On Rue Tatin (5 page)

Then he swiveled to look at the little brick building behind the house, which belonged to the church. “You should try to buy that, too,” he said. “It would add a lot of value to the property.”

“So you think we should buy the house?” I asked.

“If I were younger I might think about buying it,” Christian, who was then forty-five, said. “At this point in my life it’s too much work, but it’s a beautiful house.”

I understood Christian’s point. He and his wife, Nadine, had bought an old farmhouse nearly twenty years before when they had three tots, and had lived in a tent in front of it for a year while they made it livable. It is not an experience he would want to repeat and he is convinced he accomplished it only because he was young. Yet he obviously thought this house in Louviers was full of potential.

“Its walls and roof are solid,” he said. “If you have to pay someone to fix it up you can’t afford it. If Michael can do it himself, you should seriously think about it.”

I took that for encouragement.

Edith came to pick me up and before we left we went through the house again, deciding what should be where when it came time to decorate the rooms. I could just imagine all the
soirées
we would have there, in the shadow of the church, L’église de Notre Dame. That night I reported everything to Michael, who knew all the protagonists and could judge their responses. He seemed excited, too. I thought the world was turned upside down.

I called an engineer, a plumber, a roofing specialist to come see the house. I got estimates for installing electricity. I took photographs, pasted them together, and FedExed them to Michael, along with the estimates and every shred of information I could find about Louviers. I talked at length with Bernard, who assured me that there were no complications for a foreigner buying property in France. He said he would introduce us to his banker, and that would help expedite matters should we decide to buy it.

Michael and I talked, we debated, we each agreed we didn’t have the money to undertake the project. And then, with Bernard’s help, we decided to buy it.

I was beside myself. With excitement. With dread. With panic. With desire. My dream to own property in France—a dream I had never actually articulated, even to myself—had come true. It didn’t matter that we were moving to France on a wing and a prayer. It didn’t matter that we were always seeming to scrape by. It didn’t matter that life in France was bound to be more expensive than life in the United States with sky-high prices for everything from gasoline to farm-raised chickens. And it didn’t matter that we would be so far from our families and American friends. Never big on paying attention to reality, I definitely put on my soft-focus lenses this time. If Michael thought we could do it, then we could.

We made an offer on the house, which was immediately accepted. I met the owner, who was a small nervously sad woman, and signed the
compromis de vente
, or the contract to buy the house. Bernard was true to his word, taking time to help with all the paperwork and signing where necessary. On my last night before going back to the United States we celebrated. Christian and Nadine came for dinner bringing a dish of richly flavored braised pigeons from their farm, where they raised eight hundred of the squeaky birds for local restaurants.

Edith and Bernard opened champagne. Christian made a toast. “To Suzanne and to Michael, who have just bought a house in the Marseille of the north,” he said with an evil smile. “That your car doesn’t get stolen nor your windows broken.” My heart stopped. Marseille, a lovely city, nonetheless has a reputation of being full of
voyoux
, hoodlums. Was there something I should know? They all burst out laughing. “He’s just trying to scare you,” Nadine said.

I left the following morning for Paris, where I was to spend a few days before returning home. I met an American friend for coffee and showed her the picture of the house. “It’s gorgeous. I’ve lived here fifteen years and always wanted to buy a house,” she exclaimed. “How did you find the perfect house in one week?” I told her I didn’t know. I was in a dream, pinching myself. We were really going to do it, I thought.

I returned home and Michael and I prepared for our move. We loved our house in Maine and decided not to sell but to rent it. After all, we imagined, after two to three years in France we might return and, meanwhile, it was a good investment.

We were busy packing and organizing, trying to decide what to take and what to leave. After doing comparative studies of moving costs, we decided we would bring the bare minimum—my kitchen equipment, which included a collection of heavy copper pots I’d amassed over the years, knives, baking dishes, scales, and dozens of other small necessities in the life of a cook and food writer. We would also bring my office chair (a luxuriously comfortable one), file cabinets, and computers. We would bring Michael’s most essential tools, a futon couch, Joe’s stuffed animals, and as many of his toys and treasures as we could fit. We decided to send our Subaru station wagon over and gave it a complete overhaul.

An American friend of mine (also a food writer) was moving back to the States from Paris and she made a list of things she wanted to sell, which included lamps and bookcases, chairs and a table, and an impressive array of coffee grinders that she used to grind spices. We bought what we thought we would need and she threw in many things she didn’t want to sell but didn’t want to ship back either, and arranged to have it all moved out to Edith’s. Yet another friend, warning me of how expensive everything was in France, listed all of the things in her attic that she was planning to give away but that she would save for us if we needed them. With all of that we figured we could get to work immediately. What we didn’t have we would gradually acquire.

We sold or gave away just about everything we weren’t going to take with us, which accentuated the feeling that we were embarking on a huge adventure, a new life. Joe observed all the activity and it made him nervous. Children don’t generally like change and he likes it less than most—I had to scheme to get rid of anything belonging to him, for the minute he would see something leaving he’d say, in his two-year-old English, “I love that, I just love it!” and try to grab it.

Meantime, Edith and I talked regularly. She described the garden, the size of the apples on the gnarled old tree in the yard. The hydrangeas turned out to be purple, one of my favorite colors, the roses were pink, red, and white. She and I planned the garden and talked endlessly about the house. I would report what she’d said to Michael, and then he and I would plan and scheme some more. He spent a lot of time with paper and pencil sketching out ideas for the house, all based on the photographs I’d taken. We never talked about the financial aspect of it, which seemed daunting. Our attitude was “It will all work out.”

We spent the month of September 1993 visiting our families and our friends on the West Coast as a sort of farewell, then we embarked for France, landing at Charles de Gaulle/Roissy Airport where Edith met us. We piled into her VW van and she flew down the
autoroute
toward Louviers at 150 kilometers an hour, the equivalent of about 100 mph. I looked at Michael who raised his eyebrows. It was great to be back in France!

Both Michael and I were so excited we could hardly sit still. Joe, a boy who doesn’t like to miss anything, had been awake for days, it seemed, as we took him to and fro to see family and friends. He hadn’t slept much during the twelve-hour plane trip either, but once the van started moving he conked out, draped over his father’s knees. I looked at his pale, chubby, toddler’s face. We knew he was upset at the move because he didn’t quite understand what was happening. We hoped it wouldn’t take him long to adjust.

Our first stop was Louviers and the house, for Michael’s first look. He extracted the still-sleeping Joe from his knees and laid him tenderly on the backseat. Edith passed the house keys over to him and waited in the car with Joe while Michael and I went to look. The house was as beautiful as I’d remembered. A large red and white
vendu
, sold, sign hung over the door, physical proof that the
compromis de vente
still held good. It gave me a sense of ownership, which helped override the sense of panic I felt as I approached the front door.

Michael opened it. I held my breath as I walked with him through the rooms. We didn’t talk. We were both too busy looking. I breathed a little easier as I looked at the curved staircase in the foyer—it was still as graceful as I recalled. Michael walked through the door into what I supposed had been the kitchen, a high-ceilinged room with a big window overlooking the back garden, an angled back wall, and a graceful fireplace—it was so filled with dusty antique furniture and piles of newspapers, buckets of stones and wood and other rubbish that it was hard to get a real sense of it. We poked our heads in the other rooms on the ground floor, all of which looked as if small bombs had exploded in them.

Michael banged on walls, scraped surfaces, looked in nooks and crannies, wiggled doors, opened and closed windows, all things that wouldn’t have occurred to me to do. At the best of times Michael is a man of few words. He was absolutely silent, intent on his inspection.

I’d truly forgotten what a mess the house was in. I’m not sure I ever really noticed. Even now, as I stumbled over chunks of stone, tiptoed around holes in the floor, and realized that there wasn’t one single room out of the fifteen in the house that could really pass for livable, I felt an excitement bubbling inside. It was a blank slate, ours to re-create.

The crisp fall weather outside meant the house was cold inside, and as I focused on the holes, the grit, the lath showing through the walls, it seemed worse than I’d remembered. What had I been thinking? What if Michael hated it? What if I’d made a huge mistake? These were questions I was to become extremely familiar with over the next years, as I watched Michael struggle not only with learning the French vocabulary involved in building, but with unfamiliar materials, dimensions, customs, and traditions.

As we emerged from the last room, the one above the curious little “apartment” that the owner kept, which was even shabbier than it had been the first time I’d seen it, and made our way down the many sets of stairs, Michael’s blue eyes absolutely blazed with excitement.

“I love it,” he said. I let out my breath. We walked hand in hand into the garden—it was overgrown and messy, but the old apple and pear trees that graced it were unmistakably charming, and the church loomed over all.

While we stood there looking at the house with its boarded-up window on the ground floor, its lovely timbering, and the bell tower, an elderly lady parked her bicycle by the front door and went off to do her shopping. Pigeons cooed from under the eaves. We were caught up in the magic of owning such glorious real estate, of having a concrete project to work on. I was in a state of bliss to think that for the foreseeable future we would be in France, would come to understand its rituals and traditions, would no doubt make new friends and deepen the wonderful friendships we already had. And the thought of the food and the flavors that would be ours! I couldn’t wait for the adventure to begin.

We drove on to Le Vaudreuil, for we were staying with the Leroys for our first few days. As I walked inside I was enveloped with the familiar aroma of lavender and fresh thyme that has always pervaded her house, and I felt I was home.

We hauled in our baggage and settled Joe to sleep on a couch in the living room, which doubles as Edith’s painting studio. Finished and half-finished portraits and still-lifes in Edith’s characteristic vibrant colors, as well as a collection of paintings by other artists, provide the decor; the pleasant scent of oil paints the ambience.

While Edith built a fire in the kitchen fireplace I made coffee, got out butter and honey, and cut the
baguettes
we had stopped to buy in the village into lengths for
tartines
. Edith’s children were in school, Bernard was at work in his office across the street, the house was quiet. All was right with the world, I thought, as I dipped my butter-and-honey-slathered
tartine
into my bowl of stiff black coffee before biting into it. We talked over our strategy for the next few days, then simply enjoyed this taste of France. Michael relaxed in an easy chair and fell asleep, while Edith filled me in on the local gossip.

That evening we had a celebratory dinner with Edith, Bernard, and their now four children, and the following day Michael went to the house to poke around and I took Joe to look at the little house in Le Vaudreuil that I’d rented over the phone from the town mayor. We figured we’d need it for two to three months, the time it would take Michael to install enough electricity and plumbing to make the house in Louviers livable.

Set on the back boundary of the mayor’s garden, it looked like a little timbered doll’s house. Its main room downstairs had a picture window looking out at the languidly flowing river Eure. The corner kitchen was adequate, the small bathroom functional, the two bedrooms upstairs charming. The only thing it needed was a telephone.

I spoke with Florence Labelle, the mayor’s wife and our landlady, about the phone. I had asked her if we could install it before we arrived, but she couldn’t see the necessity for that. “We’ll do all that when you get here.” True to her word, she called the phone company directly. No doubt because she was the mayor’s wife they arrived later that day, but the news wasn’t good. They couldn’t install a phone in the back building because it wasn’t a legal residence. To Florence, this didn’t seem a problem. “You can use my phone when you need to,” she said kindly, not realizing how vital a phone is to my work.

I panicked, just a little, explaining to Florence why I had to have a phone, how I had a great deal of research to do not just for the cookbook I was about to write, but for all the articles I had contracted to do. She had a private conference with the France Telecom representative, and the next thing I knew a date was set to install the wiring and hook up the phone. “So it will be all right?” I asked. “It’s not illegal?” She looked at me.
“Bof!”
she said, pushing back her hair. “All we have to do is trim a few tree limbs and not mention anything.”