Drink
Ordering alcohol is not a matter to be taken lightly. For me, character assessment by scrutiny of drinking habits is swiftly replacing my other critical obsession with people's bookshelves and shoes. And today a romantic evening is at stake.
I am only half-way through the wine list and we are still deliberating over the dinner menu when the barman appears to take our aperitif order. I hesitate. There are two main rules a femme fatale should observe. The first is to look as if you will sleep with anything with a pulse but in reality be too screwed up to sleep with anyone. The second is to have a tightly constructed portfolio of idiosyncrasies for men to fall in love with and other women to be intimidated by. Drinking is a vital part of this.
Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca had the art perfected. Even the traces of feminine wiles she left after her death (her slanted handwriting, the scent of crushed azalea petals on her monogrammed handkerchief) were enough to hound the new Mrs de Winter almost to insanity. And a necessary eccentricity is either to have a signature drink or to be utterly precious about ordering precisely the right drink for the time and the place. Better still, to contrive to do both.
But choose carefully. Obviously a white wine spritzer will not do (unless you are achingly hip and clever enough to work out whether post-postmodern retro cool means a spritzer is a good or a bad thing). Nor will a Bacardi and Coke, under any circumstances. Nor even a G&T which, though seldom inappropriate, is too everyday.
Inspired, I order a Campari and fresh orange juice, the most recherche of readily available drinks. I used to drink it in Italy for breakfast, languishing in Veronese pavement cafes, nibbling at croissants and pastries. Bitters, of which Campari is one, were made in the days of apothecaries to secret recipes with infernal ingredients like roots, bark, herbs and peel. But this particular drink was first concocted by Gaspare Campari in his Milan cafe in the 1860s, and orange peel is a key element, which is why it tastes so good with freshly squeezed orange juice.
At university I made a point of liking it because no one else did and a bottle could be made to last all term. So I am mortified when it arrives and my latest love, taking in the white plastic swizzle stick and the pretty red colour, says, "Ah, it's an easy listening drink to go with your new Andy Williams CD". Assuming a certain hauteur, I remove the swizzler and demand he tries it, certain he will wince at its sourness.
But he is distracted by the dinner menu, claiming that if only he were not morally opposed to it, he would start with foie gras and split-pea casserole with parsnips and madeira because it sounds so delicious. This is infuriating. Because meat-eaters with morals make me even more cross than vegetarians without them (why is it worse to overfeed a goose than restrict a feathery chicken to a dark box all its life?), I am obliged to incite him to cruelty while worrying about finding a Sauternes.
But as I scrabble back through the wine list, he declares, "It's the only principle I've got in the whole world, so I think I'd better cling to it". Quite true, and rather than watch him surrender his last shred of humanity to a complete moral vacuum, I allow the foie gras eccentricity to pass. He annoys me further by liking the Campari, almost preferring it to his own trademark pint of bitter, ordered today because he particularly wanted to receive it on its little silver tray. My latest love is a far more accomplished femme fatale than I will ever be. How very disconcerting.
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