Free All the Days and Nights by William Maxwell Page B

this or that Hôtel des Sports or de la Poste or du Lion d’Or — always with truffles. In Montignac, there were so many ofthese signs that Ellen said anxiously, “Do you think we ought to eat
here
?”
    “No,” Ray said. “Périgueux is the place. It’s the capital of Périgord, and so it’s bound to have the best food.”
    Outside Thenon, they had a flat tire — the seventh in eight days of driving — and the casing of the spare tire was in such bad condition that Ray was afraid to drive on until the inner tube had been repaired and the regular tire put back on. It was five minutes of nine when they drove up before the Hôtel du Domino, and they were famished. Ray went inside and found that the hotel had accommodations for them. The car was driven into the hotel garage and emptied of its formidable luggage, and the Ormsbys were shown up to their third-floor room, which might have been in any plain hotel anywhere in France. “What I’d really like is the roast chicken stuffed with truffles,” Ellen said from the washstand. “But probably it takes a long time.”
    “What if it does,” Ray said. “We’ll be eating other things first.”
    He threw open the shutters and discovered that their room looked out on a painting by Dufy — the large, bare, open square surrounded by stone buildings, with the tricolor for accent, and the sky a rich, stained-glass blue. From another window, at the turning of the stairs on their way down to dinner, they saw the delicious garden, but it was dark, and no one was eating there now. At the foot of the stairs, they paused.
    “You wanted the restaurant?” the concierge asked, and when they nodded, she came out from behind her mahogany railing and led them importantly down a corridor. The maître d’hôtel, in a grey business suit, stood waiting at the door of the dining room, and put them at a table for two. Then he handed them the menu with a flourish. They saw at a glance how expensive the dinner was going to be. A waitress brought plates, glasses, napkins, knives, and forks.
    While Ellen was reading the menu, Ray looked slowly around the room. The
“élégante salle à manger”
looked like a hotel coffee shop. There weren’t even any tablecloths. The walls were painted a dismal shade of off-mustard. His eyes came to rest finally on the stippled brown dado a foot from his face. “It’s a perfect room to commit suicide in,” he said, and reached for the menu. A moment later he exclaimed, “I don’t see the basket of ice cream!”
    “It must be there,” Ellen said, “Don’t get so excited.”
    “Well, where? Just show me!”
    Together they looked through the two columns of desserts, withoutfinding the marvel in question. “Jerry and Anne were here several days,” Ellen said. “They may have had it in some other restaurant.”
    This explanation Ray would not accept. “It was the same dinner, I remember distinctly.” The full horror of their driving all the way to Périgueux in order to eat a very expensive meal at the wrong restaurant broke over him. In a cold sweat he got up from the table.
    “Where are you going?” Ellen asked.
    “I’ll be right back,” he said, and left the dining room. Upstairs in their room, he dug the
Guide Michelin
out of a duffel bag. He had lost all faith in the
Guide Gastronomique
, because of its description of the dining room; the person who wrote that had never set eyes on the Hôtel du Domino or, probably, on Périgueux. In the
Michelin
, the restaurant of the Hôtel du Domino rated one star and so did the restaurant Le Montaigne, but Le Montaigne also had three crossed forks and spoons, and suddenly it came to him, with the awful clarity of a long-submerged memory at last brought to the surface through layer after layer of consciousness, that it was at Le Montaigne and not at the Hôtel du Domino that the Richardsons had meant them to eat. He picked up Ellen’s coat and, still carrying the
Michelin
, went back downstairs