The Provence Cure for the Brokenhearted (17 page)

And Place de l’Opéra itself? It was stunning. We stood in front of the huge building, standing as broad-shouldered as it had been when my grandparents found each other in the crowd. I saw it as a cake—the tiers of arches then pillars then ornate trim and beading, topped with a beautiful greened-copper dome and brightly shining gold angels.

We bounced through the city from story to story, monument to monument. At Notre-Dame, Abbot was impressed by the stained glass portrayal of the man condemned to hold his decapitated head for eternity and, of course, the gargoyles. Charlotte lit a candle and stuffed money into an
offertory. This surprised me. Wasn’t she too jaded for this? The three of us took seats in the back of the cathedral in the cool darkness.

Tourists shuffled at the edges, creating a hushed noisiness.

I said, “I could use some buttresses, you know, support. Maybe I have buttress envy.”

“You could crouch lower to the ground,” Abbot said. “Except it’s all dirty.”

“I hear buttresses take a long time to build,” Charlotte said, and she handed me the brochure, and then seemed to disappear into herself. She could do this in a way I’d never seen before—turn her presence on and off.

But she seemed to be taking everything in, even if she was quiet about it and kept her commentary to a minimum. She was impressed by the crêpe vendors on the street, the quick wisps of their instruments. She said, “I love the way the French shove chocolate into everything. It’s, like, the best nervous tic ever.” She loved the morning coffee and the cubed sugars. She wanted to stroll through the market and look at the fish and roasted pig. She stopped to read the menus that were posted outside of nice restaurants—the ones translated into English. “You could really just eat your way through this town and understand it just as well as walking around and looking at it.”

She reminded me of, well, me at the age when I first started to understand food as more than food. Henry had loved food, for all the right reasons—comfort sometimes,
but also artistry. To him food was identity, culture, family, how you define home and love and who you are—all of it at once. If we were someplace for a couple of days, he’d try to hit the local market, try to find the quintessentially local cuisine. “It all tells a story,” he said.

Charlotte talked about food the way he had. “The sauce hits the roof of my mouth, almost too bitter or something, but then its aftertaste is sweet. How do they do that? Taste this.”

I nibbled. This was when the tourism bustle fell away. Time slowed. But I found myself fighting my own desire to concentrate on the taste. I was willing to register texture, but resisted the rest. If Henry and I had been there together, we would have tasted.

“Do you taste it?” Charlotte asked. “Do you know what I mean?”

“I know what I should be tasting,” I said. “You describe it perfectly. I just don’t.… I’m not there.…” I shook my head. I remembered seeing Henry tear up once at the end of a meal in New Orleans. “Are you crying over the pecan pie?” I asked him. “No,” he said, pressing tears from his eyes. “It’s not just the pie. It’s chemistry and physics. It’s place and time and history and religion and music.…” He was overcome.

For all the distraction of Paris tourism, I felt blurred by his presence, overwhelmed with double vision—the world as I was seeing it and the world as Henry would have.

Charlotte seemed to understand that there was more to it and didn’t push me.

As we left the café, we were quiet until Abbot spotted the Place de la Concorde. “Look! They have a giant pencil just like ours in D.C.”

“Look the world over,” Charlotte said, “and you’ll find men erecting erections. That, Absterizer, is a sign of patriarchal oppression.”

“What have you been reading lately?” I asked Charlotte.

“No need to read anymore to be able to say stuff like that. That’s just banter.”

“I didn’t banter about patriarchal oppression until college.”

“Banter has evolved,” she said. “Plus, my boyfriend, well, my ex, he was a good banterer and very anti–patriarchal oppression.”

And so there was Adam Briskowitz: not a boyfriend, a disaster. And now her ex. How awful could Adam Briskowitz be, really, if two of his defining characteristics as a young man were to be very anti–patriarchal oppression and a good banterer? I knew there was more to it, and so it was my turn not to push. I would push later.

Near Les Halles, we came across a giant statue of a tilted head resting in an open palm. We took turns posing with it as if we were picking its nose.

We were Americans, after all.

our days after arriving in Paris, we took the TGV—an incredibly fast train—to Aix-en-Provence, and I was relieved that we wouldn’t have to keep up the pace of tourism. It hadn’t worked as a foolproof distraction, as I’d hoped. We were going to set up house, create daily rhythms. We weren’t going to have to comment on what we saw, photograph it, treat it as a memory in the making. We were just going to live, to be. I’d gotten fairly good at faking this at home. How much harder could it be in Provence?

With much confusion and anxiety, I picked up our rental car near the Aix-en-Provence train station—which is not to be confused with the other Aix-en-Provence train station, as my mother had. This was a sad reminder that my mother hadn’t been to Provence in decades. We’d never talked about the details of her return home after her lost summer, but I
knew that she and my father had reached some agreement. Had she promised never to return to the house in Provence if my father promised never to stray again? Or was it unspoken? Had my mother simply felt that she had to give up some part of herself in order to keep the marriage intact?

While we loaded our baggage into our rented Renault, I realized what was wrong. It wasn’t simply that I was frazzled after demanding a rental car in the wrong place then having to take a taxi across town to the right train station. I was going to have to drive—in France. I remembered my mother navigating these roads, peeling out anxiously into rotaries, pulling over onto shoulders choked with high weeds to avoid oncoming cars. French drivers terrified her. And although I once prided myself on my driving, Henry’s crash had shaken me. I would sometimes grip the wheel and imagine its impact on his ribs, his chest. As I asked Charlotte to get the map and directions out of one of the pockets in my bag, I must have sounded nervous.

“Do you want me to drive?” she asked tentatively. “I will, you know, even if it’s illegal or something here.”

“It’s okay,” I told her.

“But you know the way,” Abbot said from the backseat, where he’d already buckled himself in. “You were here when you were little a lot.”

“Things have changed,” I said, “but we’ll be fine, and eventually I should recognize things. Mountains don’t change.”

I started up the car and pulled onto the narrow street. Aix-en-Provence was a bustling city, traffic zipping everywhere. We
took the highway to lesser roads via rotary after rotary—what is with the French and their love of rotaries? The signs, the tollbooths, the rest stops were all foreign, the strange scenery that tried to lure my eyes from the road—maybe these were good. I couldn’t think too much of Henry. I had to focus.

Charlotte called out route numbers and matched them with road signs. She kept me on track. Eventually we found ourselves in the countryside, which was somewhat calmer. The ancient Mont Sainte-Victoire looked like it had only freshly torn itself up from the ground—muscled ridges, pockets of light and shadow from the spotty dark clouds set against a bright, bruised sky.

I thought of the stories from my childhood—this landscape, the promise it held for me then. “In the beginning,” I heard myself say, just as my mother had always started the first story of the house—the birth of the house itself, one of my ancestors, who built the house, stone by stone, alone, without stopping, for one year, all to win the heart of a woman. “And she fell in love with the house and the man who’d built it.” The car was quiet, and each of us was windblown from the open windows as we drove on past farmland, a fruit and vegetable stand, and beautiful, old Provençal homes.

“The sky is like one of Uncle Daniel’s paintings,” Abbot said, his voice wistful. “If you tilt your head and squinch your eyes.”

“Everything looks like my father’s paintings if you squinch your eyes enough,” Charlotte said. “In fact, it’s best
if you close your eyes altogether if you want the full effect of my father’s work.” Charlotte’s resentment of her father’s career—or maybe, more accurately, not his career but his singular, passionate focus on it—cropped up in an angry edge to her voice.

“But Abbot’s right,” I said. “His new work with the thick lines reminds me of the mountains.”

Charlotte didn’t reply, but leaned forward to turn on the radio. For the next several minutes, she fiddled with the dial, finding only techno-pop and French ballades. Eventually she landed on Pat Benatar singing “Hit Me with Your Best Shot.” I started belting it out and she and Abbot joined in. The cicadas were noisy in the tall grass, so noisy, you could even hear them over the noise of the engine and the music and our boisterous singing.

Benatar was followed by a Jacques Brel song. I told Charlotte to leave it on. I remembered it from my mother’s albums. I hummed along, following signs to Puyloubier, the small village in walking distance from the house.

The kids had both seen photos of the house—my mother’s, and Elysius’s most recent album, too, from her trip with Daniel the summer before, when he’d proposed to her. Her photos showed an older, wearier version of the house than in my mother’s pictures.

“There will be a small sign and a long shared driveway,” I reminded them, “and two houses set way off the road. The smaller one, with blue shutters, is ours. The mountains will be there, pressed up to the backs of the houses, and big
trees. On our land there’s a fountain with fish in it—fat orange koi—and a pool.”

They knew all of this, but they listened quietly. Maybe they wanted to hear it again. On either side of us, there were vineyards—long rows of thick stalks, green leaves, the posts, and thin guide ropes. The whole valley was trilling with cicadas. I remembered describing their sound to Henry, and the way that, in early spring, he would always take Abbot and me out to hear the peepers in the swamps, the frogs’ shrill mating calls, a chorus of love songs.

As we pulled onto the route leading directly to Puyloubier, the road narrowed, the tall weeds and fences dotted with small white snail shells I remembered from my childhood. I was sure only one car could manage at a time but soon realized that cars coming in the opposite direction weren’t afraid of the tight squeeze. They barreled along at breakneck speeds, their engines roaring by as I bumped off onto the road’s edges. I held my breath when they passed—an instinct to suck in my stomach, as if that would help. My heart felt like a battering ram in my chest. I thought of Henry—I imagined the steering wheel in my ribs, an engulfing fire …

We didn’t see the sign or the shared driveway that led to the house, and so before we realized it, we ended up in the town. “How did I miss it?” I said aloud, jangled.

“It’s still back there somewhere,” Charlotte said. “I mean, it didn’t disappear! We should just get out and walk around.”

“I want to see what the town is like!” Abbot shouted.

“Okay, we could take a little walking tour and hit the market for some groceries,” I said, trying to calm down.

I parked near a small bus stop in front of a wine shop. Another Renault parked beside us. As we were getting our bearings, the two passengers were stretching their legs, preparing for a hike on one of the nearby trails. Both men wore man capris, and I assumed they were German tourists. By the way they looked at each other, almost furtively, I thought maybe they were lovers.

We walked past a group of boys, shirtless, in long madras and flowered shorts, playing soccer in the square, and old men playing bocce under small trees in a dusty courtyard in front of a large municipal building, painted deep orange with large windows and a Spanish-style roof. A beautiful woman with straight black hair had parked a stroller with a sleeping baby inside of it and was sitting on a bench near the circular fountain surrounded by a cobbled square. She was watching another child ride his bike around the courtyard. “Doucement, Thomas!” she called to him, wanting him to be more careful. “Doucement!” Other than that, the town was quiet, almost empty.