Playing House in Provence

by Mary-Lou Weisman

  Julie’s soirée is an extravaganza of superficial friendliness. In spite of their obvious limitations, superficial friendships have their advantages. Our conversations, such as they are, are fueled by sheer goodwill. For all we know, we could be triple kissing thieves and serial killers. It took us two sojourns in the Vaucluse to figure out that one of our friends is suffering from advanced Alzheimer’s.

  I would not have thought it possible to be friends with people who cannot speak English, but our relationship with Sylvie and Alain Prétot proves me wrong. Even if we can’t finish each other’s sentences—sometimes we can’t even understand them—there is friendship in smiles, in gestures, in touch, in favors, in offerings of food and drink, in the light in their eyes whenever we meet. Because they live just a few doors away from Mo, we see them often. Sylvie, especially, exudes a sense of warmth and welcome. An invitation to stop by for a drink turns out to be a full-course dinner. It is her earth-motherly nature to give, and we find her irresistible. In time, as our French improves, we begin to know them both beyond superficial, conversational niceties. Larry finds a cooking companion in Alain. They button themselves into their white chef’s jackets—Alain keeps a couple at home—and bond over a vol-au-vent.

  The long hours we’ve spent studying and socializing in Mo’s home makes intimacy inevitable, even though she can’t speak English, or at least claims she can’t. She tries to maintain a certain professionalism and discipline, but because we’re in her company so often, there is no way she can isolate us from her private life or she from ours. Merde happens. Her washer overflows. She suffers from migraines. She suspects her son is smoking pot. She thinks about retirement. So does Larry. In Provence, he loves painting watercolors. He enjoys reading for hours on end. But, he wonders out loud to Mo, whether he would do that at home if he really retired. I tell Monique about my parents with candor usually reserved for the analytic couch. Mo catalogues the many ways that Ange was a total creep. We never knew him well enough to notice. We arrange for a Franco-American marriage between her first grandchild, Quentin, and Isabelle.

  The downside of this relationship is that Mo is less and less our professor and more and more our friend. It is our fault. Mo is eager to teach us the subjunctive mood if we’d let her, but we won’t. We would rather become French than learn French. By now, Mo says, we ought to have finished all the tenses, but we have so much fun talking and joking with her in our mediocre French that we often undermine our pursuit of fluency in favor of fun.

  When vrais are English speakers, the potential for friendship increases. I never expected to make real friends in Provence; the language barrier alone would see to that. But with Ulli and Bettina, there are no barriers, just minor bumps. We’ve got a leg up, so to speak, since at all times we’ve got one and a half languages in common. Both Ulli and Bettina speak decent English. When our French fails us, we migrate to English. We talk candidly about everything: what’s happening to America, what’s wrong with Angela Merkel, where we’ve traveled before, their intense dislike of Germans, the Muslim headscarf, their sexual histories, our marital problems, their latest tag sale acquisitions, the existence of God, how Ange turned out not to be as nice as he seemed, and why, then, do we suppose that Mo stayed with him for as long as she did. When you can gossip in French, you’ve arrived.

  With Bob and Ellen, we don’t even bother to speak French. In fact, the day that Mo introduced me to Ellen at lunch, we automatically retreated from the dining room to the hallway where Mo couldn’t hear us, and began to speak mad, passionate English. We are like seatmates on a long airplane trip, throwing conversational caution to the winds. Perhaps that sense of impermanence is why our friendships, as with Ulli and Bettina, happen so quickly and carry such a charge. It is also true that we have been preselected to get along. We already have a lot in common: we are adventurers, we are on foreign soil, and we are all trying to be French.

  Someone Put a Banana in My Chardonnay

  Petty humiliations happen daily. Usually I am able to accept them as no-pain, no-gain learning experiences. The unpleasant feeling is quickly forgotten, and I switch over to trying to correct and memorize the mispronounced word or other evidences of ignorance. Embarrassment is a great teacher. But when the constantly hovering drone of humiliation bombs on me three times in one day, even Paxil won’t help.

  Day breaks, spilling a torrent of chilly rain on Provence. Bad weather on this particular day is especially annoying because Mo has decided that we are to visit a vineyard. I put on my raincoat and take a shortcut through the parking lot to the pâtisserie to buy two of what has become our favorite treat, a sacristan, a flakey almond pastry sprinkled with confectioner’s sugar.

  Since I see the baker nearly every morning, I decide to comment on how bad the weather is, how it’s raining constantly. It’s the French thing to do; the French love to talk about the weather. “Quel mauvais temps,” I say. “What terrible weather.” “Il pleure sans cesse.” “It doesn’t stop raining.” I’m very pleased with myself, so I wonder why she looks at me as if I were nuts. On my way home, I check my yellow dictionary. The infinitive for rain is pleuvoir; the infinitive for cry is pleurer. Great! I have told her that I cry constantly.

  Next stop on my mortification tour: the vineyard. We are met and escorted around the property by Dominique, a young and gorgeous vintner who, even though she’s female, is the personification of one of the most important French traditions ever—winemaking.

  In a brief introduction, delivered inside the winery, she explains that her family has been producing wine for hundreds of years, as far back as anyone can remember. It is a foregone conclusion on the part of her parents and relatives that she will inherit the vineyard and become a winemaker. The fact that she is a woman seems to be irrelevant, even when so many business signs read, “Somebody or other and Sons.” No doubt, at this very moment, somewhere in California’s Napa Valley, a father is grooming his daughter to take charge of the Beaujolais Nouveau. She may be one of the first female American vintners to break the grape ceiling.

  Dominique is not resigned to the role of tradition in her life; she embraces it. Her ambitions are defined by the past. I, by contrast, come from a country so young that it hasn’t had a chance to accumulate many traditions, and from a family so fractured by divorce or distance that they can’t even agree to get together once a year and carve a turkey.

  Now it’s time to tramp around the vineyard. Dominique’s got a supply of one-size-fits-all rubber boots for visitors. It is raining harder than ever. Our boots make raunchy noises as we slog through the sticky mud. Larry, Ulli, and I share an umbrella. I am having a terrible time. It was William James who said you could make yourself feel better by smiling. So far it’s not working.

  Once back inside the winery, it’s time for the wine tasting. My mood improves. Dominique pours us each a glass of wine from a bottle of one of her best Chardonnays. First we have a swishing lesson. I am unable to swish the wine in a circular motion in the glass. Larry is instantly expert. So is Ulli. Mo, of course, is swishing just fine. She was probably born knowing how, just as she was born knowing how to tie a scarf. I am so determined to master swishing that I create a kind of storm at sea as waves of wine splash over the rim of my glass and drip down my hand. I have never been so not French.

  Next we are instructed to sniff the wine to detect its “nose.” I’ve never understood that little affectation. I’m the one with the nose. It’s the one with the smell. I raise my glass and sniff. It smells like wine to me, but since I know that’s not the answer, I know to keep my nose down and my mouth shut.

  When it’s time to taste, my luck changes.

  “I detect a hint of banana,” I say. I really do taste banana. I’m not making it up.

  “Extraordinare!” Dominique declares. “Incroyable!” Even Larry and Monique are impressed by how natively French and subtle my taste buds are. Dominique affirms that there are, in
deed, notes of banana in this Chardonnay. And then I blow it by asking at what point in the process do they mix in the bananas. Everyone stares as me in total disbelief. That’s my morning.

  My afternoon is worse. Now it’s raining harder, but even so I decide to try to save the day. There’s an exercise class that’s held in the church basement across the parking lot, and exercise always makes me feel better. Plus, an exercise class offers an excellent opportunity to insinuate myself into village life. I look forward to meeting some local women; surely they’d want to chat with this American stranger in their midst. I slip into the class, clutching my mat. Nobody even acknowledges me with a bonjour. I take my place and try to follow the directions barked out by the leader. “Baissez votre bassin!” she commands. I have no idea what she wants of me, except that votre means “your.” I know that the lake in the center of L’Isle sur la Sorgue is called a bassin, but that gets me nowhere. Baisser, as far as I know, means to kiss, but surely she does not want me to kiss my lake. The instructor, in utter disgust, marches over to my nicely arched body and pushes on my stomach, forcing me to lower my pelvis. After class, I roll up my mat—nobody says à bientôt—and head home.

  I look up the pertinent words in the dictionary. La bise means a kiss. Le bisou is a social kiss, the kind you plant three times on people’s cheeks when saying hello or goodbye. Le baiser is a passionate kiss, as between lovers. Or at least it used to be. The B-word is now synonymous with the F-word, so if you want to stay on the safe side of sex, use embrasser, which still means “to kiss.”

  I run my finger down the page a little further and learn that baisser, with two s’s means “to lower or go down.” So that’s what she meant. I should lower something, but what? In the treacherous French language, bassin means pelvis as well as lake. Now I get it. She wanted me to lower my pelvis. I will suffer one more humiliation with the deadly baisser/baiser homonyms. Flying home that year, the French flight attendant will roar with laughter when I ask her if my seat goes down on itself.

  Provence in a Suitcase

  We can tell that our month in Goult is coming to an end; the digital device on the dashboard of our car blinks away the days, nearing the thirty days that September hath. My Monday through Sunday pill dispensers are running low; the toothpaste tube is rolled to the max. We embark on a long goodbye.

  When I was a kid, whenever we went on a trip, I would hang out of the window as my father backed the DeSoto out of the driveway and wave goodbye to everything in sight. “Goodbye, house! Goodbye, lawn! Goodbye, mailbox! Goodbye, driveway!” I’d keep it up all the way to “Goodbye, neighborhood!” I reenact the same ritual when leaving Provence, especially when it comes to people.

  We “goodbye” everyone we know—René, Danielle, Catherine, Yves, Alain, Sylvie. We go to our last class with Monique and bid her a tearful goodbye.

  After class we go out for a farewell dinner with Ulli and Bettina. They take this occasion to announce that they are planning to take a trip to New York City and the New England states during the coming year. Of course they’ll be staying with us as a part of their trip. We’re delighted. It’s not goodbye; it’s à bientôt.

  We are in a totem-toting mood. We want to bring Provence home with us. I must buy French spiral notebooks, the kind with grids, even though they look identical to American notebooks. I hoard French toothbrushes. They’re just enough different from American ones that they’ll remind me at least twice a day of my love for Provence. I also must import those flat, little, yellow cellulose sponges that come in net bags and swell to normal sponge size when submerged in water, even though, a few days later, when I get home, I will find them in Trader Joe’s. Nor are we beyond smuggling. We buy four bottles of our favorite prepared vinaigrette and a long string of figatelli, wrapped multiple times to hold in its gamey aroma.

  Most unbelievably, Larry wants to buy a pocketbook, the kind that French businessmen carry. After a month of seeing how normal it is for Frenchmen to carry pocketbooks, he is ready to take the plunge. We linger for nearly an hour in a men’s leather store while Larry explores various pocketbooks’ inner and outer features, all the while talking himself into the virtues of having all his important stuff easily accessible and organized in one place, instead of rattling around in his pants and jacket pockets.

  He buys one. Such is the power of Larry’s desire to be French that he actually believes that he is going to carry a pocketbook. Larry? I don’t think so, and I am right. The bag hangs, unused, on a hook in his closet, next to the beret he bought the year before.

  Our actual trip home, like all our returns from Provence, whether from Nice or Paris, seems agonizingly endless. I do in-seat isometrics. I read. I make notes to myself, which, if implemented, would improve my life. Some people do these life assessments at the new year. I find that I get the best view of my life from a perspective of thirty-six thousand feet, and the best ideas of how to improve it. I will get up earlier. I will remember to defrost dinner in the morning, so I won’t have to melt it in the microwave at night. I will join a French conversation class. I will find time to relax and read in the afternoons instead of waiting until bedtime when I’m too tired. I will watch less television. I will use the living room more. I will rid my closet of every item of clothing that I haven’t worn in two years and take it to Goodwill. I will eat less meat. I will be a nicer person. Unfortunately, as I learn over and over again, my resolutions don’t adapt well at ground level.

  I watch the movie North by Northwest twice. I obsessively return to the airline channel that displays the progress of our tiny black plane as it moves glacially along its trajectory from London, across the Atlantic, to New York’s JFK. Whenever I check our progress, the icon seems stubbornly frozen, like a faulty computer cursor, over Nova Scotia. Nevertheless, the endless agony of going home won’t stop us from returning next year. Soon the bad travel memory will fade into the kind of dumb obscurity usually reserved for childbirth.

  In the Fourth Place

  Living Sideways

  The Vaucluse is becoming our home away from home. After three years, the thrill of the new has morphed into the comfort, the pleasure, and sometimes even the boredom of the familiar. It was inevitable. My father was right. The butler no longer relishes the fantasy of presiding over a well-run household. On the other hand, that doesn’t mean he isn’t enjoying the reality.

  We know the drill. We buy our plane tickets. We land in de Gaulle, hop on the fast train to Avignon, sit in the right seats, pick up the rental car, and navigate the rotaries like pros. We head off in toutes directions toward L’Isle sur la Sorgue, past towns whose names we know by heart, drugstores where we’ve filled prescriptions, stands of plane trees, restaurants where we’ve eaten more than once, and ATMs where we’ve turned credit cards into euros. Familiarity doesn’t breed contempt; it breeds familiarity. It’s good to be almost home.

  We’re headed for a different medieval house in a different medieval town near the top of yet another charming hilltop village, Bonnieux, population 1,408, not counting us. A new house is the novelty on which we thrive. It challenges us to make ourselves at home. The same is true for a change of town. We like our address—rue Voltaire. As was the case with Goult, our house is in the center of town but far enough away from the town’s two churches to allow for an uninterrupted night’s sleep.

  Instructions from the house’s American owner advise us to park our car in the street below, across from the twelfth-century ramparts. We soon find out that the ramparts also serve as the foundation of our terrace. They’re our ramparts! We are off to a very good start.

  We asked Ulli and Bettina to check out the house before we signed the rental contact, but in spite of several drives through Bonnieux searching for rue Voltaire, they had been unable to locate it. Now we know why. The so-called street leading to our front door is narrow, unmarked, one way, and so steep that one could easily assume it’s a driveway. To approach our front d
oor, one must angle one’s body forward, like Miss Clavel from Ludwig Bemelman’s Madeleine.

  No one in their right mind would rent a house most easily approached on all fours, but we are not in our right minds. We are pretending to be French. The cant of our street will also have the virtue of canceling out my caloric intake of sacristans and croissants even before I reach the best pâtisserie in town, which, we will soon learn, is even further up the hill.

  Rue Voltaire isn’t the only ridiculously steep road in town. There’s the hill that leads to the town’s most famous landmark, the well-named twelfth-century High Church, La Haute Eglise, which sits defiantly at the top of eighty-six steps, testing the devotion of the faithful. In medieval times, the locals, charged with carrying the coffins to the church, used to complain that the dead buried the living.

  Larry and I arrive at our rental home, panting and laughing. We stand askew, our hands planted on our hips for balance. Does somebody else’s life get better than this?

  Yes it does. We will spend the next month living in a view. When Vincent, the caretaker, opens the door, our eyes are ineluctably drawn right through the house to the panorama below. We cross the living room and open the French doors—what else?—and step onto a very large stone patio, twice as wide as it is deep, bordered by the rampart. Our eyes widen at the sight that lies below: first the cockeyed geometry of the orange tile roofs; then the wide and deep Luberon valley—its towns, its patchwork of farms, its church spires, its miniature roads and tiny cars. We identify Goult, our last hilltop hometown, just across the highway and a bit to the east. There’s the Pierre Cardin-branded ancient town of Lacoste, easily recognized by the crenellated de Sade castle where, in the eighteenth century, the Marquis spent his adult years, when he wasn’t in jail or an asylum for the insane. And that’s definitely ochre-colored Rousillon, and Apt even further to the east. On a clear day, we can see Mont Ventoux.