Picnic in Provence (17 page)

Millefeuille de tomate provençale, tapenade d’artichaut et coppa de parmesan d’Italie (AOC) sur son lit de salade, sauce aigre douce aux abricots.

And of course, since this is a snooty Parisian bistro and half their clientele are Russian businessmen, the English translation would be printed just below:

Tomato napoleon of artichoke tapenade and aged Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese on a bed of mixed greens with sweet-and-sour apricot vinaigrette.

The
sauce abricot
was a happy accident. While making the dressing for the green salad, I mistook a bottle of peach/apricot syrup for the olive oil. Since I didn’t realize my mistake until it was at the bottom of the bowl, I decided to try my luck. Mixed with Dijon mustard and some olive oil, it was very nice—much sweeter than a French vinaigrette, more like an American-style honey Dijon. I decided to add it to my pretentious Parisian bistro dish because, believe it or not, Parisian bistros love imitating American food. Anyone who has been in Paris in the past five years will note the rise of le Tchizzberger. (That’s bistro for “cheeseburger.”)

I’m moderate in my use of social media, but I can’t stop taking pictures of the tomatoes. Close up. I’ve taken to snapping endless photos of the voluptuously rounded globes. I rejoice in the mingling of olive oil and purply-red flesh. Basil leaves rest like the strategically placed tassels of high-end strippers. Crystals of sea salt catch the afternoon sun like rhinestones under the glaring lights of the Folies Bergère. I may have invented a whole new type of food photography: tomato porn.

WE HAD A
welcome cancellation for the fourteenth of July.

Each village has its own traditions to celebrate Bastille Day. There are community picnics and fireworks, go-go dancers and karaoke. Alexandre was most interested in the cotton-candy stand and merry-go-round installed in the parking lot near the tourist office. He got behind the wheel of a shiny blue Rolls-Royce. Like any bachelor out for a joyride, he was pleased as punch when two little girls climbed in back.

The main event was up the hill near Angela and Rod, after dark. I’ve never seen a community theater production of
La Cage aux Folles,
but it must look something like this. There were fishnet stockings, feathered headdresses, and not much else. The choreography was greatly appreciated by a row of elderly men in plastic chairs. There was a dance floor below the stage; kids chased a pair of soccer balls among couples dancing
le rock
. By midnight, Alexandre was a zombie, but there was no question of pulling him away from the music and the flashing lights. When I sat down next to him, he immediately got up and moved farther on, nearer to the smoke machine.
Not in front of the girls, Mom.

When Gwendal went to the bar to get a Perrier, the butcher blocked his path. “You bring that to your wife and come back for a real drink.” I didn’t see him for the rest of the evening.

I approached the bar with Alexandre almost asleep on my shoulder at 1:00 a.m. Gwendal was still drinking with the butcher. “I heard the cancan dancer was you,” I said. Apparently our butcher, in honor of Bastille Day, has been known to put on a majorette outfit and parade down the main street. “I was disappointed to have missed it.”

“Next year,” he said.

“We’ll be here.” A scantily clad butcher is part of the stock French fantasy, like the handsome young doctor or the buff plumber of American daydreams. Or maybe that’s just me.

THE NEXT EVENING
there was a
fanfare
concert up the hill at the Café du Cours in Reillanne. These roaming brass bands sometimes came to our neighborhood in Paris. People would open their windows and throw coins down into the street, sometimes inside an old sock. It always made my day.

If I owned the Café du Cours, I would be unable to resist the urge to fix it up—light the dark corners, strip the tin ceiling, put the brick pizza oven back to work; in other words, totally ruin it. As it is, the cement tiles with their colorful Liberty pattern are never quite swept clean; the barman empties the espresso grounds into a grimy wooden drawer underneath the machine. The hot chocolate comes with cocoa powder on the bottom and warm milk above—if you want something drinkable, you have to stir it yourself. There are open-mike poetry nights and exhibitions of local photographers. The place is perfect just the way it is.

In contrast to the citizens of Céreste, the residents of Reillanne look laid back, like their shoes have walked from here to St. Jacques de Compostelle and their shirts, in soft and flowing fabrics, have been washed by being beaten against a rock. Reillanne has a reputation as a village of
soixante-huitards
and
néo-ruraux
—old hippies and young neo-rural transplants, both types looking for a life outside the traditional French circuit of
Métro,
boulot, dodo
(subway, work, bed). The moms in Reillanne carry their babies in colorful hand-tied slings.

We take a table on the terrace, overlooking the main square. The awning of the Café du Cours is a sheet of corrugated metal. The name is painted in large block letters on the wall. The
f
in
café
has been chipped away, along with a portion of the plaster. There’s a single strand of oversize Christmas bulbs above the door.

When the
serveuse
arrives with our drinks, she smiles at Alexandre.
“C’est pour monsieur,”
she says, shaking up his apricot juice before pouring it into the glass.
“
C’est des
habitués du comptoir.”
Alexandre’s a regular, you see. Every week, while I’m buying our roast chicken at the Sunday-morning market, he’s at the bar with his dad, elbows on the counter.

There’s a hum of conversation. I watch the girls in their headbands, striped dresses, and toe rings. A car stops in the middle of the crosswalk, blocking my view; a man gets up from his table and leans into its window, catching up on the news. These are the times and places that make me feel most like writing. At the next table, a little girl does pirouettes with her mom, bumping into several metal chairs.

The band wanders out of the café to begin their first set. There’s a French horn, a clarinet, a tuba, and a man with a drum and a cymbal strapped to his chest. The drummer stubs out his hand-rolled cigarette. He is wearing orange chinos and a white version of the pageboy cap Gwendal wore when I first met him.

What are they playing? Is it “Sunrise, Sunset”? Broadway seems a long way from here; not just another time zone, but another galaxy. I watch the shadows of the leaves playing against the facade of the church. A pizza truck is parked in the center of the square; it’s too early for dinner; everyone is still outside, enjoying the lingering light.

Time slows down. I’m constantly amazed at the simplicity of our life here. Pleasure completely without irony, detached from the calculations and one-upmanship of my former life. Nights out in New York—an art opening, a bar, a club—were filled with anticipation. Who would we meet? Is this a step in the right direction? Are we the center of attention? My twenties were about being looked at. My thirties are about looking.

Alexandre went inside with his father to the Turkish toilet, leaving me with the serious task of guarding his apricot juice. I still avoid
les toilettes à la turque
—no more than two porcelain footprints and a drain. My thigh muscles are not up to sustained squatting of this kind.

The sound of the tuba resonated, floating over the terrace, beyond the facade of the church, through the square, up into the narrow streets to the tip of the clock tower before dissolving, like smoke, into the night sky.

MY FIRST EXPERIENCES
with French Cuisine (with a capital
C, merci
very much) took place at Babette, a now-defunct restaurant in a brownstone in Manhattan’s theater district. The silverware was heavy, the ladies old, and the calf brains sautéed in clarified butter. Even today, a certain formality still hovers over French dining. It’s hard to shake the image of starched chefs, maniacal shallot-chopping technique, and maybe a baroque birdcage of spun sugar to enclose your single scoop of grapefruit-champagne sorbet.
Oui,
the French know how to lay out a five-course dinner like no one else, but in Provence, I’ve discovered a less formal repertoire: the dishes people bring to picnics and serve with evening
apéritifs
, savoring the last of the long summer sun.

It’s the end of August and the tourist hordes have begun to thin. Tonight Gwendal and I have organized a neighborhood picnic and outdoor film screening on the terraced stone steps of the lane just behind our house. In the summertime, it’s easy to issue invitations; we meet everyone in the street at least twice a day.

The kids are up late; it’s the last hurrah before school begins next week. All the guests have brought their mismatched garden chairs, and after setting up the screen at the bottom, we managed to arrange a very respectable, if narrow, amphitheater. Young and old, village natives and city transplants, mingled, drank wine, and ate quinoa tabbouleh salad.

Jean’s contribution to the picnic was a savory cousin of the crumbly butter cookies that the French call
sablés
. Pebbled with chopped black olives, rosemary, and freshly grated Parmesan cheese, they are what my British friends would call “moreish”—a succinct way of saying you could eat the whole batch in one sitting. The French, of course, would never do such a thing. Someone had brought a branch of dried dates. Paired with a date and a glass of white wine, the
sablés
were the perfect start to our casual dinner
en plein air.

It’s hard to find a movie that everyone from the age of two and a half to ninety will enjoy. We settled on Jacques Tati’s
Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot
. Tati is a bit like a French Charlie Chaplin; he can make serving a tennis ball or buying an ice cream cone into a comic ballet. Some of our older neighbors had seen the movie when it came out in 1953.

We’d recently gotten friendly with a couple who’d moved into a house up the road. As soon as we got to talking, we realized the husband used to work just a few blocks from our old apartment in Paris. He is from Senegal, and he promised to teach me how to make a proper
maffé
—the traditional West African groundnut stew. We reminisced about the hole-in-the-wall boutique on Faubourg du Temple, owned by a grumpy Chinese guy, that sold all the hard-to-find African ingredients—fiery hot peppers, okra, and broken rice. Our kids get on beautifully. Alexandre is crazy about their little girl, who alternates between playing with him and coyly ignoring him. It starts so early.

I spent the evening doing what I can’t help doing, hostessing. I brought drinks to two older women firmly ensconced in their canvas chairs. “So adorable,” said Madame X with a smile, patting one of our new friends’ kids on the head. “Remind me. Do little black children have the same color blood as the rest of us?” It was said with no animosity, just the blithe, terrifying ignorance of someone who went to elementary school before the Civil War.

I would be morally naive to think that no one holds these opinions, and politically naive to think that no one says this kind of thing out loud anymore. But I wish I hadn’t heard her. It left a hairline crack in the lens, a flicker of shadow on an otherwise perfect evening.

We had to wait till sunset to start the film; the kids had run themselves ragged, and they leaned against our knees or slept curled up on our laps. It was cool; we took turns running the fifty feet to our respective houses to get sweaters and stuffed animals and blankets. We laughed all together when Tati served his tennis ball.