The Provence Cure for the Brokenhearted

by Bridget Asher

  Julien now explained that he was not my husband.

  The officer seemed offended that we would lie to him so boldy, and I was immediately resentful. I felt bullied. Was this some kind of tactic—to immediately treat people as liars—to put people on the defensive?

  We followed him back to an office with four World War II–era desks. Off to the left were two more private offices, with posters of French soccer stars.

  I guess I was expecting something different from the station in general, something more French—something, I’m embarrassed to admit, like the French Foreign Legion from old black-and-white movies—but this was just a village police station, and the man in front of me was a cop, and the walls were painted an almost nauseating pale green, industrial, unsettling, and completely familiar.

  As we walked into a small anteroom, we were joined by another officer. This one had a fat mustache. He handed me a form and told me to fill it out. I listed all of the things that had been stolen, including the dictionary. That was what I really wanted back. Even though I’d told Abbot that there was something good for us to learn in having had it taken from us, something important, I still wanted it back more than anything else. I put a star next to the word dictionary. I’d explain to them how important this was to my family, personally—not that they’d care, really, but I felt I needed to.

  The officers asked me to describe what happened. I told them as well as I could in French. I explained the two men were habillés comme les touristes d’Allemagne—dressed like tourists from Germany. They asked me if I’d locked the car. I wasn’t sure. They wanted me to describe the thieves’ car. I remembered that the car had no hubcaps but didn’t know the word for hubcaps. Julien did and so he jumped in. They asked about damage, what was stolen.

  The one in the sweater vest asked what I meant by habillés comme des touristes allemands.

  I explained tight shirts, sandals with socks, and acted out capri pants and then realized that capri was probably a French word. I looked at Julien for a little help, but he seemed to be enjoying the pantomime. “Go on,” he said. “You’re doing well!”

  The officer with the mustache asked me why I thought German tourists wore capri pants.

  I couldn’t answer this question. I had no idea. It was a resolute notion I had about German tourists and capri pants on men. I shrugged.

  Julien translated the question.

  “I know what he’s saying,” I said. “I just don’t have a good rationale to share with him at the moment!”

  They had a transcript of my phone call and, referring to it, the one in the sweater vest asked skeptically if the thieves were armed. “Les voleurs ont eu un pistolet?”

  “Non,” I said, and explained that boys in flowered shorts—les shorts avec les fleurs—had the gun. To avoid the embarrassing confusion between the words gun and rocket, I stuck with the term pistolet. “Les voleurs n’ont pas eu un pistolet.”

  “Le pistolet était un jouet!” the officer in the sweater vest explained with amusement. The gun was a toy.

  Julien looked at me with his head tilted and gave a shrug. “See?” he said. “It’s like this.”

  “I know,” I said. “I get it. The fake guns.”

  Finally the officer in the sweater vest asked about the star next to the mention of the dictionary.

  I explained in French that the book was very important to my family, that it was the book of someone who is now dead, someone we love.

  “Qui?” the officer with the mustache asked.

  “Mon mari,” I said. My husband.

  “C’est une veuve?” the officer in the sweater vest asked Julien. She’s a widow? His eyes were glassy with tears. I wondered if he had lost his wife.

  “Oui,” he said.

  “Si jeune,” the officer in the sweater vest said, shaking his head. So young.

  They leaned back in their chairs and told me they would search for our stolen goods. One officer leaned in close to the other and they had a quick, hushed conversation. Then the officer in the sweater vest leaned across the table and motioned for Julien to come closer. He asked him something in a quiet voice.

  Julien looked at him quizzically then shrugged and said to me, “They want to know if you know any well-known Americans.”

  “Famous people?” It was too hot to wear a sweater vest. “Celebrities?”

  “Yes!” the officer in the mustache said in a heavy French accent. “Des stars!”

  The officer in the sweater vest added, “Do you know Daryl Hannah?” He pronounced Daryl Hannah with such thick rs and a silent h that I couldn’t recognize the name.

  “Who?” I asked.

  “You know!” the sweater-vest officer said, annoyed with me. “Darrrrrr-elle Anna! From the film Splash, wif Tum Anks.”

  “Daryl Hannah,” Julien said.

  “Oh, Daryl Hannah,” I said.

  The officer rolled his eyes as if Julien and I were mocking him and he hated us a little for it.

  “I know of her,” I said. “The way I know of Sophie Marceau and Edith Piaf.”

  “Edith Piaf is dead,” the officer with the mustache informed me.

  “That’s true,” Julien said, though he was having a hard time keeping a straight face now.

  “I assumed as much,” I said.

  “But Sophie Marceau, she is very good. Even in bad films, she is good. She is French.”

  Julien looked like he was going to burst into laughter.

  “You disagree?” the officer with the mustache said to him defensively.

  “She’s good,” Julien said. “She’s very good.”

  “Like Julia Roberts!” the officer in the sweater vest said. Roberts was pronounced Rrrrro-bearrr.

  “I know,” I said.

  “Anyone else?” the officer in the sweater vest asked. “Well known?” The two men looked at me expectantly.

  “I once saw Al Pacino,” I said. He was walking in to a premiere in New York, wearing a black linen suit. Henry and I had been there for a friend’s wedding. It was a fluke.

  “Pacino,” they said, with reverence, narrowing their eyes, nodding.

  “And I heard Bill Clinton give a speech once,” I said.

  The officers laughed at this, and asked Julien something very quickly in French. I heard the word embrasse very clearly.

  Julien shook his head, lifting both his hands in surrender. “Gentlemen,” he said. “Non.”

  The officer in the mustache glared at him for his disobedience. “We want to know … Did you embrace him?”

  “Like the woman…,” the officer in the sweater vest asked.

  “Monica Lewinsky?” I shook my head. “No, I did not embrace Bill Clinton like Monica Lewinsky.”

  “Monica Lewinsky,” they said, laughing. “She is well known.…”

  “Okay, okay,” Julien said. “Enough.”

  “We can go now, right?” I asked.

  Julien stood up. “We’re going.”

  “Absolument,” the officer in the mustache said. And with that, they both reverted back to French, handing me my police report, telling me to file it with my insurance just in case.

  The one in the sweater vest walked me to the door and said, in French, with a French shrug and a French pout of his mouth, “Maybe we’ll find your things. Maybe you’ll step in shit with your left foot!”

  “He’s wishing you good luck,” Julien said.

  “Thank you,” I said to the officer.

  The officer put his hands on his hips and smiled, a posture of grand benevolence.

  As I waved goodbye, I whispered to Julien through my smile, “I can kiss our stuff goodbye. It’s gone forever, right?”

  “Yes,” Julien said. “Gone forever.”

  oments later, Julien witnessed what could only be described as a buying frenzy. I’d promised Charlotte real shopping at the little shops in Aix and convinced her that this was just to tide us over until we could get there. So she’d given me some sizes and set me loose. “When
in doubt, go with black,” she said, giving me a pat on the shoulder.

  At the Monoprix, I bought everything from little-boy underwear, bras, shoes, and a few stretchy dresses that would fit various sizes, to toothbrushes, hairbrushes, and vitamins. I bought foods that didn’t need to be cooked, as we had only the blackened hull of what used to be an oven, including a monster vat of Nutella, which Abbot had fallen in love with, and a bizarre pâté, just because it was a sale item that the French seemed to be buying in bulk. I bought a camera, adapters, and a universal phone charger. I couldn’t stomach buying another cell phone. The idea of bullying through the details of a French plan was too daunting. We would make do with Charlotte’s phone.

  “I feel so American,” I said on the drive back, the car packed with thick, reusable bags—each of which I had to pay for—rattling in the wind.

  “An invasion,” he said.

  “Storming the beaches of Normandy.”

  “You stormed.”

  “But I had to,” I said.

  “Churchill is proud of you.”

  “In my defense, I didn’t enjoy it,” I said, and I hadn’t. Except for the pâté, it had been a chore. I felt American in part because the Monoprix felt so American—a big, airy, fluorescent supermarket.

  “To make you feel more French, we will go to the patisserie—you can buy French bread and feel better.”

  Julien drove us back up through the tight, winding streets of Puyloubier. He turned down one of the side streets, stopping in front of a small bakery.

  A bakery.

  I realized now, quite suddenly, that I didn’t want to step into a bakery. I hadn’t been in a bakery, aside from the Cake Shop, since Henry’s death, and I’d avoided the Cake Shop as much as possible. Wasn’t I here to get away from the things that weighed on me? Wasn’t I allowed some small measure of relief?

  I thought about telling Julien that this was what I did for a living, but I couldn’t. He might ask questions—just ordinary, polite questions—but these would force me to recount the details. There was no way to separate my life’s work from my life’s love. I wanted only to tell the stories that I wanted to tell, and questions could catch me off guard. I was afraid of the whimsical nature of memory.

  I was unsettled. My hands were shaky. I rubbed them together to try to get rid of the feeling. I convinced myself that it was easier just to go inside, to get it over with. I could turn on my critical eye, as I had with Elysius and Daniel’s wedding cake, which would allow me some objectivity, distance, and I hoped that it would see me through.

  We stepped out of the car and into the small patisserie-boulangerie, a stone building with a green awning, which sat at the end of a row of houses with their big wooden shutters. A bell on the door alerted the baker, who was a lean man in his mid-sixties. He stood behind the domed display cases, wearing a crisp white shirt and a fine chain with a delicate silver medal, plain and circular, with an inscription too small to read. He spread his broad hand on the counter and leaned on it, bantering with Julien, the medal glinting now and then.

  I gazed at the glass-encased flans topped with berries, the croissants spotted with chocolate, the miniature glazed cakes.

  “We came here as kids,” I said. I remembered Véronique and my mother bickering over who would pay for what.

  “Yes,” Julien said, “we had your birthday party.”

  Once—it was that last visit, when I was thirteen—we’d arrived in France early enough in June to hit my birthday and had a small party. This was where we’d bought the goodies for it. I remembered thinking I was too old for a party with little cakes.

  But still, I remembered this shop exactly. And now I knew what all of the cakes were. I knew some of them quite intimately. Suddenly I wanted to hear the words in French. I pointed at one of the beautiful, exquisitely detailed desserts. “Qu’est-ce que c’est?” I asked. What is it?

  “Américaine?” the baker asked.

  “Oui,” I said.

  The baker grew serious then. He looked at me and then at Julien. He seemed to want to ask a question—something about Daryl Hannah?—but he didn’t. Instead he described the framboise, a raspberry mousse with pistachios and two layers of genoise soaked in a raspberry syrup.

  I pointed to the next and asked again.

  He described, patiently and reverently, the tarte citron, a lemon curd in a sugar pie crust.

  I asked about the next and the next—the tiramisu, where the almond jacond was soaked in coffee syrup; a pear pinwheel, poached in white wine; a hazelnut meringue with buttercream and chocolate ganache; a white circular mango-topped cake that involved rum, sautéed mango, and toasted coconut; truffles with spongy layered centers and bitter, dark-chocolate ganache; and tarts, one with chocolate, nut, and marzipan.

  I repeated the words in a quiet voice, almost mouthed them. I loved the feel of the words themselves: framboise, mousse, pistaches, citron, coco …

  I remembered working in the kitchen with my mother, after her lost summer when she’d come home, her hands dusted in confectioners’ sugar as she rolled out fondant, whipped cream, separated yolks with the delicate back-and-forth between cracked shells. My mother worked frenetically and I dipped around her elbows. Elysius disappeared with her friends, but I stayed with my mother in the steamy kitchen as much as possible, dizzy from the scents of the cocoa, caramelized sugar, and cakes, all of it billowing around the kitchen in gusts.

  There was a bakery not far from the house I grew up in, the white cardboard cake boxes tied with string, curved, clear display cases, and little glass figurines that you could buy to put on top of a birthday cake, women in white uniforms who took our orders and wrote our names on the cakes in swirling letters right in front of us. And eventually, when my mother’s obsession with baking came to its end, we went there only for birthday and graduation cakes. But I always had the desire—so strong and fixed on each beautiful cake, my hand pressed to the chilled glass—to be back in the kitchen with my mother, to witness what must have been part of some kind of healing process, to witness a woman who’d come home, yes, but who was then returning slowly to herself.

  I wasn’t sure what had come over me here in this little French bakery. I felt light-headed and hungry—but in a way I hadn’t felt in a very long time—a hunger as restless as my guilt. I nodded along with the baker and found myself saying, “Une of those. Trois of those. Deux of those. Non, non, quatre.”

  The baker kept glancing at Julien as if asking if I really had permission, if I was sane. Julien kept nodding, Yes, yes, do as she says.

  I felt absurd driving home. With the backseat filled with bags from the Monoprix, I had to stack the boxes of pastries on my lap. They were so high, they blocked my vision. I wedged loaves of bread between the door and the passenger’s seat. “It’s part of our French education,” I said.

  “No need for a rationale,” Julien said. “But that was …”

  “What?” I said. “It’s just my contribution.”

  “Exactly,” he said. “I understand. But that was …”

  “Joyful,” I said. “It was very joyful. I’m working on joy, right? That’s what people are supposed to do, according to you, when they’re miserable.”

  “It was …”

  “What?” I said. “What was it?”

  “Erotic.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “Don’t be so French about it,” I said, smiling a little.

  “I’m not being French. That was the international language. It was erotic.”

  I sighed. “I was overcome.”

  “Yes,” he said. “That’s what it was. It’s a start.”

  “A start of what? Am I living a little?”

  “Yes,” he said, “just a little, but a start.”

  ulien helped me unload all of the bags from the Monoprix into my house, but we carried the patisserie boxes and loaves of French bread to the Dumonteils’ house. Through the open windows, I heard a strange, atonal moan, one sad note and then another. M
usic? Some awful, sad goose?

  We found Charlotte, Abbot, and Véronique in the kitchen, all working with rapt intensity. Véronique was sitting on a stool pulled to the counter, checking on something in a Dutch oven.

  Charlotte looked up from a chopping block, teary-eyed. Was she the one who’d been moaning? A nervous alarm shot through me. Had something awful happened? Had someone called with bad news?

  But then she said with a smile, “I’ve never cut an onion before.”

  “How is that possible?” I asked.

  “No one I know cooks real food,” she said.

  “It’s a chemical reaction,” Abbot said. “The onions have tiny cells and you break them open.” This sounded like something Henry would have taught him. Henry was a cook who talked about the chemistry of food. How did Abbot hold these things in his head still?

  Abbot was sitting in front of a row of wineglasses filled with various levels of water. He dipped his finger into one of the glasses and rubbed its delicate lip. That was the noise I’d mistaken for moaning. It was music. “I already dissected a sardine,” he said. The intensity in the room was studious, not sorrowful. Was I not able to make these kinds of distinctions anymore?

  “See,” I said to Julien, shaking off my alarm, “their French educations have begun.”

  “They are brilliant children,” Véronique said. Although she seemed completely relaxed and serene, it was clear that she’d orchestrated the children into this state of wonder and curiosity.

  We set the boxes down on the kitchen table.

  Véronique turned and gasped. “What is this?”

  “I had a kind of attack in the patisserie,” I said.

  “Open them!” Abbot cried.

  And so we did—popping open lids, revealing the bright confections, swirls, glazes.

  “Why so much? We will keep these for dessert,” Véronique said, shutting the boxes—perhaps uncomfortable with the abundance.

  “What did the police say?” Abbot asked. “Will they find everything for us?”

  “Probably not,” I said.

  He looked down at the row of glasses in front of him.

  “I promised a cathedral and warthogs this afternoon!” Julien said.