My Grape Escape (13 page)

“Where are you Laura?” he called out.

“Bedroom,” I answered quietly, wondering how I could cover up my achievement.

He strode around the corner and his eyes went from me to the hole and then back to me again.

“
Et merde. Et merde, et merde, et MERDE!”
I couldn’t figure out if he meant the hole or Monsieur de Luca. Perhaps both.

“How did it go?” I stood up and tried to dust the plaster bits off my thighs. “What did he say?”

Franck leaned over the top of me and touched the side of the hole. More plaster crumbled away under his fingertips. “I was praying the walls wouldn’t be in this state.”

“Look!” I held out my hand. “I think this may be Revolutionary-era horsehair! I found it in the plaster. Can you believe it?”

Franck gifted me with an icy stare and kicked the wall, unleashing an impressive shower of plaster. “The humidity has gotten into them.” He said ‘humidity’ with the same tone one would use to say ‘gangrene’ to a soldier in the trenches.

“I’m sure we can fix them. What did Monsieur de Luca say?”

Franck ignored my question. “Does my wife have a special skill in plastering that she has been hiding from me until now?”

My eyes shifted back to the hole. “Not exactly.” I was, on the other hand, convinced that Franck could develop plastering skills in no time. I also sensed, however, that this wasn’t the most auspicious moment to declare my faith in him.

“With these old walls everything can fall around our ears, and until the wallpaper is off and you start going at it, you just don’t know.” He scanned the walls around us, worry growing in his eyes. “This could be a much bigger job than we bargained for. I’m not sure we will be able to get it done by May.”

“We have to get it done by May.” We had accepted - and spent - the deposits our prospective guests had sent to us. They had booked their plane tickets and their rental cars. We couldn’t cancel on them.

Franck’s index finger twitched on his right hand. He was dying for a cigarette.

“We only have to worry about these two rooms until the plans are sorted out,” I said. “What did Monsieur de Luca say?”

Franck turned and stalked into the kitchen, his finger still twitching. I followed and watched him, concerned, as he slumped down on one of the mismatched wooden chairs. “He agrees that none of this house is his…”

“That’s
perfect
!” I made a move to hug Franck but he stopped me with a quick hand gesture. “However, he wants to talk to his notary about it.”

Two years in law school had been long enough to learn that consulting one’s legal team was rarely a precursor to a simple resolution. I sat down in the other wooden chair.

“Let’s summarize.” If I wasn’t logical, I would be swept away with another wave of fear. “We have bought a third of a house for the price of a full one and even that third is looking like it might fall down around us. We may be engaging in an expensive legal battle, and we have tons of work to do on this house before the first of May with no idea how to do it or where to start. Is that about it?”

“We don’t have much money,” Franck added.

“Oh yes. I forgot about that.”

“We don’t have a car.”

“I forgot about that too.”

Franck rapped his knuckles on the scarred wooden kitchen table. “And in about a week or so, the seller’s children will be coming to collect all the furniture, so we won’t have anywhere to sit, eat, sleep, or
faire l’amour
.”

I didn’t think my heart could sink any lower, but it did. “And we have no money to buy new stuff,” I confirmed.

“Correct.”

“Christmas is in four days and we haven’t bought anyone presents yet.”

“Right.”  Franck nodded.

I dropped my head to the table and began to laugh. It was so ridiculous, what else could we do? I heard Franck begin to chuckle above me.

“So, what the hell do we do?” I asked without lifting my head up.

“We give up,” Franck said.

“We can’t give up!” My head snapped up. There were our future guests, of course, but I couldn’t live with myself if we didn’t at least try to make it work.

“Not forever,” Franck said. “Let’s just give up for a few days. I propose we borrow my dad’s car, go to Beaune, have a coffee, buy presents, and then eat and drink and try to forget the rest of it until Christmas is over.”

I opened my mouth to protest, but in truth the image Franck painted was just too seductive. I twisted up my hair, slipped on my warmest sweater, and swiped on a coat of lip gloss I had found in the bottom of my backpack. Denial had an undeservedly bad reputation.

Chapter 14

The kitchen in Franck’s parents
’
house smelled of snails. Well, not snails exactly. Snails don’t actually smell like much all by themselves. But the way Mémé was preparing them, sautéed in parsley and garlic butter and then stuffed back into their shells, they smelled like heaven.

In the past four days we had managed to forget all about our house in a flurry of Christmas shopping, wrapping, and long frosty walks in the vineyards. We had just finished our last-minute shopping. The cold had taken grip in earnest while we had been fortifying ourselves post-shopping with stiff espressos at the Café Carnot. When we emerged, laden with wrapping paper and shopping bags, the cobblestones under our feet had become slippery with ice.

It felt like the whole world and everything in it, including myself, had fallen into an enchanted winter’s sleep. Granted, since arriving at Franck’s house to celebrate
Le Reveillon
with them
,
I had drunk two rather large glasses of
kir
royale -
a regular
kir
that had been gussied up for the holidays by adding
crémant,
a bubbly champagne-style wine made in Burgundy – instead of the usual local white wine called
aligoté
.

Mesmerized by Mémé’s deft movements, I watched as she assembled the French version of a Yule log. With her spatula she spread the
gateau de savoie
with her homemade chocolate
ganache.
She then rolled it up and wrapped the cake – which now resembled a very large sausage – in a damp tea towel she had prepared in advance. This accomplished, she peered into the oven where the
escargots
were bubbling away.

“You can’t cook and do something else at the same time,” she told me. Mémé had a penchant for doling out unsolicited advice, and never more so than when she was in what she called her
domaine
, the kitchen. “You need to keep an eye on things at all times. Even stopping to answer the phone can ruin everything.”

I nodded. I was one of the only ones in the family who didn’t tease Mémé when she gave advice, partly because I was brought up to be polite, and partly because I considered her instructions on life to be sound.

Her discourses tended to be on one of two subjects. The first was cooking,
bien
sûr
. The second was men, philandering men like her first husband in particular. This specimen with a chronically wandering eye had been the father of Franck’s two aunts (or his mother’s half-sisters, technically). Even in France, where philandering was relatively commonplace, Mémé’s first husband had been a philanderer beyond compare. One of the favourite family stories was that as he lay practically
on his deathbed in the hospital
,
he was caught by his second wife with a hand up the skirt of one of the nurses.

Mémé always advised me that philandering men couldn’t be changed:
“Quand ils sont comme ça, ils seront toujours comme ça.”
When they are like that, she said, they will always be like that
.

Mémé
hadn’t reacted to her first husband’s philandering the way women were expected to do in the 1940s, which was simply to put up with it. On the day she found him reconnoitering with a fellow villager in the hayloft, she declared she had endured enough. She divorced him, moved to Villers-la-Faye and set herself up as the village
boulangère
. It required a stiff spine to withstand the whispers about her scandalous divorced background and her liberal ways. Still, her bread was delicious and the villagers came in droves. The villagers referred to Mémé as
la sauvage
or “the savage” because she seemed to have no need for any company besides that of her daughters and her own sisters and brothers.

That all changed when her first husband up and married one of his many paramours, a woman named Aline who, from that point onwards, became Mémé’s nemesis. Aline became pregnant almost immediately. Mémé decided she had to get remarried too. She selected Georges, who lived across from the village bakery. They were married quickly and within months she was pregnant with Franck’s mother.

The way she had lived took courage. When I was near Mémé, inhaling the scent of her cooking, I felt that somehow I was also soaking up some of her boldness.

Mémé pulled out a bubbling escargot from the oven and with her oven mitts placed it down on a little napkin in front of me.

“
Goûtez.
” She winked at me. “Tell me if you think they are ready.”

At ten to eleven, after a feast of the delicious escargots and
foie gras
on tiny toasts with honeyed Sancerre wine, we staggered up the road toward the thundering bells of the village church. The midnight mass wasn’t something Franck’s parents – who had been very religious at one time but who had since become almost atheist – attended regularly, but Franck in particular had pushed for it this year. Even though I was usually no fan of church, given the state of our new home, prayer could hardly hurt.

Penetrating the inside of the church after walking through the silvery winter air was a shock. Inside, the temperature was roughly on par with Tahiti. I looked around and saw that the
Père Bard
had fitted out the church with six humongous heaters that emitted a burning stench reminiscent of the heaters at our new home.

We found seats together near the middle of the pews and underneath a swaying archway that seemed to have been constructed solely from dried vines and scotch tape. Cut out stars and drawings of the Virgin Mary made by the children hung down from these gravity-defying structures.

“I wonder how that thing is staying up?” I mused. I was sitting just underneath a Blessed Virgin who bore an uncanny resemblance to Pamela Anderson. She quivered in the tropical air. Baywatch had been a hit here in Burgundy too.

“Must be the Holy Spirit,” Franck surmised.

A few raggedy hymns were sung and then the
Père Bard
eased his crooked body down on a rickety plastic chair that had been placed in the aisle between the two flanks of pews. He began to talk in that singsong tone of his and very quickly his sermon veered from the birth of Jesus to one of his favourite topics – the Blessed Virgin of Lourdes. For a non-Catholic, I knew an impressive amount about her. She just so happened to be a key figure in the lore of Franck’s family. According to Michèle, who was paying close attention to
Le Père
, the Blessed Virgin of Lourdes was responsible for the existence of Franck’s little brother Emmanuel-Marie
,
who sat perched like a blond cherub on my other side.

Michèle’s brutal cancer treatment should have, according to every shred of medical evidence, rendered her sterile. Throughout her illness and her recovery she visited Lourdes several times and prayed to the Virgin. A few months after her treatment ended she began to have stomach-aches. Terrified that her cancer had metastasized she reluctantly booked an abdominal ultrasound. The doctor took his time in examining her. She was certain as she lay on the table that he was measuring new and inoperable tumors.

He finally wiped off the gel and announced cheerfully, “You will be feeling much better in seven months or so.”

“Why? Will I be dead by then?” she asked.

He laughed and patted her shoulder. “
Non.
You’ll have had your baby by then. You’re around two months pregnant.”

Unfortunately, when she shared her incredible news with her oncologist he was horrified. He was convinced that due to the extensive radiation she had endured, her baby would certainly be deformed and handicapped - if it survived at all. He urged her to have an abortion, or at least an amniocentesis. Michèle refused, unswerving in her belief that her baby was a miracle. Seven months later Emmanuel (meaning “God is with us”) -Marie (to thank the Virgin) was born. He weighed in at over nine pounds and was perfectly healthy. Despite the fact that in the years following his arrival, Michèle and André had soured on the Catholic religion, the belief that the Virgin of Lourdes had played a part in Emmanuel-Marie’s existence remained unassailable in Franck’s family.

The
Père Bard
leaned forward on his cane, lowered his voice, and moved on to a different Virgin apparition - Our Lady of Fatima. I found myself leaning forward too. Apparently she had appeared in Portugal in 1917 and predicted the spread of communism, making prophesies about the annihilation of certain nations.
Père Bard
stood up shakily, galvanized by the topic. He began to thump his cane on the floor as he warned us all that we were going to die in a blaze of terror and flames, any day now.

I looked around me. This from a priest who, last time I had seen him, told me that God put us all here on earth to have fun. Emmanuel-Marie was fiddling with his hymnbook, the portly winemaker in front of me was picking the wax out of his ear, and Mémé was polishing the wooden pew with a corner of her shawl. Nobody was the slightest bit fazed.

“So what can one do?” the
Père Bard
asked, then looked out at his congregation. I listened carefully. I really wanted to know.
Le Père
turned his face up to the swaying arch that had miraculously, all stayed aloft. “All we can do is pray.
Tous ensemble
. Altogether, now.”

He bowed his head, and I followed suit. If the end of the earth was truly imminent, that certainly put my house-related problems into perspective. Besides, it was comforting to feel for once as though I wasn’t the only one who was doomed. We were all in this together. Maybe that feeling of not being alone was part of the reason why people had been coming to church for centuries.

In my head I asked the Virgin of Fatima and the Virgin of Lourdes and Jesus and God and basically whoever was listening for help
,
so that we could complete our renovations in time. I prayed that the neighbor wouldn’t try to extort half of our house or kill Franck. I prayed that we would find a car (a cheap car, preferably). I prayed that I had made the right decision in leaving law and jumping into this house thing. And I prayed that somehow, even though I couldn’t possibly see how from my current vantage point, everything would work out. After we had kissed our neighbours and walked back out into the winter air to the sound of church bells, I almost believed it could.