My Grape Escape (21 page)

“Really?” This sounded hopeful. “What’s his name?”

“Antoine.”

“Can you call him?”

Franck eyed the door to the office, which had still not been graced with the Maître’s presence. It was going on three o’clock. “I’m not sure if I’ll be allowed to make calls from jail,” he muttered. “That’s where they put you when you kill a notary,
n’est-ce pas
?”

Just then Le Maître blew in the door, hair unkempt and his face a vivid shade of scarlet. Without even sparing a glance at the waiting area – a skill he had no doubt honed over years of practice – he shouted something belligerent to his secretary and then slammed his office door behind him.

Franck stood up. The air around him crackled with anger. The secretary took one knowing glance at him, saw a client that was on the verge of exploding, and pressed the intercom button to talk to the Maître.

“Madame et Monsieur Germain have been waiting since two o’clock,” she said. “They have another appointment afterwards,” she lied. “Can you see them immediately?”

Muffled raillery followed from Le Maître. Clearly he didn’t know or, when I considered the matter more closely, didn’t
care
that he was on speakerphone.

“
Bon, d’accord
,” he finally acquiesced. “Let them in.” He let out a sigh of such epic proportions that I heard it not only through the speakerphone but also through the closed door of his study. Franck didn’t need any further invitation. He marched into Le Maître’s
étude
.

“
Vous êtes très en retard
. You are very late,” Franck said to Le Maître, who froze on his way from his desk to the door to let us in. For a few seconds, Le Maître woozily tried to meet Franck’s baleful look with one equally as challenging, then his shoulders dropped and he began to chuckle.

Franck and I weren’t sure how to react. We had been primed for a fight, not dissipation.

“Sit down. Please, do sit down.” He waved us into the two chairs and picked up a letter from his desk and waved it in the air. “You absolutely must listen to this letter I received this morning.”

“Is it from the
cadastre
?” I asked, hopeful.

Le Maître frowned at me as though I was speaking gibberish and began to read: “
You are not only a competent man, but a very alluring one. You know my husband doesn’t care for anything now save his tractor and his vines. I find myself a very lonely woman, especially in my
intimate life. Could we not find time to get to know each other better?”

“
Ça alors!
” Le Maître Lefebvre slapped the missive on his desk and surrendered to mirth. “Can you believe it?” Franck and I exchanged a look of bewilderment. Could our notary actually be sharing a love letter with us? “She’s practically begging me to sleep with her.” He wiped his eyes.

“Will you take her up on it?” Franck asked him, finally. How had we gotten so completely off topic?

Le Maître picked up his Mont Blanc and caressed it, contemplating Franck’s question. “I would have to be very desperate. She has no breasts to speak of.” With this he looked pointedly at my ample frontage and raised an approving eyebrow at Franck. “No, she is a
vieille peau
,” he concluded with regret. “Still her letter is just too funny not to be enjoyed. I read it to my secretary before lunch but as you have seen for yourself she has no sense of humor.”

Given the daily aggravation of working with Maître
Lefebvre,
I felt nobody could really blame her on this point.

“Now then.” He smiled magnanimously at us. “What are you here for today?”

It took a good hour plus several exasperated visits from Le Maître’s secretary before we were able to rectify the plan so that it actually reflected the house Le Maître had sold us. Le Maître was excessively bored by the proceedings and at several junctures had to go back and quote his favourite passages from his love letter out loud to keep from nodding off.

“And your neighbor agreed to this without any bribery or threats?” Le Maître asked as we were signing the last few documents. He cocked an eyebrow at me. “You didn’t offer yourself up to him, did you?”

“I didn’t want the house that badly.”

He hooted and then, with a beatific smile, began tapping his adding machine to calculate the myriad of different fees that we were going to be charged for his services. After he presented us with a shocking bill, Franck wrote him a cheque. At last we were in possession of documents proving we owned the entirety of our French house.

“I didn’t think such a level of unprofessionalism existed,” I mused as we climbed back into the car.

“He
was
drunk, you know,” Franck said as though this went some way in excusing Le Maître’s erratic behaviour.  

One of the central ideas I had learned about the law in the past two years was that it had to be taken seriously: you had to take your clients seriously, you had to take yourself seriously, and you had to take your vocation seriously. Le Maître seemed to have missed that lesson entirely. He was, however, living by the Père Bard’s credo that God put us all here to have fun….and drink copious amounts of wine.

“I know he’s useless as a Notary,” Franck admitted. “But you have to admit, he
is
entertaining.”

I couldn’t argue with that. I rolled down the window and took a deep breath of air that felt as icy as the frost on the vines we whipped past. The house and the furniture in it were finally completely, unequivocally, ours. Now all we needed to do was get it in picture perfect shape for our first guests who were arriving in two months and five days.

I closed my eyes and enjoyed how the soft winter light filtered orange under my eyelids. All we could do was plunge ahead and hope that whoever had been guiding us this far wouldn’t abandon us now.

Chapter 21

It was the beginning of March. Paulo had come and given his inaugural plastering lesson to Franck and then left him to figure it out on his own. This involved lots of swearing and endless trips down to Beaune to buy bags of dried plaster.

I hopped into the car to accompany Franck down on one such trip. The day before Gégé had also given us an indecipherable list of pipes, taps, and joints to purchase, but my secret plan was to begin perusing for bathroom tile while Franck lost himself in the plumbing section.

Le Gégé had become a member of our little family, or
notre
tribu
as Gégé liked to call us. We were living like a strange isolated tribe; all three of us spangled in plaster dust, dreaming of electrical radiators, and unable to relate very well to the rest of humanity. It niggled at me that we had never officially discussed with Gégé how much we were going to pay for his help.

“We need to ask Gégé for an estimate for all the work he’s doing,” I said to Franck as we sped along
La Nationale
past the shiny yellow and black tiled roof of the castle in Aloxe-Corton. I knew the money was leaking out of our bank account every day and our budget was getting smaller and smaller. I had regular nightmares about getting to the end of work without a single
franc
left to pay our ever-increasing debt.

Franck sped up to pass a vineyard tractor puttering along the road. “Laura, it’s not going to happen for a long time, if it happens at all.”

“But we
have t
o know how much he wants.”

“He would be offended if we started talking about money now. You don’t want him to leave us, do you?”

“Of course not. I don’t know what we’d do without him.” Gégé had become the wry rudder of our crazy project and was an invaluable resource and sounding board. Without him, we would be back at square one.

“You’ll have to trust me then. We can’t ask him about money now. I’ll know when the time is right.”

I crossed my arms and frowned out the window as the chateau of Clos Vougeot and some of the world’s most prized vineyards whizzed by. This did nothing to alleviate my stress, or tie up one of the many loose ends. Anger flared up my neck. Again I was frustrated that I had no choice but to do things Franck’s way, especially as I had a hunch that Franck might be wrong. Surely Gégé wanted to know how much he was being paid too. He couldn’t be spending day and night helping us for free.

Franck read my silence perfectly. “I’m not wrong about this, you know.”

“Hmph.”

“It’s hard for you to accept that some things will just resolve themselves without your help, isn’t it?”

“There’s no guarantee that things will resolve themselves on their own.” I took my glasses off and picked plaster specks off my lenses.

“Is anything ever truly guaranteed?”

“Don’t go all Jean-Paul Sartre on me.”

“You could do with a little more French philosophy and a little fewer control needs.”

Franck could be annoying, especially when he was right. Still, I couldn’t help feeling uneasy about digging a debt hole with Gégé that we might never be able to repay. I liked him too much to fall out over something like that.

At the home renovation store I narrowed my tile choices down to two: a stone coral or a more neutral white with grey wiggles. I meandered back to find Franck in the plumbing section. In front of an impressive display of toilets, Franck was chatting with one of our neighbours from Magny, a winemaker who I had only ever heard referred to as
La Patate
or “The Potato”.

In small Burgundian villages like Villers-la-Faye and Magny-les-Villers almost everybody had a nickname. I ruminated on this fact as we sped back to Magny, our trunk almost scraping the road under the weight of several bags of plaster and a mysterious assortment of pipes and joints.

When we got back home I was surprised to see that Gégé hadn’t arrived yet. I poured myself a cup of coffee and waited for him by the kitchen window, contemplating how the March wind rattled the bare branches of the two
tilleul
trees across the street. The reconverted Parisian bus used by
Le Jacky
as a mobile shop squealed to a halt in front of the church.

Another neighbor,
La Grenouille
(The Frog) came staggering down the road to buy a baguette from the bus accompanied by his friend
Le Bud
. One of
Le Bud
’s
hastily pulled up suspenders slipped down as he broke into a trot.
Le Zech
zoomed by in his car and honked and waved at Jacky’s bus. Gégé’s white
camionette
pulled up and I watched as he got out – he was moving slowly today for some reason - and ambled over to shake hands with
Le Bud
and
La Grenouille
and smoke a companionable cigarette with them. Gégé had begun to refer to Franck as
Le Fou
, “The Crazy”. Franck’s childhood nickname had begun to stick again – no doubt because he had married a demented Canadian woman who had convinced him to purchase this disaster of a house.

Everyone had a nickname, it seemed. Everyone except me.

I would have settled for a simple “
La
” in front of my name. In these Burgundian villages most people had earned the designation of
Le
or
La
(for example,
La Josette
) in front of their nickname, sort of like the Scottish “Himself”. It was not only a way of expressing playful affection for that person, but also a way of recognizing that he or she was irreplaceable, one of a kind. Even though there were about three Josettes in the village, there was only one
La Josette
.

I scratched the fine layer of white plaster dust off the windowpane with my nail. Franck had gotten to the finishing coat of plaster in the living room and had begun his first attempt at sanding the day before. It had taken him two weeks to get to this point in one room and he still wasn’t satisfied with the result. I hoped he would pick up speed as we still had all the other rooms left to do.

Gégé bid the men good-bye with another handshake and began to walk over to the passageway under our house. I poured him a coffee while wondering just what it would take for people here to accept me as one of their own and start calling me “
La Laura
”, or better yet to be referred to as “
La
” and then to have a nickname bestowed on me as well. It probably would never happen. After all, I wasn’t from these villages. The couple from Paris who moved to Villers-la-Faye twenty-five years ago were still referred to as “The Parisians”.

So far nobody called me anything but a respectful “Laura” or worse yet, “Madame Germain.” They probably referred to me as “
La Canadienne
” as well but never within my earshot.

“
Bonjour,
Laura
.
” Gégé had let himself into the kitchen, the usual brown paper package of croissants and
pain au chocolat
under his arm. We kissed each other on the cheeks and he passed me a
pain au chocolat
. Franck came in, gave me a kiss, and shook Gégé’s hand.

We all sat down for a late breakfast and within seconds our patisseries were speckled in plaster dust. Now that the sanding of the walls was well underway there was no escaping the fine white powder that settled on every surface. Gégé had informed us three days ago that he was actually shitting plaster when he went to the WC. I was too afraid to look.

“I’m still sanding.” Franck grimaced. “It’s harder than it looks and some of the plaster still isn’t dry enough.”

“Can’t we just throw some drywall up in front of all the holes?” I asked for the umpteenth time. I felt like we had been in this plastering stage for a century already.

Gégé shook his head and picked at his croissant. “I’ve told you Laura, it will start to bubble and weep within months. It would be like stitching up an abscess before draining it first.”

I was so put off by this analogy that I put down my pastry.

“You don’t look very good this morning.” Franck studied Gégé. “Are you feeling all right?”

“I’m depressed,” Gégé answered, picking at his croissant.

This got my attention. Maybe it was the gray March skies, but I had also been feeling despair lurking around the edges of life the past few days.

“About what?” Franck asked.

Gégé gave the saddest shrug I had ever seen. “Everything.”

“Everything what?” Franck probed.

Gégé took a drag on his cigarette and his eyes teared up. He tried to laugh but it came out as a gulp. “Where should I start?”

 “Start with the thing that is bothering you the most,” Franck said.

He looked down at the table top, his chin quivering. “I want to have a girlfriend. I see you two together and I want that. I’ve been lonely for so long. Olivier and everyone say it’s going to happen any day now, that I’m going to meet someone, but
merde
! Where is she? I’m starting to think that there’s nobody. I’ll be lonely forever.”

I sat perfectly still in my chair, riveted. Didn’t Gégé know that adults weren’t supposed to admit to feelings like that, even to themselves?

“Olivier sat across from me a few years ago saying the exact same thing as you,” Franck pointed out. “Now he’s married and has a son.”

Gégé’s mouth twisted. “Just because it happened to Olivier doesn’t mean it’s going to happen to me. Is it because I keep making the wrong choices? I mean, look at me. No girlfriend, no place of my own, not a lot of money…what is the point of it all? I’m completely lost.”

I gasped. Even at my most discouraged, I could never bring myself to actually admit to the feeling. I had always assumed that feeling lost meant something was defective with
me
because weren’t we supposed to feel happy all the time?

However, I didn’t think Gégé was at all defective for feeling depressed. Instead, I was impressed by his courage
in admitting how he really felt, even though it scared me. It made me feel as though he were dangling me over a cliff. If I followed his brave example – which I longed to – I would surely drown in years of pent-up emotions.

Large tears began to roll down Gégé’s cheeks. I didn’t know where to look and stared down as I began to dissect my
pain au chocolat
. Franck, being from a family who aired its emotional distress with the same nonchalance as t-shirts on the laundry line, munched through his second croissant while watching Gégé, concerned but nonplussed.

“Tell me some of your problems,” Gégé said after a few minutes of crying. “
S’il vous plait
. That way I won’t feel so alone.”

“The walls,” Franck said, his voice muffled with pastry. “I dream about those holes every night. Most nights I get up to look at them to see if they are really as big and as bad as they are in my nightmares, only to find that they are actually worse. Then I can’t get back to sleep for a long time afterwards. I’m also scared that we’re running out of time, not to mention money.”

Gégé nodded sympathetically and his brown eyes shifted to me. “
Et toi
?”

I blinked. Everything felt wrong! I felt utterly overwhelmed, but I couldn’t say it. I had to keep it in, didn’t I? Wasn’t that my penance for having these feelings in the first place?

“Don’t get me started!” I laughed, taking the coward’s way out. “The holes, of course, and the other things Franck said.”

Gégé watched me for a few more seconds than was polite. He didn’t buy it. Thankfully he pushed back his chair and beckoned to Franck. “We can’t do much about my problems today, but let’s see if we can’t do something about those holes.”