Playing House in Provence

by Mary-Lou Weisman

  Also by Mary-Lou Weisman

  Al Jaffee’s Mad Life: A Biography

  Traveling While Married: How to take a trip with your spouse and come back together

  My (Middle-Aged) Baby Book: A Record of Milestones, Millstones, and Gallstones

  Intensive Care: A Family Love Story

  www.marylouweisman.com

  Playing House In Provence

  How Two Americans Became a Little Bit French

  Mary-Lou Weisman

  Playing House in Provence

  How Two Americans Became a Little Bit French

  Copyright © 2017 Mary-Lou Weisman.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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  ISBN: 978-1-5320-2534-1 (sc)

  ISBN: 978-1-5320-2535-8 (e)

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2017909067

  iUniverse rev. date: 09/01/2017

  Contents

  Changing Places

  In the First Place

  Home Sweet Medieval Home

  Totally Immersed

  Talking French with Your Mouth Full

  Never Try to Act Out “Sausage” in a Supermarket

  Cooking and Eating Provence

  The Stuff Center of the World

  How to Go to the Bathroom

  Hanging Out

  Make Way for Ducks

  In the Second Place

  The Second Time Around

  Real Friends and False Friends

  It Loses in Translation

  We Don’t Like Tours; We Listen In on Yours

  We’re Party Animals

  What’s She Got That I Haven’t?

  Proust Brings Cookies to Dinner

  Broken and Entered

  In the Third Place

  Not So Nice

  The House Speaks English

  Nostalgia for a Life We Never Lived

  The Geriatric Tour de France

  A Type A Couple in a Type B World

  Best Friends

  Someone Put a Banana in My Chardonnay

  Provence in a Suitcase

  In the Fourth Place

  Living Sideways

  The More Things Change, the More They’re Different

  Caruso in the Kitchen

  Larry Takes a Mistress

  An Ill Wind That Blows No Good

  The Uncommon Market

  Real Live Tourists

  At Home Away

  About the Author

  Wherever we roam

  With Larry, I’m home

  Changing Places

  I don’t know about you, but no matter where we’re traveling, especially if we’re having a wonderful time, we invariably stop at the local Realtor’s office to peer at the listings and indulge in a one-month rental fantasy. We choose the house we like best, convert the price from euros to dollars, and then fly home and forget entirely about our dream until our next one-week vacation.

  My husband, Larry, and I don’t want to tour a foreign country; we want to become part of it. We want to pierce the tourist veil, get as close to the essence of the culture as we can. No more observing from the outside, our noses pressed to the glass. We yearn for someone to open the door and invite us to step right in and make ourselves at home. To accomplish this would take time, more than the week we usually allot for a vacation.

  It took decades before we put our fantasy to the test of reality. By then, both of us were in our low sixties, right on the cusp of being late middle-aged and young-old. But since sixty had just become the new fifty, perhaps we were merely late middle-aged. We had raised our children. We had solidified our careers. We had saved enough money so that we could travel. We were still in pretty good shape, probably because we enjoy physical activity. We swim. We ride bikes. We hike. We have arthritis. We pump up the volume on the TV. We are beginning to hear from our rotator cuffs. Couldn’t we have at least one last great adventure before all we can do is try to balance on our walkers on the decks of cruise ships?

  We had been playing this game of fantasy interruptus for years until one day, in the lovely Provençal town of L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue (sounds like Leel sur la Sorg), our fantasy caught up with us.

  The year was 2002. We were strolling in the shade of the romantic plane trees, past the huge, mossy paddles of the ancient wooden waterwheels that churn at the river below. We stopped for coffee at Le Café Bellevue, where the Sorgue River swells to the size of a small lake and ducks paddle sweetly by. We talked about how much fun it would be to shed the twenty-first century and live in this medieval town.

  This was hardly a new conversation for us; it was just a new medieval town. We talked about how we’d rent a little house, buy cheeses and pâtés at the market, drink wine at lunch, tuck baguettes under our arms, and pedal our bikes to Le Café Bellevue, where we’d be regulars, and eventually they’d like us, even though we’re Americans. In time, we would become so French that we wouldn’t like Americans either.

  “But we couldn’t just hang out for a month,” I said. “We’d have to find something to do, some way to connect. We could take a French course.”

  “Or maybe a cooking class,” suggested Larry, who always has food on his mind.

  One would have thought, given our record for unrealized rental fantasies, that neither of us would have dared to say, “Wouldn’t it be great to live here for a while?” But one of us did.

  Just then we saw the sign posted on a telephone pole: “Cours de français. Immersion Totale.” We took the sign literally, as a sign. We would immerse ourselves totally in the study of French.

  We both love the French language, and we already had a head start. Larry had studied French for three years in high school. Then he spent the summer after his first year of college riding his Vespa all over Europe, ending up in Paris, where he registered for a course at the Sorbonne, which entitled him to a cheap dorm room at La Cité Universitaire. He may have attended a class or two—he certainly meant to—but mostly he hung out in cafés, hitting on French women.

  I, too, had studied French for three years in high school. The source of my love for France and the French language is Oedipal. My father loved words. It was important to him that I not settle for less than the right word. “Cherchez le mot just,” my father insisted, even when I was a little kid, writing book reports in grade school. He knew a few French words and phrases and enjoyed decorating his conversation with a bon mot whenever he got the chance. I grew up believing it was important to be able to speak French—or at least to be able to fake it. We were thus primed to choose France for our first experiment in international l
iving.

  I groped in my pocketbook to write down the e-mail address on the cours français sign—bringing our fantasy one step closer to reality—but could find only paper, no pencil.

  “Excusez-moi,” said Larry to a good-looking, middle-aged man with a fetching black moustache, who was sitting on the nearby curb, sanding a bureau. “Avez-vous un crayon?” The man put down his work, stood up, and begrudgingly made his way to the house in front of which he had been seated. He returned shortly with a pencil. After a quick “Merci,” Larry turned and began copying the e-mail address on the sign.

  “Ne partez pas, ne partez pas, attendez un moment,” cried the man. He was asking us not to leave. Our vestigial French was holding up. So far, so bon.

  This time, the man we would come to know as Ange dashed into his house and returned with Monique Desrozier, his pretty, vivacious lover and the woman with whom we would be totally immersed for three of our four stays in Provence, each a month long, over the next four years. She would also turn out to be our coconspirator in the heady but perilous plot of pretending to be French.

  Our fantasy was taking on some flesh-and-blood reality. She invited us into her home, where a third-floor room served as her classroom. She spoke to us exclusively in French and yet chose her words carefully and pronounced them with such precision that we understood almost everything she said. At that moment, it was easy to imagine living in this beautiful town and studying in this classroom with this charming woman. I put the piece of paper with her name and e-mail address in my pocketbook and hesitated, searching my mind for the right way to say goodbye. Even people who haven’t studied French know about adieu, au revoir, and voulez-vous coucher avec moi, but there was a better word, and I couldn’t find it.

  “A bientôt,” Monique said.

  Of course. See you soon. That was it.

  “A bientôt,” we replied, and off we went, giddy with excitement and promise. But did we mean it? Were we just teasing or were we going to go all the way? At the time, even we didn’t know.

  The moment of truth came a couple of days later when we were back home. After emptying out our suitcases and sorting our clothes into piles of lights and darks, I turned my attention to my pocketbook. I put my passport back in my desk drawer, stashed the extra euros in a Ziploc bag, crumpled up all the used tissues, my boarding pass, and the ads for underwater watches and foot massagers I’d torn out of Sky Mall magazine, and tossed them into the trash. Then I came upon the scrap of paper on which Larry had written Monique Desrozier’s e-mail address. It took me a moment to realize what I was holding. Now that we were home, sated by a week of travel in France and eager to resume our lives, how foolish, never mind how unnecessary and potentially disappointing the pursuit of this fantasy could be. I knew better. I was about to crumple and toss the address into the basket when I thought about a conversation I once had with my father, just after he’d retired. A man of steady habits, he confided to me that he had long harbored a most peculiar fantasy, to be a butler in a well-run household. I asked him why he didn’t fulfill his fantasy. After all, there was nothing to stop him. “But if I did,” he explained, “then I wouldn’t have the fantasy, would I?”

  How wise I thought him at the time! Fantasy, by definition, is an idea that has no basis in reality. Yet such is its lure that we nurture it in spite of what we know to be true. I found myself wondering: Maybe my father would have been a happy butler. Maybe you can have your fantasy and eat it too, so to speak.

  Then we worried about money. The euro was on the rise against the dollar. We knew that the days when we could travel in Europe on five dollars a day were long gone, but Provence on $150 a day?

  Between Larry’s second and third years of law school, we camped throughout Europe on even less than five dollars a day. We funded this adventure with money we received as wedding gifts, which is why we still have no silver flatware or china. We never missed them. We’re not much for luxuries. In Europe, we cooked over a Coleman stove. It took forty-five minutes to get the water for spaghetti to boil. In Italy, we drank a red wine called Est Est Est, which cost less than a Coke. In the Loire Valley, we bought an entrecôte, which we thought was a steak, and cooked it over a campground fire. It was a steak, a very chewy horse steak. We buried it, commemorating the event with a cross made of twigs and a homemade sign reading “Dobbin, RIP.” That night we shared tuna from a can.

  When we were in Rome, our financial situation got desperate. I horrified Larry by plunging my right arm in up to the elbow, stealing loose change from many a public fountain. Robbing some naive coin-tossers of their wishes bothered me a lot less than the prospect of skipping lunch. I drew the line at the Vatican fountain.

  In Tours, France, we washed in the public baths after a sign on the shower in the campgrounds informed us that the shower wasn’t working. “La douche ne marche pas.” When you’re poor in France, a lot of things don’t marche. I sat naked on a long, slatted wooden bench, waiting my turn with a lot of other naked women, who were also getting stripe marks on their buttocks, until a matron carrying a stack of towels and tiny bars of soap escorted us to the women’s shower room. There, one pull of a rope would get you a couple of seconds of hot water to soap up, and a second pull would allow you to rinse off. Then, shivering, we dried ourselves with towels so frayed we could see through them. A sign on the shower wall read, “Défense de chanter et siffler.” Singing and whistling are prohibited. As if.

  Poverty is a reliable way to find your way into a culture without even trying. It ensures that you will have experiences denied to most tourists. Still, with the accumulation of money, age, and an increased desire for creature comforts, poverty has lost its charms. We no longer like to shower in public or sleep outdoors in a bag.

  The amount of money it would cost us to fund this month was staggering, but Larry, the major moneymaker, was unshaken. He had not yet retired, but he had achieved enough seniority at his law firm that he could take a month-long vacation without raising eyebrows. Besides, he was certain he could sustain his clients on virtual life support, plugged into his cell phone. Money would still be coming in, and I could write anywhere.

  We decided that September would be the best time to be in Provence—not too hot, yet early enough to avoid the cold blasts of the mistral winds that come from the north and typically arrive by early October, although they can happen at any time.

  I went to my computer, English/French dictionary in hand, and composed an e-mail telling Mme Desrozier that we’d like to study French with her three times a week during the entire month of September and asked her if she would please give us the name of a Realtor who could find us a house in L’Isle sur La Sorgue. That bit of prose alone required several dictionary consults. I returned one last time to the dictionary’s “Useful Phrases Section” to figure out how to sign off. Nothing simple and straightforward like “Sincerely” was apparent, so I chose the shortest option, Dans l’attente de votre réponse—I look forward to hearing from you—and hit send. I was already pretending to be French.

  Now that we had found a teacher, we needed to find a house, some place modest but comfortable. We were determined to live in L’Isle sur la Sorgue so that we could walk to Monique’s house from Le Café Bellevue. Within a day or two, I received a response from Monique. “Je suis ravie,” it began. Uh oh. Was she raving? Was she ravenous? I had pretended too well. I went back to the dictionary. No, she was merely delighted. This would be the first of many encounters with annoyingly deceptive French words.

  Monique also provided us with contact information for a Realtor, Catherine Gottinkiene. I wrote her an e-mail, also in tediously researched French, spelling out our needs. She responded with a contract, which took a half hour to translate, describing a house on a street called Impasse des Jardins, a dead-end street and gardens. The place sounded appealing, and it seemed to fulfill our requirements at a price we could afford, although barely.

 
In order to get to Provence, we first fly from JKF Airport in New York to Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris and then board a train for Avignon. From there, we pick up our rental car and drive to L’Isle sur la Sorgue. During the six-hour plane trip, Larry, a borderline narcoleptic, falls asleep before the flight attendant has a chance to demonstrate how to fasten a seat belt, and he continues to sleep soundly through the entire trip. I, an insomniac, having taken two Ambien, remain paradoxically wide awake and unjustifiably furious with Larry.

  Once in Charles de Gaulle, we are instantly reminded that we are tourists. We cannot find any signs at any of the portes or gates that read “Avignon.” I flip through the pages of my yellow 3 x 4–inch English-French/French-English dictionary. “Oû est la porte pour Avignon?” I ask some guy I’m pretty sure is French since I couldn’t fit into his shirt. Frenchmen tend to be small, wiry, and two-dimensional. He directs us to a gate, the sign over which reads “Marseille.” I’ve heard that Parisians can be perverse, but are they sadistic enough to purposely sabotage strangers? Then after a moment, Larry, who knows east from west the second he emerges from a New York subway, gets it. Avignon is in the direction of Marseille.

  Boarding the high-speed train, familiarly known as the TGV or train à grande vitesse, is une comédie d’erreurs unless it’s happening to you. You can’t just get on any old first- or second-class wagon. You must get on a specific car and then into a specific seat. It says so on our ticket, but we can’t read our ticket because it’s in French. Some of the information is clear enough; we know we’re in seconde classe, but we can’t decipher the rest. We also don’t understand that the TGV, in order to maintain its reputation for grande vitesse, will bullet into the station, soundlessly open its silver doors, take a few deep, electronic breaths, close its doors, and speed on toward its target, Marseille. If you’re left behind, it’s too bad. Tant pis.