“Bonjour,” Julien and I say.
“You two are together,” he says, with a wink. “I said that you were and you did not believe. But now you do?”
I look at Julien. “Now we do,” I say.
We invite the officer in. He sets the suitcase down on its wheels and pulls it along. It is beaten, faded, worn. But the police officer looks triumphant. “This is yours?” he says.
“I think so,” I say.
Charlotte emerges from the bathroom, her face moist, holding the baby, tightly wrapped in a thin blanket. “Who is it?”
“Could you call Abbot and Frieda in from the field?” I ask.
She nods and walks quickly out of the room. I can hear her voice, calling for them out the back door.
“I found this,” the officer says. “And I remember you. You are friends with Daryl Hannah, no?”
“No,” I tell him. “I never really said that.”
He sighs. “Well.” He waves away this detail. “This is something stolen from you by the thieves, no?”
Abbot and Frieda run in to the room, see the cop, and freeze.
“Bonjour,” the officer says, in a very officious tone.
“Bonjour!” they answer in unison.
Charlotte walks in, patting the baby’s back. “What’s going on? Is that your suitcase, Absterizer?”
Abbot looks at me. “Is it?”
“I think so,” I say.
The officer tips the handle toward me. My hands are covered with sugar, and so Julien takes it and lays it on the floor so that Abbot can have at it. He kneels down, and Frieda plops cross-legged beside him, her frizzy curls bouncing around her head.
“The suitcase was left on the side of the road all year. But it was found and I remember this detail!” the officer says. “You put a star next to this one item on your list. And I did not forget this star!”
Abbot unzips the dirty suitcase and opens it. The clothes smell bad. They’re dry but mildewed. Frieda holds her nose and shakes her head, scooting away. But Abbot picks through the clothes until he finds what he’s looking for. “Mom,” he says, “it’s still here.” He pulls out the dictionary. The binding is warped, and the cover is deeply rippled. It’s dried but a little swollen. Abbot opens it up to the inscription, which is blurred but legible.
“Le dictionaire!” the officer says, beaming. “It’s been discovered!”
Frieda looks at Abbot, confused.
“It was gone,” he tells her. “It’s special and it was gone, but it came home to us!” And this was home, just like that. Home. The dictionary came home to us, like my mother after the lost summer, like the letters I sent her, like every small sadness that—strangely, and when you least expect it—can return as joy.
Julien puts his arm around me, and I grab the front of his shirt with one fist. “It’s a gift,” he says. “Take the gift.”
“It’s all a gift,” I tell him. “All of it.”
~le fin~
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the villagers of Puyloubier for their hospitality and incredible patience, especially the beautiful and warmhearted Laurent and Jerome, who were generous beyond measure. I would like to thank the glamorous duo, the mayor and his wife, Frédéric and Beatrice Guinieri, and J.F., for his graciousness. Elizabeth Dumon, thank you for answering all of my questions about your gorgeous home, land, vineyard, and Gallo-Roman dig, as well as your fantastic cuisine. Thank you for being so kind to the multiple generations of my family. Kevin Walsh, I very much appreciate all of the information about the archaeological dig and your important work in the field. Thank you, Melina, for getting us all set up, and Eric for being a man of action. And, after the robbery, we relied on the generosity of Helene Mitchell and her husband, the witty Brit. Thank you. (While I’m at it, I’ll thank their dinner guest, Neal, who made a deep and lasting impression on me, giving me a charge that I will spend my life trying to fulfill.) A thankful shout-out to the Trets Police Department! And, yes, Bastien, our occasional extra kid, thank you for the lessons! Jacob Newberry, thank you for the translation help. Frankie Giampietro, how I’ve come to rely on you and your brilliant mind. Thank you, Florida State University. Margaret Kyle, thank you for your insight into the artistry of pastries—the blur of food and love. Linda Richards, master pastry chef, thank you for allowing me into the world of The Cake Shop, a beautiful place to dream. And I thank those kids in tow, the ones who gave me the child’s-eye view—Ph., F., T., O., and Lola. And, as ever, thank you to David. Let me say it again—yes.
Thank you, Nat Sobel. Il faut d’abord durer!
And thank you, most of all, Caitlin Alexander, my worldclass editor. I am indebted. Thank you for all of the love and care you poured into the making of this book.
If you enjoyed
The Provence Cure for the Brokenhearted,
you won’t want to miss any of Bridget Asher’s novels.
Read on for excerpts from
The Pretend Wife
“Riveting … charming and insightful.”—New York Post
“A good choice for a book group … Read The Pretend Wife and see if it doesn’t bring back memories of past relationships.”
—The Huntington News
and
My Husband’s Sweethearts
“A gem of a story about love in its various forms … You won’t be able to put it down.”—Newark Star-Ledger
“An undiluted joy to read … Don’t miss this ride.”
—JOSHILYN JACKSON, author of Backseat Saints
Available now from Bantam Books
The Pretend Wife
CHAPTER ONE
That summer when I first became Elliot Hull’s pretend wife, I understood only vaguely that complicated things often prefer to masquerade as simple things at first. This is why they’re so hard to avoid, or at least brace for. I should have known this—it was built into my childhood. But I didn’t see the complications of Elliot Hull coming, perhaps because I didn’t want to. So I didn’t avoid them or even brace for them, and as a result, I eventually found myself in winter watching two grown men—my pretend husband and my real husband—wrestle on a front lawn amid a spray of golf clubs in the snow—such a blur of motion in the dim porch light that I couldn’t distinguish one man from the other. This would become one of the most vaudevillian and poignant moments of my life, when things took the sharpest turn in a long and twisted line of smaller, seemingly simple turns.
Here is the simple beginning: I was standing in line in a crowded ice-cream shop—the whir of a blender, the fogged glass counter, the humidity pouring in from the door with its jangling bell. It was late summer, one of the last hot days of the season. The air-conditioning was rolling down from overhead and I’d paused under one of the cool currents, causing a small hiccup in the line. Peter was off talking to someone from work: Gary, a fellow anesthesiologist—a man in a pink-striped polo shirt, surrounded by his squat children holding ice-cream cones melting into softened napkins. The kids were small enough not to care that they were eating bits of their napkins along with the ice cream. And Gary was too distracted to notice. He was clapping Peter on the back and laughing loudly, which is what people do to Peter. I’ve never understood why, exactly, except that people genuinely like him. He’s disarming, affable. There’s something about him, the air of someone who’s in the club—what club, I don’t know, but he seemed to be the laid-back president of this club, and when you were talking with him, you were in the club too. But my mind was on the kids in that moment—I felt sorry for them, and I decided that one day I’d be the kind of mother not to let her children eat bits of soggy napkin. I don’t remember what kind of mother mine was—distracted or hovering or, most likely, both? She died when I was five years old. In some pictures, she’s doting on me—cutting a birthday cake outside, her hair flipping up in the breeze. But in group photos, she’s always the one looking off to the side, down in her own lap, or to some distant point beyond the photographer—like a
n avid bird-watcher. And my father was not a reliable source of information. It pained him, so he rarely talked about her.
I was watching the scene intently—Peter specifically now, because instead of becoming more comfortable with having a husband, after three years I was becoming more surprised by it. Or maybe I was more surprised not that I was his wife but that I was anybody’s wife, really. The word wife was so wifey that it made me squeamish—it made me think of aprons and meat loaf and household cleansers. You’d think the word would have evolved for me by that point—or perhaps it had evolved for most people into cell phones and aftercare and therapy, but I was the one who was stuck—like some gilled species unable to breathe up on the mudflats.
Although Peter and I had been together for a total of five years, I felt like I didn’t know him at all sometimes. Like at that very moment, as he was being back-clapped and jostled by the guy in the pink-striped polo shirt, I felt as if I’d spotted some rare species called husband in its natural habitat. I was wondering what its habits were—eating, chirping, wingspan, mating, life expectancy. It’s difficult to explain, but more and more often I’d begun to rear back like this, to witness my life as a National Geographic reporter, someone with a British accent who found my life not so much exciting as curious.
The ice-cream shop was packed, and the two high school girls on staff were stressed, their faces damp and pinched, bangs sticking to their foreheads, their matching eyeliner gone smeary. I’d finally made my way to the curved counter and placed my order. Soon enough I was holding a cone of pistachio for Peter and waiting for a cup of vanilla frozen yogurt for myself.
That’s when the more beleaguered of the two scoopers finished someone else’s order and shouted to a customer behind me. “What do you want?”
A man answered. “I’ll have two scoops of Gwen Merchant, please.”
I spun around, sure I’d misheard, because I am Gwen Merchant—or I was before I got married. But there in the line behind me stood a ghost from my past—Elliot Hull. I was instantly overwhelmed by the sight of him—Elliot Hull with his thick dark hair and his beautiful eyebrows, standing there with his hands in his pockets looking tender and boyish. I don’t know why, but I felt like I’d been waiting for him, without knowing I’d been waiting for him. And I wasn’t so much happy as I was relieved that he’d finally shown up again. Some strange but significant part of me felt like throwing my arms around him, as if he’d come to save me, and saying, Thank God, you finally showed up! What took you so long? Let’s get out of here.
But I couldn’t really have been thinking this. Not way back then. I must be projecting—backward—and there must be a term for this: projecting backward, but I don’t know what it is. I couldn’t have been thinking that Elliot Hull had come to save me because I didn’t even know I needed saving. (And, of course, I’d have to save myself in the end.) The only conclusion I can draw is that maybe he represented some lost part of myself. And I must have realized on some level that it wasn’t that I’d been missing only Elliot Hull. I must have been missing the person I’d been when I’d known him—that Gwen Merchant—the somewhat goofy, irreverent, seriously un-wifely part—two scoops of her.
My Husband’s Sweethearts
CHAPTER ONE
Don’t Try to Define Love Unless
You Need a Lesson in Futility
Careening past airline counters toward the security check-in, I’m explaining love and its various forms of failure to Lindsay, my assistant. Amid the hive of travelers—retirees in Bermuda shorts, cats in carry-on boxes perforated with air holes, hassled corporate stiffs—I find myself in the middle of a grand oration on love with a liberal dose of rationalizations. I’ve fallen in love with lovable cheats. I’ve adored the wrong men for the wrong reasons. I’m culpable. I’ve suffered an unruly heart and more than my share of prolonged bouts of poor judgment. I have lacked some basics in the area of control. For example: I had no control over the fact that I fell in love with Artie Shoreman—a man eighteen years my senior. I had no control over the fact that I am still in love with him even after I found out, in one fell swoop, that he had three affairs during our four-year marriage. Two were lovers he’d had before we got married, but had kept in touch with—held on to, really, like parting gifts from his bachelorhood, living memorabilia. Artie didn’t want to call these affairs because they were spur-of-the-moment. They weren’t premeditated. He trotted out terminology like fling and dalliance. The third affair he called accidental.
And I have no control over the fact that I am angry that Artie’s gotten so sick—so deathbedish—in the midst of this and that I blame him for his dramatic flair. I have no control over the compulsion I feel to go back home to him right now, bailing out of a speech on convoluted SEC regulations—because my mother has told me in a middle-of-the-night, bad-news phone call that his health is grave. I have no control over the fact that I’m still furious at Artie for being a cheat just when one might, possibly, expect me to soften, at least a little.
I’m telling Lindsay how I left Artie shortly after I found out about the affairs and how that was the right thing to do six months ago. I tell her how all three affairs were revealed at once—like some awful game show.
Lindsay is petite. Her jacket sleeves are always a bit too long for her, as if she’s wearing an older sister’s hand-me-downs that she hasn’t quite grown into. She has silky blond hair that swings around like she’s trapped in a shampoo commercial, and she wears small glasses that slip down the bridge of a nose so perfect and narrow I’m not sure how she breathes through it. It’s as if her nose were designed as an accent piece without regard to function. She knows this whole story, of course. She’s nodding along in full agreement. I forge on.
I tell her that this hasn’t been so bad, opting for business trip after business trip, a few months hunkered down with one client and then another, every convention opportunity—a life of short-term corporate rentals and hotel rooms. It was supposed to allow me some time and space to get my heart together. The plan was that when I saw Artie again, I’d be ready, but I’m not.
“Love can’t be ordered around or even run by a nice-enough democracy,” I tell Lindsay. My definition of a democracy consists of polling the only two people I’ve chosen to confide in—my anxiety-prone office assistant, Lindsay, who at this very moment is clipping along next to me through JFK airport’s terminal, and my overwrought mother, who’s got me on speed dial.
“Love refuses to barter,” I say. “It won’t haggle with you like that Turkish man with the fake Gucci bags.” My mother insists I get her a fake Gucci bag each time I’m in New York on business; my carry-on is bulging with fake Gucci at this very moment.
“Love isn’t logical,” I insist. “It’s immune to logic.” In my case: my husband is a cheater and a liar, therefore I should move on or decide to forgive him, which is an option that I’ve heard some women actually choose in situations like this.
Lindsay says, “Of course, Lucy. No doubt about it!”
There’s something about Lindsay’s confident tone that rattles me. She’s often overly positive, and sometimes her high-salaried agreement makes me double-think. I try to carry on with the speech. I say, “I have to stick by my mistakes, though, including the ones that I came by naturally through my mother.” My mother—the Queen of Poor Judgment in Men. I flash on an image of her in a velour sweat suit, smiling at me with a mix of hopeful pride and pity. “I have to stick by my mistakes because they’ve made me who I am. And I’m someone that I’ve come to like—except when I get flustered ordering elaborate side dishes in sushi restaurants, in which case I’m completely overbearing, I know.”
“No kidding,” Lindsay agrees, a little too quickly.
And now I stop in the middle of the airport—my laptop swinging forward, my little carry-on suitcase wheels coming to a quick halt (I’ve only packed necessities—Lindsay will ship the rest of my things later). “I’m not ready to see him,” I say.
“Artie n
eeds you,” my mother had told me during last night’s phone call. “He is your husband still, after all. And it’s very bad form to leave a dying husband, Lucy.”
This was the first time that anyone had said that Artie was going to die—aloud, matter-of-factly. Until that moment it had been serious, surely, but he’s still young—only fifty. He comes from a long line of men who died young, but that shouldn’t mean anything—not with today’s advances in medicine. “He’s just being dramatic,” I told my mother, trying to return to the old script, the one where we joke about Artie’s dire attempts to get me back.
“But what if he isn’t just being dramatic?” she said. “You need to be here. Your being away now, well, it’s bad karma. You’ll come back in your next life as a beetle.”
“Since when do you talk about karma?” I asked.
“I’m dating a Buddhist now,” my mother said. “Didn’t I tell you that?”
Lindsay has grabbed my elbow. “Are you okay?”
“My mother is dating a Buddhist,” I tell her, as if explaining how terribly wrong everything is. My eyes have filled with tears. The airport signs overhead go blurry. “Here.” I hand her my pocketbook. “I won’t be able to find my ID.”
She leads me to a set of phones near an elevator and starts digging through my purse. I can’t root through it right now. I can’t because I know what’s stuffed inside—all the little cards that I’ve pulled from little envelopes stuck in small plastic green forks accompanying the daily deliveries of flowers that Artie’s ordered long distance. He’s found me no matter what hotel room I’m in or apartment I’m put up in anywhere I happen to be in the continental U.S. (How does he know where I am? Who gives him my itinerary—my mother? I’ve always suspected her, but have never told her to stop. Secretly, I like Artie to know where I am. Secretly, I need the flowers, even though part of me hates them—and him.)
The Provence Cure for the Brokenhearted Page 31