by Gully Wells
After it was all over we—my mother, Nick, Peter, Rebecca, and a few others—walked over to Freddie’s favorite restaurant, L’Étoile, on Charlotte Street for lunch. I must have been seven or eight the first time he took me there, guiding me through the French menu, gently suggesting I might like to try something other than sole meunière; why didn’t I have turbot or the civet de lièvre with gratin dauphinois? No, thank you, I was a boring little creature of habit, and always had sole, always on the bone, and if it happened to be a lady, carefully separated the fat worm of roe from the rest of the fish and dipped it into the melted butter before gobbling it up. Nothing seemed to have changed in the thirty years since: Most of the dishes on the menu were the same, white-lace-bordered curtains still hung in the windows, and—greedy for the past, clinging to every remembrance of him, hungry for childish comfort—I knew exactly what I was going to order.
Le Bébé
ABOUT SIX WEEKS AFTER I gave birth to Rebecca, I had gone back to see Dr. Scher for a checkup. With understandable professional pride he examined his neat little incision, pronouncing it to be “healing very nicely. You’ll be back in a bikini in no time,” and then we moved on to the subject of birth control. Birth control—was he completely insane? How could he possibly imagine that, having spent the past four years trying to become pregnant, I would ever want to “control” this all-too-elusive process? Dr. Scher looked a bit taken aback at the vehemence of my response, but he was probably used to dealing with crazy hormonally unbalanced ladies, and said he understood completely and looked forward to delivering my next baby. “But not too soon, I hope,” he added, smiling.
He needn’t have worried. Over the next nine years the whole infertility psychodrama revved up once again, and with each month’s evident failure to become pregnant, I was back in the hands of the doctors, clutching glass jars of murky liquid in my armpit and delivering them to Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital. However this time the problem wasn’t just the creatures, it was also my aging, sluggish, no-good eggs. Dr. David, who occupied a reassuring, wood-paneled office on Park Avenue, his desk covered in silver-framed photographs of his numerous grinning children, said they needed to be shocked out of their catatonic stupor with some serious drugs.
“Are you sitting down?” I didn’t recognize her voice, and yes, I did happen to be sitting at my desk, feeling depressed because none of the drugs had worked, and by the way who was this? “The lab results just came back,” Dr. David’s assistant said, “and you’re pregnant!” I celebrated by bursting into tears, and Rebecca and Peter celebrated by taking their delirious mother/wife out to dinner since she was clearly in no state to cook for them that night.
When my mother heard this shocking news she remarked to a mutual friend—quite accurately—that I was much too old and poor to have another baby. At forty-three I was certainly aged, and of course we had no money, but I refused to see any connection between these two undeniable facts and the exquisite little person growing inside me. On October 22, 1994, Dr. Scher got out his scalpel once more—like his sister, Alexander had refused to enter the world the conventional way—and made another neat incision, out of which he popped, looking, according to his dad, deeply affronted by this uncalled-for disturbance in his peaceful aqueous existence. His grandmother, a lifelong connoisseur of good-looking men, pronounced him “a handsome little bugger,” and so he has remained to this day.
Now that my mother was living in London, and Nick was working at an establishment called the Arvon Foundation in Devon, where credulous punters paid good money to be introduced to the mysteries of “creative writing” by people like Will Self and Beryl Bainbridge, our summers in France became the only time we could be together en famille. All this bouncing about between New York and London and the calamities of the “real” world made La Migoua—the house that never changed, the one constant in all our lives, the place where we felt settled and indisputably at home—seem all the more comforting. Fathers died, girlfriends went mad, lovers left, husbands shouted, apartments were sold, but this totally undistinguished little house in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by olive trees and vines, had some ineffable quality that slipped down like Valium to calm our jittery souls.
As soon as I walked into the kitchen I recognized the familiar cool musty smell, I saw the one-handled pot that the one-armed Algerian in the junkyard in Toulon had given us thirty years before, the big-bellied grandfather clock stood in the corner, and upstairs, the handsome little bugger would go to sleep in the same curly white wrought-iron crib that my mother had carefully lined in netting—“Can’t have the critter getting its head stuck”—when Nick had been a baby. Dressed in a billowing Edwardian gentleman’s nightshirt from the market in Le Beausset, her hair now pewter gray, her eyes bluer than ever, my mother came downstairs, happy and amazed that Alain had managed to find us among the huddled masses at Marseille airport and had brought us safely back to where we belonged.
The marble-topped table beneath the lime tree, where Freddie used to work, was still there, but instead of being covered in his papers, it had uncaringly turned itself into a dining table that had already been set for lunch. I glared at it, just as I had glared at poor Isaiah Berlin, who had been sitting quite innocently, near us at L’Étoile, after the memorial meeting, and had the temerity to be alive, enjoying his cheese soufflé, while Freddie inhabited a box at the back of the same dark closet where his suits still hung. After lunch Isaiah had come over and said all the right things, so I decided to forgive him, but it would take me a bit longer to come to terms with the table.
Sitting about after we had finished eating, it didn’t take my mother long to move on to one of her favorite topics: her daughter’s stubborn refusal to acquire a driver’s license. “Jesus, when are you going to learn to drive? You can’t just go on using poor old Alain for the rest of your life, you know.” Ah yes, a very good question and one that, year after year, I failed to answer because I honestly had no idea when that miraculous day would come. How it had happened I do not know, but somehow the misguided notion that men had been put on this earth to do things for me, including drive me around, had gotten into my head, and despite plenty of evidence to the contrary, refused to leave.
Maybe it was my father’s fault. All those years of being the sole object of his adoring attention, all those trips around Europe, just the two of us, in his little white convertible that smelled of new shoes, all those leather-bound books stuffed full of letters I had written him, my artless drawings, photographs of us together—no wonder I believed that men were naturally disposed to give me an extremely good time. Then again, maybe it was a reaction against my mother’s fierce independence and determination to prove that anything they could do, she could do far better herself. Whatever its origins the end result was the same. If I wanted to go anywhere that trains didn’t reach, “poor old Alain” had to drive me, an arrangement that, much to my mother’s irritation, turned out to suit us both admirably.
Although I’ve never had much time for the kind of lushly mirrored, damasked, gilded, Limoged, multistarred restaurant that Alain Ducasse created at Le Louis XV in Monte Carlo, when I heard that he had opened a simple country inn high up in the hills of Haute-Provence, I thought that maybe the other Alain and I should go and investigate. “Simple,” I was to discover, in Monsieur Ducasse’s vocabulary, is an entirely relative concept.
It was just after dusk when we arrived at La Bastide de Moustiers. A single black cypress tree, as elongated as a Giacometti, stood silhouetted against the wall, the cool night air was full of the scent of rosemary and roasting gigot d’agneau, and the old stones surrounding the front door had soaked up the sun’s rays and were still warm to the touch. In the kitchen, baskets full of fresh vegetables and fruit were arranged on a long wooden table: baby courgettes with their butter yellow blossoms still attached—a lost bumblebee buzzing about above them—orange tomatoes the size of gooseberries, and a mixture of white currants and fraises des bois that would later b
e transformed into fruit tartlets. One of the chefs was pouring a dollop of thick green olive oil—the color and consistency of motor oil—over a pan of miniature aubergines that he shook gently over an open fire. Dinner would be served in half an hour.
For pampered souls, exhausted by a lifetime of frowning at enormous tasseled menus, what could be more of a luxury than being handed a single creamy card that describes what the chef has already decided you will be having for dinner that night? So charming, so simple, so easy—it was just like being at home, except that of course it wasn’t at all. Neither my mother nor Alain’s wife could ever have produced a meal like his. Tomatoes stuffed with some magic combination involving basil and olives; michon bread, full of all the flavor and strength that ordinary baguettes lack; a classic Niçoise crêpe made of chickpeas (pois chiches); courgette blossoms (sans bee); the gigot d’agneau I had seen roasting over the kitchen fire, flavored with poivre d’âne, an herb that grows wild in Provence and nowhere else. I looked across the table at Alain, and we both smiled. “Pas mal?” he asked, and I had to agree that it was “pas mal de tout.” Nor was it over yet.
A wooden platter appeared, covered with more varieties of goat cheese than I knew existed: some smooth and blue with a hard crust, others covered in fresh herbs, tiny pyramids of sharp flavor, logs of creaminess, and none of them had traveled more than twenty kilometers to arrive at our table. No other kinds of cheese were permitted. No Brie de Meaux, no Camembert from the Pays d’Auge, no Saint-Florentin from Burgundy, no Comté from the Jura, no Bleu de Bresse—all would have violated La Bastide’s fanatical devotion to its own Provençal terroir.
These days there are only a few winemakers left who still maintain the old tradition of cultivating the special peach trees among their vines that produce the famous pêches de vignes. Tiny white peaches that are the concentrated, perfumed essence of peachiness on account of being left to ripen slowly on the trees and not ever being watered, they are almost impossible to find in any market, and I have never actually seen one with my own eyes. But that night I tasted them, in the form of an oh-so-simple sorbet, for the first and only time in my life.
When simplicity is raised to this level of perfection it is really most confusing and can’t help but put you in mind of Marie Antoinette, who, just before the deluge, had discovered that there is nothing more soothing to a jaded psyche than country living. Exhausted by the stress and strain of her very public life, tired of the formal rituals and endless banquets, she chose to escape to her faux-rustique toy farm hidden away in the woods at Versailles. There she could dress in muslin, not satin, drink milk still warm from her own cows, and live the kind of bucolic existence that no real peasant could ever dare to dream of. It was a world in which cottages were covered in fragrant wildflowers, the lambs’ fleeces were as white as snow, the baby vegetables emerged from the potager covered in dew, not dirt, and the pretty young shepherdesses all had rosy complexions, milky bosoms, and smiling eyes. Instead of sitting down at a damask-covered table in the Hall of Mirrors and eating off golden plates, the doomed queen and her entourage would picnic outdoors at a wooden trestle table in the shade of an old chestnut tree. Which was just what Alain and I had done that night.
WHILE MARIE ANTOINETTE HAD BEEN frolicking at La Bastide de Moustiers, all manner of hell had broken out at La Migoua. No, my mother hadn’t had another heart attack, but she had been taken to the hospital; she would need to have some tests and probably stay there for a couple of days. It was not a happy scene. Nick was wild-eyed with worry; Katharine, a large, kindhearted friend of my mother’s from New York, was crashing around the kitchen boiling up a cauldron of artichokes for nobody in particular; Alexander wanted to go to the beach—my mother was sick and everything was falling apart. Screw the artichokes. What we all needed was to go out to dinner that night, and the place we needed to go was called L’Oursinado.
Lulu Peyraud had told me about this restaurant the summer we had cooked bouillabaisse together. Hidden away on its own rocky spit of land, surrounded by crooked umbrella pines, high above a secret cove, it had an air of passé but still sexy chic, the kind of place that Romy Schneider and Alain Delon might have gone for an adulterous dinner in a sixties movie—or in real life. In homage to its name, we ordered a huge platter of oursins—Rebecca was persuaded to take one bite of their strange orange flesh but refused to contemplate a second—and in honor of Madame Peyraud bouillabaisse followed—the children were understandably even more horrified by this dish—and to calm us all down we had a digestif of local marc, to settle all the fishy creatures I imagined were still swimming around inside me. Yes, all in all, I told myself complacently, L’Oursinado had indeed been one of my more inspired ideas.
The rest of the evening was considerably less edifying. The first sign of trouble, as Alain was driving me home, was an open suitcase—a bottle of shampoo, bras, the odd shoe, a hairbrush, crumpled clothes scattered about—in the middle of the road up to the house. The second was the sound of sweet gentle Nick screaming, “Get out now. You are not spending another night in this house. Go find a hotel, just get out!” What fresh hell was this? Katharine was collapsed in a heap on the sofa, Nick was apoplectic, the children were cowering up on the top floor, and Alain drove off just as fast as his trusty taxi could take him down the hill to the relative sanity of his wife in Le Beausset.
I poured Katharine a drink, always the first step in these tricky situations, told her there was no question of her going to any hotel, ran upstairs to reassure the kids, and took poor Nick, who was totally unhinged with worry about our mother in the hospital, outside so he could explain what the fuck was going on.
“What’s her bloody suitcase doing back up here? You know I’m only going to kick it down the road again.”
Well, all right if you must, but maybe while you’re kicking you can tell me what happened? So I stumbled alongside Nick in the dark, and the whole story came out.
“The stupid cow was gossiping on the telephone about us.”
Apparently Katharine had said Nick was leading poor innocent little Rebecca down the slippery slope to debauchery—and no doubt drugs—by taking her to a sleazy pool hall after dinner, and that I was clearly having a tempestuous affair with a local cabdriver.
He gave the suitcase another kick. “And she said that this was the most dysfunctional family she had ever seen”—I picked up an armful of clothes—“I couldn’t take it any longer so I snatched the receiver from her hand, slammed it down, and told her to get out.”
Oh I see. Grateful as I was for Nick’s robust but unnecessary defense of my honor, and tactless though Katharine undoubtedly had been, surely we couldn’t chuck a lady out into the night. Later on I brokered the best deal I could. Poor old Alain would be summoned in the morning to cart Katharine off to the train station in Toulon, I would help her retrieve her suitcase and its scattered contents, and now could we please all just go to bed?
The next day my mother got back from the hospital and started complaining about the state of the kitchen. “Jesus, can’t you guys at least do the dishes when I’m not around?” which cheered us all up. And I am happy to report that the rest of our dysfunctional family’s summer went by in an entirely peaceful, uneventful blur.
La Jambe
I HAD NEVER HEARD OF Buerger’s disease until the day my aunt called me in New York and told me that my mother was in the hospital. Also known as thromboangiitis obliterans, it is a recurring inflammation of the small and medium veins and arteries of the hands and feet. There is no known cure. As the disease progresses, the circulation of blood in the extremities is so restricted that gangrene sets in and amputation is necessary. The disease is strongly associated with smoking.
My mother had already had two heart attacks, the second far more severe than the first, and although she had tried to stop smoking, she never completely succeeded. And even if she had been able to pack it up, how can you erase the damage caused by fifty years of relentless addiction to cigarett
es? By the time I arrived in London the doctors were discussing just how much of her right foot, and possibly leg, would have to be amputated.
Brave she had always been. She mocked the hell that came her way, refused to cave in to self-pity; she didn’t believe in asking for help or showing weakness. Wit was her weapon of choice against fear—that’s how she had behaved all through her life. And now, face-to-face with true horror, why should she have changed? Just before the operation she wrote to her old friend Claus von Bülow:
They, the ultimate THEY, are coming shortly to do whatever it is they are going to do and so just in case I pull an involuntary Oates on the expedition, I wanted to thank a few—you in particular—for noble and kind behavior. It was so good of you to make the boring trip [to the hospital] so often, and it was much appreciated. I suspect they’re going to go for that particularly skinny easy-chop area just below the knee—I don’t think there’s a hope of saving my poor little foot that has been with me since I was a baby … they haven’t said any of this, mind you, but they have shifty eyes when they speak and they say guarded things.
Still in the hospital after the amputation, she called another old friend, the art dealer Gene Thaw, in New York, and said, laughing, “Next week I’m getting fitted for a parrot.” But the jolly old wooden leg would take much longer to fit, and in the meantime she was sent home in a wheelchair to a house that was nothing but stairs. Nick was living in the basement flat in York Street, and without him I don’t know how she could ever have managed at all. Friends rallied—most especially Claus—and her sister, Beegoonie, who had nursed her through her last heart attack, was nearby and ready to help with anything, anytime. But she was still alone. Even in the days when she’d had two legs she hadn’t been any good at it, she hated it, it had never been her thing, and now it must have been torture.