The Provence Cure for the Brokenhearted (5 page)

I thought the advice was pretty good. I was sick of my sister’s boyfriends, too. Plus, I wasn’t going to culinary school in order to meet men. I was tired of men. I was pretty sure I’d ruined my share. In fact, at this point, I’d recently ruined someone’s career at NASA by talking them into getting stoned, broken up someone else’s engagement, and been blamed for a sizable Jet Ski accident—no fatalities. I was afraid of men for the same reason I was afraid of frogs—because I couldn’t predict which way they would jump.

In general, I saw love as entering into an agreement that depended on your willingness to compromise. This was rooted in my parents’ complicated marriage, of course. The story goes that my father, an attorney for the U.S. Patent Office, saved my mother from the typing pool.

Problematic, on a feminist level, for many reasons, it was made worse because of one of our family secrets: my mother was brilliant. Her father came back from the war and opened a five and dime, which supported the family for years but was struggling by the time she reached college age and, to compound matters, her father’s health started to fail, and so college
was completely out of the question. As a housewife, my mother watched all of the latest movies, even the foreign films, which she went to alone because my father refused to read subtitles. She referenced films by the names of their directors, a distinctly French trait. She gardened scientifically and read books on physics, history, philosophy, religion, but rarely mentioned these things. She led a quiet, secretive life of the mind. One Christmas, someone gave us the game of Trivial Pursuit. My mother knew all of the answers. We were startled. “How do you know all this stuff?” we kept asking. After the game was over and she won, she put the lid back on the box and never played again. Had my mother needed saving? She accepted the story that, indeed, she had. It was no wonder then that when I met Henry in the kitchen of that party all those years ago, I saw love as compromise, even weakness.

Henry was the first person I met at the party. He was talking to the chef’s daughter—a towheaded third grader. He had a smile that hitched up on one side, a smile I immediately loved.

He introduced himself. Henry Bartolozzi. The two names didn’t seem to fit together and I said something about it. He explained that Henry was his mother’s choice, the namesake of her grandfather, an old Southerner, and his last name was from his father’s Italian side.

I told him my last name. “Buckley. A hard name to cart through middle school. I was a walking limerick.”

He tapped his chin. “Does
Buckley
rhyme with something?
Funny. I can’t think of anything.” Then he confessed that Fartolozzi hadn’t helped his middle school rep any. Raised in the Italian section of Boston—North End—he had an accent that was New England with a bounce, as if inspired partly by Fenway, partly by opera.

I remembered that night, after the party spilled out onto the lawn, the towhead and her older brother lighting firecrackers that skittered across the pavement. It was dark. It was hard to tell if Henry was glancing at me or not.

Later a lot of people piled into his old, rusty Honda, and when the radio accidentally hit an easy listening station, I started belting out “Brandy.” I confessed that I was this kind of unfortunate drunk, an easy listening diva. Despite this, or maybe because of it, Henry asked for my phone number.

The very next night, a new friend of mine from school named Quinn invited me to dinner. I claimed I already had too much work. Quinn said, “Okay, it’ll just be me and Henry then.” And I said, “Henry Fartolozzi?” I told her I could change my plans.

Henry brought bottles of a great Italian wine—a splurge; none of us had any money. Because I wasn’t used to the low futon masquerading as a couch, I kept dousing myself with wine each time I sat down. By the end of the night, I smelled like a winery.

My main mode of transportation was an enormous 1950s-era bicycle—bought at a Goodwill. Henry offered to drive me home—it had gotten chilly. I declined, but he insisted.
He stuffed the monstrosity into the trunk of his ancient uninsured Honda, but then the car didn’t start. At all. This was a relief. If he was trying to save me, it helped that he was failing.

I said, “I know what’s wrong with your car.”

His blue eyes lit up. “You know engines?”

I nodded. “The problem’s simple. When you turn the key, it doesn’t make any noise.”

Henry found this charming. I found it charming that he found it charming. “You’re right,” he said. “It’s probably the sound-effects alternator.”

Henry walked me home—about six blocks. When we got to my house, I realized I’d left my keys at the dinner party. He walked me back to Quinn’s, and then to my place again. At this point it was three o’clock in the morning. We’d walked and talked a good chunk of the night away. Now, back on my front stoop, we lingered.

He said, “So, do you like me?” He tilted his head, his dark lashes framing his blue eyes. He had full lips and the smile appeared again—just a half smile really, just that one side.

“What do you mean?” I asked. “Of course I like you. You’re very nice.”

“Yes, but by the sixth-grade definition. Do you
like me
like me or do you only like me?”

“I might
like you
like you,” I said, looking at my shoes and then back at him. “
Might
. I don’t have good luck with men. In fact, I’ve sworn them off.”

“Really?” This is the part I remember so clearly—how close he was, so close I could feel the warmth of his breath. “Can I ask why?”

“Men are work. They think they’re going to swoop in and save you, but then they take effort. They need cajoling. They’re kind of, by and large, like talking sofas.”

“For a talking sofa, I feel like I’ve got a really strong vocabulary.” He whispered this, as if it were a confession. “I did well on standardized tests—when compared to other talking sofas.” And then he really stared at me. I was falling in love with his shoulders. I could see his collarbones, the vulnerable dip between them, his beautiful, strong jaw. “I think swearing off men is old-fashioned.”

“It’s kind of an antiquated notion. I might have been drunk when I said it.”

“Maybe you were on a bender?” He smiled his half smile. “Taking a break from belting out ‘Brandy’?”

“Probably. And now in the sober light of day, I can see what a bad idea that was—like trying to put on a full-scale production of
West Side Story
in your local 7-Eleven.”

He was impossibly close now. “Have you ever tried to put on a full-scale production of
West Side Story
at a 7-Eleven?”

“Twice. It didn’t work,” I said. “I’m over it now, swearing off men, that is.”

“You’ve officially de-sworn-off men,” he said.

“Yes,” I said.

“You sure?”

I nodded, but I wasn’t sure.

And he kissed me—softly at first, almost just a tug on my mouth, but then I gave in. He held my face in his hands. He pressed his body against mine, against the door. I dropped my keys. We kissed and kissed, a moment that in my memory feels infinite.

The kiss, that was the beginning. Henry and I worked as a couple because he convinced me that I was wrong about love. Love isn’t about compromise.
Life
is hard.
Life
demands compromise. But when two people fall in love, they create a sanctuary. My family was fragile. Love was something made of handblown glass. But Henry had been raised so differently. His family was loud, rowdy, bawdy, quick to anger, quick to forgive—with food everywhere—Southern food mixed with Italian set to the mantra of
Mangia! Mangia!
—always frying, bubbling, spattering, the kitchen pumping like a steamy heart.

On one level, I didn’t expect to fall in love. I saw this other future version of myself, a tough, independent woman, bullying my way through life. But, honestly, I also felt like Henry was the exact person I’d been waiting for—the
soul
I’d been waiting for—and the package he came in was like unwrapping gift after gift.
And this is what you look like. And this is what your voice sounds like. And this is the set of your childhood memories
. I’d thought I’d been looking but really I’d been just waiting for
him
without knowing that I was waiting, really, without knowing that I’d been missing him before he arrived. I
thought he was the answer to the longing I’d felt at thirteen. I thought the ache was a restless lonesomeness, but it was more like homesickness for a place you haven’t yet come to.

In my sister’s kitchen, I was remembering our first kiss, the feeling of being pressed up against the door, the sound of the keys as they fell from my hand, jangling, and hit the cement stoop. There were so many hours, days, weeks that blurred from one moment to the next and slipped by. I wasn’t good at the daily. I was lousy at cherishing the moment. It turned out that my longing was part of who I was. It had subsided, but then—especially the year before Henry’s death—it returned. It got in the way of my ability to appreciate the details of my daily life. That’s what Henry did so well while I longed.… How could I have been so careless? Why didn’t I pay closer attention?

I was homesick in my sister’s kitchen, on her wedding day. I wanted to go home, but the home I longed for, with Henry, was no longer there.

“Let’s get your father and Abbot together. They can keep each other busy until the wedding starts,” my mother said loudly over the kitchen noise. She’d managed not to smear her makeup while crying; it was one of her skills.

She pointed to my father, who was wearing a navy suit and sitting in the corner of the breakfast nook, penciling numbers into a book of Sudoku. This was how the ex-workaholic now handled the passage of time. Sudoku was a point of contention between my parents, and my father had to do it on the sly. Sudoku was a putterer’s thing to do, and
my mother hated puttering. But my father was drawn to detail work, the intricacies that he’d found fulfilling as a patent lawyer. He liked categories within subcategories within subcategories. He talked a good game about his adoration of invention, but truth be told, he enjoyed rejecting claims for “indefinite language.” Deep down, I think my father had wanted to be an inventor, but he ended up a legalistic grammarian, a keeper of language.

Abbot looked at me mournfully. He loved his grandfather, but he didn’t want to be abandoned in the noisy traffic of the kitchen. Plus, there was something inherently demeaning about being pawned off, and he knew he was being pawned off.

“You two are buddies,” I reminded him. “You’ll keep each other entertained.”

We walked over and my father looked up from his Sudoku. “Well, don’t you two shine up nice?” he said. “How do, Abbot?”
How do
was one of Abbot’s baby expressions. He’d been a very social baby, asking everyone all day long how they were doing—baggers, bank tellers, librarians.
How do? How do?

“I’m good!” Abbot said, putting on a happy face.

“Maybe you two can watch a television show in the den,” my mother said.

My father glanced at her, gauging her emotion. I assumed he could tell she’d been crying. “Sounds good! Let’s get out of the way of all this pomp and circumstance.”

“There’s a Red Sox game on,” I said. Henry had been such
a die-hard Red Sox fan that it was Abbot’s legacy, nearly genetic, and now it was my sole responsibility to make sure that he got hooked. I’d bought him all kinds of paraphernalia—ball caps, T-shirts, a pennant pinned to his door, curling in on itself like a dying corsage, as if even the Red Sox pennants needed New England’s chill and this one was wilting in Tallahassee’s humidity.

“There’s also a show on whales today,” Abbot said. “Whales have retractable nipples. They’re mammals, like us.”

“Baseball players are mammals, too!” my dad said.

“But they don’t have retractable nipples,” Abbot explained, undeterred.

“They don’t,” I admitted. Abbot is a very smart kid, and in the world of kid-logic, he’d won this argument. “Whales,” I said. “Blubber it is!”

“Bring on the blubber!” my father said.

My mother turned away from us. “I hear your sister calling,” she said. I could, too, a shrill voice coming from the upper reaches of the house. She started marching toward the stairs then called to me over her shoulder. “Don’t dawdle!”

My father reached out and touched my arm. He lowered his voice. “She told you about the fire, no doubt. She’s upset. You know how crazy your mother is about that place.” He’d never been to
that place
, not once. The house had become a point of contention between my parents—at first because my father was always too busy to go and later because it represented my mother’s abandonment of us after my father’s
affair. “It turns out the woman in charge over there fell and broke something.”

“She told me, but she didn’t mention Véronique,” I said. Véronique’s house stood about two hundred feet from ours and had also been in the family for generations. Over scattered summers of my mother’s childhood, she and Véronique had grown up together. My mother didn’t have siblings and Véronique had only brothers, and so they’d said that they were like sisters. A few years after Véronique’s divorce and after we’d stopped visiting, she’d renovated her larger house, turning it into a bed and breakfast. In return for minimal upkeep, she used my mother’s house for overflow during the summer months. This was the arrangement that had stuck and was still in place. “What did she break? Did it have to do with the fire?”

“I don’t know the details,” my father said. “Your mother’s being emotional. I just warn you. She’s more hyped up than usual.”
Hyped up
, that was the expression my father used to describe what I saw as my mother’s restless longing for something else. For what, I don’t know. I knew only my own longing, the kind I’d likely inherited from her. I knew the shape it took now—I longed for Henry, for him to come back to life.

My father’s affair didn’t strike me as being filled with this kind of longing. I’ve always assumed that he stumbled into the affair, that it happened the way pilots are taught a plane crash happens. It’s never just one thing but a number of
contributing factors at once—ice on the wings, coupled with an electrical issue and some clouds.… Or maybe it was, more simply, a midlife crisis. He’d saved my mother from the typing pool, and here was his chance to relive that drama. His affair was with a woman at work, though I’m not sure what she did. She was younger, per usual, newly divorced. He had a soft spot for women in need. Did this other woman need him in a way my mother had outgrown?