I collapsed back into my chair.
“Are you burnt?” Franck snatched up a napkin and rubbed my leg.
“That was Juliette?” A minute ago I had felt beautiful. Now…
Franck brushed a finger across my blazing cheek. “Does it hurt very much?”
“I’m fine,” I lied. As fine as a hedgehog beside a unicorn could ever feel, that is to say, not very fine at all.
“I’m relieved Juliette has met you now,” Franck said. “That should be the end of that.”
“The end of what?” I fought for breath.
Franck stirred his espresso. “She has been phoning me and saying she wants to get back together.” I wanted to curl up in a ball but I forced myself to sit up straighter.
“And?” I asked.
Franck looked up at me. The clanking of the coffee cups and the murmur of conversation at the bar seemed very far away.
“How could you even ask that?” he said. “I have told her that I am not interested. I told her that I am in love with you.”
I reached over, twisted his T-shirt in my hand and kissed him. Relief coursed through my veins. It hit me then how what had begun as an exotic whirlwind romance had deepened into something else entirely. If I lost him, I knew I would regret it for a very long time. Maybe forever.
Even now that we were married, the mere mention of Juliette had the power of hurtling me back in time so that I felt exactly like that eighteen year old sitting in that smoky café. Especially now, when I was covered with plaster dust and feeling somewhat lost in my own life.
“Her father is really nice.” Franck picked up another scraper lying on the floor and knelt down beside me. “I always got along with him.” He began to scrape slowly, thoughtfully. “I don’t want to have to ask to borrow my parents’ car again; I think we can borrow Stéph’s today. She’s off work.” I knew Franck was waiting to hear my decision.
“Do you want to go now?” I asked. “If we can borrow her car maybe we can go and see Juliette’s father before lunch.”
Franck dropped the scraper and went off in search of the phone.
Thirty minutes later, I was in Chalon shaking Juliette’s father’s hand.
“Please, call me Antoine,” he said. He had sparkling aquamarine eyes like his daughter and professed to be enchanted to finally meet me. Juliette was of course mentioned, but just a quick update that she was living in Lyon now with a boyfriend named Giles.
In a stark contrast to René, Antoine quickly brought the conversation back around to the subject of the kind of car we were looking to purchase. While Franck filled him in, he led us outside to the lot at the back of his dealership. We began looking at price tags. Everything was light-years beyond our budget.
“What is your budget exactly?” Antoine asked finally.
He paled when Franck named a figure, but led us to the very back of the lot where there were four vehicles that had clearly seen better days. Antoine led us right to the worst one in the lot – a white car speckled with spots of rust peeping through the flaking white paint.
“A Renault 21,” Antoine tapped the hood. “Doesn’t look like much and she has lot of kilometers on her but I think she will hold up for you” – he frowned - “for a few months anyway.”
“How much?” Franck asked. A half an hour later, we were signing the purchase papers.
“You see?” Franck tapped Stéphanie’s steering wheel after we had arranged to pick up our car the next morning. “Everything works out in the end. Now we don’t only have a car, but we are going back to my parents to feast on a delicious chicken for lunch. Elle n’est pas belle la vie? Isn’t life beautiful?”
As we wound up through the vineyards on our way back to Magny-les-Villers, it did seem that my chronic attempts to control the future were unnecessary. After all, Franck and I had managed to stay together and even get married despite the ravishing Juliette. If I just relaxed, maybe both the urgent and the important and everything else would take care of itself. We had an epic task ahead of us in the months to come. I would have to remind myself often that in looking for a car, we ended up with not only a car but also a delicious chicken lunch and a pile of gorgeous Emile Henry tableware. On that gray December day, la vie did seem belle indeed.
After the excitement of the chicken expedition combined with the heady possession of our new car, Franck and I seemed to be stuck in the monotony of scraping off every inch and every layer of wallpaper throughout the house. The world outside seemed to grind to a halt, suspended by the frost. The temperature had plummeted and villagers were saying this would be one of the hardest winters of the last fifty years.
The days took on a routine. We woke up shivering, showered in the cold, scraped off wallpaper in the cold until we got down to the crumbling plaster, and then went to bed in the cold. I asked myself several times a day what the hell we were doing. Progress seemed slow and, at times, virtually non-existent.
“We need to get someone to help us with the re-plastering,” Franck moaned as yet another chunk of the wall disintegrated between his fingers. “I should call Olivier and see if he’s thought of anybody.”
I had no patience for all this waiting around to see if other people could help us. We should be able to figure this out on our own. I scraped harder and the plaster crumbled down, making a huge hole between the big old wooden baseboard and the wall above.
“Don’t forget that we don’t even own the whole place yet.” I tightened in resentment at this fact. “You’d better make a phone call to the surveyor while you’re at it.”
“He’s scheduled to come in two days,” Franck reminded me.
“You could call and confirm.” When was Franck going to start to expect the worst rather than naïvely hope for the best? We’d never get the house done if we kept doing things his way.
“I think he needs to be harassed,” I said. “You need to be more on top of things like that.”
My tendency to blame others when things weren’t going well had never made me proud. It was brought to my notice for the first time in grade three, the year I had Mrs. Lusk for my teacher. She had feathered black hair and wore A-line skirts with nude nylons and wedge sandals. I idolized her. She loved art projects and was very excited to teach us all how to make our very own macramé plant hanger. We were paired up in teams and took turns holding the strings tight while the other person wove them together like Mrs. Lusk had showed us. Lisa, my partner, wove her hanger with deft fingers. Mrs. Lusk made the entire class stop their weaving and have a look at the marvel Lisa had produced.
My cheeks burned. I was going to do better. My weaving would be so brilliant that Mrs. Lusk was going to stop the entire class and exclaim about my plant hanger too. She would announce that I was far more talented than Lisa.
When it finally came my turn to weave, my fingers didn’t seem to work properly. The strands kept slipping away from me as sweat started to bead on my forehead. In the end, my plant hanger was a distinctly lumpy, ugly affair.
“It’s nice,” lied Lisa. I shot her a look of pure hatred.
Mrs. Lusk came by just as I was fretfully trying to untie and retie the three end pieces together. She placed a gentle hand on my shoulder. “I think maybe you didn’t knot your strands tight enough, Laura.”
This wasn’t happening the way it was supposed to happen. She was supposed to notice how wonderful I was, not how hopeless. I couldn’t stand her thinking badly of me.
“Lisa didn’t hold the strands properly,” I said. I felt both relieved and ashamed as soon as the words came out of my mouth.
Mrs. Lusk kneeled down so that her feathered hair brushed my arm. “Laura, it is a very bad habit to blame other people for our own difficulties.”
My innards curled up in mortification. Since that day I had been painfully aware of this nasty tendency to blame others when I was doing or feeling badly. I resisted most of the time, but the worse I felt, the stronger my urge to blame someone for it… like now.
“
I can’t believe you haven’t called Le Maître about that mistake in the plan again,” I snapped at Franck. “Besides, why did we use him as a notary in the first place? You knew he was an incompetent drunk.”
Franck stood over me, picking off the gluey bits of plaster that were stuck to the end of his scraper. “The one time we tried to find a different notary he cheated us out of a house, or have you forgotten that already?” His voice was as icy as the road outside our window.
“You give up too easily.” I threw down the scraper, rage boiling up inside me. “You’re just not persistent enough.”
In Canada, or even in England, I would have been on the phone harassing the cadastre until he did something but I knew that in France things didn’t work like that. This was, of course, because the French did not operate on the premise that the client was always right. In fact, a French person would have no compunction about hanging up on a client – repeatedly, if necessary. Franck had told me time and time again that what was needed to get things done in France was summarized in one word - seduction. The trick was getting people to like you enough that they wanted to help you. Franck was a million times better at this than I was, but feeling useless just stoked my anger.
“You give up too easily,” I muttered again.
“You blame people too easily,” Franck said, his eyes kindling.
He was right and I knew it, but my fury had nowhere else to go. I threw my scraper down on the wood floor. “Screw this. I’m going for a walk.”
Franck glanced past me to the window. “It’s snowing.”
“I’m not blind.”
I pulled on my boots and jacket and stormed out the door. A blast of air that must have blown right off the Siberian plains hit my face. I almost stopped but my pride wouldn’t let me. I shuffled up the icy road as quickly as I could until I reached the far wall of the church across the street. I pressed my body as far as it would go into the nook where the wall of the vestry met the wall of the nave. The cold of the stone seeped quickly into my flushed skin. Why hadn’t I stopped long enough to put on gloves, a scarf and my wool hat? I stamped my feet and tried to shove tighter in the corner. Merde it was cold.
Maybe I could walk but where would I go? It was pitch dark and probably ten degrees below zero. I could sneak inside the church; it would be warmer in there. Not a lot, but it would be protected from the wind anyway.
I peeked around the wall. I could make out Franck’s silhouette as he watched out the living room window. Why didn’t he come out to find me? I had enough sense of self-preservation not to go and throw myself in a ditch and freeze to death, but the fact that he knew that was highly annoying. I couldn’t feel my fingers anymore.
We hadn’t fought like this in a very long time. During our two years in Oxford we hardly ever fought. Then again, we hardly saw each other either. Our lives just hadn’t intersected very much besides a few brief moments of overlap. Those were snatches when I wasn’t buried under a pile of law books or Franck wasn’t spending the week in Versailles taking photos of French film stars that would end up in the next issue of Paris Match.
Now I had pitchforked the two of us into this house mess that promised to be every bit as stressful as law school. Why did things always have to be so difficult and complicated? I had spent my adult years searching for the magic key that would make my life effortless, the way it seemed for so many other people, yet it continued to elude me.
This house project was supposed to bring Franck and me closer than ever before, but now I realized that it was just as likely to drive us even further apart.
My fingers were stiff and I couldn’t jam them any further in the fleece of my jacket pockets. I couldn’t unknot the tangle of my thoughts or resolve our multitude of renovation woes either, but I could go back inside so that Franck wouldn’t be worried. Hopefully, he was a little bit worried by now.
I emerged from my hiding spot into the howling wind and slid down the road toward the house. Shame burned a bright spot in each of my otherwise numb cheeks. I slunk up the stairs into the warmth of the veranda.
Before I could turn its worn knob, Franck opened the big wooden door from the other side, pulled me against his chest, and enveloped me in a crushing hug. The scent of plaster dust and apples was deeply ingrained in the scratchy wool of his sweater. He plucked off my hat and buried his face into my hair.
“I was just coming to get you,” he murmured.
“I’m sorry,” I mumbled. “I don’t know why I got mad like that…I didn’t mean to…I am just so…”
Franck squeezed me tighter against him. “I know. You’re still a mess.”
I nodded. “I’m sorry I worried you.”
“I wasn’t worried. I saw you go behind the church. I knew you’d come back when you got cold enough.”
I opened my mouth but then shut it again. I deserved that. “Why were you coming to get me then?”
“To tell you that I just got off the phone with the cadastre, who did call me back. He’s coming in a week.”
Here I was, knowing I needed to reconnect with Franck after two years of distance and yet sabotaging that very goal with my impatience and control-freak tendencies. I was sick of acting so unlovably. “I’m sorry I yell - ”
“Then Olivier called me.”
“Alors?”
“He invited us over for coffee right now. His friend Le Gégé has dropped by and he might be able to help us.”
That was the best piece of news I’d heard in a long time. I looked down at my icy boots.
“Does it worry you that we’re fighting so much?” I asked in a quiet voice.
Franck twisted a stray bit of hair that had slipped out of my ponytail around his wrist. “Non. It worries me when we never fight at all, like in Oxford.”
I looked up into his face and traced the curve of his quirked lips with my finger. Franck never failed to surprise me with his unique way of looking at the world. “You must be feeling very reassured these days then.”
Franck kissed the cold tip of my nose. “Very.”
Chapter 18
I was barely in the door of Olivier’s house when he thrust a glass of kir in my hand. His face bore a knowing, compassionate look that reminded me of a Gallic, barrel-chested Dalai Lama.
I gave Dominique les bises and tried to give Marcel one on his head of curls, but he ran away from me, shrieking with laughter. I spotted a slight, young looking but balding man bending through the low doorway that led from the kitchen area to the large living room of Olivier’s house. A cigarette dangled from his lips.
“The floor is poured too thick,” he said to no-one in particular.
Franck strode towards him and extended his hand. “Gégé. Ça va?”
Gégé’s eyes crinkled in a way that was both shy and friendly at the same time. He shook Franck’s hand. “Ah, Le Fou,” he mused. “Olivier has been telling me about this ruin you bought. Sounds like you’re as crazy as ever, hein?”
Franck and his village buddies all had nicknames growing up. Franck had been christened Le Fou or “The Crazy One”, no doubt due to his penchant for doing things like deciding late into a party one night that he was going to drive down to Monaco in time to see the sun rise over the Mediterranean.
Franck introduced me. Gégé stuck out his hand to shake but I had already leaned in to give him the bises. He blushed but didn’t seem displeased.
“We need to go back in the living room,” he collared Olivier who had tried to sit back down at the kitchen table. “I need to tell you everything you did wrong.” Olivier expelled a put-upon sigh, but he got up and followed us through the low stone doorway.
“Franck deserves his share of the blame too,” Olivier grumbled. “After all, he helped me pour the floor.”
“Don’t worry,” Gégé said. “I’ll shame him too.”
It didn’t seem prudent to mention that I had actually watched the pouring of the floor we now stood upon. That day was stamped in my memory. Olivier had enlisted
Franck and Martial and a few other stalwart and muscular friends to pour a concrete slab in the huge upper floor of the barn so that he could transform it into a massive living area. It just so happened that the pour was scheduled for two days before I was due to go back to Canada. I remember watching as Franck shovelled the heavy concrete from a wheelbarrow and paused only occasionally to turn his head and cast me a secret smile. I stored each one up like a precious jewel. I was starting university in Montreal in the fall and I didn’t know when, or even if, I would ever see Franck again.
The consensus amongst Franck’s friends and family here in Burgundy was that it was a long shot. Franck was twenty-three, just finishing his mandatory military service, had no money, and had never been on an airplane in his life. I was eighteen and was slotted to begin my Bachelor of Arts at McGill. Our future lives ran in parallel rather than intersecting streams. By sheer force of will we bent our paths until they intersected.
Olivier had similarly twisted his destiny. When his friends poured this massive floor for him they had all wondered, Franck included, why a single man like Olivier would need all that extra space in his new house. The old man who had lived in this house before him had been an inveterate bachelor, or vieux garçon. When Mémé heard the news that Olivier had bought this house she wrung her dishtowel in her hands and declared that by buying the house Olivier was damning himself to the same fate.
Luckily Olivier hadn’t listened to whispers. Before the floor had fully cured, Olivier met his future wife Dominique, and their son Marcel was born just a year later. Sometimes I wondered if by pouring this floor Olivier hadn’t actually paved the way to a new life for himself.
I liked to believe that people could change the course of their lives. That’s sort of what I had been trying to do, albeit in a floundering way, when we had bought La Maison des Deux Clochers. It hadn’t gone exactly as planned so far, but maybe Gégé could help us turn things around.
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