Chapter 5

Amelia introduced me to life's finer pleasures. After making love, we would snack on chunks of bread torn off baguettes, accompanied by small wedges of Brie cheese and slices of Bermuda onion. "Dear Casi, you must learn to distinguish between good Brie and bad Brie." With her mouth full, munching noisily, "On the continent, we would laugh at the quality of cheese you Americans accept. Because it is marked 'imported, ' you believe that it is the finest. On the contrary, the dairies of Europe use America as a dumping ground for their inferior and unacceptable cheeses, the swill any self-respecting Belgian or Frenchman would feed to the pigs." She swallowed, then emitted a small, ladylike belch. "With few exceptions, what is marketed as high quality Brie here is bitter and spotted with brown mold. I needed to look far and wide to find even this middling quality cheese."

It tasted fine to me, delicate and creamy in fact. I couldn't imagine it being any better, and told her so. Her response: "If I were Judith and you Holofernes, I would cut off your head for impertinence!" A rather drastic remedy, I thought.

Rather than cutting off my head, she filled it with a cultural education of sorts. We haunted foreign film festivals, viewed the works of Bresson ("Le Filou"), Carné, Eisenstein, Buñuel, Fritz Lang. She assigned me books to read, and we discussed Goethe, Stendhal, and Balzac. We talked far into the night, and sometimes fell asleep in each other's arms, too fatigued to make love.

And there were the long walks in Central Park, the picnics on the lawn by the statue of Sigismund Wasa, mounted, in full battle armor, with crossed swords over his head. "He was king of Poland, a member of the Swedish royalty at a time when Sweden was still a superpower and exerted influence far beyond her borders," she informed me. I was ashamed at how little I knew of my own heritage, and when I showed some interest she promptly enrolled me in a night course on world history.

While I was busy studying the Paleologue dynasty and trying to remember who suppressed the Phokas Rebellion, she hand-fed me squares of nougat-filled Lindt chocolate squares. Never again would I settle for the pallid American imitation. Never again would I take Byzantine history for granted.

Malassol caviar on small rounds of buttered black pumpernickel (the real stuff, from a neighborhood bakery). Taramosalata on triangles of toasted light rye. Sacher torte... like chocolate cake on steroids. Mozart Kugeln... round chocolate pralines filled with pistachio marzipan. All this washed down with hot, smooth and creamy Droste Dutch Process cocoa.

Gradually, she was changing me, subverting me, raising my standards, making me dissatisfied with American food, and to some considerable extent, with American culture. Converting me into a European sophisticate. I didn't stop to wonder why.