My Grape Year: (The Grape Series #1)

by Laura Bradbury

  Franck and I were silent as André’s car wound out of Villers-la-Faye through the vineyards. I peered out the rear window, looking at the village that had changed my life. It was nestled, seemingly unchanging, in that perfect little crook between hills. I wished, not for the first time, that I could know the future.

  Franck squeezed my hand, and we exchanged a charged look. I could tell by the tense line of his eyebrows that he was worried too. We both wanted a future together, but nobody was handing out guarantees.

  Please God, let me come back to this place. I sent up a little prayer, even though I had never been religious.

  We wound down the hill to Nuits-Saint-Georges, past the church and my old bedroom beside the belltower at the Lacanche’s house. They undoubtedly thought I was the most ungrateful chit of a girl. This pained me, but I knew that I would make the same choice again. That must be one of those painful parts of growing up—realizing that sometimes what was right for me and what others believed was right for me could not be reconciled.

  André pulled up to the train station, and between Franck and him, they barely let me lift a single bag. I was going to miss this gallantry at home. Once he assured himself I was settled with Franck on the right train platform, André bid me a solemn au-revoir. I thanked him for his hospitality and his help, and gave him a warm kiss. He said he hoped to see me again soon, but as this probably required the departure of his eldest son as well, I was not surprised to see a conflicted look in his ice-blue eyes.

  Finally, it was just the two of us, Franck and me, on the platform. I had to say good-bye to Burgundy, but thanked God I didn’t have to say good-bye to him…yet.

  Franck, with some difficulty, leaned over the pile of bags and lifted my chin up with his thumb. “How are you doing? Overwhelmed?”

  “I can’t believe I’m going back to Canada. It seems like another life. This is my real life now. Here. With you.”

  “We’ll make a new life together,” Franck said. “Just for the two of us. Montréal will be perfect, a place between your old life and my old life.

  “It’s freezing in the winter,” I quipped to keep away the tears that were lingering constantly at the edge of my eyelashes.

  Franck’s eyes gleamed. “I hope so. We can keep each other warm.”

  The metal train tracks began to reverberate. I looked up and saw the TGV coming in the distance. There it was…my future…please God, our future. I just needed to get on.

  In Paris we stayed at the apartment of another one of Franck’s ubiquitous second cousins who seemed to populate Burgundy and the rest of France. The cousin in question had gone to Marseille on a training course, so we had his apartment to ourselves. It was only three streets away from the Gare de Lyon, where our train had pulled in.

  When Franck opened the door, I marvelled at the apartment’s postage stamp size. The kitchen was basically a cupboard and the shower was a shower nozzle that was hung over a bathroom that did not house a toilet, but rather a Turkish-style affair with a hole in the ground. I had a difficult time imagining this second cousin—whom I’d met briefly at Mémé’s party, and who had dazzled me with his impeccable elegance and Parisian je ne sais quoi—living in this place. The bed was a single mattress of dubious age, pushed up against the main room, which also contained a tiny table and chairs. Once my bags were piled up against the far wall, there was barely enough room for us.

  “All apartments in Paris are like this,” Franck explained. “You get used to the lack of space. It never bothered me because in Paris you only come back home to sleep anyway. There’s too much to do outside.”

  I threw my backpack down on the bed. “What should we do first?”

  “Do you want me to show you my Paris?” Franck said. “My favorite places?”

  I wrapped my arms around his torso and felt the smooth planes of his muscles against my chest. I couldn’t conceive of not being able to do this. “Yes,” I said.

  “Are you ready?”

  “To have you show me around Paris? I think I’ve been waiting for that my entire life.”

  “Then let’s go make the most of the next twenty-four hours.”

  It was getting near lunchtime, so Franck led me to the Latin Quarter to buy us something he called a shawarma.

  He took us down into the metro, which he, like Madame Beaupre, knew by heart. It was stifling and there was no sitting room, so Franck held on to a strap and I wrapped my arms around his waist, our bodies moving in sync with the rocking motion of the metro car. I buried my face into the soft cotton of his T-shirt and breathed in the familiar scent of him. In twenty-four hours, I would have to fly away from this. It was unthinkable.

  Franck led me up the stairs underneath a beautiful art-deco sign for the Saint-Michel metro station. I snapped a few photos, and then he plunged us into noisy narrow streets with swarthy men standing on the doorways of Greek restaurants whose windows were full of displays of distinctly unappetizing plastic food. They exhorted us in Greek-accented French to come in.

  “Will we be eating in one of these places?” I asked Franck.

  “Those are just for the tourists. Most of the shawarma shops are for tourists too, but there are a few which are still the real deal.

  We turned and followed streets that got narrower and twistier. How could he possibly remember where he was going?

  Finally, we ducked into a shop that was well away from the main thoroughfares and filled with hearty customers eating large bundles of bread and meat wrapped in wax paper. They were talking in a language that definitely wasn’t French or English. There wasn’t a tourist in sight.

  They turned to us and stared, but Franck just smiled and placed our order with such aplomb and obvious knowledge of the place and its offerings that the men went back to their conversations. I watched the man behind the counter shave off paper-thin slices off the huge rotating slab of meat and put it into a pita with a dizzying array of sauces and cut up vegetables that Franck chose for us.

  “Do you think you can handle the spicy sauce?” Franck asked. “They don’t even think of offering it to tourists.”

  That sounded ominous, but I didn’t think of myself as a tourist, so…

  “Bien sûr.”

  The man behind the counter worked fast and in no time was handing each of us our wax paper bundle.

  I took a bite. Warm and spicy and flavourful and completely, wonderfully foreign. “This is delicious.”

  Franck took my hand and led me out of the shop and through more crooked little passageways until we pulled up in front of a blue-and-white-painted shop with what looked like Greek pastries in the window. I cocked a brow.

  “Our dessert,” he explained. “Should I just get us an assortment?”

  None of the pastries looked familiar to me, so I nodded, my mouth full of delectable shawarma.

  The large woman behind the counter greeted Franck like an old friend and lovingly packed up a neat little box of pastries. She tied a blue ribbon around it, fashioned it into a makeshift handle, and passed it to him.

  Franck led me through the maze of streets and across the Place Saint Michel into a little garden just off the Seine. He closed the gate behind us, and I was suddenly surrounded by a sense of peace and, apart from the background noise of car engines and the occasional honk, an almost rural quiet. Here, amazingly, right in the center of Paris. He found a spot to eat behind a rock under a tree, and spread out his jacket for us to sit on. I sat half reclined on his lap, trying not to drip spicy shawarma sauce on his jeans.

  “This is perfect,” I murmured. “Did you come here often?”

  Franck nodded. “The Sorbonne is just up the street. I’ll take you there after.”

  We chewed contentedly in silence for a while.

  “I don’t want to leave tomorrow,” I said, blinking back tears yet again. I wanted to hold on to this moment, draw it out for eternity.

  Franck smoothed the hair off my forehead. “I’ll move heaven and earth so that we can be tog
ether again soon. Do you trust me on that?”

  I nodded. Of course I did. It was just that…he felt like my home. I couldn’t imagine being away from him for even three hours, let alone months…or longer.

  “Besides…,” Franck’s finger dropped from my forehead and began to trace the whorl of my ear. “It’s not tomorrow yet. It’s still today.”

  “I am starting to realize I live in the future most of the time,” I said ruefully, wiping a drip of sauce from my chin. That was another reason why we worked so well together. Franck possessed an innate capacity to live in the present, and he managed to drag me there too. I kissed him—a spicy kiss thanks to the shawarma. After we finished off every last crumb, Franck untied the blue and white box and had me pick my first choice of pastry. Honey oozed from all of them.

  I picked one that looked particularly tempting and took a bite. It was the perfect chaser to the savory mix of tastes in the shawarma.

  “This is delicious,” I said. “Greek?”

  “North African actually,” Franck said. “Tunisian and Morroccan.”

  I had enjoyed countless memorable meals during my year in France, but this lunch with my amoureux in Paris was the most memorable of them all.

  After we finished eating, we lazed in the dappled shade until the pull of the city outside the gates became irresistible.

  “I know!” Franck said, as he gathered our wrappers into the now-empty pastry box. “I can’t believe I didn’t think of it before.”

  “What?”

  “There is a place right near here where we must go,” he said. “It’s the perfect place for you.”

  My curiosity was piqued, and I followed as Franck led me across the Place Saint Michel, dodging oncoming traffic with the aplomb of a Parisian, and then walked over a few more streets. He pulled up in front of the most delicious-looking bookstore I had ever seen. Shakespeare and Company was written in old black letters on a yellow background.

  “I know how much you love books,” Franck said. “Hemingway used to hang out here. I wonder if it’s not in fact your spiritual home.”

  We wandered in and lost track of time as we explored the winding stacks of books and all the incredible nooks and crannies where writers still gathered, wrote, and sometimes even slept. I found a second hand copy of A Moveable Feast I had read before coming to France. It was one of my favorite books by Hemingway.

  I bought the book, and they added the most beautiful bookstore stamp on the front cover.

  “That,” I said as we strolled out arm in arm, “was perfection. I want to move into that place for a while.”

  “Maybe we’ll figure out a way to come back to Paris and live here for a period of time,” Franck said. This idea sparked a thousand other seductive images in my mind.

  “Café?” Franck asked and I nodded. We walked back through the streets of Saint Michel and then up to the Sorbonne. It was a magnificent building with a majestic dome and a pillared stone entrance fit for royalty. Beside it was an excavation site where a team was industriously digging up Roman ruins.

  “This is where you went to school?” I said, marvelling at the beauty of the building and the square in front of it.

  “Yes.”

  “I’m so sorry I didn’t believe you went to the Sorbonne that day in Savigny after we first met.”

  Franck tugged my ponytail. “You didn’t, did you? I had forgotten about that. Femme de peu de foi.” Woman of little faith.

  “I was so suspicious. It’s just that every day at school, the other students’ favorite game was tricking me.” I thought of Thibaut. I still couldn’t believe that I’d tried to convince myself that he might be the one for me. The fact that things with him were always unsettled and difficult should have been a clue.

  “I loved going to school here.” Franck looked up, admiring the Sorbonne’s exquisite lines against the cerulean July sky.

  I sighed. “That would be so amazing.” I’d always had a soft spot for grand old buildings that celebrated academia. The Sorbonne. To actually take a class in one of its amphitheaters…

  Franck grabbed my hand and led me through the front door.

  “Are we…?” I asked, but then decided it was better not to ask if we were allowed inside or not. Even if we weren’t, I was willing to try.

  We passed three guards who were armed with black assault rifles. Luckily, Franck assumed a nonchalant expression and didn’t hesitate as he knew where we were going. In our shorts and summer shorts we easily passed for students.

  He cracked open a door and drew me into the most beautiful amphitheater I had ever seen. Rounded domes were everywhere on the ceiling; it looked more like a cathedral than a schoolroom. Franck indicated a worn wooden bench beside us. The floor was lined with them—row after row.

  “Sit down,” he said. “Look up.” Huge swaths of the walls and ceilings were covered with exquisite frescos. “Even though the teacher wasn’t very good, I would never miss a lecture here. I spent most of the time staring up at the ceiling.”

  We sat like that for about ten minutes, when the door opened and one of the armed guards walked in. “What are you doing in here?” he shouted. “Get out!”

  We scurried out of the building and into the square, laughing.

  “That was totally worth it,” I gasped.

  “Oh yes,” Franck agreed.

  “What about that coffee you promised?”

  Franck led me to one of the cafés on the square.

  We ordered and spent several minutes soaking up the intellectual vibe. Could I dare dream that Paris too, was part of my future…our future?

  “We have to decide what we’re going to do with the rest of our afternoon and evening until the balls begin.” Franck unwrapped his sugar cubes and stirred one into his espresso.

  I had forgotten about the firemans’ balls. Franck had told me late in bed one night how every fire station in Paris hosted a ball for Parisians to celebrate Bastille Day on the night of July 13th. We could go from one neighborhood of Paris to another and dance.

  “We’ll be going late tonight.”

  “Very late?” I asked.

  “Maybe all night.” Franck grinned.

  “Will we sleep?” I asked, although truth be told, I wasn’t really thinking about sleep.

  “There will be time tomorrow,” Franck said. “Trust me.”

  The rest of the afternoon was filled with wonders. Mint tea in the tiled courtyard of the Grande Mosque, ice cream from the Berthillon ice cream shop on the Île Saint Louis in the middle of the Seine, then a walk along its banks, and another café.

  Because it was July with its long days, Franck even had time to show me Nôtre Dame, and lastly, the Pont des Arts, before dusk fell. We stood on the wooden bridge looking out over the railing towards the Eiffel Tower and watched the blue sky turn indigo. Franck stood behind me, with his arms enveloping me, while his chin rested on my head.

  “I want to live here with you,” I said.

  “On the Ponts des Arts? I think the gendarmes might have something to say about that.”

  “Well, if not on the Pont des Arts, then somewhere else in Paris.”

  “There is so much more I have to show you,” Franck said. “We could go for cafés sur le zinc in the morning, take in a little bit of the Louvre in the afternoon, go to a brasserie for a glass of wine in the evening…you could study at the Sorbonne…”

  “What would you do?”

  Franck shrugged. “How can I know what the Universe is going to bring me? I knew I wanted to travel after my military service, but I didn’t know that the Universe was going to bring you to me. I never could have imagined this. I love that. The not knowing.”

  “Do you really?” The not knowing drove me crazy. The uncertainty of life was something I’d always struggled with. I could never even fully enjoy a book—no mater what type of book—unless I read the ending first. Then I could relax into it and enjoy the story. Unfortunately for me, life wasn’t like that.

&n
bsp; Yet, I thought of Franck as a child, sitting up on the wall at his grandmother’s house eating baguettes that the Mémé had lovingly slathered with butter and jam for him—while I was building driftwood forts on the beach. The Universe patiently waited for us that night in Nuits-Saint-Georges—for me and my red-ribboned tap shoes and Franck with his sore back after moving stones all day. Wasn’t that proof the Universe knew what it was doing? Maybe I just needed to let go and trust it with my future, and Franck’s future, and—dare I believe it—our future.

  Franck kissed the crown of my head. “I think we’re lucky that we have to fight for each other.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. That way we will never take what we have for granted.”

  “It is sort of a miracle,” I said, leaning back into him.

  “Not ‘sort of’.” He kissed the back of my neck, and just then the lights of the Eiffel Tower to the west lit up, bathing us in their glow.

  CHAPTER 40

  A few hours later, Franck and I were nestled in a brasserie in the Sixth Arrondissement. We’d just finished a dinner of a goat cheese salad, steak frites, and fromage blanc. This had all been washed down with a strong house red, which made me teeter between joy and sadness every few seconds.

  He reached over and checked my watch. “The balls will be starting.”

  We paid up and stepped out into the Paris evening. Every cell in my body rejoiced at how I was actually living the moment—diminutive French cars whipping by honking at each other, the warmth of Franck’s arm around my shoulder, the muggy air of Paris in the early summer, the whistle of firecrackers being set off by kids in adjacent streets, the jingle of a few francs in my pocket…

  Better yet, I understood everything that was happening around me—every expletive yelled by the pedestrian who had just been cut off by a mobilette roaring around the corner, the chatter of lovers chatting at a café table we passed, the waiter taking an order… It was an entirely new life I was living and it hadn’t, in the grand scheme of things, taken that long to create.