Picnic in Provence (22 page)

I inspected the bottom of my coffee cup. “Did you know that my grandmother, Dad’s mom, had shock treatments? In the late sixties, right after my parents got engaged.”

“No,” said Linda, “I don’t think I did know that.”

“I read something recently. Apparently, it’s coming back into fashion.”

The woman at the table just behind us stood up and zipped her coat. “It’s true,” she said, leaning in to collect her bag. “It’s much safer now. Very effective.”

I smiled in spite of myself. Gotta love this town. Innate one-upmanship coupled with a complete lack of personal space. In a way, it was touching. Only in New York would a total stranger butt into your private conversation just to let you know there’s somebody out there who’s a tiny bit crazier than you.

I SAID GOOD-BYE
to Linda, promised to send her a copy of my book, and walked across the park. When I need to talk to my father, I go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. After the funeral, I’d never gone back to the cemetery. I can’t imagine he’s there. For me, he’s buried in the Egyptian wing, under the Temple of Dendur, a small sanctuary they took apart stone by stone in Egypt, carried across the ocean, and rebuilt under a glass atrium on East Eighty-First Street.

My father and I came here nearly every weekend from the time I outgrew the Museum of Natural History to when I left for boarding school. The admission fee was “suggested,” which meant he could hand over just a few singles without comment and then help me clip the shiny metal tag with the capital
M
to the neck of my sweater. There’s still no mandatory fee for admission, but since my dad died, I always make a point to pay the full price so that some other parent, short of funds, can give his or her daughter what my father gave me. I carry one of those metal tags in my wallet. My talisman, my good-luck charm.

I still love the ritual of visiting my favorite objects, the clever feeling of knowing my way around. I walk past the Roman-era mummy in the foyer, past the seated jackals, and go into the temple, look at the Napoleonic-era graffiti carved into the stones.

If I wasn’t mentally ill, to anyone watching, I must have been doing a pretty good imitation: sitting on a granite bench, tears streaming down my face, counting the pennies and nickels in the fountain. Any high-school student who has read Machiavelli can tell you: fear binds as well as, maybe better, than love. My fear of getting sick is my last link to my father. I miss him. If I stop being afraid to be like him, I will have to let him go.

I cut through the back doors, made a left at the Chippendale chairs, went past the Tiffany stained-glass windows, and hung a right to the Regency dining room. Such a comfort, this house full of beautiful things where nothing ever moves. As much as my childhood bedroom, these rooms feel like home. I feel so unmoored sometimes, never more so than when I come back to somewhere safe, somewhere knowable. So many places are inside me now; I feel spread a little thin. Who knows what will feel like home to Alexandre. The narrow paved streets of Céreste? The smell of the wood smoke from the chimney and the croissants from the
boulangerie
? What will be our special place? Where will he go to think of me?

There are moments I want to wrap Alexandre up like a mummy and keep him close, and moments I want nothing to do with him. I know I am missing a piece of his childhood, but how can I be fully present for something I never experienced?
I feel like I was robbed of something.
Where did she go, that little girl, and why does she only show up—fragile and hurting—when Alexandre pushes me away? Am I protecting myself? Leaving him before he leaves me?

ON SUNDAY AFTERNOON
I took the train up to Connecticut to visit my friend Kim. Her daughter is already six months old and I haven’t met her. I am looking forward to lunch. After three weeks in the States, my palate is completely exhausted. All I can taste is sugar, salt, and fat. A few more days of this and I’m in danger of turning into a cranberry streusel muffin.

Kim is one of the best cooks I know. We met in college, and during our single days in New York she taught me how to make super-easy chocolate fudge and a very reassuring chicken potpie. She has a recipe for carrot cake with cream cheese frosting that ought to be carved on stone tablets and stored in an ark. She supervised my first béchamel in Paris, and she always has the right tools at hand, including a heavy sloped cookbook stand and one of those flat metal spatulas for even icing.

Kim’s husband is Hungarian, and she has tackled intercultural marriage in much the same way I have—through pastry. When she and Mark got engaged, Kim invited her future in-laws for dinner and served her famed carrot cake for dessert. It elicited a strangely muted response; no doubt it was too sweet for their European palates. So Kim did what any smart daughter-in-law-to-be would do—she immediately went out and bought several Hungarian cookbooks.

“They are very hard to find,” she said. “I love this one.” She handed me a thick volume. The cover was old-fashioned, an older man in a three-piece suit standing behind a buffet laden with layer cakes, grapes dangling from a raised brass stand, and a whole fish in aspic.

“It’s by George Lang, who used to run Café des Artistes. He died recently; his obituary was in the
Times
.”

“I love reading the obituaries.”

“It’s an amazing story,” she continued, searching for serving pieces in the silverware drawer. “His parents died in Auschwitz, and when the Russians took over after the war he escaped to Austria hidden in a coffin. The recipes are very precise—most of the Hungarian cookbooks are grandma-style, with directions like ‘stir until it looks done,’ which is not very helpful if you’ve never seen it, let alone eaten it.”

The result of Kim and Lang’s joint efforts was already sitting on the counter when I arrived. A simple yellow cake, dotted with slightly sunken cherries and topped with crystallized sugar. “Instead of baking powder,” she said, bending to take the salmon out of the oven, “you lighten it by folding in beaten egg whites.”

Lunch was served at lunchtime, which felt like a treat after my haphazard eating schedule these past few weeks. Along with the oven-roasted salmon, Kim tossed a salad of peppery rocket leaves with roasted red onions, cubes of butternut squash, toasted walnuts, and lumps of snow-white goat cheese. The dressing was nothing but oil and vinegar, maybe a pinch of sea salt. The textures and tastes were perfectly balanced—no elbowing of flavors, no spice shouting for attention. She set the table with her wedding china laid on a thick white cloth. It made me feel pampered, like a special guest. Flora played in her playpen. After lunch, Mark made me an espresso; he smiled unabashedly when Kim brought over the cake. It was moist, not terribly sweet. A cherry escaped my fork and rolled to the center of the plate. I picked up a golden crumb from the tablecloth with the tip of my index finger. The longer I’m away the clearer it becomes: Home can be something as vast as a country, as holy as a temple, or as simple as a cake.

W
hat would you say if you caught your husband? Caught him red-handed. Caught him at midnight, up to his elbows in juicy, sticky, yellow cherries. Would you say your marriage had turned a corner? Might medication, or at least an extended yoga retreat, be in order?

I WOULDN’T SAY
the idea for an artisanal ice cream business came to us overnight, but almost. It had been a long winter. Sometime between the saffron harvest and Christmas, Gwendal negotiated his way out of his job. It felt dangerous to give up a well-paying position in the middle of a recession, and I suppose it was. It also felt necessary. He was forty-one years old and thoroughly demoralized—it was either start his own business or buy a Porsche, pick up a nineteen-year-old, and take that one-way street straight to the corner of Crazy and Unfulfilled. We had his severance, some savings, a small inheritance from his grandparents, and French unemployment benefits for the next eighteen months. Never one to sit idle, he’d spent the dark afternoons editing a book of contemporary Afghan poetry for a friend who lives in Kabul, sourcing alcohols made from protected mountain herbs for a friend on the cocktail-bar scene in New York, and organizing a screening of an American documentary for the local anti-fracking campaign.

THINGS REALLY STARTED
to take shape when Angela and Rod, our original Céreste B&B hosts and dear friends, offered us their cellar. A vaulted stone cellar with a big picture window looking out onto the main street. When Gwendal and I first met, he’d often talked about having a space of his own, maybe an art-house cinema with a café, maybe an old-fashioned cabaret with spicy rum punch and contemporary circus performers spinning from the ceiling. At the moment, the cellar was nothing but a fluorescent-lit storage area smelling faintly of damp, filled with forgotten furniture and cases of wine. But it was there; an empty space, open to our imaginations.

As the weeks wore on and winter hibernation turned into spring thinking, some themes began to crystallize: The new business had to be something that shared the extraordinary flavors we’d discovered here in Provence. Something that would be fun for us and good for the village. We talked about a cocktail bar; we talked about handmade chocolates spiked with lavender liqueur. One night, Gwendal said, “You know what this place really needs—a great local ice cream parlor.”

I took it in stride. My husband likes to think out loud—try things out, try things on. I figured this was just one of many slightly wacky ideas that would wander through the front room before one settled in by the fire for good.

I was trying to focus on my writing, to make sure we had something to live on during this entrepreneurial adventure. There I was, perfecting my recipe for sausage with braised red cabbage, and before I’d looked up from my computer he had finished a business plan and was making appointments with bankers. Of course, this was the part that he knew how to do. He had pried twenty million euros for a project out of a banker in the fall of 2008—two months after Lehman Brothers collapsed into dust and worldwide credit was frozen hard as an orange Popsicle. “You have to tell bankers a story,” he said, handing me the first printout, a logo in the corner of an ice cream cone stacked with five colorful scoops. “In cinema it was easy. They want to be part of something fun, glamorous.” Sometimes he sounds so American, it freaks me out.

I didn’t know quite what to say. A thought flashed through my head:
Is this why I went to college?
It sounded romantic, but would he, would we, really enjoy washing dishes all day?

This may be an odd way to put it: I’m a child of divorce, so when I married Gwendal, I promised myself I would be his first wife and his second—the one he fell in love (and into bed) with, and the one he was able to grow and change with. I promised myself that I would support his happiness instead of burying him under a pile of mortgages and responsibilities.

In a sense, by coming to Provence, by learning to love the life we share here, the decision had already been made. Giving up the suits, the title, and the salary was just the final snip of a cord that had been fraying since we arrived. It’s a very different life choice than any I’d imagined for myself, for my family—for my shoe closet—but at the same time, it is a perfectly logical extension of the leap of faith that brought us here.

A second thought came rushing in to replace the first:
Fresh fig sorbet.

I thought about those first weekends Gwendal and I spent together in Paris—full of passion and discovery. About our last first date, two cones at sunset on the Île Saint-Louis. It comes down to this: I love my husband, and I trust him. And if we are going to be knee-deep in bitter chocolate sorbet, we’d best do it together. Welcome to the family business.

AND THAT, DEAR
READER
, is how I found myself standing in a field making small talk with skinny cows.

It was the beginning of April. Now that the cows and I had been properly introduced, it was time to talk to their owner. Damien stood in the doorway of the white laboratory building wearing a paper shower cap. He didn’t look me or Gwendal in the eye; his gaze rested somewhere just to the left of my knees. Though I’d chosen my outfit that morning with an eye toward “girl who spends time around livestock,” it was clear this guy thought I was a fraud. Whatever the rural version of street cred was, I needed some, and fast.

“We are making the yogurt,” he said. “I’m just changing flavors. Go have a look around the farm.”

Just as well I hadn’t worn my new boots. As Gwendal and I walked through the half-open barn, my feet sank into the mud around the corrals. I was reminded of my mother’s first trip to the French countryside; she’d spent a good portion of the afternoon trying to pet a chicken.

When Damien came out of the lab, we regrouped around a few stacked bales of hay. A new calf had been separated from the others. She stretched her neck, trying to peek over the edge of her pen.

“Céreste,
oui,
” he said dismissively. “So you know Madame Gibert?”

“Oui,
bien sûr,
Madame Gibert. Her cousin took care of our son just after we arrived.

“We’ve heard of you throughout the region,” I continued, perhaps a bit too eagerly. “Martine and Didier Caron gave us your name. We did the saffron harvest with them last year.”

His face softened a bit. He finally looked me directly in the eye.

Not at the swishiest Christie’s auction in New York or the poshest garden party in London had I felt the need to do what I was doing right now: name-dropping. I was desperate to prove that we weren’t total newcomers, pretentious Parisians just passing through, that we were beginning to have roots in the community.

Damien walked us to the gate. “This is just a tease,” he said, handing Gwendal a small container of pale yellow cream. It was so thick I was tempted to turn it upside down just to see if it would hold its shape. “I don’t have enough to sell you. I use it for my own ice cream.”

Just as we were walking out, he finally muttered the price to Gwendal. If we came to pick it up ourselves, his raw milk, straight from the farm, life’s work of those haughty Jersey cows, would cost one
centime
less per liter than industrial long-life UHT.

OF COURSE, TO
start this new business, the cows and I were not the only ones Gwendal needed to convince.

“You have to make them understand this isn’t a
crise de la quarantaine
”—the French equivalent of a midlife crisis—said Geneviève, who runs a local agency that provides interest-free loans to promising small-business owners. Gwendal was sitting in her office, dressed in a button-down shirt and a not-quite-pressed pair of khakis (Céreste doesn’t have a dry cleaner and I don’t iron).

“You need to make sure they don’t think you are”—she paused with a certain gravity—“the goat-cheese man.”

We’d all heard the stories. “The goat-cheese man” was obviously code for a much-feared archetype: The city slicker who comes to Provence and, eager to liberate himself from the tyranny of his cuff links, buys a hulking great farmhouse with a half a roof and a beautiful view (on a clear day, you can see the Alps). He dreams of starting a charming boutique hotel with footed bathtubs and Bellinis made from his favorite champagne (he’s already sent down several cases) and the local peach nectar. He will mix them himself every morning as he chats with his worldly yet undemanding clientele, who compliment him on the Egyptian cotton sheets and ask for advice about local hiking trails. After two years of infinitesimal progress with local contractors, there is still no electricity for the hot tub, so he gives up and moves into the barn, which is too run down to insulate and too large to heat. At the local
boulangerie
(where he walks on his morning constitutional) he meets a picturesque goatherd and decides his true calling is to produce organic goat cheese for Alain Ducasse. After six months of lonely hilltop apprenticeship and the sour smell of whey clinging to his cashmere, he realizes that he hates goats, hates cheese, hates farms, hates Bellinis, and hates Provence. He sells the house at a loss to a retired English couple (who are used to living without heat) and flees, a penniless wreck, back to Paris, to grace, once again, the world of international finance.

If we didn’t rise to quite this level of naïveté, it’s true that Gwendal and I had both spent the better part of our careers, well, typing. And if our research thus far was correct, ice cream seemed to be more about chemistry than cooking, which meant I would be no help at all.

THE SUNDIAL IS
pointing our way again; our friends Isabelle and Grégoire and their three children arrived for the first of May. Everyone should have a pair of friends he or she introduced who are now happily married. Gwendal and Isabelle met during his military service in Australia. Grégoire is a friend of his from engineering school. When I met Gwendal, he and Grégoire were working on a short film about a clown named Max who rides around Paris on a bicycle getting into all sorts of mischief.

This summer would not be quite as carefree as the summer before. We’d been looking at the numbers and it was clear belts needed to be tightened. I wore a corset for a couple of weeks in high school for a production of
The Importance of Being Earnest;
it gave me black-and-blue marks. The fact of the matter was, Gwendal and I had been living rather high on the hog these past few years. With his executive salary, we didn’t worry about daily expenses, and when I finally started making a living from my writing, we were able to pay off some of our loans. The majority of the people we know and love in France are living on much less and they still manage to eat fresh food, go on holiday, and celebrate important occasions.

I stayed home with Alexandre while Gwendal took our guests on a hike and a picnic. Their five-year-old made it the whole way up the hill to Montjustin. It’s a good two and a half hours at that pace. “You should have seen Nicolas,” said Gwendal as they came through the door. “He walked the whole way.”

“How do you do it?”

“We give the children little goals,” said Grégoire. “Games to play along the way. Otherwise, every five minutes it’s ‘Are we there yet, Papa Smurf?’”

The next morning we went to the market in Reillanne; Isabelle was in charge of lunch. When I have guests, the American in me still tends to overbuy, overcook. For four adults and four kids, I would have bought two roast chickens from the rotisserie (my mother would have bought three, they’re small), a heap of roast potatoes, salad, bread, cheese, and at least two kilos of the year’s first strawberries for dessert. But I let Isabelle take over. She decided on a
salade de chèvre chaud
—a salad with warm goat-cheese toasts and lardons.

When we got home Isabelle filled up the sink and washed a huge head of frisée lettuce. She browned the bacon cubes in my biggest sauté pan and took them out with a slotted spoon. Then—and this is a stroke of genius—she put each of the slices of bread into the pan to soak up some of the salty fat. She let them steam a bit, so the bread wouldn’t dry out in the oven while we were heating the cheese. I never thought of that.

She cut each round of goat cheese in half lengthwise and laid them on top of the toasts with just a drip of honey. While the toasts were heating in the oven, she made a simple vinaigrette in the bottom of my largest salad bowl.

When we sat down, I did a quick calculation in my head. For perhaps eighteen euros, we had made an incredibly satisfying meal for eight people. It’s a shame the proverbial goat-cheese man couldn’t join us for lunch. He might have stuck around.

“IT’S YOUR BIRTHDAY
tomorrow?” said Isabelle. “We’ll bake a cake!” She sounded genuinely excited. Gwendal and I are not so great with celebrations. Our birthdays are ten days apart in May and we’ve been so busy these past few years that the day itself sometimes passes almost without mention. I can’t remember the last time I really celebrated my birthday. When I turned thirty in Paris I didn’t have enough friends to throw a party. We went for a quiet dinner with my parents, which I remember thinking at the time was vaguely depressing.

I have a friend who recently turned forty. “We decided to go away to this super-fancy hotel in Cabo for two days,” she told me. “I thought about having a party, but then I realized we were going to spend exactly the same amount of money and I was going to do all the work.” It was a reminder that whether it’s making the canapés or securing a reservation at the “right” restaurant, we’ve made celebrating expensive—and stressful. There’s got to be another way.

On the morning of my birthday, I was banished from the kitchen. Gwendal came back from a walk—alone.

“Where are Grégoire and the girls?”

“They took the long way home.”

When I was finally allowed back into the kitchen, the whole family was gathered around the kitchen table. There was a cake—a simple sponge layered with raspberry jam and topped with a melted chocolate glaze that slid down the side in appealing drips. There was a bouquet of flowers from the field across from the chapel: yellow mustard grass, purple flowering sage, and delicate white canopies that Marion told me were actually the flowers of wild carrots.