The Oyster Plant

The other day, my best friend asked me if I was happy, and I said, truthfully: “Yes, I am.”

The strange thing was: I felt like I was lying. When I said it, I felt my voice rise a bit and become high-pitched, as though I were trying to paint over some lower-pitched feeling that might betray me. Something invisible tugged at my assertion. She let it slide. Our conversation continued.

As I walked home I thought: If I am happy, why did that feel not entirely true?

So often our lives pass by unexamined. Even if we journal, pray, and talk to thoughtful loved ones about our state of affairs. The complexity of our emotional state is so difficult to convey in a book, let alone a single word. I feel like I am happy, mostly. I have a new job that is purposeful and important and I am excited about (mostly, and sometimes it gives me anxiety). I have a partner that loves me and tells me I’m beautiful and walks me to the train station and packs my lunch (mostly, and sometimes he hurts my feelings). I have a body that is relatively young, strong and healthy (mostly, and sometimes I examine my pockets of cellulite the bedroom mirror).

I am sure that if I said I was unhappy, it would be untrue, mostly. So why is there some whiff of deception in the truth?

Later that night, Andrew and I joined a neighbour named Lucien for dinner. Lucien’s garden backs up to ours, and when we returned from quarantine in Scotland, he told us, with tears in his eyes, that his wife had died of a stroke. Lucien is gentle and friendly, though we struggle to communicate for my lack of French and his of English. We say Bonjour to each other when he waters his garden, and it is a comfort to hear him calling his terrier across the yard.

When we joined Lucien for dinner, he made us fondue. His wife, he explained (with Andrew acting as translator), was from Gruyere, and she made the best fondue; it was in her blood. He had not made fondue in twenty years, but he would try. It was delicious, and we ate and drank and laughed, and misunderstood each other, but didn’t mind much. Lucien showed us the memorabilia around his home: brass cow bells, their collars colourfully embroidered, that the cows wear when they come down from the high mountain pastures at the end of the summer, their horns in wreaths of flowers. He pointed to paintings from places they’d visited, black and white photos of his wife, of her daughter laughing. There was a poster that I loved that had photos of all of the elements one can taste in wine: plums, grass, leather, pear, earth. Each element was written in French, and Andrew helped me pronounce them while Lucien was upstairs pouring us wine.

Lucien opened the door to a cellar filled with bottles of wine from floor to ceiling. He showed us a few exceptional bottles and remarked that, while he loved to drink wine, he had lost his sense of smell, and that took away significantly from the pleasure of it. In his working years, Lucien had been a perfumer, so his nose was his most precious organ, leading him to turn abstract ideas into scents. A brand might come to him and describe a woman walking through a field on a summer’s day, and Lucien was tasked with turning that into something that could be bottled—all the scents from the poster, and hundreds more, at his fingertips. But now, he couldn’t smell, he shrugged. My storyteller’s sensibility wanted it to have coincided with the death of his wife: And with his love lost, the great perfumer could no longer smell. But like most tragedies, big and small, there was no easy poetry to it, just the pain.

I found myself feeling both happiness and grief—neither supplanting the other—throughout the evening. The company was wonderful, the conversation lively, crowded around the warm fondue pot, and the night felt suspended in a moment of magic. And yet, there was an empty seat at the table, and the encroaching darkness outside had a weight to it.

We sat on his terrace, sipping a final glass, and Lucien asked if we liked oysters. We answered enthusiastically, and he walked over to a corner of his garden. He bent to pluck several green leaves from a small shrub with purple flowers, and returned, handing us the leaves. Close your eyes, and when you bite into the leaves of this plant, he explained, it tastes just like an oyster. I sniffed it, and it smelled purely vegetal, if a little salty. I readied myself to give a good reaction to please our kind neighbour, even though I doubted the possibility of his claim. And then I bit into the leaf and began to chew. It was utterly transformed: briny, mineral, meaty, and unmistakably, it became an oyster. We were delighted, and Lucien smiled.

I think that is the kind of happiness that I feel, when I hear a lovely cover of a favorite song sung in French, when I celebrate a very happy birthday that ushers me toward the end of my childbearing years. When I float on my back in Lake Geneva, look up at the clouds and see my grandmother’s face. Happiness is not a lie, but perhaps it is a plant that tastes like an oyster.