by Laura Fraser
BUT I CAN’T hide out in Nevada forever.
Even back when this was a divorce ranch, the society women had to leave after six weeks of carousing with the cowboys and take the train back to New York. I have to go back to work, back out into the world, and get past my fear. Because as afraid as I suddenly am of being alone, of being hurt, violated, victimized—all the worst-case scenarios of being a single, independent woman—I am more afraid that I am going to lose touch with some essential part of who I am. I’m not sure who I would be if I were not, at heart, that kid who wanted to hop freight trains, was unafraid to walk around the cobblestone streets of San Miguel de Allende and try to chat with the locals, who idolized glamorous Brenda Starr, went three thousand miles away to college, and then set off to travel in the Mediterranean alone. I only know I would be depressed, and I am not, by nature, depressed. I have to get over this.
So I wave good-bye to Maya, put the top down, and drive over the Sierras back to San Francisco. It is one of the few times, at home, when I wish I had a regular job to get up and go to every morning, instead of trying to engage in the optimistic and uncertain business of coming up with ideas and stories and trying to sell them. I pitch a bunch of article ideas, none of them quite right, nothing moving, until one day an editor calls and asks if I could please do a quick story about bicycling in Provence, focusing on the food and bringing along a female friend who also likes to ride. This is one of those moments when you scrub and scrub and then a fairy godmother appears and waves her magic wand. Of course I’d like to go to Provence with a friend, in safe company.
Because I’m still feeling nervous about traveling, I ask someone very familiar and comfortable, whom I’ve known my whole life, to come along—my cousin Charlotte, who is an extraordinary cook and speaks perfect French. I know she will be as eager as I am to sample the ratatouille, tapenade, figs, pastries, and wines of the region, to taste the simple, rich pleasures of a cuisine that Roger Vergé, one of the greatest chefs of the south of France, describes as “gay, healthful, and natural, gathering together the gifts of the soil like an armful of wildflowers.”
Arriving in the center of Avignon by train from Paris is like stepping out of a high-tech transportation corridor into a medieval fairy tale, with fourteenth-century stone palaces and narrow, winding streets. Charlotte greets me at the hotel with a bottle of Côtes du Rhône to inaugurate our trip. From the start, it turns out to be a comfort to travel with someone I’ve known my whole life and a pleasure to expand not only our relationship but also my understanding of all things French. Whereas I speak only a few phrases, Charlotte is fluent; though I can appreciate an extraordinary meal, she can dissect its ingredients and technique.
In the morning, we wander around, stepping out onto the Pont d’Avignon bridge that stretches over just half the Rhône. We could admire the town’s imposing palaces and whimsical shop windows all morning, but our noses lead us to the market instead. There, we are overwhelmed by the baskets of baby vegetables, bunches of fragrant lavender and thyme, mounds of olives and capers, and perfect rounds of cheese. We buy a few ripe figs and then meander to a pâtisserie, where we savor a flaky pastry stuffed with spinach and goat cheese. Charlotte is so knowledgeable about French food that I nickname her “Cousine Cuisine.”
We meet up with our group in the morning and begin our cycling in a tiny hilltop town, Crillon-le-Brave, which has a splendid view of Mont Ventoux, the bald-headed mountain that dominates the region (and that the poet Petrarch climbed in 1335, becoming the first person in recorded history to go mountain climbing for fun). The hotel is a collection of centuries-old stone houses cobbled together with lush pocket gardens. When we check into our suite, Charlotte opens the latches on the windows overlooking the villages and valley below, then twirls around the room. “Okay,” she says, clapping her hands, “I’m happy.”
We take a warm-up spin around the Plateau de Vaucluse, where the fields are thick with lavender. As we ride side by side on the empty country roads, catching up, I realize that Charlotte is as anxious as I am to get back in touch with something deep, true, and unafraid about herself. This is Charlotte’s first trip since her daughter, who is three, was born. She both revels in the freedom to be in adult company—which I take for granted—and aches for her little girl. Since childhood, Charlotte, a petite strawberry blonde, has always been a dynamo—a gymnastics champ, ballerina, concert pianist, artist, caterer, competitive runner. She’s entirely focused, and it seems there’s nothing she can’t do well. But the birth of her daughter brought her low, bluer than she’s ever been, and ever since she’s had bouts of feeling guilty about being depressed when she has such a darling baby, out of touch with her athletic body, her identity lost, feeling trapped in the house, uncertain of her future. Cycling in the Provençal countryside seems to restore us both to our stronger selves, at least out there in the lavender fields.
And so does the food. At a picnic lunch with the world’s best baguettes, olives, tapenade, fresh fromage de chèvre, and charcuterie meats, we regretfully refuse the local rosé wine since we want to finish the ride. “This is going to be the most difficult decision of the trip,” Charlotte says, eyeing the bottle, “whether to drink the wine at lunch.”
Charlotte and I make a great team: we both love bicycling between villages and coming back to our posh medieval-era hotels exhausted and hungry. We finish a long day of bicycling and climbing hills with a six-course French meal and a view of the sun setting fiery red over the hills. We lose everything but the moment as we eat lobster in a tomato shell; pan-roasted fois gras with peppered toast and wine sauce; roasted pigeon with ginger, white beans, and tomato; local cheese; roasted figs with cinnamon crème brûlée, everything finished off with a warm and crunchy chocolate parcel. It’s a memorable dinner.
But the meal we enjoy most is the next day, and much simpler. We ride past silvery olive trees through the Calavon Valley, landing at a bistro in the tidy, picturesque hill town of Eygalières. There, under an outdoor grape arbor, we eat a tangy goat cheese melted on toast, niçoise pizza, runny chocolate cake, and a chilled pear soup. “Now, this,” says Charlotte, sighing, “is real Provençal food.”
When we start in on our first glass of wine, I realize that even though I am here in paradise, I have not felt entirely happy since the day I floated under the waterfall in Samoa. Our first course arrives, the wine warms our cheeks, and we gasp at the freshness of the flavors, so transporting that my eyes start to water.
“What is it?” Charlotte asks. I don’t want to tell her that I haven’t been myself lately and that this is the first time since then that I’ve started to feel a tingle, a deep, warm sense of everything being all right again. I forget about the power of food, friendship, and family to revive and comfort me. I don’t want to say all this out loud; to talk about my new sense of vulnerability would put too much of a burden on her, on the trip, and it’s something I want to forget entirely for the moment. Instead, I simply say how wonderful the meal is and how it reminds me of another meal I had a few years ago.
At home, I tell Charlotte, I keep a framed photo of myself clinking glasses with a friend at dinner. It’s not flattering: I look wan and worn out, with red-rimmed eyes, cheeks flushed. But the expression the camera caught is one of pure contentment. The photo was taken on May 8, 1997. I remember the date because on May 7, my husband left me. Up until dinner, May 8 was probably the worst day of my life. I spent most of it in bed, trying to grasp my new reality, that the man I had loved and married and planned to have children with had left me, abruptly, for someone else. I’d been lied to, cheated on, and abandoned, and I had a dinner reservation at Chez Panisse in Berkeley, the restaurant Alice Waters made famous for its local farm-to-table approach and simple presentation of exceptional ingredients.
Ironically, the dinner with my longtime friend Larry was payment for a bet I’d lost about which of us would get married first. We’d made the wager years before, when I’d thought I was too free-spirite
d to settle down, before I met the man who changed my mind. After I wed, Larry got married, too, and each of our lives got busier. Finally, our schedules coincided with a day we could get a reservation. That it turned out to be the day after my husband left me made me laugh at the universe in spite of my sadness.
When I told Larry the news, he asked if I wanted to cancel dinner. But I needed a reason to get out of bed, and that day, dinner at my favorite restaurant was the only one that would work. I might cry through every course, but I was going.
I met Larry at the entryway to the dark-wood Arts & Crafts building, greeted by a spray of wildflowers and a large bowl of fruit in season. We were seated in a cozy corner, with a view of the kitchen and its copper plates. We started with a glass of champagne and a plate of Hog Island oysters on the half shell with little sausages. The oysters were so fresh they tasted like my tears. I closed my eyes to feel the sensation of the sea.
Larry chatted about wine with the server, chose something French, and started telling me about novels he’d enjoyed recently. He knew better than to ask how I was feeling.
After the oysters came a fish and shellfish soup, with a delicate broth of fennel and leeks. The flavors were so subtle and perfectly balanced that my mind had to close off everything else to rest on my taste buds. There was no room in my consciousness for heartbreak, divorce, and having to move out of my house, only space for a soup whose flavors shimmered like gold.
The server poured a dark-hued Bandol wine, ripe and inviting. The flavors spread across my mouth into a smile. The main course arrived, an earthy grilled duck breast with rhubarb sauce and roasted turnips. The rhubarb took me back to my childhood, when I would pick the bitter stalks from my grandmother’s garden and we would make my favorite pink stew. Grandma is gone, but rhubarb is as permanent as my memories of her. The rhubarb duck comforted me with its familiarity; no matter what happens, in spring there is always rhubarb.
When dessert came, a berry feuilleté, perfect little fresh spring berries in the lightest and flakiest of pastry, Larry uttered a French expression of delight. He said the meal made up for the time, years before, when we’d gone bicycling on Thanksgiving when everything was closed and all we could find for dinner was mango juice and pretzels. At that moment, the Chez Panisse meal was making up for so much more. The server snapped our photo as we finished our wine.
I would go back to my tears the next day, and it would be months before such a look of contentment would cross my face again. But at that moment, sharing a wonderful meal with a friend, the last pastry flake melting on my tongue like snow, I was happy. And every time I looked at that photo during the dark times that followed, I knew I would be happy again.
“I guess it’s silly to talk about a French meal in the States when we’re here eating the real thing,” I say. Charlotte smiles. She gestures to the waiter, brings out her camera, puts her arm around me, and asks him to take our photo.
WHEN THE CYCLING trip finishes, we take a train to Paris, finishing off chocolates we found in Saint-Rémy on the way, each infused with a hint of Provence—lavender, thyme, basil. When we arrive in Paris, Charlotte is prepared, having already researched the restaurants and found us a charming and inexpensive hotel. I’ve been to Paris only a couple times before, the last time for a few days with my mother, who wanted to travel in Europe with me to help take my mind off my divorce, on the way to Italy. Paris is the perfect place for cheering you up, almost by example; its sublime beauty lights up all that gray.
I call the Professor to let him know I’m in town; I’ve never spent any time with him on his home turf, so I’m excited and nervous to see him. I also don’t know how he is going to feel, hearing from me out of the blue. When he answers the phone, he is surprised and then delighted that I’m in Paris, and wants to see me right away.
Charlotte and I meet him in a perfect French café, and since I’m with my cousin, he is formal, kissing us both on both cheeks, but then hugging me tight. When we pull away, I notice that for the first time since I’ve known him he’s wearing a tie, an old-fashioned red plaid thing, instead of his usual scarf. I wonder if he dresses more conventionally at home in Paris than when he’s traveling, being his Mediterranean self, and then I notice something else about the tie.
“The Fraser tartan,” I say, and laugh; it’s the dress plaid from my family’s Scottish clan. The Professor is pleased that I’ve noticed, and I’m happy he thought of me in Scotland, even though we’re no longer lovers, and wanted to surprise me the next time he saw me. It’s funny that while in Scotland, he went looking for my ancestral home, made a point of it, though I’ve never stepped foot in that country.
“There are Frasers everywhere in Inverness,” he reports. “But none of them at all like you.” He smiles at me with his crooked French teeth and watery blue eyes. “They’re very serious, very hard people. I think you must have an Italian bastard somewhere in your past.” He gives me a little squeeze.
WE HAVE ONLY part of a day together; he has a girlfriend and responsibilities with his children. But for a few fine hours he shows me his Paris, a relaxed stroll through the Tuileries, then secret courtyards, and along the Seine. He takes me to lunch in a restaurant he’s frequented since his student days, a grand old place with huge antique mirrors that retains the marvelous atmosphere, amid its splendor, of being a dive. The Professor points out slots in the walls where the regulars used to keep their cloth napkins. “This has been here since the time of Balzac,” he says.
He shows me his apartment, a tiny place in the Sixteenth Arrondissement, a more bourgeois neighborhood, he explains, than he’s used to, but he’s here because his kids and their mother live nearby. It’s a small studio dominated by a big desk, with books floor to ceiling, and a little nook with Indian pillows where he sleeps; there is little room for anything here but his mind. There are a couple of beautiful drawings and a photo of a woman, his girlfriend presumably, crossing her slender ankles and wearing white pumps. I do not imagine the Professor with someone who wears white pumps.
We have little time, because he has to go pick up his son. It’s so different from all our other visits together, where the days stretched out long, with no plans except to decide when and where to eat, to swim now or later. We have so much to say to each other, but, conscious of our short time, we sit there on his couch, saying nothing. Finally I ask him about the book he’s writing, and he gives me an enthusiastic description, verging on academic; it’ll be his best book yet, he thinks, and will even be translated into English. “Now you can read my book,” he says.
He asks where I have traveled, and I tell him Italy, Samoa, Tahiti, Nicaragua. “Ah,” he says, “la bella vita continues. You are always on the road.”
“I’m not settled down like you,” I say, half teasing, glancing at the photograph of the woman in white shoes.
“It’s not what I expected,” he says. “But I’m happier with a woman, someone to share dinner with.” He sighs. “My secret now is that I have no secret life. My students look at me like I’m an old man. I’m completely boring.”
“Never,” I say.
“Grazie, signorina,” he says, and strokes the back of my hand.
He asks about my next trip, and I say I’m not sure, I may take a little break from traveling.
“Because you have a boyfriend?”
I shake my head no. “I’m not interested in men right now.”
“Impossible,” he says. “No men, no travel? What’s happened to you?”
I get up and pretend to inspect the art books in his library. Then I sit back down. We are so used to touching each other, and now we can’t touch at all. Tears start to roll down my eyes.
“Che c’è?” he asks. What is it?
“I miss you,” I tell him in Italian. “I miss knowing that I’ll see you.”
He picks up my hand, squeezes it, then gives me a hug. I use his Egyptian scarf to wipe my eyes and pull away.
“Do you know what I liked best about y
our book?” he asks.
I shake my head no. We have never spoken much about the fact that I wrote a book about our romance.
“It was the first time I understood that you loved me.”
I nod yes, unable to speak.
“We’ve had a beautiful story,” he says. “Life is full of stories, and we’ll have more, each of us. Though maybe fewer.” He smiles.
“Sì,” I say. He embraces me again and then kisses me and then caresses me, and I pull away, alarmed.
“I can’t,” I say and start crying afresh.
“It’s nothing. Just a little caress,” he says, opening his hands wide. “We are old friends.”
“It’s not that,” I say, and somehow I tell him that I don’t feel comfortable touching anyone at all, I can’t travel, I’m too afraid, something bad happened to me in Samoa. He listens to me and frowns. He brings out one of his little cigars, in a tin box, and lights it, inhaling. “Do you want one?” he asks.
I shake my head. “I only smoked that one time, in Ischia.”
He blows a perfect smoke ring, and in spite of myself I smile.
He considers my story. “Mi dispiace molto,” he says, giving me a hug and then still holding on to my hand. “I’m so sorry. I’m sorry that happened to you, my dear.” He takes another puff. “But don’t make things too complicated. That experience happened, and of course you always want to be careful. But you can’t let one experience with a cretin change you. You’re a stronger woman than that.” He strokes my hair. “You love to travel, you have a great big appetite for life, and that’s who you are. You just have to continue to be yourself. It’s simple.”
“Simple,” I repeat. “Okay, Professor.”
He holds up his glass. “La bella vita,” he says. I pick up my glass, a little shaky, and clink. He gathers his coat and bag, and then he walks with me to the Métro.