The Provence Cure for the Brokenhearted

by Bridget Asher

  I was always a surprise? Or my family was a surprise? Or all Americans were a surprise? Maybe this was a vague historical reference to D-Day? “Didn’t my mother tell you that we were coming?” I asked. “I’m so sorry if there was some misunderstanding.…”

  She raised her hand and shook her head. “No, I heard from your mother. She is always a surprise. That is how you learned it.”

  Learned what? I thought. How to be surprising? Maybe she knew that my mother’s running off to the house was a surprise—a woman running away from her life. Véronique now kissed Charlotte’s and Abbot’s cheeks. He braced himself for the kisses’ germs, squeezing his eyes shut and scrunching his nose, even though I’d warned him.

  Three men walked out of the house at that moment, holding glasses of wine, then onto the yard. I felt like a strange spectacle. Look, some Americans have landed on the lawn! Hurry before they fly away!

  “Thieves broke into their car and took all of their things,” Julien told his mother.

  “All of your things were taken?” Véronique said. “It is necessary to tell the mayor.”

  “The mayor?” I asked, looking at Julien.

  He nodded. “Yes, the mayor of Puyloubier. He will want to know this.”

  Abbot piped up. “The house has a smoke detector, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes, of course,” Véronique said, maybe a little insulted.

  “He’s a little nervous,” I said. “That’s all.”

  A gorgeous young woman appeared on the steps. She was wearing a tank top and a faded jean skirt, barefoot. “Julien!” she called to him, pouting. “Viens! Je t’attends!”

  “J’arrive, Cami!” he called back, and then he smiled. It struck me that Julien, the splasher, the sulker, the boy who’d led me up to the mountain chapel haunted by a decapitated hermit, had become a playboy. “Coming in?” he said to me.

  “Please!” Véronique added.

  “Another time,” I said. “We’re still recovering. You know, the robbery, the gun …”

  “Tomorrow,” Véronique said, shooing everyone back inside. “Breakfast!”

  “Yes, thanks,” I said. “We’ll be there.”

  “Do you have your papers for the rental car?” Julien said. “I can take care of that for you. Calling, explaining, arranging …”

  I dug in my purse and handed him the rental agreement. “I have to make a police report in Trets,” I told him.

  “If the car is not here, then I will take you. With luck, it’s not raining.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “For everything.” Abbot and Charlotte were talking about bedrooms, who would get the biggest one, which one would be left empty. I walked toward them but turned back to say, “Maybe I’ll run into you!”

  “Maybe,” he said, and then his eyes flitted over my body, my wet clothes. I wondered if it was all see-through. He seemed embarrassed, and he quickly said, “There are, what do you call them, coats for leaving the bath? They are in the closets. You can wear them while your clothes dry.” And then he turned and loped off into the house.

  “Clothes,” I said to myself. We would need all new clothes.

  “Clothes,” Charlotte said. “Where am I going to find clothes that aren’t all … French?”

  “They make the boys wear very small bathing suits here,” Abbot said. “I saw pictures of them in my word books.” My mother always bought him French word books. He looked a little terrified at the prospect of having to wear a tiny maillot de bain.

  “We’ll survive this,” I said, and then I added, “Forever elegant, right?”

  “Right,” Charlotte said. “Forever elegant.”

  he Dumonteils’ house and our house stood about two hundred feet apart, separated by a long gravel driveway that split in two and curved behind each house. The vineyards on either side of the driveway ended abruptly at the grassy edges of the two front yards, ours with its stone fountain, larger and twice as high as a plastic kiddie pool. Behind the Dumonteils’ house stood the garage, and behind our house, slightly off to one side, was a gated pool. From there, vineyards stretched to the base of the mountain, which took about fifteen minutes to reach on foot. I knew that the Dumonteils owned the land behind their house, renting it out to farmers. Ours had been parceled and sold by our ancestors so that little of it was actually ours. Who could blame them? The land was worth a lot of money. Still, we had the view.

  But crossing the driveway to our house, I could see an area cleared out of the vineyards behind the Dumonteils’ house. And within the clearing there was what seemed to be a maze dug into the ground. It was about one to two feet down into the earth. An excavation. I knew that Abbot would love this. It had to do with death. Abbot’s relationship with death was, for good reason, intense.

  But there would be plenty of time to explore later. I led him away from the dig, for now, toward our house, holding his hand.

  “It doesn’t look like the pictures,” Abbot said. He broke from my grip and ran to the gated pool and tipped forward. “It’s empty.”

  I walked to the stone fountain in the front yard, ringed with tall weeds. I saw a white snail shell, holding a bead of rain. The fountain was now filled with old rainwater, no fish.

  “It’s a jungle,” Charlotte said.

  I looked up at the two-story house and saw a swallow dip out of an open upstairs window. “We don’t have to update this house. We have to reclaim it,” I said.

  The back door was open, its stone step worn to a smooth dip. We carried in the grocery sacks. That’s all we had aside from my pocketbook, which luckily was home to all of our passports. We stepped into the kitchen, which smelled like stale smoke. The oven was a blackened hull, a dark, empty mouth, completely destroyed. Its door was off its hinges and propped against it. The kitchen used to have a fireplace and hearth. The chimney was made of stone—put into place, as the family mythology had it, by my ancestor, the lovesick young man who built the house. It had subsequently been repurposed as the exhaust for a contemporary oven. The stones were blackened, but they’d withstood the fire. The wood cabinets on either side of the oven were destroyed, but the tile backsplash on either side of the stone chimney was still intact. The walls and the ceiling were also blackened—darker and thicker the closer to the oven. The kitchen was charred, but the house itself was sturdy and strong.

  “It’s like those pictures of smoker’s lungs they showed us at school,” Abbot said, “just in case any of us were thinking of being smokers, so we wouldn’t.”

  There was a tiny refrigerator, still operating, and a washing machine tucked under the counter. The washing machine had a cracked face. I wasn’t sure it would hold water. The sink, though elegant speckled marble, was impractical. I was used to my double sink, deep enough to wash a toddler in. This sink would overflow in a matter of seconds if the drain were blocked by a few pieces of chopped lettuce. One circulating fan was propped beside the long kitchen table. Abbot turned it on and it started rotating noisily, a slow, back-and-forth buzz, nodding to a stop at either side, as if it, too, were checking out the house and finding it, well, disappointing.

  “I’ve never wanted to scrub a floor before in my life, but this one …,”Charlotte said. She bent down and touched the tile work. It was beautiful, but the stains looked entrenched.

  “I don’t know that you’d get much satisfaction out of this floor,” I said.

  There was a tall, empty drinking glass on the table with a clutch of ashen lilacs propped within it. I pointed it out.

  “Left by the French couple trapped in the French film?” Charlotte said.

  “I guess so.”

  I toured the small sitting room, ran my hand over book bindings without reading them. I looked at the small bathroom, its tight shower. I walked up the steep, narrow stone steps. I toured the four bedrooms. The walls were a bit dingy. I thought of my mother’s plan to make them look clean and crisp, like white linens. This one for Abbot. This one for Charlotte. This one for me.

  I turned on
the light beside the bed, a double bed with white linens and a thin comforter, and opened the empty wardrobe and dresser drawers. I had nothing to fill them. Charlotte and Abbot had found a radio and turned it up—an old French song with a creaky accordion. They were pretending to sing along in French. Boshswacheeee Savaasweee ponshadooo …

  The shutters were cracked, the window partly raised. I opened the shutters wide, cranked the handle to open the window. I looked out at the mountain, a misty gold in the last bits of hovering sun. The air was already drying out. A wind dipped in and out. I felt like I had landed, touched down in a place that was both very strange—the taste of the air, the slant and bounce of light—and also familiar, as if I’d always known that this was the way that air and light should be. I felt like I’d known this feeling before—in the kitchen with Henry Bartolozzi amid the caterers, and then on my stoop falling in love with him that night of the dinner party and the lost keys and the kiss—that sense of being homesick for the place you’ve never been and then arriving somewhere new, unknown, and sensing home.

  I missed Henry deeply. Here, I would have had some new angle on him. What would Henry the foreigner in a foreign land have been like? There were endless versions of him to mourn—he was my lover, my confidant, my business partner, my son’s father. He was one man’s son, another man’s brother, his mother’s boy. Everyone I met had some other version of Henry—my mother and father, Elysius and Daniel, Jude, all of our neighbors, relatives, friends, his old college buddies, his friends from childhood. After he died, they offered me their memories, their Henry, and it only added to the loss. I wanted to say, “He’s gone, too? How many Henrys can we lose?”

  Abbot ran in and dived onto the bed, spread eagle. “What are these pillows made of?” he asked, squeezing them.

  “Feathers,” I said, turning from the window.

  “Mom,” he said in a quiet voice, squeezing the pillow in his arms.

  “What is it?”

  His eyes filled with tears. He squeezed them shut. “I packed the dictionary.”

  “Oh, Abbot,” I said, rushing to him, wrapping my arms around him.

  He started sobbing. “I didn’t listen. I packed it down deep under all of this other stuff. I wanted Daddy to come with us.”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “Hush. It’s okay.”

  “But it’s not okay. It’s gone. The robbers have it and they don’t even know what it is.”

  “Abbot,” I said, and I lifted his chin to look me in the eyes. “It’s a dictionary. It’s not your father. That dictionary isn’t Henry Bartolozzi. Daddy is in here,” I said, tapping on his narrow chest. “He’s with us all the time.”

  Abbot grabbed me around the ribs. “I didn’t mean for it to get stolen.”

  “Of course you didn’t,” I said. “It’s okay. It’s better this way, in fact. Now you’ll know that it isn’t your father in the dictionary. You’ll know that he’s always with you.”

  He looked up at me and nodded.

  Just then Charlotte walked down the hall, peered in, and leaned in the doorjamb, looking happy.

  “What are you smiling about?” I asked.

  “I just realized something,” she said.

  “What’s that?”

  “The thieves stole my SAT prep books,” she said. “It’s almost like feeling unfettered!”

  “SAT word?” I said.

  “Ironically, yes.”

  hen I woke up the next morning, I was in a bed far away from my own bed. For a moment, I didn’t know what bed I was in. I’d slept in only a white bathrobe, the windows open, the night air breezing in and out. The room was empty. Empty. My things gone. For a moment, I didn’t feel like I’d been robbed; I felt like I’d been released.

  I felt a pang only when I thought of the dictionary, but even then, I knew that the dictionary had already, magically, done its work. It had gotten us here. And it was better for Abbot not to think of his father as a spirit in a book that could be stolen from us.

  Maybe Abbot had been right to quote my mother. Maybe the robbery was a Buddhist gift. If we’d had all of our things—clothes, toiletries, and, most of all, technology—not to mention a working kitchen and a healthy rental car, we could have been independent, holed up here in the house. But that was the mistake that Abbot and I were making at home. Today, we would have to head out into the world.

  We’d hung our clothes on a rickety wooden drying rack in Charlotte’s room. The air was so dry that the clothes dried stiff. The fabric felt strange against my skin. I remembered the feeling from my childhood—the scratchiness of the towels that dried as stiff and rough as loofahs.

  While Abbot shook out our shoes—his sneakers, Charlotte’s Converses, and my clunky sandals—just to be sure there were no scorpions, I jotted a list of all the things we’d need. The list was long. We needed everything—including, most important, a charger for Charlotte’s phone.

  I looked up as I wrote this down. “Forty-one missed messages?” I said to Charlotte. “Did I read that right?”

  “Briskowitz,” she said. “I think he gets on there and just starts reading The Iliad or something. Who knows.”

  “You don’t listen to his messages?”

  “Nope,” she said, and then changed the subject, rolling her shoulders around in her shirt. “Does your shirt feel freshly starched, Absterizer?”

  “It’s like wearing an exoskeleton,” Abbot said.

  As we stepped out the back door to walk to the Dumonteils’ house for breakfast, we saw the mountain in full morning sun. It took on a bright azure, its shadows orange, looking luminous, rippling like a gown from the sky to the earth. This seemed like the best way to step out of any house into the world.

  “It’s bigger today than it was yesterday,” Abbot said.

  “Seems like it, doesn’t it?” I said.

  “It’s kind of humbling,” Charlotte said. In the clear light of day, I saw how different she looked without makeup and hair products that stiffened her hair. She was softer, more vulnerable, even more beautiful. I imagined all of the love stories of this place: the man who built the house, stone by stone; the couple who miraculously conceived a baby here during the mistral; my grandmother and grandfather after World War II; the flurry of Bath whites that enveloped my sister, my mother, and me one summer afternoon. And what of my mother’s lost summer?

  Elysius had been proposed to here. No wonder. Was it the mountain that had worked its magic on Daniel? Perhaps. I still held on to the impact of Henry’s death, how everything had become suddenly fragile for us all. Henry proposed to me at a Red Roof Inn off of I-95, where we’d decided impulsively to have sex, midday. This was astonishing to us in retrospect only in that we’d been so damn poor, still in culinary school and broke. Sex at a Red Roof Inn was a huge luxury. It was there, perhaps inspired by the grandeur, lounging naked under the orange comforter, that Henry told me that he wanted to spill his guts.

  “Okay,” I said, propping myself on my elbow.

  Henry took a moment and then finally said, “I really like you.”

  Now, this didn’t strike me as spilled guts. We’d been inseparable since the night of our first kiss. He’d just taken me to a family reunion on his mother’s side in North Carolina. And I’d phone-introduced him to my parents and Elysius. We’d pretty much covered the liking, even the really liking. I said, “I don’t think that constitutes having spilled your guts.”

  “How about this?” He paused and then said, “I’m in love with you and I want to spend the rest of my life with you.”

  Now this, this was spilled guts. It was completely courageous and elegant, especially amid the Red Roof Inn decor, paintings bolted to the walls. I took this as a real proposal. I said, “Yes,” as in I accept, as in I do. “I love you, too.”

  This was the moment that we always came back to. The wedding that followed, with all of its foofaraw, was nothing in light of this essential moment that we considered to be the start of our marriage. We’d talked
about how embedded in every marriage there was a true moment when your hearts sign on for good. It didn’t necessarily happen when the guy mows WILL YOU MARRY ME into your lawn or trains a puppy to bring you a velvet box. It doesn’t necessarily happen in the white hoop gown or because some exhausted justice of the peace says so. It usually happens in some quiet moment, one that often goes unregistered. It can happen while you’re brushing your teeth together or sitting in a broken-down car with an engine that just won’t budge. Some unplanned, unscripted moment. And this was ours. This beginning was finalized by the two of us, unceremoniously, stealing mini hotel soaps and shampoo bottles from a Red Roof Inn.

  I wasn’t jealous of Elysius and Daniel’s proposal—though, granted, it made a much better story. But I was jealous that they’d gotten to be here together to create a love story. Henry and I wouldn’t have that chance, and I was a little pissed at us for not making the time and/or blowing the money. We should have, but we were taking time for granted.

  Abbot, Charlotte, and I made our way down a small path worn in the grass from our back door to the Dumonteils’ back door. We walked up the steps and gave a knock.

  “Entrez-vous!” a woman’s voice called out.

  We stepped into the cool, dark foyer at the back of the house. There was a richly ruby-colored Persian runner on the floor, orangey and pink, that stretched down the length of the hall all the way to the front door, which stood with brightly lit panes at the other end.

  Véronique appeared from the doorway on the right—the kitchen—wielding a cane and hobbling around on her cast. I still wasn’t sure what had happened to her. She clapped flour from her hands—small bursts of white clouds. Again, we did the ritual cheek kisses. There were pleasantries.

  “Look at this boy!” she said about Abbot. “He has a little of you. A little!”