French Bait and Switch
We’ve been having a coyote problem in our neighborhood. We live in Hollywood, California, where the hills are alive with the sound of creatures from the wild. The coyotes are attacking cats like crazy, and even though this isn’t new, it seems the incidents are increasing; that their behavior is more and more aggressive and brazen, and that they are coming down from the hills earlier in the day, not caring what we concerned people think. Never mind that the out-of-control development in the neighborhood is encroaching on their domain, two of their recent victims were my own cherished kitty cats. Two in one year!!
Luckily, my friend Theo came up with a clever solution. Theo is six years old. The answer is simple: he will build a robot cat made of nuts and bolts, and blocks of wood. When the evil predator bites down on the decoy cat, naturally his teeth will break. The coyote will be so distraught that he will never go near a cat, ever again.
Sounds reasonable to me. Why didn’t I think of that? I am going to try it on my French husband even though he is not an evil coyote. Since nothing but French bread is allowed in our house, just for fun, I am going to slip a regular American sour-doo (as he calls them) baguette in a La Brea Bakery bag. Aside from traditional French bakeries spotted here and there around town, La Brea Bakery is the only non-French company that makes widely-available bread he will eat without spitting. As he plunks down obscene amounts of soft brie cheese on his decoy baguette, I will have the pleasure of watching his unsuspecting teeth bite into a non-French baguette and enjoy it!! I rub my hands in anticipation, much like Klaus Kinski in Nosferatu as he awaits the arrival of Lucy, though his nails are much longer than mine.
The trap is set, the coyote arrives. Heh heh heh. It is four o’clock in the afternoon, time for a snack. He heads straight for the bread-box and pulls out the “baguette.” Heh heh heh. Out of the refrigerator comes the Port Salut cheese. I have decided to try this new cheese because I am independent and would like to branch out from the soft ripened bries and camemberts that usually live in our chiller drawer.
“Port Salut? What is zis doing here?” he says. Immediately I feel I have made a mistake.
“What’s the matter?” I say, “Don’t you like Port Salut? I thought you said it was good?”
He sneers. “That’s the cheese they serve at four o’clock.”
I am supposed to understand by this that when he was a child in boarding school, this is the cheese they served at the four o’clock snack hour.
“Disgusting,” he mutters, and walks away, shaking his head at my ignorance.
I feel defeated. All zis planning…but wait! What do I see ten minutes later but my husband cutting a thick slice of Port Salut and slapping it on ze “baguette.” Heh heh heh. He pops the whole thing in his mouth and washes it down with some Orangina. I am awash in tingles.
“So, what do you think?” I say as nonchalantly as possible.
“Better disgusting cheese than no cheese,” He says.
Carine Fabius is a Haitian native, who grew up in New York City and has made her home in Los Angeles for the past 20 years. Her most recent book, Sex, Cheese and French Fries—Women are Perfect, Men are from France is a witty look at an American woman’s life with a Frenchman. She is also the owner of Galerie Lakaye, L.A.’s premiere gallery of Haitian, Caribbean, and Latin American art for the past 18 years. She is also an independent museum curator, jewelry designer and co-owner of Lakaye Studio, manufacturer of a line of temporary henna tattoo kits known as the Earth Henna body painting kit. She is married to a Parisian sculptor, Pascal Giacomini
