The Provence Cure for the Brokenhearted (34 page)

“How is it really going?” I asked Charlotte.

“Terribly,” she said. “I love him.”

“Oh,” I said. This wasn’t what I expected.

“I know you don’t believe me. I wouldn’t. I don’t believe sixteen-year-olds fall in love, not really. But I don’t know how else to put it.”

“I believe you. We’re wired to fall in love.”

“Wired,” she said. “That makes us sound like animals, like we have no choice.”

“We are mammals,” I said, thinking of the beluga whales and their belly buttons.

“My mom is incapable of real love. She just can’t handle it. And with Elysius and Daniel it’s complicated. It’s something like love, but it’s not love, or it’s not the kind of love I
want. It’s something else—like a lifetime arrangement to take care of each other. But you and Henry,” she said softly, “it was love from the beginning, right?”

“But you can’t dismiss these other kinds of love. I mean, maybe your mother is capable of real love, but isn’t good at showing it. And Daniel and Elysius have something that will endure, I think. It’s already endured eight years. Maybe …”

“I know, I know,” Charlotte said. “But I want to know, honestly, was it love from the beginning with Henry? I mean, it wasn’t something … else?”

I didn’t want to push my own definition of love. It was narrow, and I knew it. It was all I really understood, though, and I also had to tell the truth. “It was love from the beginning.”

“And it lasted,” she said.

“It is lasting,” I said.

She nodded. “That’s what I want, whether it ends up being with Adam or not.”

“Yes,” I said, “that’s what I want for you. The problem is, being in love with Adam Briskowitz is almost a separate issue right now.”

“I know, I know. Will he make a good father? Can I trust him to be there for me?”

“Yes,” I said. “How involved do you want him to be?”

“Is it up to me, really?”

“You should know what you want.”

She sighed and looked up at the mountain, the sky. Adam
was standing in the distance, staring at the dirt, with one hand on his hip. “I think about all the stories you told me about this place. All the love stories, all of the enchantments. But maybe it’s only enchanted for all of you—the women in your family, the direct line. What do you think?”

“I don’t know that I believe them.”

“Huh,” she said. “I didn’t at first, but now I might. But they don’t apply to me.”

“You don’t know that,” I said. “You never can tell …”

Adam, still off in the distance, spun around. He was shouting, but we couldn’t hear what he was saying. “I don’t think it’s going as well as he thought it would,” Charlotte said.

“He strikes me as a strange kind of optimist.”

“He thinks his mother will want to take care of the baby. He’s actually said that we could move in together and live in the guesthouse by the pool. That’s insane! I’m sixteen. I can’t live in a guesthouse by the Briskowitzes’ pool, hand my baby off to Peg in the mornings, and then run to first period.”

“Does he love you?”

She nodded. “I think he does, but he’s scared shitless, really. That’s what he’s not saying. He’s scared shitless.”

Adam kicked the dirt. A small cloud lifted into the air. He yelled something, then raised the phone over his head and snapped it shut, as if this were the formal ending of a flamenco dance.

“He’s funny,” I said.

“He’s not trying to be funny,” she said. “But he’s funny.”

Adam strode toward us now, head down. “Plan A,” he shouted, “is not going to work out! Peg and Bert have really burnt their bridges!”

“What happened?” Charlotte called out.

“They’re demanding I come home directly.” He walked up to us and put his hands on his knees, breathing hard. “Peg is fixating on the fact that I lied to her about taking a course on famous French painters.”

“Did you tell her that you are, at this very moment, standing in the shadow of Cézanne’s Mont Sainte-Victoire?” Charlotte asked.

“I did make this clear. She was unimpressed.”

“And the pregnancy?” I asked.

“Now, that made an impression!” he said, straightening up.

“What was her response?” I asked.

“They suggested that I come home and be grounded.”

“Grounded?” I said, rubbing my forehead. Bert and Peg Briskowitz. I imagined them at this very moment sitting like two stuffed-doll versions of themselves propped on their sofa stunned, completely stunned. One might say to the other,
Did we try to ground him? Was that what we said?
And maybe the other wouldn’t even respond. Just numb silence. “It’s a little late for grounded. They need some time. That’s all. You’ve caught them off guard.”

“This is very bad,” Charlotte said. “If that’s how the
hippies
who’ve
been through the fire
handle their
fourth
child, I’m screwed!” She threw her hands up. “Completely screwed!”

“No,” Adam said, “screw them. I’m glad I’ve seen their dark side. We’ll just move on to plan B. No guesthouse by the pool. You weren’t completely cool with that, anyway. We’ll just move on to plan B.”

“What’s plan B?” I asked.

“We move in to an apartment in town together. Just the two of us. I commute to UF, taking only night classes, and Charlotte finishes high school, maybe online. And our parents pay no more than they’d normally pay for our current existences, but we both take on small jobs just to cover the additional costs of diapers and wipes and things like that.…” He was really talking only to himself now, pacing in small circles.

“Wait,” I said. “Let’s slow down.”

Now Julien and Abbot were singing full bore.
“Marchons! Marchons! Qu’un sang impur abreuve nos sillons!”

I fixed my attention on Charlotte. “Listen,” I said, “can you call? Are you ready for it?”

She didn’t look at me. “I want to get it over with,” she said. “We need to have some definites.”

“Okay,” I said, “do you want me here or …?”

She’d already opened the phone, hit speed dial, and was waiting for a voice on the other end of the line.

dam and I waited together, sitting side by side on the edge of the fountain.

He said, “What am I supposed to be doing?”

“You need to remain flexible.”

“Flexible,” he said. “Remain flexible.”

“The thing is that it’s not about you. You’re orbiting. She and the baby will be the sun. You simply need to remain flexible. Keep orbiting. Be ready when called.”

“I’m just a planet.”

“Yes.”

“But the baby is half of my genetic makeup.”

“That’s kind of immaterial now,” I said.

“Oh.”

“Trust me,” I said. “You’re getting off light in this whole deal.”

“I know,” he said. “Respectfully speaking, I’ve never been so relieved to have been born male—even with all of the socio-economic privilege and societal bullshit, I’m just happy to be a boy on pure anatomy alone.”

“And you should be.”

“And I am!”

I turned to him. “How did you two let this happen? How? Can I ask that?”

“Of course you can ask,” he said. “That’s only fair. A good question.” He coughed into his fist. “Well, there was this one time that, after, you know, and we weren’t maniacs or anything, it wasn’t like we were going nuts all the time.…”

“I get it. Go on.”

“It was gone after. Just
poof
! We couldn’t find it.”

“The condom?”

“Bingo,” he said. “It was just …”

“Poof.”

“MIA,” he said. “Later, you know, she found it. But, well, the timing of that event must have been pretty, um, serendipitous.”

“Serendipitous.”

“That’s right,” he said. “What I want people to know, for the record, is that we were trying to be safe. And maybe I didn’t put it on well enough, maybe there was sloppiness in my execution of that … point … issue … but, well, there you have it. It’s not something Bert and Peg asked, but I can see a future conversation in which it comes up.”

“If I could offer a suggestion,” I said.

“Of course.”

“I wouldn’t use the word
serendipitous
. I’d try to tell the story simply, honestly.”

“Okay,” he said.

“And so in the spirit of simplicity and honesty,” I said, “do you love Charlotte?”

“I do love Charlotte,” he said, without hesitation. “I don’t know what to do about it, but I love her.”

We sat there quietly until Charlotte returned. She’d been crying.

Adam got up and walked to her. He wrapped his arms around her and she put her head on his shoulder. When she lifted her head, he asked, “How was it? What did they say?”

She looked at me and smiled. “Elysius was Elysius. At first, she wasn’t really as surprised as I’d have wanted her to be. She’s always expected something like this from me, I guess.
And then my dad …” She laughed a little. “He said that being pregnant at my age would stunt my growth. I informed him that I haven’t grown a millimeter since seventh grade. This was news to him. Then he started to get upset, really upset. But Elysius kicked in. She was great. She calmed him down, and by the end, he was saying all the right things.”

“What are the right things to say?” Adam asked.

“He was saying that my health and the health of the baby were the most important things right now.” She sat down beside me on the fountain. “He said it was his instinct to get on a plane.” Her voice caught in her throat. “He can’t, of course. He’s already taken off ten days for the honeymoon, and he needs to work.”

I put my arm around her shoulder. “I’m so sorry,” I said.

“Well, on the upside, he’s going to tell my mother for me, and”—she took a deep breath—“he’s sending Elysius.”

“Why?” I asked.

“To bring me home.”

“Do you want to go home?” I asked.

“I could take you home,” Adam said.

“Aren’t you grounded?” Charlotte said.

“That’s not even funny,” Adam said.

“Do you want to go home?” I asked again.

Charlotte looked around. “I love it here. I love the mountain. I love that I can breathe a little and no one’s making me shove my nose in a book so that I can go off and get good test scores and be some robot who gets into a good college. I’m learning to cook, and Abbot needs me and people seem
to like me. And I feel
sure
of myself here. We have about three more weeks. So, no,” she said. “I don’t want to go. They can’t force me to.” She looked at me. I didn’t know what to say. She shook her head and rubbed tears from her eyes. “Except that they can force me to go home. I know,” she whispered. “I know.”

decided to wait for my family to call me. I knew that they would. I expected that Elysius would be first. Maybe she would put Daniel on the line with me. They would want to know how Charlotte was really holding up, the story from my perspective. They’d want to know how long I knew—if I had been in on it in some way—and they’d pump me for information about Briskowitz, whom I was sure they would view as a problem that needed solving.

I assumed my mother would call next, as Elysius would rope her in immediately. The news of Charlotte’s pregnancy would snap my mother out of her reveries, perhaps. She would kick in to high gear. She’d be prepared, in an instant, to be there for Charlotte and Elysius, and she would commence, without delay, mentally rearranging lives.

What I didn’t expect was a call from my father. I was on a ladder in Charlotte’s bedroom, doing the trim work, when Charlotte’s phone rang on her bedside table. My father wasn’t one for talking on the phone. He still had some old-world notion of the phone as a kind of tool to be used in emergencies. “Phones aren’t walkie-talkies,” my mother would tell
him. “You don’t have to just state your coordinates.” I assume that his distaste for phones and the idle conversations that took place on them had something to do with his definition of masculinity. He did own a cell phone, but only perhaps because they seemed more like walkie-talkies. But the number that appeared on the caller ID of Charlotte’s phone was their landline, so I answered it expecting my mother.

I climbed down the ladder. “Hey, so you heard.”

“I did,” he said, his voice startling me.