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the flavor). They were very fine oysters. Maybe even the best. My brother, just as before, was by my side. I’d re-created, as best I could, all the factors present in my youth. But once again, I felt restrained from pure enjoyment. Something was still missing. This was not what I was there for, I realized. This whole enterprise was a sham – the search for ‘the perfect meal.’ That’s not what I’d been looking for at the water’s edge in Arcachon, in La Teste’s empty streets, in the overgrown garden at number 5, rue Jules Favre, or atop a windy sand dune in January.

My father was, to me, a man of mystery. He probably would have been pleased to hear that, as he considered himself, I think, a simple, uncomplicated sort of a guy. Though warm, sentimental, and passionate about things like literature, art, movies, and especially music, his appreciations ran deep, so deep that what I always suspected was his true nature, that of a secretly disappointed romantic, was nearly out of sight. A shy man with few friends, uncomfortable with confrontation and with large groups, a man who dreaded tie and jacket, unpretentious, amused by hypocrisy, affectation, with a sharp sense for the absurd and ironic, he took a childlike joy in simple things. He was a sucker for films about French schoolkids – the films The 400 Blows and Zéro de Conduite resonate particularly in my memory. The mischievous, borderline-delinquent children in both films were as close as I ever got to imagining my father as a kid. Despite the fact that he was raised by his widowed French mother in the very neighborhood where I now live, I know almost nothing about his life there. I can’t picture him playing with friends in Riverside Park, just outside my window, as he surely must have. I can’t picture him emerging from the apartment on Claremont with a stack of schoolbooks under one arm. I can’t see him at private school in jacket and tie. I do have one of his old schoolbooks from the time: Émil et les Détectives, in French, with his doodlings of goofy Nazis and Stuka dive-bombers in the margins. He used to read to me from that book – the English version – as he read from The Wind in the Willows, Dr. Dolittle, and Winnie the Pooh. And I remember how he’d do the voices of Toad, Eeyore, and Piglet.

He was in the army as a young man, as a supply sergeant in postwar Germany – about which I also know nothing, only that it seems to have left him with a lifelong appreciation of ‘funny’ German accents and a suspicion that behind every German accent lurks a terrible wartime secret. He found Mel Brooks’s take on Germans entirely in keeping with his own, but his laughter masked, I always suspected, some deeper bitterness and cynicism. He saw something ugly yet fascinating there, I’m sure. He loved, in later years, bleak, multilayered espionage thrillers like those of John Le Carré and Len Deighton, adored films like The Man Inside, The Third Man, Funeral in Berlin, and thought Dr. Strangelove was the funniest movie ever made.

I guess I knew him best from what seemed to make him happiest: lying on the couch on his days off, reading Jean Larteguy in French, endless John D. MacDonald novels – adventure stories, usually romantic, a little bit sad, set in faraway climes; watching a new Kubrick film; listening to a new record on his giant JBL studio monitors; fiddling with the dials on his old Marantz radio; or sitting on the beach at Cap Ferret during the two or three weeks he could get away from his job at Columbia Records and join us in France. Eating saucisson à l’ail between crusty French bread, sipping vin ordinaire in his white terry-cloth shirt and boxer-style swimming trunks, wiggling his toes in the sand, he always looked most completely at ease. He’d charge into the rough surf with me or Chris on his shoulders and try to scare us about the incoming breakers.

Back then, when we’d become bored with the beach blanket and our Tintins and our sandy sandwiches and Vittel, Chris and I would rush off to explore the dunes of Cap Ferret. We’d build forts out of the plentiful driftwood