Bourgeois Bouillabaisse

A Short Story

By Ben D’Alessio

The moon was one of those super-moons my lovely wife goes on about the night we had the Richardson-Velazquezs over for a late-night nightcap. The party was a masturbatory display of Dr. Fitzgerald’s post-impressionist acumen, which always begins with Van Gogh and ends with Gauguin — the New Englander bastard kept his original Kielberg on display above the fireplace, even though the empty wall surrounding the painting drowns it out because it’s too damn small. I’ve told him — and will continue to tell him — the same every time he throws a soirée and I examine the landscape (a generous term) as if never having seen it before.

My dear wife, Genevieve, disagrees — surprise, surprise — and believes it’s an immaculate location for the painting and that Fitzgerald had an immaculate taste for art and where exactly to place the pieces in his home. The Kielberg is his only original, ignore him if he says otherwise.

But my darling wife doesn’t know the first thing about art, unless she’s examining a line-up of the bottle-art adorning scotch and brandy labels — she could curate those for an exhibition at the Woodmere, like some Andy Warhol garbage. She also doesn’t speak French, but she always attempts to conjure up her lessons from the Grier School at the Fitzgerald’s because of all the French oeuvre surrounding her on the walls, I guess. She can nail the accent on Beaujolais Nouveau and Sancerre and Chartreuse (are you starting to get the picture?) like she was Jeanne Moreau, but please, if she tries it with you, I entreat you to put on the visage of a deaf-mute — I don’t care if you’ve translated À la recherche du temps perdu, just trust me.

She always was one of those hopeless romantic types and I suppose that’s what’s attracted her to the Gallic culture. Well, something good has come from this preoccupation because Genevieve is a damn good cook. All types of cuisine, really, but that French high-brow stuff is her specialty and I’m not complaining, not about this, at least.

That’s what we wanted to serve the Richardson-Velazquezs when we invited them over for dinner, but they declined and I’m not surprised. Viv can come on pretty strong, especially after a couple glasses of Cutty Sark — which is any conversation that occurs after…