by Don Wallace
Benedict’s girlfriend, Annette, led us to a back garden table set with glasses and plate upon plate of hors d’oeuvres. A voluptuous blond with a touch of Marie Antoinette playing milkmaid at Versailles, she uncovered a tray of charcuterie. An hour later we were still being introduced to new dishes, some whisked out of the oven. Benedict and I were warbling snatches of song to each other. At the two-hour mark, Mindy tried to suggest we really should let them go. “But wait,” Benedict cried, “Champagne!” It had been in the sun for a while and popped with a spray of foam. A perfect plumber’s drink, we all agreed.
At three hours we tried to find the door. Our boy is waiting for us, we pleaded. But the French don’t fall for that one, ever. We all laughed. No, we agreed, he was probably delighted to be out in the never-ending twilight, going from apéro to apéro with his village pals. Benedict raised a hand to get our attention. “It is time for you to see…” He gestured to their bedroom. We blushed. Annette pulled on a velvet rope, and purple curtains parted.
It was a vision of ancient Greece straight out of a Maxfield Parrish print that hung on my grandmother’s guest bedroom wall, a fresco of robin’s-egg blue sky and fluffy pink clouds at sunrise, flanked by the real article, Ionic columns in bas-relief. And beyond those, inside, a ten-foot-tall pink scallop shell made of plaster of Paris whose base ended in the gold faucets and tap of a spa tub and Jacuzzi.
“Pour l’hiver,” said Benedict. For the winter. He winked at Annette.
“Elles sont longues, les nuits,” agreed Mindy, with a giggle. Winter nights are long.
“With the bubbles of the bath,” said Annette. “Like Champagne?”
“Avec Champagne, parfait,” I said. “Parfait pour un chanteur du rock.”
“Don’t you get any ideas,” said Mindy to me. Then, of course, she had to translate and Benedict had to promise to draw up plans for a proper bath for a fellow like me, which is to say, a fellow like himself, a man with the big rock voice.
• • •
We may have woken one of the old Druid water spirits with the faucet—and not a benevolent one, because on a day not long after Benedict’s apéro we were roused from our siesta by screams in front of our house. The whole village came running. We stumbled out our front door to find a distraught tourist, a wild-haired woman who’d rented a house for herself and her many, almost uncountable children. She was standing on tiptoes beside the beehive well—the well that had once been ours—peering down into its dripping darkness. Shrieking the name of a girl. Sobbing, she started to climb up the stones as if to plunge down after, we assumed, her lost child.
It was a horrible moment.
“Mama?” asked a small, curious voice. A little girl popped her head out from under a large, tentlike hydrangea next to the well. The mother took one look and nearly fainted.
Back at the house, we found ourselves shaken and spent some time reliving the incident. We hadn’t given the well a thought for years. Once it wasn’t ours anymore, it had merged into the village scenery. But now we realized that, yes, it was a terrible accident waiting to happen. We decided to speak to the “owner” the next day about installing a door or barring the well completely.
Then Mindy broached a worry that, we had to admit, only an American would think of. What if a child fell in the well and the gendarmerie asked who owned it, and our neighbor did an about-face and swore it was ours? What if some tourist drank the polluted water and got sick? What if they sued? And who would they sue—a French person or an American?
It may be important to note that Mindy had trained as a lawyer and passed the California bar. Though she’d never practiced, Mindy was, as they say, sensitized. We knew the French were not lawsuit-minded. But why not protect ourselves, since we’d already given up the well?
We decided to not approach the Mairie’s office. But we’d recently received notice that our old insurance agent, whom we’d never met, had retired and passed our account along to a M. Grancoeur. Unlike his predecessor, M. Grancoeur had written us a personal letter wishing us the best and hoping we would visit him.
We needed to see him anyway, he confided, to discuss our automobile, the first we had purchased in France. We could insure the car, satisfy our curiosity as to why our predecessor had always included a cow in our home coverage, and find a way to specify in our contract that we did not own that well, no sir, nor had we ever.
M. Grancoeur’s office was on the quai in Le Palais, overlooking the harbor’s second basin, and enjoyed an uninterrupted view of the looming Citadelle Vauban, our island’s grand, star-shaped fortress. A small sailors’ café next door was, as always, packed with red-faced, stubble-cheeked men and red-faced, straw-haired women in cable-knit sweaters. Next door, a window display of naked chickens sizzled and bronzed under an artificial sun.
Our diffident entry into the insurance office was greeted enthusiastically with a raised hand from a mustached Bellilois in the back, while the female agent in the front tried hard not to smile. She looked like she’d been waiting for this moment.
And it didn’t take long. With flourishes and the fastest French I’ve ever heard, M. Grancoeur ushered us to our chairs and got straight to business: Would we come to dinner tonight? No, how about tomorrow night? Okay, then, Sunday night. Settled. His wife, Marianne, would cook a fish, perhaps a turbot, perhaps a lotte. Oh, could she cook! His thick black eyebrows rose and fell with each declaration.
“Do you fish with a cane?” he asked me in labored English. At my double take, he smiled. “Maybe you are not so old. How about a pole?” Then he rhapsodized about casting from the cliffs where the waves crash. Now that was fishing.
Eventually we got down to our insurance policy. We’d simply paid our bill over the past thirteen years and stuck it in a file without knowing what it said, except that a cow was mentioned. It was our first insurance in our lives and at the time still our only insurance. (We were idiots, in other words.)
But M. Grancoeur began to show us how he would save us money, tsk-tsking over his predecessor’s lack of imagination. Our annual fee, already quite reasonable, could easily be trimmed. Our car, if driven thirty days or less a year, could be covered on a pro rata basis. If we promised never to take it off the island, there was a special discount available. Voilà. Mindy and I looked at each other, impressed. All this and he was having us to dinner?
Finally, unable to restrain herself any longer, Mindy brought up the cow as a prelude to bringing up the well. M. Grancoeur waved the thought away. It was automatic, he explained. Every house had a cow because every house needed milk and butter. Times had changed, but the basic policy hadn’t. He paused. “Do you wish to rent a field?” he asked. Because he knew where he could get us a cow. We shook our heads.
The tinkle of a bell. The next client was here for his appointment. Mindy looked a question at me. I shook my head, no. It would not do to bring up the well. She nodded in agreement. It would not be sympa. An all-purpose word used frequently on Belle Île, it meant to display tact and generosity, like what M. Grancoeur had just shown us.
So we’d never get the well back, and we’d never be truly rid of it. It would become a tale lodged in the village’s tangled history. One day no one would remember, or care. Or it might show up as a set of cross-hatches on a map. “Puits et chanteur.” As we were forever learning, such was life on Kerbordardoué.
• • •
Later that summer the waves got good and never stopped. We’d had a summer like this two years before, the first year that we completely forgot ourselves and lived like surf rats. For our Parisian second-home-owning friends, the change that came over us was alarming and unforeseen. Because during the previous fifteen years, as we’d worked to repair and renovate the house, we’d been earnest, attentive, respectful Francophiles, they did not recognize these feral new Wallaces. In our heedlessness, we made regrets to M. Grancoeur for his gracious dinner invitation and never did
reciprocate with an apéro invitation to Benedict and Annette. We told ourselves we’d make it up the following year. We didn’t.
Surfing was our folly back home, one we’d never expected to surface on Belle Île. Now it had made us do a graceless thing. The consequences weighed heavy on our minds. We talked about making amends the following year.
But the following year was 9/11, and we did not come.
• • •
A year later, the morning of September 11, 2002, found us sitting at our dining table in Kerbordardoué. Mindy and I were a mess. After living with the smell and sight of Ground Zero, we’d decided to go away from our neighborhood. If anyone needed a break, it was Rory, who’d lost his best friend at Hunter College High School in a hit-and-run on Queens Boulevard at the beginning of the year. Another close friend from school, Sam, was coming along, as well as Devo.
By the time the departure date rolled around, we craved Belle Île. But in two short weeks the boys were gone, cutting it short. Following our painfully scripted instructions (we hoped), they’d set off for Paris and the United States. Nothing you can do once they hit the teen werewolf phase. Or so we told ourselves.
We stared at our coffee and a limp little bouquet Mindy had picked the day before. A little talking, a few tears. Then nothing to say.
A rap on the door. “Uhhh…” Company? This early? Probably a couple of the boys wanting to borrow the village scepter—Rory’s spear gun. I got up and opened the door. M. Grancoeur stood in a coat and tie, cheeks freshly scraped, a profusion of Belle Île’s glory in one hand and a bottle of wine in the other.
“Please,” he said, “accept the condolences of France.”
• • •
No way were we going to blow this apéro. Getting to the market early (and not even pausing to check the surf), we’d scored the little, fresh Sauzon “Chèvre Amouroux” in all their varieties: ciboulette, black pepper, red pepper, rosemary. Not one day, but three days before, Mindy went to the Hôtel du Phare and dared to enter the kitchen below the stairs. There she bought enough langoustines to fill three supplement plateaux de fruits de mer. We asked our psychiatrists to recommend wines.
A brace of avocados came out of deep hiding to make Don’s famous guacamole. A second wave, including lamb chops, would hit the barbecue at zero hour plus one twenty. And those were just the heavy artillery. We had tacky little cheesy wheels from the supermarket. We had puffs and doodles as only the French can make them. We had the tins of Quiberonnaise lobster pâté, mackerel pâté, sardine pâté…
An hour before M. Grancoeur and his wife and wonderful cook, Marianne, were due to arrive, Mindy began to scream from upstairs, where she’d gone to give the toilet one more swipe of the brush. I ran up to see her cowering in the doorway, a bath towel wrapped around one arm, trying to advance under it like a shield toward a geyser of water shooting up from the toilet and blasting off the skylight and varnished pine ceiling.
It took only a minute to shut off the water for the entire house. With fifty-nine minutes to go for the guests, Mindy ran to Gwened’s to borrow her phone and call Laurent, the plumber from whom we’d been advised to hide our outdoor faucet, lest he never make a house call again. A moment later she came back, panting. “He didn’t answer, of course. It’s Sunday!”
“Okay. Well, we just have to keep the water shut off.”
“Marianne will want to use the bathroom. I will.”
“Look, Gwened will understand…”
“She’s having her own apéro. She was not pleased when I asked to borrow her phone. If we send strangers over to piss…” We both knew the kind of village demerits that would earn. Mindy stared at the carefully laid outdoor table, the two interior tables, one laden with bottles and glasses, the other with plates and baskets.
“I’m going to call Benedict.”
Then it hit us. The apéro we’d never reciprocated. The Was-that-them? glances we’d received from Benedict and his wife across the beach. “How can you?” I spluttered. “We haven’t talked with him in forever. He’ll never take our call!”
Without answering, she walked downhill to the Vicomte’s to make the call. In five minutes she was back. “He’s coming.”
“On a Sunday? No plumber in history…. How did he sound?”
“Friendly. Polite.”
The arrivals were near-simultaneous. First, a throaty rumble and silky gear shift. The silver Porsche leaped up the lane like a panther and slotted itself across the square. Then a stolid Citroën bumbled in, barely squeezing between the blossoms. As we were shaking Benedict’s hand and beginning the awkward explanation of the last three years of neglect and social sloth, the Grancoeurs came up. Because Benedict was in his Sunday clothes, they mistook him for a guest. Awkwardness squared.
Benedict and M. Grancoeur recognized each other and were professionally friendly, but I suspected that our insurance agent was disappointed. Of all the guests we might invite to join him: a plumber. We had friends among the psychiatrists, professors, artists, museum curators, lawyers, and so forth. Did we honestly think that only people that he, noble-hearted Grancoeur, might feel comfortable with were…
Benedict never let it happen. Of course, good to see you, too, M. Grancoeur, but if you will excuse me for interrupting your party, one has to see to a little plumbing emergency. Once Mindy and I jumped in with the story of our watery disaster, hilarity ensured, inspiring a cascade of similar stories and fond memories. I’m sure Benedict could’ve blown us all away, as a maestro, a connoisseur, of the water closet. But he preferred to act more as a referee, arms crossed, chuckling, throwing out the occasional informed commentary.
What had just transpired? A romance of manners. If only the sincerity and, counterintuitively, the artistry with which the impeccable Benedict and the expansive Grancoeur became instant comrades could be bottled and shipped back to America!
With a shrug, turning down offers of drink and food, Benedict headed upstairs with his canvas satchel. I tried to follow, feeling obliged in case my assistance was required. He waved me back. “C’est votre apéro,” he said sternly. The show must go on, rock star.
The apéro was hardly halfway through when Benedict came down. “Voilà,” he said. “La Fontaine Wallace est complète.”
“La Fontaine Wallace!” exclaimed M. Grancoeur. He squeezed his eyes shut. “Parfait! Vraiment, c’est La Fontaine Wallace.” His wife giggled uncontrollably.
I looked at Mindy. “I don’t get it. What’s the joke?”
Benedict, M. Grancoeur, and Marianne roared. M. Grancoeur handed Benedict a glass and filled it with Champagne—he’d arrived with a wine caddy and vintages for every stage of what was supposed to be our apéro. “Call your wife,” he said. “She must try this Champagne.”
Annette made excellent time for driving a plumber’s truck. The party rolled, each wave of food cheered and devoured. We made a lot of noise, I guess, because a steady stream of neighbors not having apéros strolled past just to crane their necks and wave through our wide-flung windows. Dusk donned her robes of purple velvet (unless those were wine stains from M. Grancoeur’s excellent Burgundy swirling before my eyes).
At one point Gwened’s departing guests filed past our windows like ten little Indians, if you replaced the feathered headdresses with identical coifs from Le Palais’s Elle-Lui Salon du Coiffeur, each woman of a certain age and impeccably dressed, if a little prim. They nodded and smiled and made little hand waves. We waved back over the necks of the empties.
“Madame Guedel will think we are drunk,” said Mindy, in French.
“Ainsi, nous sommes!” we cheered back. Well, we are!
Pop went a Champagne cork. “La Fontaine Wallace!”
Even an apéro must end. Ours did, after several false starts. At midnight we were doing the dishes and bagging the trash when there came a rapping on our window. “Oh god,” said Mindy, but when
we saw Celeste’s and Henry’s wide-eyed faces pressed to the panes, we had to laugh. Who better to analyze the party than our very own psychiatrists?
They burst in full of questions: How did it go? Everyone in the village was talking about our apéro. M. Grancoeur, he was our insurance agent? He was reputed to be one of the island’s true gourmands. And the owner of the Porsche, who was he? A very chic fellow. Our plumber? Non, non, you are kidding. He drives a Porsche?
Mindy tried to explain. Benedict came for our— “Fontaine Wallace,” I interjected.
Henry and Celeste looked very respectful. Of course, La Fontaine Wallace. A very important part of France’s heritage.
“Oh, my, look at this label,” Celeste cried to Henry, holding up a bottle among the several that she was putting into a black garbage sack. “Is M. Grancoeur a collector? This vintage is very rare. Extraordinary.” She nodded approvingly at us. “You have had a distinguished evening. A great social success.”
Mindy and I looked at each other. How could we begin to explain?
“Ou est votre Fontaine Wallace?” asked Celeste. Her expression was earnest and delighted. She wanted to see where our “fountain” was?
The jumbled conversation that followed went a bit like this:
“Celeste, Henry… Perhaps you can help explain…”
“Yes, yes, Mindy. Yes, Don, what is it?”
“Well, our toilet broke today. It just popped and shot water up like a…bottle of Champagne.”
“Oh, but what a terrible thing! And this before your apéro? But you shut off the water. You might be able to get a plumber in a couple of days. They are impossible all vacation. That young Laurent is very unreliable, worse than his father.”