The Provence Cure for the Brokenhearted

by Bridget Asher

  “Injured swallow,” Abbot said. “We’re going to nurse it back to health and then throw it off of a roof or some other place high.”

  “Interesting plan,” Adam said, and then he turned to Charlotte and said, “Is that what you’re going to do with me?”

  “Why are you here?” Charlotte asked, over-enunciating each syllable as if talking to someone who’s slow-witted.

  He dropped his suitcase to the gravel and said, “You know why I’m here. Everyone knows why I’m here.”

  “No,” she said. “We really don’t.”

  He turned and stared at all of us then, mystified. “Look, I’m not some snob. I’m not an elitist, if that’s what you’re thinking. I dropped out of Phillips Exeter in the ninth grade, for shit’s sake, because I wanted to embrace the proletariat. I’m … I am …” He was at a loss for words. He took off his suit jacket in a kind of angry protest. “I’m one of the good guys.”

  Charlotte closed her eyes and sighed. “Why do you talk like that?”

  “Like what?”

  “Like you’re giving a speech and everyone knows who you are?”

  “But don’t they know who I am?” Adam said.

  “Not really,” she said. “You’re just some guy who’s shown up proclaiming his desire to embrace the proletariat.”

  “Is he going to stay for the night?” Véronique asked.

  “Yes,” Adam said.

  “No,” Charlotte said.

  “I am going to stay the night,” he said to Charlotte.

  She stormed off toward our house. “Do what you want to, Briskowitz! No one here gives a living shit!” She marched up the back steps to our house and slammed the door.

  Adam spun around and kicked the end of his suitcase with one of his Top-Siders.

  “Will you want to eat your meals here, too?” Véronique asked. “We offer breakfast and dinner.”

  “Yes, please,” he said. “That would be very nice. Thank you.”

  “I’m Abbot Bartolozzi,” Abbot said, standing up.

  “I’m Adam Briskowitz,” he said, offering his hand.

  Abbot stared at it a moment and then looked at me and then Julien, who gave a nod, and then Abbot grabbed Adam’s hand quickly and shook it.

  “You all know why I’m here, right? I mean, with Charlotte being pregnant and all.”

  “What?” I said.

  “Oh,” Julien said. He put his hands in his pockets and took a small step backward. “Abbot,” he said. “We will look for the flies to give to the bird.”

  Abbot looked up at me. “Charlotte’s pregnant?”

  “We’ll look for flies,” Julien said.

  “Go on with Julien,” I said. “I’ll figure it out and talk to you later.”

  Julien picked up the box with the bird and they walked off toward the vineyards.

  “I knew,” Véronique said.

  “You knew?” I said.

  “I’m glad she told someone!” Adam said. “I mean, it’s not healthy to keep secrets. It really isn’t. It gums up your breathing, your blood flow.”

  “She didn’t tell me. I saw that she becomes tired suddenly,” Véronique said. “Sometimes she puts her head on the table, and she walks heavy, like her center has moved. It’s evident.” Then she turned and walked back to the house. “Bring your suitcase. I will show you your room.”

  Adam Briskowitz, I thought to myself. Briskowitzed. Is that what he meant? I didn’t mean for her to get Briskowitzed? “Adam,” I said, “are you sure?”

  “It’s why I’m here,” he said. “I’m going to get a job or something. I think people quit school and sell cars, right? I was going to be a philosophy major, so what’s one less philosophy major? I’ll ask her to marry me and she’ll say no. That’s how it’s going to go, I think.”

  “I don’t think there is just one way that people do this anymore,” I said. “There’s no blueprint.”

  He looked at me with genuine surprise.

  “Come!” Véronique said.

  “Coming!” he said, and he flipped his sunglasses back down over his glasses, picked up his suitcase, and followed Véronique across the lawn toward the back door.

  I looked at our house. In the upper window, I saw Charlotte. She looked down at me. Her face was full of light from the golden hour of dusk, her head tilted, her expression oddly serene, resigned, and I knew it was true.

  harlotte?” I knocked softly on her bedroom door. I could hear the soft chatter of the radio. “Charlotte? Can I come in?”

  The radio went silent. The doorknob turned, and I heard the latch release. If Henry were here, we’d have had a talk about this, and he’d have coached me. He’d have told me that there were things I was supposed to say. What were they? Henry would have known. He was good at these kinds of things. He knew instinctively how to be loving and open. This was my one opportunity to say the right thing. I was, most likely, never going to have a daughter—much less a pregnant teenage daughter. But I was, once upon a time, a teenager myself. What would I have wanted someone to say to me? Maybe I should start there.

  I opened the door slowly.

  Charlotte stood before me in Monoprix shorts and a T-shirt, and I remembered what she looked like in the shop with Elysius and my mother in that dress on a leash and her fishing boots. She was so strong, so incredibly tough. “He told you,” she said.

  “Charlotte, I don’t know what to say.”

  “I haven’t told anyone,” she said. “It’s a huge relief, more than anything.”

  “How long have you known?”

  “Since before the wedding,” she said.

  “That’s a long time to carry a secret like this,” I said. “Charlotte, you could have told me.”

  I walked over and hugged her. It took her a moment, but she hugged me back. She hid her eyes in the crook of my neck and started crying, and I thought not so much about the pregnancy and all that was to come, but really about Charlotte holding this heavy secret inside of her for all this time. I’d never told anyone that I’d thought I might be pregnant when Henry died, that there was a small hope, but only because I didn’t want to hand that hopefulness over to anyone else. But this was too much to ask of someone so young. She’d known during the wedding, in the boutique in that awful dress, throughout Paris and the robbery. I felt for her and started crying, too. We stood there until it grew dark outside, listening to the swallows twittering amid the noise of cicadas.

  Charlotte was breathing steadily now. We sat down on the bed.

  “I came here so I wouldn’t have to tell my parents,” she said, pulling a tissue from a box on her bedside table and wiping her nose. “They would want me to look at all of my options. I just wanted to get to the second trimester.”

  “Why?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “So you could keep it?”

  She nodded.

  “They would have supported any decision you made,” I said.

  She shook her head. “Nope,” she said. “They would flip. All of them. But that’s not even it. It’s not them,” she said. “I knew I’d want to have an abortion if I stayed. I’d see school coming, and at my school, well, it would have been worse than death. I’m privileged,” she said, disgusted by the word. “Getting pregnant is like shitting on privilege.”

  “Charlotte, this happens. It always has and it always will. Do you think that getting pregnant makes you some kind of ingrate?”

  She laughed. “Getting pregnant makes me a dipshit. The kinds of friends I have come apart at the seams because of early decisions for Harvard.”

  “How far along are you?”

  “Eight weeks, medically speaking.”

  “And how are you feeling?”

  “A little tired, but weirdly like I’m on calm drugs or something. No morning sickness, and I’m not at all bitchy. It’s totally ironic, but I think pregnancy agrees with me. I mean, I’ve never been all that maternal. I gave my dolls bad haircuts, but I want to have the baby and d
o this right.”

  “You’re so … sure,” I said.

  “It’s weird. But ever since I got here, it’s been completely clear.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  “And Briskowitz? Do you think he’ll make a good father?”

  “Briskowitz makes a good Briskowitz. He’ll be a lousy philosophy major, frankly. He talks a good game, but he’s way too scattered. As for fatherhood?” She thought about it. “He at least has a good one to model off of. Bert Briskowitz. He’s a well-mannered orthopedics man who doesn’t force Brisky to play golf. What more could you ask for in today’s fractured society?”

  “You can ask for a lot more,” I said.

  She looked at me skeptically and then down at her hands.

  I thought of Henry after the miscarriage. When he was looking for that leak in the pipes, he had popped off an access panel and then took out the handles of the tub, leaving three holes in the wall. One night, I’d left the light on in what was going to be the baby’s nursery. And so, when I walked into the bathroom, the holes in the tiled wall were lit up. I stepped into the tub, fully dressed, sat down, and looked through the holes into the nursery. I was looking in on what my life could have been. It looked perfect and unattainable from there—like someone else’s life. Abbot’s old crib was back up with new brightly colored bedding. I’d bought a fuzzy, woolly white throw rug. I knew then what I would have said if Henry had been there. I’d have told Charlotte that Henry and I would help her raise the baby. I’d have told her that she could move in with us. She could go to school, and Henry and I would manage the baby for her. We would create a new kind of family. We would make it work. But I couldn’t make this offer. What kind of a mother would I be to an infant and a sixteen-year-old in addition to Abbot? I was barely managing as it was. Instead, I said something very rational. “You have to tell your parents.”

  “Look,” she said. “I just need time. My mother is kind of off her rocker. She’s not stable. She believes in gemstones, and then she can go hysterical like Alanis Morissette tripping on acid. It’s not pretty. And my dad’s great, but he and Elysius aren’t kid-friendly. I mean, they like kids in the abstract. They love Abbot, of course. But they’re not parents by nature. Seriously, the whole time they’ve been raising me it’s been painful to watch—like people playing racquetball left-handed in high heels. None of it came to them naturally.”

  “You can’t do this without them.” I wondered if they really would flip. It was hard to say.

  “I think I can,” she said.

  “You don’t know how hard it is. And you can’t ever really know what the sacrifices will be. It was hard enough for me when Henry was by my side and we were ready. You just can’t imagine how hard it’s going to be on you and Adam.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.” She flopped onto the bed. “This is why I didn’t tell anyone.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. I didn’t want to push her. “We don’t have to have all the answers right now.”

  I stood up and walked to the window. Julien and Abbot were sitting on the back step of the Dumonteils’ house, the box at their feet. Maybe they were feeding the bird or helping to make it a nest for the night or planning where to keep it so no feral cats could get to it. And, looking down at Abbot, there was this feeling I couldn’t deny. Charlotte was pregnant, and there was a stirring of joy. I couldn’t help it. “A baby!” I whispered.

  “I know,” Charlotte said. “That’s the intense part. I’m pregnant with a baby.”

  “Is this what you were praying about in Notre-Dame and Saint Maximin?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know anything about praying. All three of my parents are agnostics,” she said. “I just kneel down and say the same thing over and over.”

  “And what was that?”

  “I kind of pretend that I’m one of the Flying Wallendas.”

  “The circus performers?”

  “I don’t know why, except I read about them when I was a kid, and they made an impression. They did these pyramids up on high wires.”

  “And so what do you pray for while pretending to be a Flying Wallenda?”

  “I’m the kind of Flying Wallenda who prays for a good net. That’s it,” she said. “Just a good net.”

  hat night, we all ate dinner together, sharing the dining room with a British family with two children who wanted fried potatoes, and three older Australian women who cornered Véronique about where they could find the best Mediterranean beaches.

  Julien was there, too. He helped his mother serve and took the two British children out into the yard to look at the fireflies so that their parents could eat in peace. When I looked out the wide windows, I saw the two children running in the grass barefoot, but Julien was watching me. And who was I now? A woman surrounded by a pregnant sixteen-year-old and her strange young boyfriend with his wild head of hair and my eight-year-old son who had to be talked out of bringing the bird in its box into the dining room with him? Everything seemed to have shifted. The fact was that Charlotte was pregnant the day before, when I’d been thinking that this was the way it was and the way it was going to be. But now all of that was gone. This was new terrain. We were all interconnected now, locked together by this secret. It wouldn’t last, of course. Charlotte would have to tell her parents—Briskowitz too—but for now, I wondered if Julien was thinking what I was thinking: What a strange family.

  Charlotte described the meal: eggplants stuffed with a mix of prosciutto, anchovies, salt pork, and mushrooms, seasoned with garlic, onion, salt, and pepper, topped with breadcrumbs, butter, and lemon.

  “You helped make this?” Adam asked Charlotte. “I thought you considered stirring fruit-on-the-bottom yogurt cooking.”

  “That was then and this is now! I know the difference between pressed and chopped garlic. I prefer pressed.”

  “Huh,” Adam said.

  “She can cook like crazy,” Abbot said.

  We were quiet for a while.

  “This is a nice place,” Adam said. He was wearing a Velvet Underground T-shirt now and had his suit jacket back on.

  “Heidi used to come here as a kid,” Charlotte said.

  “I was a bad little kid,” Adam said. “My parents didn’t believe in discipline. I once hit my brother during the movie Gandhi.”

  “Huh,” I said.

  “I learned that nonviolence is hard, which is one of the lessons of the film. But, in general, because my parents were softies, I’ve had to learn things the hard way.”

  “And what way is that?” I asked.

  “I got beat up a couple of times for being snotty,” he said. “And I went to a do-good liberal school that made us interact with and serve the poor. That stuff is pretty artificial, but it does sink in.”

  Charlotte couldn’t even look at him. He’d come all this way. I felt sorry for him, but I wasn’t so sure that I should. Charlotte would have good reason to be cold.

  Abbot was the one to bring up the pregnancy. I’d told him before we came in that Charlotte was indeed pregnant. That she was too young, really, and that would make it hard on her. But we can be happy for her. That was about all I had time to cover.

  Now Abbot said, “I know that just because you’re pregnant doesn’t mean you’re married. Like Jill and Marcy.” This was a lesbian couple, friends of ours, one of whom had twins through in vitro.

  “Actually, Jill and Marcy are pretty much married,” I said. “They’ve been together for ten years or more.”

  “Oh,” Abbot said. “Are you a lesbian?” he asked Charlotte.

  “Nope,” she said. “Unfortunately, that’s not my calling.”

  “Oh, so you’d prefer to be a lesbian right now?” Adam said. “Very nice.”

  “I was just saying that if I were a lesbian, I wouldn’t be in this situation.”

  Adam looked at Abbot. “I’m going to ask Charlotte to marry me.”

  “And Charlotte is going to say no,” Charlotte
said.

  “See?” he said to me. “I told you she was going to say no.”

  “I’m going to say no because it’s a bad idea. What are you, from the 1950s all of a sudden?” she said.

  “I’m trying to do the right thing,” he said. “And last I checked, getting married was the right thing.”

  “Last I checked, you thought that marriage was the institutionalization of patriarchal dominance. You thought that marriage was just condescending tax code.”

  “I was probably high,” he said, and then he looked at Abbot and then said to me, “No offense. I don’t smoke weed anymore.”

  “None taken,” I said.

  “It’s seriously been, like, two months.”

  “Okay,” I said, not sure that this was really cause for celebration.

  “Why aren’t you going to say yes to getting married?” Abbot asked Charlotte.

  “I’m not getting married, because it just doesn’t apply to sixteen-year-olds, Absterizer. Parental units or not,” Charlotte said.

  “Gotcha,” Adam said. “And so this has nothing to do with the fact that you don’t love me enough?”

  “You want to get married because I’m pregnant. What’s that got to do with loving me enough?”

  This was said a little loudly, garnering the attention of the British and the Australians alike.

  “Do your parents know?” I asked Adam quietly.

  “Not exactly,” he said.

  “What’s that mean?” Charlotte asked.

  “They know I’m here,” he said. “They just happen to think that I’m here on a tour of famous French painters.” He looked at me. “My mother is the one in charge of educational expenditures, and she’s a little disconnected.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Listen, you both need to tell your parents. I’ll give you a couple days—three, tops—to get some kind of plan, or at least talking points, and then you’ve got to call them.”