“Do you want to hand it down to Laurent, a new generation of Comtois Père et Fils?”
“Part of me does. But at the same time, I don’t want him to feel tied down, to leave him no options, the way I always felt.”
“Oh! I’ve been meaning to ask: What is biodynamic agriculture? You mentioned it the first time we met, and I’ve been wondering ever since.”
“My brother, it turns out, was suffering from a brain tumor, and several of our neighbors have had similar struggles. It hasn’t been directly tied to pesticide use, but for those of us who live this close to the land, it’s a concern.” Jérôme led the way back to the living room, where they took seats by the fire. “When I brought Laurent to live with me here, I decided to try doing without pesticides. The biodynamic method doesn’t make a lot of scientific sense, but it seems to be working. I want to give it a year or two, at least, to see if it makes a difference.”
“How does it work?”
“A man named Steiner developed it in the twenties. It views the farm as a living organism made up not only of land but also air, animals, plants, compost. . . . I know it sounds mystical, but in many ways this is what winemakers have always done. This is the magic of wine: the way the taste of the grapes reveals the spirit of the land.”
“That doesn’t sound all that woo-woo.”
“Woo-woo?”
“It’s a term that means ‘supernatural,’ sort of different.”
“Well, I’ve given you the short version. There are some bits that are a little more woo-woo—stuffing a cow’s horn with manure, burying it for six months, then digging it back up, mixing the contents with water, and then sprinkling it over the land. Every time I do that, I wonder whether Dr. Steiner is looking down on me and laughing at the gullibility of those who follow his method.”
“I don’t suppose it could hurt, though, right?”
“That’s what I tell myself, as I drag myself out of bed at three in the morning to apply manure according to the movement of the cosmos.”
They shared a laugh. Silence reigned for a few moments as Jérôme stoked the fire. Rosalyn studied the photos on the mantelpiece: several of Laurent, but also others she assumed were of relatives. There was one of a young Jérôme with his arm around another young man who shared a strong family resemblance.
“How’s your brother doing now?”
“He’s been given a clean bill of health, thank goodness. But . . . I don’t know if it was the tumor itself or the lengthy recovery, but the ordeal changed him.”
“Is that why he ran off with your wife?”
Jérôme looked surprised. “Is that what the rumor is?”
“Oh my Lord, I’m so sorry I just blurted that out. Too much champagne, maybe.”
He shrugged. “In a small town, rumors are inevitable. Anyway, I mention Raphael’s health as an explanation, not an excuse.”
“And your wife?”
“She had neither excuse nor explanation.”
“Is that her?” Rosalyn asked as she looked at a photo of a striking blond woman holding a baby.
He nodded. “Naomi.”
“She’s very beautiful,” she said.
“She is.” A muscle worked in his jaw as he looked at it. “I keep that photograph for Laurent.”
“How did you two meet?”
Jérôme sighed, relaxed into the sofa, and put his feet up on a low table. “It could not have been more of a cliché. We met in Paris, at Shakespeare and Company. Have you heard of it?”
“The famous bookstore?”
“The very one. It’s an iconic place, especially for those of us with a love of English literature. With Notre-Dame visible out the window, no less. The store had this friendly black dog that would greet the customers, and a huge sign saying: ‘Be not inhospitable to strangers, lest they be angels in disguise.’”
“And did you think Naomi was an angel in disguise?”
“I blush to say it now, but at the time I did,” he said with a wry smile. “She had fallen asleep on one of the cots—the store has these cots left over from when exhausted students needed to nap—and she was lying there with a book of Yeats’s poetry splayed open on her chest. She was a vision, her hair strewn out behind her. . . .”
“That’s very romantic.”
Jérôme gave a bitter laugh. “Are you familiar with Yeats? He’s one of my favorite poets. ‘I have spread my dreams under your feet; tread softly because you tread on my dreams.’ It was only much later that Naomi confessed to me that she wasn’t a poetry lover after all. She simply wanted to nap and had chosen the book by chance.”
“Well, she’s resourceful, at least.”
“She was that. The worst of it? She was napping because she’d been up all night drinking and dancing in a discotheque.”
“That’s hardly a crime,” Rosalyn said.
“I suppose. But I thought she loved Yeats.”
“At least the beauty wasn’t a lie.”
“Amazing how little that can matter, over time. Don’t get me wrong. She isn’t a bad person. We were both at fault—I thought Naomi was a beautiful poetry lover, and she thought I was a Parisian English professor. Turns out, we were both wrong. Cochet, as you may have noticed, isn’t Paris. Naomi wasn’t cut out for village life.”
“That’s no excuse for running off with your brother.” Rosalyn put her hand to her mouth, as though she could get the words back. “I’m sorry, again. That was over the line.”
“It’s the truth, though. Turns out, she was . . . déloyale. Is it ‘disloyal,’ in English?”
Rosalyn nodded.
“And it wasn’t just that Naomi didn’t like poetry—she didn’t even like to read. We had almost nothing in common, except Laurent. He came along quickly. Otherwise we would have broken up long before.”
“He’s a charmer.”
“He’s my everything. It breaks my heart to see him miss his mother, despite everything.”
“I missed my father after he left, even though he didn’t deserve it.” Rosalyn stared into the fire, remembering running after her father’s car as he drove away; she had screamed and cried, begging him not to leave. The image was so vivid, she sometimes wondered if she had seen the scene in a movie and superimposed it over her own memory. After that, their only contact was an annual birthday card, holding a ten- or twenty-dollar bill. She hoarded the money in a jar on her bookshelf, imagining taking him out to lunch the next time she saw him, impressing him with how grown-up she had become. But he never visited. Dash had managed to track him down and flown him in for their wedding; she used the opportunity to give him his money back. It was the last time she saw him.
“So, Naomi moved back to Paris?” she asked.
“Last I heard, Berlin. She’s living with a fashion designer there. She shows up when she feels like it.”
“She looks like she’s a lot of work.”
Jérôme let out a bark of laughter. “That she is.”
Rosalyn remembered the time and effort she used to spend making herself look good for Dash: getting hair extensions, going to Pilates class, having her nails done every few weeks. Constantly burnishing the external shell. Her mother’s words rang in her ears: Men liked pretty girls, and since she was not a natural beauty, she would have to work at it. Stay on the diet, endure the plucking and waxing, never “let yourself go,” never dare to relax and just be herself because her real self was not good enough.
After Dash got sick, Rosalyn had dropped the unyielding beauty regime and hadn’t looked back. What was the point? No matter how hard the external shell, life pierced through to the soft core.
“Your hair looks different, by the way,” said Jérôme. “I noticed it at the party.”
“Blondine trimmed it for me.” She brushed her fingers across her forehead, feeling self-conscious. “She decided I
needed bangs.”
“It’s very . . . becoming. That’s how you say it in English?”
She smiled. “Works for me.”
His eyes locked with hers for a moment.
“Well. It’s getting late,” Rosalyn said. “But may I ask one more favor before I go?”
“Why stop now?”
“May I see your family library?”
“It’s my favorite room in the house.”
The library was something out of her childhood fantasies. Two stories tall, complete with a spiral staircase in one corner that led to a catwalk that encircled the room. Floor-to-ceiling shelves were lined with books, some with old leather bindings, others with glossy new covers. The air held the same slight mustiness as Émile’s letters.
“This is amazing,” Rosalyn said, her voice breathless.
“My great-grandfather was self-educated, and had a passion for books. He built this library, and then his daughter, my grandmother, added to it. According to family lore, the villagers were invited to borrow books, which was a boon before the mobile library started coming to town.”
“And do you do the same?” she asked as she pulled a tome from a shelf. Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris. She opened it and recited: “‘Il y a aujourd’hui trois cent quarante-huit ans six mois et dix-neuf jours que les Parisiens s’éveillèrent au bruit de toutes les cloches sonnant à grande volée dans la triple enceinte de la Cité, de l’Université et de la Ville.’”
He smiled. “Très bien fait.”
“This is the first book I ever read entirely in French,” she said. “I was terribly proud of myself.”
“You are welcome to borrow it, if you would like,” he said, leaning one arm on a shelf, gazing at her as if perplexed by her actions.
“Would I have to sign in blood, or anything like that?”
He frowned. “I do not understand.”
“I’m joking,” she said. “Sorry. Thank you for the kind offer. I would love to borrow a book, if you truly wouldn’t mind. But maybe one in English? I finished the books I brought with me my first week here. I had an e-reader, but it broke right before I left home.”
He let out a bof, to let her know what he thought of her e-reader. She loved the device, which would have been especially useful on a trip like this one, allowing her to take dozens of books with her, one to suit every mood. But there was nothing quite like the sensation of a real book in her hands, the thrill of discovery when perusing the shelves, as she had after her father left, when she found refuge—and fantasy—in her local library.
“Do you speak all these languages?”
“Oh no. My Latin is rusty, and my Arabic is close to nonexistent—I know a few words, but never mastered the alphabet. I speak only English, Spanish, and German. I get by in Italian and Portuguese, but I wouldn’t win any awards.”
“Only six languages? My estimation of you is plummeting, monsieur.”
He looked surprised, then chuckled when he realized she was teasing. “You like to joke.”
She smiled in response, perusing the spines of books written in Arabic. “All these books, all these stories, but we don’t have the key to open them.”
“Rilke.”
“Pardon me?”
“Rainer Maria Rilke said something similar: ‘Be patient with all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue.’”
Their eyes met and held.
“Do you believe that?” Rosalyn asked.
“It’s as useful a philosophy as any other. Rilke also says that we would not be able to live the answers, so we should live the questions. Something along those lines.”
Live the questions. For some reason the phrase reminded Rosalyn of her therapist’s insistence that pain wasn’t optional but suffering was.
“There is an English section over here,” Jérôme said, leading her into one corner and running his hand along the spines.
His hands were large and brown, the fingers long and capable-looking, calloused from farmwork. Rosalyn leaned toward him, close enough to smell his scent, something green, like the earth. Who knew naked grapevines carried a fragrance? She noticed the way his honey-colored hair curled on his tanned neck, had an urge to lean closer, to put her mouth right there, on that spot. . . .
Rosalyn reared back, shocked at her own reaction.
“You know, I—I have to run,” she said. “I’m sorry. I totally forgot I was supposed to return a very important e-mail before bed.”
“Don’t you want to take a book with you?”
“Thanks. I’ll take this one.” She grabbed the nearest book in English. “I don’t have time to find more right now. I’m sorry. Thank you so much for dinner.”
And she hurried out, compelled by cowardice, just like she had that one time, the last time, at the hospital.
Chapter Thirty-nine
That night, Rosalyn dreamed she was back in front of the medicine cabinet in the cottage in Napa.
This time she tried to slam the door closed, but something was blocking the way. When she looked to see what, she found Dash tucked inside—Dash, but not Dash. He reached out for her, swollen fingers grasping, as she backed away, reliving the betrayal of running from his hospital room, unwilling to go with him but forever after steeped in regret and remorse and fear.
Rosalyn awoke crying, awash with the awareness of death.
Three a.m. Dash died at four twenty-seven in the morning. She stared at the smooth ceiling of Chambre Chardonnay and did the math in her head: In an hour and twenty-seven minutes, it would be nine hundred thirty-nine days since Dash died.
Her sheets were damp with sweat, and she shivered.
She remembered one rare occasion when she had been at a wine event and come home later than Dash. He was already in bed, asleep, but when she slid under the covers, he turned and reached for her, spooning her, sharing his warmth. It was the safest feeling in the world, being held in his arms as she let sleep take her.
Later, it was she who cradled him, slipping carefully into bed so as not to wake him, when he’d lost so much weight that he felt skeletal in her arms, a bag of bones. She lent him her warmth then.
Perhaps she had given him all of her warmth. Perhaps she still was.
* * *
Rosalyn gave up on sleep, turned up the heat in the room, and took a long, hot shower, feeling the reflexive guilt of a native Californian for wasting water, but doing it anyway.
One of the techniques she used when grief threatened to consume her was to concentrate on mundane things. The scent of the shampoo. The slipperiness of the bar of soap. The small sky blue crackle-glazed mosaic tiles lining the shower stall. Slowly, she allowed her mind to wander, prepared to rein it in should it stray too far into the minefield of grief. She wondered if Emma had to hold her leg outside the stall to shower without getting the cast wet. She imagined Blondine arguing with Gaspard as they had built this new gîte, the frown on her face as she picked this towel, the determination to create a large shower that would please demanding American tourists.
This American, at least, was grateful.
Rosalyn quickly dried off and dressed, noting the rough grain of the thick towel, the softness of her favorite blue jeans and sweater, the warmth of her wool socks—then opened her journal and started to draw.
She thought of the séchoirs, the barbed wire that hung young soldiers out to dry. She drew a sketch of herself like that: injured, bleeding, stuck. She thought of the look on Dash’s face in the nightmare. The baby in her locket.
It was too much. She shut her journal and turned back to Émile’s letters.
September 2, 1917
My dearest marraine,
Just a brief note because it has been too long since I wrote last. I know you wi
ll be overjoyed for me when you learn that I have secured another pass to visit my dearest Lucie. My wife.
I scarcely believe I can call her this. Ours was the humblest of ceremonies; a few friends, and Lucie’s family, gathered to share champagne and special “cakes” made by the baker for the occasion. But I did not care if we drank only water and ate hardtack. I cared only for my dearest, loveliest, strongest Lucie.
Our wedding chamber was in the attic of Dakar, through a rabbit’s hole, strewn with flowers and candles. We had only a few days together, a painfully brief honeymoon. When the fighting is over, I hope to take her to Paris, where she has never been.
Rosalyn sat back, elated that Émile, the poetic farm boy, had married his astonishing Lucie. That they could find joy together under such grim circumstances. Unfortunately, the missive ended abruptly and without a farewell, as though this page had been separated from the rest of the letter. She searched for its fellow pages.
Her hands stilled when she found a letter written in an unfamiliar hand.
December 18, 1917
My dear Madame Whittaker,
My name is Lucie Maréchal Legrand.
I am so very sorry, sorry beyond belief, to tell you what I must.
Émile has fallen. I received official notice that he has been buried at Châlons-en-Champagne. He lies beneath one of the millions of horrifying white crosses marking the final resting places of too many young men, studding the land in a painful mockery of the vines.
I am told his mother is inconsolable; I doubt she’ll survive the final blow after so very many others. Émile was so vital a person, the repository of so many dreams for the future. He was beloved.
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