She lays the bunches on brown paper. I pick one up, hold it near my face, and inhale. There. Clean anise. Green bite. No damp rot underneath. Stems not limp. Leaves narrow, glossy, alive. Tarragon can be insistent if mishandled, domineering in the worst way. Good tarragon doesn’t shout. It waits until fat, acid, or heat gives it somewhere to go, then it changes the room. I take six bunches.
Mireille watches me. “You smiled.”
“I didn’t.”
“With your eyes.”
“That sounds like something a bad waiter says.”
“You smiled,” Mireille insists.
“The tarragon is good.”
“The tarragon is beautiful,” she says.
“You are allowed to enjoy something before correcting it.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
“No, you won’t.”
I almost smile again.
She catches it and points at me with a bundle of parsley.
“There. Again.”
“You’re becoming expensive.”
“I was born expensive,” Mireille says.
“You are the one who took years to learn taste.”
I accept the insult because her herbs are exceptional. I move from her stall to mushrooms, then citrus, then peas. The market begins to brighten by degrees, not with sunlight yet, but with the accumulated force of people moving fast under artificial light. Forklifts glide through aisles. Men call prices. Plastic crates stack and vanish. A cook from a hotel kitchen I dislike argues over asparagus with the intensity of a man whose chef will blame him personally if spring fails to arrive in straight lines.
I open a pea pod with my thumb. The peas inside are small, tight, and bright. I taste one. Sweet, but not childish.
Good.
The seller, an older man with a flat cap and hands stained green at the fingertips, watches me.
“For soup?” he asks.
“No,” I say. “Not soup.”
“For garnish?”
“God, no.”
He laughs. “Then you may buy them.”
“I needed permission?”
“For these, yes,” he says.
I take enough for testing, not enough to commit. Six days before opening, a chef who commits too early because the market flattered him deserves every disappointment that follows.
By the time I stop for coffee, the list is marked, adjusted, improved, and more honest than it was when I left the penthouse. The coffee stall sits between produce and poultry, run by a man named Sami who has heard every insult in the market and collected several of the better ones as if they were currency. He hands me an espresso before I order.