Thierry shot a mystified look at Franck, not sure quite what to do with my impromptu walk down memory lane.
“Did you ever see the donkey…you know, excited?” Frank asked me.
I thought about this for a moment. “I don’t think so. There were no female donkeys around, just a lot of sheep.” The coin dropped. There had been two horses, Areeb and Pal, and I had definitely seen them. If donkeys were anything like horses…Franck and Thierry hooted with laughter.
“D’accord. I get it now.” I waved my hand at them to shut up. “Is that really true about our electrician?”
Franck stopped laughing. “What kind of question is that?”
“Allez. I bet you want to know the answer too.”
“I certainly do not.”
I raised a brow at Thierry. “Is it true?”
Thierry took another sip of his kir. “Just ask any woman who lives in these villages. ”
“You don’t seriously mean he shows it off when he’s making house calls?”
“Laura!” Franck said.
“He’s quite well known for seducing his female customers,” Thierry admitted.
Franck frowned at Thierry. “You couldn’t have told me this before?”
“I thought you knew.” Thierry protested with a shrug. “Everybody around here knows.”
“I didn’t hear that part of it. You just told me that he fenced in his free time and almost made it onto the Olympic team when he was younger.”
Thierry raised an eyebrow. “What better way to defend himself against all the angry husbands?”
The next morning Franck got up in a chipper mood, but by the time lunch rolled around his cheery humour had been defeated by the challenge of making a smooth surface of our horribly ancient and humid walls.
As we sat down over a salade frisée, a roll of parma ham each and a round of camembert, I saw that my husband was glaring at the world through an oeil noir.
“Ça va?” I ventured but he merely frowned and wiped his hands on his plaster spackled jeans. Apparently, now that Gégé and I were emerging from our respective funks, it was Franck’s turn. The timing couldn’t have be worse, I reflected as I sat down over my after lunch café and sucked my pencil, wracking my brain to come up with something I could cook for Gégé, Paulo, and Momo that night in our tiny kitchen. It had to be something strong tasting and dark in colour so that the inevitable plaster in the dish would remain undetected.
“Do you have any ideas for dinner?” I asked Franck who nursed his coffee across from me.
“Non.”
He was definitely in what I always thought of as one of his French moods. His whole family indulged in them on occasion, as did pretty much every French person I knew. The Canadians I had grown up with most definitely did not. Not in public anyway. Maybe this was why I still felt a strange mix of embarrassment and relief when I thought about breaking down in front of Gégé.
“You seem to be in a bad mood,” I observed, trying to keep my tone light. In general I tried to keep a sense of humour about Franck’s French moods but after a while they never failed to destabilize me. I wasn’t sure where it came from, but deeply embedded in my brain was the conviction that I should be able to make everyone around me happy.
“I’m fine.”
When Franck was in one of his rare funks I knew from experience that nothing I could say or do could pull him out of it.
Gégé came in the kitchen then, took one look at Franck and raised an eyebrow at me.
I shrugged. “I’m trying to figure out what to cook for dinner tonight. Any ideas?”
“Oui!” Gégé served himself some coffee. “A couple of smoked morteau sausages and potatoes in the pressure cooker with crème fraiche and freshly chopped parsley.”
“That’s perfect! Can you tell me how to make it?”
Gégé did just that, then left Franck and me alone again while he went down to the cellar to examine some pipes.
“Gégé’s idea is nothing short of brilliant,” I remarked as I marked down crème fraiche on my shopping list. The recipe was easy, filling, delicious, and required only two pots.
“I need to get back to those walls.” Franck got up and poured the remaining half of his coffee in the sink.
I had to pull off this dinner, surly husband or not.
By the time seven o’clock rolled around I was at my wit’s end trying to clear out enough debris in our living room to make room for an empty table and five chairs around it.
The potatoes and the morteau had been purchased and were cooking away in our trusty SEB pressure cooker – an essential tool in any self-respecting French kitchen, even the most rudimentary ones like ours. The comforting smell of smoked pork and garlic filled the house. Even the odour of burning rubber from the convection heaters provided no match.
I had poured the crème fraiche into a small casserole so that it would be ready to heat up a few minutes before we served the dish.
As I was snipping up my parsley in a glass with scissors - like Mémé had showed me - Franck stomped into the kitchen. He looked around, muttered “quel bordel!” then took himself off again. A mess? Of course the kitchen was a mess. There was nowhere for me to put the pots and pans I was using to cook. The whole house was a mess - we were in the middle of renovating it. It wasn’t only the pressure cooker that began to steam. We had people coming to dinner though, people whose help we needed. Now wasn’t the time for me to explode.
I wrenched open the sticky window and drank in the spring air, hoping it would cool down my temper. The church across the street hunched in front of a restless sky.
Why did my life always seem so much messier than everyone else’s?
The door clattered open and Paulo’s voice arrived in mid-sentence. I listened for a few seconds as he recounted how a barrel of wine had fallen off a truck in front of his house. I took a last gulp of air and shut the window. These guys were the only ones who could help us out of our fix. Somebody had to be the gracious host and I didn’t think it was going to be Franck.
I could tell as I brought the steaming dish of morteau sausages and fingerling potatoes into the living room that this evening was going to take every single ounce of tact and diplomacy in me. Paulo was keeping up a constant stream of tall tales. Franck and Gégé, who was dressed in an ironed dress shirt and dress shoes with his best jeans, were a receptive – meaning completely silent - audience. It would have been a relief to stay pinned in my chair by the centrifugal force of Paulo’s never-ending monologue. Momo, however, was the problem.
After a few minutes in his company it became clear that this reputedly well-endowed specimen liked to be the centre of attention himself. He, unlike Franck, Gégé, and I was not content to sit back and let Paulo steal the limelight for the evening. The more Paulo talked, the more Momo fidgeted in his chair.
Franck kept our glasses of Ladoix Premier Cru topped up but this didn’t seem to mellow the two men at all. Rather the contrary, in fact.
“Those Pauland idiots came by every day for a month,” Paulo rambled on. “They had bought up every house around me and had all the land to build their new winery. I kept telling them that I couldn’t make up my mind and to come back the next - ”
“I know the guy who did the electrical for that build,” Momo interrupted.
“I had them over a barrel,” Paulo turned his voice up a notch, talking right over Momo as he continued to tell his excruciatingly detailed story. “So what I did next was - ”
“Do you know what happened to me when I was fencing the other afternoon?” Momo asked us. I stood up and began to clear the plates.
“…tell them I would never sell my house to them - ” Paulo’s voice got even louder.
Momo’s eyes kindled. “There was this woman - ”
“But they came back the very next day with their lawyer. Can you believe that?”
I scurried off to the kitchen and took a long time assembling my cheese platter of Époisses, Cîteaux, and
Comté. When I could avoid it no longer I went back into the living room just in time to hear Momo yell belligerently at Paulo, “I think you could have gotten them to pay you a lot more for your house!”
I stood frozen a few feet from the table. Paulo’s muscular forearms flexed. “What did you just say?”
Gégé and I exchanged worried looks. Franck looked mildly interested for the first time since lunch.
“Your story is boring.” Momo spread out his sinewy hand on the tablecloth that I had hoped would add a touch of civility to the proceedings. “If you had held on longer you could have got those rich idiots at Pauland to pay you double that amount.” I stared at Momo, incredulous. With the exception of Gégé, the men were behaving like little boys in the schoolyard.
Paulo curled his fingers into a fist. “Say that again. Go ahead. Say it!”
I wanted to crawl underneath the table. It reminded me of the time we were having dinner at our newly engaged friends’ apartment in Lyon and they embarked on a marital spat of such epic proportions that it ended with the fiancée twisting off her engagement ring, flinging it out the window to the courtyard below and stalking out of the room. I had often wondered if French people felt the compulsion to misbehave in front of me precisely because I was such a well-behaved audience.
“Your story is n’importe quoi.” Momo tossed this smouldering log on the fire. Franck made no attempt to mediate. On the contrary, his eyes widened with delight at the prospect of a pre-dessert brawl. Paulo knuckled the tabletop and stood up.
“You are a petit merde.” Oh dear. Not so much the “shit” part but the “little” part. Momo was on the small side, even for a French man.
Gégé threw me a desperate look. We needed them both to keep working with us, but I didn’t know what I could do now to save the evening. It was too late.
Momo stood up, cocky as a rooster. I was fed up with Gégé and me being the only well behaved people around. I threw the cheese platter down on the table.
“Stop it!”
Neither Momo nor Paulo seemed to hear me. They remained standing; their eyes did not leave each other. My fist came down hard on the table.
“You should be ashamed of yourselves!”
The four men stared at me and then glanced at each other, not quite sure what to do. Gégé roused himself first and gave me a little grin. Why should I be the one who felt embarrassment when other people were behaving rudely?
“I made you all a nice dinner tonight even though I’m exhausted and the house is a disaster and Franck has been in a funk for most of the day.” Paulo opened his mouth but I held up my hand and adopted the French technique of speaking even louder. “All you do is bicker with each other while Franck sits in the corner, enjoying the show. I will not have it! Paulo, Momo, Franck - you have a choice. Either you start behaving or I am going to kick you out of my house!”
I glared at each of them, daring them to talk back. After a moment, Momo and Paulo sat down.
“Gégé, you can stay,” I added.
None of them uttered a sound. Gégé caught my eye and made a silent clapping gesture with his hands. The other three men studied the olive branch print of our tablecloth as though it were a lingerie catalogue. Why had I never tried yelling at rude guests before? It was a revelation.
After a minute or two of stony silence Gégé began to chuckle. “What’s wrong les gars?” he chided his fellow men. “Cat got your tongue?”
Franck looked up at me and cracked a sheepish smile. Paulo and Momo began to laugh as well, and finally relaxed their shoulders.
“Are you going to start behaving yourselves?” I demanded. “Otherwise you will get no dessert from me.”
They nodded like schoolboys – obedient schoolboys now.
“Bien,” I said. “In that case, help yourself to the cheese.”
The Époisses was creamy and stinky, but it did not even come close to the deliciousness of allowing myself to tell everyone off.
When I glided into the kitchen to get the tarte aux poires that I had bought from the patisserie, I heard Momo say to Franck, “You’ve got a real hellion for a wife.”
“I know,” Franck answered, pride in his voice. “Isn’t she great?”
Chapter 23
Today we found a possible solution to our window problem. His name is Antoine.
Michèle, Franck’s mother, and Antoine met at Lourdes several years previously while Michèle was searching for a miracle to cure her cancer. Antoine was a volunteer there. He became not only a close friend but also one of Michèle’s pillars of support during her treatment and recovery. When he wasn’t busy facilitating miracles on behalf of the Virgin Mary, Antoine - a compact ball of energy with a round head and thin moustache - worked as a window installer.
His personal life had always been a mystery to Franck’s family. Like a modern day saint he went through life helping the sick, the desperate, and the lonely; he usually had at least one person recuperating at his home. Franck had warned me early on not to ask too many questions.
“He is from Brittany,” Franck said by way of explanation.
“Why can’t I ask questions of people from Brittany?”
“A Breton will be the best friend you could ever have,” Franck said. “But they value their privacy and they have du caractère. We must respect that.”
Antoine blew into our house three days after our almost disastrous dinner party with Momo and Paulo who, after my chastising, both got sauced and bonded over the extortionate taxes the French government imposed on small business owners and the excellent Ladoix Franck was serving (made by one of his many distant cousins, bien sûr).
Antoine looked like an eager gnome. His work pants were a well-worn azure and a tool belt of strange looking implements hung around his waist. He surprised me by refusing coffee.
“Work first!” he declared, then sallied into the living room and subjected our weather-beaten living room window to a vigorous inspection. “Disgraceful!” He clicked his tongue. “You must be freezing.”
Even though it was now almost April the weather was still unseasonably cold. I looked down and realized I had my arms wrapped around my torso again. I didn’t even notice the cold anymore.
“We do what we can to keep ourselves warm.” Franck kept an admirably straight face.
Antoine let out a hoot of high-pitched laughter. “Maybe you don’t want me to replace them, hein?” He took out his tape measure and went from room to room measuring and making note of all of the windows that needed replacing - the three along the front looking out to the church and then two tiny ones up in the attic.
Franck and I exchanged worried looks as Antoine scribbled on his paper. I thought back to our budget meeting of the night before as we lay in bed, and began to run through how much money we had to finish and the corresponding list of things still to do.
The harsh reality was that we only had twenty five thousand francs left. It sounded like a lot, but really it only amounted to a little more than five thousand dollars. We had thought we would save a lot of money by Franck plastering the walls by himself, but the holes were so deep and so plentiful that we found ourselves buying new bags of plaster every day. Each bag didn’t cost that much but they added up. Still, we knew that we had no choice but to replace our windows. They were rotting, after all. We also knew that this would prove to be an expensive proposition – Gégé took exquisite pleasure in reminding us of this fact several times a day.
“So, how much do you think they will cost?” Franck asked Antoine. Just then Gégé, with his unerring radar for catastrophe, sauntered in from the bathroom where he had been busy installing the new fixtures.
Antoine tucked the pencil behind his ear and studied his notepad. “I think it will come to about fifteen thousand francs.”
That was a huge chunk of our remaining budget. It would leave us with only ten thousand francs to finish the rest. A pittance.
“Merde.” Franck’s index finger twitched. “That was m
ore than I was hoping for. Does the price include installation?”
Antoine grinned at our worried expressions and slapped Franck on the shoulder. “Ne t’en fais pas. I can do the installation. I’ll just need to add a little extra for my materials, silicone for the joints and such.”
“Merci,” I said. It was generous of him. Maybe the Virgin Mary really had sent him to perform her miracles on earth.
“They would not be our top-of-the-line windows, you understand,” Antoine said. “But they are really the minimum of what is required in an old house like this. So should I add up the total? Fifteen thousand francs per window multiplied by three large windows and - ”
Franck made a choking noise. “You meant fifteen thousand francs per window?”
“But of course! Doing it for any less is impossible.”
Neither Franck nor I could speak.
Gégé watched us, delight illuminating his narrow face. “The three main floor windows alone would cost almost double the budget you have left for the rest of the house,” he calculated. What? He was a math genius all of a sudden?
“Merci, Gégé,” Franck said through clenched teeth.
“Could we somehow make do with these ones?” I asked, fingering the splintered window frame. A large chunk of wood crumbled off in my hand, answering my question. I turned to Antoine. “We just don’t have the money.”
Antoine sniffed. “Windows are the most important things you can install when doing renovations. Windows are always where you should go high end.”
“But we can’t afford to go high end anywhere.” I tried to make him understand.
“The price I quoted you is the price for the least expensive window that our company manufactures.” From his huffy expression I knew I was raising the ire of his Breton blood.
“What about going with windows from a different company?” Gégé suggested. “I know a lot of people that have installed windows from that store Lapeyre on the route de Dijon. They seem fine.”
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