Picnic in Provence (3 page)

P
aris in August is like the set of a science fiction movie—a planet devoid of life except for very pregnant women and stray cats. The civilized world is on holiday, walking in rolled-up jeans and summer cashmere on a beach in Brittany or donning white linen trousers and expensive sunglasses in, well, Provence. We’d been back to Céreste only once since our leap of faith in April, just long enough to sign the initial paperwork and taste the first white peaches of the season—reason enough to pack up our boxes and go. Our annual week in Greece had been canceled as soon as I learned my due date: August 21. Note to self: Next time, get pregnant
on
the vacation, not
instead
of the vacation.

Over the past three months we’d slowly introduced the idea of the move to our friends and family. It’s helpful to explain your plans to other people. It makes them real. By
other people,
of course, I mean my mother.

We tackled my mom in the rush of breathless excitement just after our first visit to the house. I approached her via the avenue that seemed most promising: home decorating. “So,” I said, taking a deep breath into the phone, “how would you like to come to Provence and shop for a hundred and seventy square meters of new tiles?” Silence. I’ve been away from home since I was fifteen, and this was hardly the first crazy idea she’d heard from the other end of a long-distance call. She let me get through the whole story. More silence. “A
vill-age,
” she said, giving the word a nice slow exoticism, like
Brigadoon
or
devil worship
. “What are you going to do in a
vill-age?
”

That’s a fair question. What is a sushi-loving, window-shopping, museum-wandering city girl who can’t drive a car or ride a bike going to do in the middle of all those trees? Most people don’t uproot their whole lives for a crazy story about a poet and a good-luck garden. But I believe in stories, the way other people believe in religion, or free-market capitalism. I did my best to express what was essentially a hunch: We felt something of our future in those walls. Céreste was the answer to a question we didn’t even know we’d been asking.

As word got around, reactions seemed to be evenly divided along cultural lines: Our French friends nodded with bewilderment: How could we possibly leave our jobs? We were so
settled.
Others nodded admiringly. They too thought about moving to the countryside—when they retired.

My American friends were more blunt: They give it six months.

WITH ONLY A
month till my due date, this time feels precious, removed from the everyday rush. Without thinking, Gwendal and I are retracing our steps—visiting old haunts, craving familiar tastes. We have Paris all to ourselves again, like the bubble we lived in those first months together, before I could speak French, when we couldn’t get ourselves out of bed before noon, and every
tarte au citron
and sprinkle of
fleur de sel
felt like a revelation. Tonight, we are in search of ice cream.

Gwendal and I were both students when we bumped into each other (okay, I bumped into him, a little bit on purpose) on the stairs at an academic conference in London. I’d noticed him sitting in the middle row of the lecture hall, the kind of earnest young man who would never hide all the way in the back. He was tall, handsome in a serious, scholarly way. He might have been German given his height and the hideous light blue windbreaker he was wearing. But the square jaw, dark hair, and tiny glasses were pure
café crème
.

A few months and one blissfully rare steak later, Gwendal lured me back to his tiny apartment in Paris with the promise of a steaming pot of mint tea. In those days the path to his place along the Canal Saint-Martin was full of soot and graffiti, a lone
papy
walking his dog down the cobblestoned quays. Ten years later, the retirees have given way to hipsters with strollers, screenwriters on the verge of a breakthrough, and, on summer nights like this one, hordes of students picnicking with bottles of wine, baguettes, and slices of pale pink ham from the Franprix. There’s still graffiti, but it tends to be done by aspiring artists or as guerrilla marketing for chic new galleries and boutiques.

I remember everything about that first weekend in Paris. It was early December, freezing and damp, the flip side of tonight’s soft August haze. The dirty little secret of Paris is that the weather is exactly the same as it is in London. But the places to hide, oh, the places to hide. We sat in cafés with fogged-up windows and tables so small you couldn’t help but hold hands. We made out in secluded corners of the Louvre. Gwendal also took me to a special exhibition about death, complete with shrunken heads. I thought it took a certain confidence to suggest it, and a certain prescience on the part of a new lover to suspect how much I would enjoy it.

But mostly, we ate. He slipped out in the morning and came back with crinkled waxed-paper bags of
chouquettes
—puffs of choux pastry studded with sugar. We went to hole-in-the-wall restaurants and lingered over
maffé,
a West African stew thickened with peanut butter, the white butcher-paper tablecloth wrinkling under our elbows.

When I met Gwendal, I had a very clear idea of what I wanted my life to look like: I was starting a master’s degree in art history, on my way to a PhD and some version of my dream job as the chief curator of the Pierpont Morgan Library. There wasn’t a lot of room for interruptions. Gwendal was a mass of contradictions to a type-A striver like me. He was finishing up a PhD in computer science while working full-time for the national TV and radio archives, but he slept on a mattress on the floor and didn’t own a tie. He was smart and well read, but I sensed an inner goofiness (when I met him, he had just started tap-dancing lessons). He seemed to be willing to wait out some of my more quaint American neuroses: an obsession with financial security, status, and unending upward mobility. Some of my finer American qualities he licked like sugar from my lips—my confidence, my optimism, my sense of endless possibility. He knew that if I stayed in France long enough,
be happy
might well appear at the top of that endless to-do list I kept in my purse. Paris, and Gwendal, had that effect on me.

If I sound soppy about him, it’s because I am. It’s also because I know how close I came to pitching the whole thing into the Seine. It took me two years to agree to live with him, six months to accept his marriage proposal. Paris was enchanting, but I had no family there, no friends, almost no French-language skills, and definitely no job. It was hard to imagine this croissant-fueled fantasy as my real life. In the end, I sat on my doubts the way you sit on an overstuffed suitcase, just so you can close the lock. It was the right decision. Every day I feel like I’m living a life I almost missed, and it makes me grateful.

The high-summer light is fading and the clouds are lined with dusty rose as Gwendal and I make our way past the giant statue of Marianne in the place de la République and down into the narrow streets of the Marais. I never walk very fast in Paris; I still peek in doorways, admiring inner courtyards and secret gardens. The extravagant squiggles of the wrought-iron balconies and the groaning weight of the wooden doors are the very opposite of the utilitarian symmetry of my native New York.

We walk across the Pont Marie onto the Île Saint-Louis, the tiny island of aristocratic mansions with beamed ceilings in the middle of the Seine. Our destination is our favorite outpost of La Maison Berthillon, Paris’s most famous ice cream maker. This family-owned institution has been open since the fifties, and in the true measure of French success (particularly in the ice cream business), they sell to other cafés and restaurants and take the whole summer off.

Choosing your Berthillon stand is of utmost importance. There are several on the island, each with a different assortment of flavors and all with a large number of tourists and regulars lined up in front. We always go to one on the eastern edge of the island, as far as you can get from Notre-Dame without falling into the river. This evening there are only four or five people ahead of us. Just enough time to consider my choices.

Berthillon’s ice cream is dense and creamy—served, in keeping with French rules of moderation, in golf-ball-size scoops. You have to be a real purist to order a
simple
(pronounced “
samp
-le”). I usually order a
double
(“
doob
-le”).
Menthe
(fresh mint),
Créole
(rum raisin), and
nougat-miel
(honey-nougat) are at the top of my list. But as good as the ice cream is, it’s the sorbets that are Berthillon’s real standouts. I almost always order
cacao amer,
a bitter chocolate sorbet so dark it’s closing in on black. My second scoop depends on the season: pear, melon, rhubarb, or
framboise à la rose
(raspberry with a hint of rose). But habit often sets in and I go back to my old favorite:
fraise des bois
(wild strawberry). These tiny gem-like fruits are the equivalent of strawberry grenades, releasing a tart, concentrated flavor that downgrades every other strawberry I’ve tasted to the level of Bubblicious.

We take our cones, wrapped in single paper napkins, and walk along the river. It is just dark enough for my favorite Parisian pastime, staring into the fifteen-foot-high windows of the grand
hôtels particuliers.
I like to imagine myself inside the wood-paneled libraries or speculate which Saudi prince installed that gaudy chandelier. We pass a long-haired teenager in sweats and a silk bathrobe—I guess you’d have to call it a smoking jacket—walking a bichon frisé. The shaggy wave of the boy’s hair, his aquiline nose and easy but slouched posture (not to mention the smoking jacket), clearly mark him as a member of the aristocratic class. “White Russian,” says Gwendal emphatically. This is one of our favorite games. When I first arrived in Paris we would walk the streets for hours inventing identities for people we saw along the way. “Sacha-Eugène,” Gwendal purrs now, imitating the high-pitched voice of the boy’s mother. “It’s the butler’s night off. Be a dear and walk the dog,
chéri
.”

Still nibbling the tips of our cones, we walk hand in hand down the stone steps to the quay, a steep descent, considering I am nine months pregnant and can barely see my toes. Just a few feet above the Seine, we hear the lapping of the water. We step over boys with bongos, wave at the passing
Bateaux Mouches
. We make our way down to the tip of the island, dangle our feet over the edge. From here we can see the conical fairy-tale towers of La Conciergerie and, as the clock strikes ten, the sweep of the giant spotlight on top of the Eiffel Tower. We’ve been here dozens of times since we met, but this precious month before the baby is born feels like a last first date. There’s a different kind of romance beginning. We will never again be entirely alone in the world. I’ve been younger, God knows I’ve been lighter, but I’ve never been happier.

TWO WEEKS TILL
my due date, and I suddenly feel like I’m developing a split personality: Dr. Jekyll and Mrs. I Wouldn’t Leave This Bed If There Was an Atomic Blast in My Kitchen.

Yesterday I was so exhausted I couldn’t even muster the will to hit the supermarket. I’d been told I needed more iron in my diet. So I found myself staring into the open refrigerator, surveying this week’s odds and ends.

When I first moved to Paris, Gwendal would often come upon me meditating in front of the open fridge, contemplating world peace or choosing middle names for our unborn children. This studying of the culinary stockpile seems to be a uniquely American habit. The French never open the fridge in passing just to check if everything’s still there. Personally, I draw comfort from it—like a king surveying his realm.

To be fair, I had quite a bit to contemplate. Growing a person is a heady business.

Gwendal had been patient with me. The French tend to start their families early. He’d been ready to have kids since the day we met, maybe the day before. I kept waiting for that feeling to arrive, the one where you see a baby on the street, your eyes well up, and your ovaries do a little dance. But it never happened. I’m extremely close to my own mother, and I knew I wanted to be one, but the timing never seemed right. Moving to another country set back the clock on my independence. It took me years to get my sea legs in Paris; when I woke up I was suddenly thirty-five. The expression is exactly the same in French:
Tic toc
.

The discussion began in earnest two years ago. It had been a busy time. I had just put every ounce of my (somewhat lost) soul into helping Gwendal start his consulting business in the field of digital cinema. He was successful and contented—even a little bit arrogant. Exactly, I suppose, what I hoped he would be. On New Year’s Day, over espresso at our local café, he blithely announced: “It’s a new year; I’m ready to move on to the next stage of my life—let’s have a baby.” I burst into tears. I didn’t know what else to do. “How can I be someone’s mother,” I said, gulping between sobs, “when sometimes I feel like I don’t even
exist
here.”

Gwendal is not an insensitive man. But he walks through life’s doors of decision easily, while I often have to be pushed through, white-knuckled, clinging to the moldings for support. From that moment, I knew that if I wanted my life in France (not to mention my marriage) to move forward, I had no choice but to build something for myself, and in a hurry. I’d cobbled together some work in Paris—writing articles for art magazines and newspapers, giving museum tours—but nothing that met my definition of a career. I am a master procrastinator; I knew if I had a baby before I got my professional life up and running, I might never have a career at all. I could see myself using a child as an excellent excuse to never get anything done—ever again. A few months after that New Year’s conversation, I started work on my first book—and threw away my birth control pills. I had to create something for myself before I could create someone else.