can be.
    “Excellent sauce, Isabelle,” said Carlos. “And delicious pork.”
    “Knowing Bruno, this pork fillet will have come from