Playing House in Provence

by Mary-Lou Weisman

  No wonder Cézanne was obsessed by it, painting over one hundred versions from all angles, in all weather, in all seasons, and at all times of the day. We pay homage by taking about ten photographs and then reluctantly get back into the car and head for home.

  Caruso in the Kitchen

  Larry has found a recipe for joues de porc (pork cheeks) that has over ten ingredients, marinates over night, and takes most of the next day to prepare. He pays a visit to “his butcher,” M. Isnard, to order the pork cheeks. Upon arriving in any town, Larry’s first stop is la boucherie, where he likes to chat up the butcher. On an earlier visit, they bonded over the subject of worldwide sanitation rules and how “they” are making it impossible for the French to export or import certain foods, including Larry’s favorite semisoft cheese, Reblochon, that, because it’s not pasteurized, is banned in the United States.

  “How are you planning to prepare it?” the butcher asks. Larry answers him in French that is comprehensible enough to engage the interest of the women shoppers who are standing behind him, waiting their turn. The butcher advises Larry to flour the cheeks before braising them. That way the sauce is thicker. One of the women volunteers that she cooks her pork cheeks for three hours; another says two and a half is enough. A third says that she marinates the meat the night before in red wine. Another serves hers with steamed potatoes. The customers are in no hurry to place their orders; they are far more interested in talking about Larry’s meal. Larry wonders what he should serve for dessert. About this there is agreement. Figs are in season. Cut them into star shapes and place a dab of vanilla ice cream in the middle and add a splash of brandy. There’s a woman at the foot of the hill who sells artisanal ice cream. Nothing less will do.

  It occurs to me that this is my fourth stay in Provence and I have not yet heard anyone say “calories,” or “cholesterol,” or even “arterial plaque.” The French do not season their food with regret, at least not here in Provence, the birthplace of French cuisine.

  However, it is also true that more and more French people are like Americans—solitary fast-food eaters, stuffing themselves with quick take-out calories, followed by periodic dieting. Le régime, a diet, the word that once dared not speak its name, has now worked its way into the vocabulary, along with Jennie Craig and McDonald’s, which the French familiarly called “McDo.”

  In 1999, a French sheep farmer named José Bové drove his tractor into a partially constructed McDonald’s restaurant in Millau, a midsized town just west of Provence, thereby striking the first blow against what the French call malbouffe, or junk food. He needn’t have bothered.

  There are now at least 1,200 McDonald’s franchises in France, second only to their number in the United States. On the Champs Elysées in Paris, the golden arches of McDonald’s compete with the Arc de Triomphe. There’s a McDo in the Louvre, and the Mona Lisa is still smiling.

  The French franchisers of McDo have designed the restaurants and the menu to suit French tastes. Upholstered chairs invite the French to linger; the Mcbaguette Burger transforms a Big Mac into haut-ish cuisine.

  The McDo-ing of France may be its culinary undoing, but in the small towns around us, the table still comes first. When Ellen enrolled her eldest child, Anna, in school, the principal instructed Ellen to bring une serviette. Because Ellen was still new to the language at the time, she looked up the word, learned that it meant either “towel” or “napkin,” and sent Anna to kindergarten with a towel. The principal, who commands the norms of etiquette, had a napkin in mind. It should be brought to school clean on Mondays and retrieved on Fridays to be taken home and laundered. Fastidiousness didn’t stop there. Anna, along with all the other children, was provided with a pair of delicate slippers to be worn at school, except during recess.

  Anna spends at least an hour eating lunch at school, where the children enjoy a three-course meal of salad, fish or meat, and dessert. There are no trays, no cafeteria lines, no twenty-minute lunch periods, at least not yet, at least not in these small towns. The children sit in small groups around tables, where they are encouraged to help themselves and their tablemates to each course, to pass the bread, to take only their fair share from the communal platters, and to engage in conversation. This leisurely scenario exists in contrast to the fuel stop of a lunch at Anna’s school in San Raphael, California. American children are, in effect, taught to rush, to wolf down their food, and to separate the idea of eating from the pleasure of socializing. Here, civility and sociability are taught at the grammar school table.

  When Larry cooks, he likes to listen to opera, preferably bel canto. He turns the volume way up, like a teenager, and sings along. This house, like all our medieval rentals, comes equipped with a television, CDs, and DVDs, among which he finds one of his favorite operas, La Bohème. He is on such familiar terms with it that he calls it La Bo.

  “Che Gelida Manina”—“What cold hands,” Larry sings loudly to an imaginary, freezing cold Mimi, the tubercular love of his life. Blending his voice with Placido Domingo’s, he doesn’t sound half-bad. He gets so carried away by the infamous high C, the note that even Caruso was reluctant to attempt, that he sets his knife down in order to fling out both arms without causing injury.

  Fresh from his triumphant visit to the butcher, he is also in the mood to speak French. If he doesn’t know a particular word, he speaks English with a French accent, like Charles Boyer. “Choppez et donnez-moi zee parsley,” he says.

  In Provence, I often act as Larry’s sous chef, chopping, grating, scraping, melting, and unrolling nasty little anchovy tins. I hand him knives, spoons, and parchment paper. I create neat little bowls full of carefully measured ingredients, and I place them on the counter in the order in which they will be needed. The French call it la mise en place.

  The final moments of food preparation are conducted with solemnity and precision, as if we were in an operating theater. Larry stops singing.

  “Romarin,” Larry says, and I hand him the rosemary.

  “Estragon,” he says, and I slap two sprigs of tarragon into his waiting hand.

  Larry adds and stirs. Mimi coughs.

  When our meal is fully cooked and the sauce is reduced, Larry transfers the cheeks gently to a platter, sprinkles the dish with chopped parsley, gets out his camera, and takes a picture of dinner. Larry celebrates all our meals with a photo. He takes more pictures of his dinners than grandparents do of their grandchildren.

  Pork Cheeks

  Ingredients to serve 6

  12 pork cheeks (Not easy to find in an American butcher shop, but a fancy one will have them or get them for you. They’re very inexpensive, possibly because nobody but you even wants to think about eating them.)

  1 bottle red wine; a Côtes du Rhône or other complex wine

  1 carrot, peeled and cut into small cubes

  1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil

  1 leek, leaves removed and cut into quarter-inch cubes

  1 tomato, chopped into quarter-inch cubes

  1 onion, peeled and cut into chunks

  1 clove of garlic, sliced

  1 celery stick, cut into quarter-inch cubes

  8 1/2 cups chicken stock

  2 sprigs thyme

  2 sprigs rosemary

  2 sprigs tarragon

  1 tablespoon brown sugar

  parsley for sprinkling

  Directions

  Marinate the pork cheeks in the red wine for 24 hours. (Less is okay, but the butcher says the longer the better.)

  Drain the pork cheeks, dust them with flour, and reserve the red wine. Gently sear the cheeks in heated olive oil. Then set aside.

  Combine the carrot, leek, tomato, onion, garlic, and celery in a hot pan and caramelize on full heat. When caramelized, add the pork cheeks and red wine. Reduce the volume by about half.

  Add the chicken stock, herbs, and sugar. Cover and slowly braise for
three to four hours on low heat. When the meat is tender, remove the pork cheeks and set them aside.

  Further reduce the sauce until it is very thick and with an almost firm texture. Pour sauce over the cheeks. Sprinkle with parsley.

  (Note: This dish is excellent served with mashed potatoes, or pureed parsnips, or a hunk of crusty bread to sop up the extra sauce. Otherwise guests will be tempted to drink it from their plates.)

  Larry Takes a Mistress

  There’s Larry, there’s me, and then there’s this third entity we bring along with us wherever we go, our marriage. At home, we’re separated every day, except on evenings and weekends. While planning our Provençal adventure, neither of us had thought about what it would be like to be together all day. We must have assumed that we would enjoy an enhanced sense of excitement at the happy prospect of more time together. We forgot to imagine that the problems that usually languish, almost unnoticed in the background at home, would move foreground in Provence.

  There aren’t a lot of things we don’t like about each other in real life, but to come upon them on a fantasy vacation is particularly galling. How do we annoy one another? Let me count the ways.

  Larry wakes up happy, a condition I find quite jarring first thing in the morning. He does the crossword puzzle, drinks coffee, sings in the shower, shaves, dresses for work, skips breakfast—“I’m not hungry”—and then stops at the doughnut shop on his way to the office. (I have a spy.)

  I wake up drowsy. I don’t mind that he doesn’t pay any attention to me in the morning. I am not worth paying attention to. I want to be left alone to suck on my coffee until I am fully conscious. Meanwhile, I flip through the pages of the newspaper, scanning the apocalyptic headlines. Will it be nuclear war, terrorists, plague, out-of-control population growth, or global warming that does us in? The more I read, the worse I feel, the more sure I am that the world is coming to an end. Then I walk down the hall to my office and write humor.

  There is nothing about this mutually exclusive routine that works in Provence. I can’t wake up any faster, and Larry can’t stand waiting for me. He’s restless. Our different morning rhythms torment us both until, after days of urging me on, Larry realizes that if he took a long walk each morning, he could leave me in peace and smoke cigarettes with impunity, like a real Frenchman.

  I am bossy. I love to tell people what to do, whether they’ve asked for my advice or not. Even people who like me think I’m bossy. My friend Gloria gave me a decorative wooden plaque, which rests on a windowsill in my office. It reads, “I’m not bossy. I just know what you should be doing.” My compulsion to give advice is unstoppable. The only way to shut me up is duct tape.

  Oddly, Larry the lawyer, a man whose profession is about giving advice, never offers me advice unless I ask for it. This courtesy, however, doesn’t stop me from minding his business whenever I get the urge. When we’re at home, he handles my bossiness with remarkable compliance. I tell him what he should do, and he does it, unless he doesn’t want to.

  In Provence, however, he finds me overbearing, no doubt due to an excess of togetherness. He experiences me as conducting a nonstop game of “Mother May I,” demanding his obedience to the childish equivalent of giant steps, baby steps, backward steps, and umbrella steps. (Umbrella steps, as you may recall, involve twirling.) “Let’s shop, eat, do homework, read, ride bikes,” I command. He protests by throwing the game. He refuses to obey.

  For my part, I suffer from fear of finding. Although I have never been in a paper bag, it is likely that I could not find my way out of one. My inability to navigate isn’t much of a problem at home, but it moves front and center in Provence, where I’m totally disoriented and utterly dependent upon Larry, the human GPS, to show me the way. Larry doesn’t mind. He loves to drive, and he enjoys being in control.

  But I mind. How can I take myself seriously as a cultural adventurer if I don’t have the guts to get behind the wheel of a foreign car in a foreign country, with foreign road signs and aggressive, tailgating French drivers, and risk crashing into something foreign? And I call myself a feminist?

  Larry is very solicitous about my need to find my own way. Whenever I gather up my nerve and tell him I’d like to drive, he martyrs himself cheerfully and moves over to the passenger seat, knowing that he will lose all control and that, having lost control, he will clutch the console for dear life and impotently stamp his right foot on a nonexistent brake pedal. Such is love. He must be constantly vigilant, give me directions, boost my morale, and at the same time suppress any yelps of fear that threaten to escape his mouth. Little by little, I regain at least some of the premarital independence I enjoyed but gave up all too gladly, along with my maiden name, when I realized I had married a man who knew where he was going.

  Larry is an obsessive compulsive. In a kinder time, one less inclined to make a pathology out of every behavior, he might have been described as a devoted worker. At home, his obsessive behavior is a minor problem. He changes lightbulbs during dinner. He throws away any unimpressive pieces of snail mail, like theatre tickets. He saves his best obsessing for the office. Until now. Unfortunately, Larry has brought his work to Provence in the form of his mistress, Mlle. BlackBerry. At home, she’s not much of a problem for me because most of the time she and Larry stay at her place, at work.

  I understand that if it were not for her, Larry would not be able to stay in touch with his office, which, I concede, he must do in order for us to afford this idyll, but I do not concede that he has to take her everywhere we go and be available to her at her every beck and beep. He always keeps her turned on. I can hear her vibrating in his pants. I beg and complain and nag and nag and don’t get anywhere.

  “I don’t see what it has to do with you,” Larry argues.

  “That’s just the point,” I snap back. “When you’re with her, you’re not with me.”

  Larry insists that he can’t live without her. “All these e-mails are emergencies, clients who must be serviced or at least mollified,” he defends. “I’ve got to keep it on.”

  I don’t believe him. What I believe is that he leads her on. It’s not her fault. The more e-mails he answers, the more e-mails he generates. Why not bother your lawyer with unnecessary questions that can wait a couple of weeks until he gets home when your lawyer is crazy enough to indulge you in a matter of minutes?

  As the days go by, Larry’s relationship with his BlackBerry becomes more and more intense, and I grow angrier and angrier. Soon, his mania intrudes into the most private parts of our private life, the bedroom. First thing in the morning, upon awakening, he reaches for her and turns her on. He sits at the edge of the bed like Rodin’s Thinker. “There’s a six-hour time difference,” he reminds me. “E-mails have been piling up during the night.”

  I try a reasonable approach, never a good idea with a stubborn man, but I keep hoping. “Set aside some time each day to answer all your e-mails at once,” I suggest, as if he were seeking an answer. He says he will, but he doesn’t. The e-mails come faster and faster. I continue to nag. I should know better. Nagging, like begging, doesn’t work. It is woman’s weakest weapon. At critical moments like this, a feminist doesn’t ask, she takes.

  “I’m taking the phone and putting it in my purse, turned off. I’ll give it to you at the end of the day, and you can answer all your e-mails at once. End of story.”

  But that doesn’t work either. When my back is turned, he riffles through my purse and grabs her. I realize that I am dealing with a high-textosterone e-mail addict. He can’t help himself. The situation calls for an intervention.

  “Either she goes or I go,” I hear myself say with soap operatic conviction. The ensuing pause is not flattering, but he agrees. He will trade in his BlackBerry for an international cell phone with no texting capacity.

  Suddenly clients are not so interested in communicating with Larry Lawyer because the six-hour time difference pr
events easy access. People call only in the case of emergencies. The phone rarely rings.

  Larry will endure days of withdrawal symptoms like phantom texting: tapping his fingers on tabletops and reaching into his pocket whenever a truck backs up, but in time, the addiction loosens its grip. Sometimes Larry will flip his cell phone open to give himself a quick hit of its dull yellow light, but essentially the crisis is over. The marriage is saved.

  I make my own annoying contribution to domestic blips. I am very competitive. At home, where he’s a lawyer and I’m a writer, we rarely find ourselves in competitive situations unless we’re cycling uphill or playing Scrabble. No matter how many times I tell myself that it’s how I play the game that counts, not whether I win or lose, I don’t act as if I believe me. Larry swears that he doesn’t mind losing—in court, yes, but not at Scrabble—and I don’t believe him either.

  An Ill Wind That Blows No Good

  We become regulars at Le Restaurant St-André, just a short walk up the hill from our house and across the street from what has become our pâtisserie. The food’s not that great, but it’s inexpensive, and le patron is very friendly. Whenever he’s got a dull moment, he wanders over to our table to chat.

  On our first visit to the restaurant in early September, le patron warns us that the mistral is on its way. He predicts with great certainty that it will blow around the Vaucluse for the next three days. Sure enough, by the next day the wind is so strong that he is clinging fiercely to his outdoor wooden menu board while we clamp our knees on our napkins and hang on to our flatware that is doing a slow creep across the table. The mistral is well known for slamming shutters, nudging people, blowing swifts off course, and making people act crazy.