Ever since I moved into my first apartment with CM our junior year in college, my mother and I have had an unspoken agreement. She doesn’t call me unless there’s a pretty compelling reason. So when my phone rings the afternoon of January first, it doesn’t occur to me that it might be her, even though I haven’t talked to her since Christmas Eve. In fact, when I hear her voice, my heart stops.
“Mom, what’s wrong?”
Her laugh tinkles up the telephone line. “Nothing, honey. I just have some news. I’m getting married.”
I slide into the club chair. “Married?” Oh, God. I’m going to have a cop for a stepfather.
“Richard has asked me to marry him.”
“Who?”
“Richard. Richard Travers. The architect. My boss.”
“What about Ed?”
“What about him? I haven’t seen him since you left.”
“Mother, who is this guy? I don’t even know him.” I have the sensation of being in a Fellini movie.
“You will.”
“Well. Congratulations.”
“You don’t sound convinced.” She laughs, but there’s an edge to it. “Should I squeal?”
“Wynter.” She’s trying to be patient. “I know you’re going to like him. He’s a wonderful man. We’ve been working together very closely ever since I started there and we’ve been almost inseparable for the last month.”
“Are you sleeping with him?”
A short silence. “That’s none of your business.”
“Well, don’t you think I should get to meet this person before you go running off to get married?”
Now she’s laughing so hard I’m afraid she’s going to choke.
“What is so goddamn funny?”
Every time I think she’s winding down, she gets hysterical again. “Oh, Wyn … you … if you could … oh, God, if you could hear what you sound like …” This is followed by gasping for breath and some little groaning noises. Then she blows her nose. “Wyn? Are you there? I’m sorry, honey, but you sound like my mother.”
I think if you feel faint, you’re supposed to put your head down between your knees. So the blood rushes to the brain. It just makes my head hurt.
“I don’t know what to say.” I sit back up.
“How about ‘Congratulations, Mom, I’m really happy for you’?”
“You haven’t even been working there that long. What do you really know about him? Maybe he’s a con artist who preys on lonely widows. Maybe schizophrenia runs in his family. He could have a criminal record or a wife in Toronto or—”
She’s still laughing. “He’s divorced. Trust me, I know what I need to know. Besides, the wedding’s not till February fourteenth—corny, isn’t it? That gives me two extra months to discover Dr. Jekyll.”
“Mr. Hyde. Dr. Jekyll was the good guy.”
“Wyn, I want you to be my maid of honor.” As if she’s making me a peer of the realm.
“Well … okay.”
“Okay?” Her voice is rapier sharp.
“What the hell do you expect me to say? I don’t even know the guy. You’re sneaking around seeing him—”
“Don’t be ridiculous. We’re two single adults. There’s no reason why we shouldn’t see each other.”
“Well, you work in the same office. I’m sure they don’t know anything about it.”
“Of course they do.”
“Does his family know about it?”
“His son knows, yes.”
“But you didn’t tell me?”
“Why would I tell you?”
“Because … just because. Why wouldn’t you tell me?”
“Quite frankly, I didn’t think you’d be interested. You never seemed to be when you had David and—”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Exactly this, Wyn. When you were married and had a wonderful, exciting life, there wasn’t a lot going on between you and me. Now, suddenly, because you’re lonely and unhappy, you want me to confide in you.”
The conversation has become a runaway train, captive of its own momentum. I want to hang up, but I can’t. Neither can I make a single word come out of my mouth. I stare at Tyler’s watercolor of Pioneer Square with diagonal slashes of rain, umbrella-toting tourists.
“Wyn? Are you there?”
“I’m here.”
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.” I notice she doesn’t say she didn’t mean it. “I was so happy and I wanted you to be, too. I wasn’t even thinking what a shock it would be for you. I’m sorry, honey. Please don’t be upset.”
One long exhale. Then I hear myself say, “I’m not upset. I’m just surprised. Sort of disappointed that you didn’t tell me before. That’s all.”
“Does that mean you’ll come?”
“I’ll be there if you want me.”
“Of course I do. Valentine’s Day’s a Saturday. Do you think you can take off work and—”
“Not a problem.” “I can send you a ticket if—”
“I can afford a ticket. Maybe I’ll even bring CM.”
“That would be nice.” The silence winds out till it’s about to snap. “Well … I guess I should let you go. I’m sure you have things to do. We’ll talk again soon.”
I open my door and stand in the freshening air, goose bumps racing up and down my arms. Three-thirty in the afternoon and darkness is coming on fast. Gusts of wind thrash the hemlocks. I need to get out of here before I start breaking windows. I pull on my new sweater and my rain parka and head out the door, my hair streaming out behind me. By the time I reach Queen Anne Avenue, the sidewalk is spotted with tiny, dark star bursts, and then the rain arrives in earnest. I flounced out of the house without my umbrella, so in a very few minutes, I manage to absorb quite a lot of water. I run from one closed shop to another, sheltering in doorways. It’s New Year’s Day. Nothing’s going to be open. I dash under Bailey’s ragged green awning and lean panting against the rough wooden door. It swings inward. I follow it, shivering and waterlogged, looking around in the dim light. It’s a funky joint. One of those places where the floor smells like it’s absorbed more beer than the clientele, and right now it’s empty.
Then I see the bartender. He has his back to me, drying glasses and putting them away. He turns around, surprised. “Sorry, we’re not open till five.” Then he laughs. “God, you’re soaked.”
“You have a gift for stating the obvious.” I turn back to the door.
“Hey, come on in. You can stay if you want. I just can’t serve you till five. Go sit by the fire and I’ll get you some towels.” He disappears through the swinging doors at the end of the bar, and I hang my dripping coat on the rack. The place is bigger than it looks from outside. There’s a pool table in the back, a fireplace burning cozily on one wall, four tables, half a dozen booths. My shoes squish wetly as I drag a chair up to the fire, sit down, stretch out my legs.
He hands me two white towels and sets a steaming mug on the table. “It’s just hot tea.” He grins. “But I accidentally spilled some brandy in it when I reached for the towels.” He puts a bear-shaped plastic bottle of honey down next to it. “Let me know if you want more.”
“Thanks.” I blot the water out of my hair, which is already kinking like mad, hand the first towel back to him, sopping wet. He takes it away and resumes drying glasses while I sit watching him. He’s tall and his brown hair is cut extremely short, but instead of bristling like a crew cut, it lays down soft and close to his head, like a child’s hair.
I squirt a golden rope of honey into the mug and stir it around. My first sip gets me a noseful of brandy and starts the heat radiating out from my core. I settle into the chair. After a few minutes, he must feel my eyes boring into his back, because he turns around. “You okay?”
“I don’t mean to stare, but do I know you from someplace?”
He looks sheepish. “Launderland. I think I’ve seen you there. I’m the one with the notebook.”
“O
h, right.” I remember him now, head bent, scribbling furiously. He hovers over the notebook the way you did in school so no one could cheat off your test. “So what are you writing?”
“Nothing exciting. A journal.” He scoops out a dish of something and brings it over to me. Peanuts. “Just throw the shells on the floor. It’s a tradition.” He parks his butt on the edge of the table. “You haven’t been here before, have you?”
“No.” I smile without understanding why. “I didn’t plan on coming here tonight, but I thought if I didn’t get out of the house I might start smashing things.”
“Cabin fever.”
“I guess I’m not used to the rain yet.”
“It takes a while. Some people never get used to it. Where’re you from?”
“Los Angeles.”
His eyebrows go up, making his dark eyes look huge. “What brings you up here? Or shouldn’t I ask?”
His face is open, direct, pleasantly anonymous. Like a priest. You want to tell him your life story. “Asking’s your job, isn’t it? Bartender slash therapist?”
“Not much of a therapist. I’m a good listener, though. And very discreet.”
“Sometimes that’s all a therapist is.”
“Good point. By the way, I’m Mac McLeod.” He holds out his hand.
“Wyn Fr—Morrison.” We shake, and his hand is cool and smooth except for a callus at the bend of his thumb.
“I better finish getting set up. You want some more tea?”
“Well …”
He picks up the mug. “Come sit at the bar and keep me company.”
He sets my refill down on a Red Hook coaster. I sip in silence, letting my eyes wander over the rows of bottles behind the bar. On the liqueur shelf, electric-green Midori, golden Galliano, red Campari, Chartreuse, the warm amber of Courvoisier, deep-berry Chambord, red-black port, and startling blue Curaçao. They remind me of this drink my father liked to make when he had an audience.
“Do you know what a pousse café is?” I ask him.
He sets down a stack of napkins and gives it a sharp little twist with his knuckles, so that it fans out into a spiral. “Let’s see—grenadine and crème de menthe and Chartreuse … I forget the others. Not many people around here would even know what it is, much less ask for one.”
“You forgot my favorite—crème de violette.” I can see my father pouring each liqueur carefully over the back of a spoon so it would sit on top of the one below, not mixing, looking like a rainbow in a tall skinny glass.
“How do you know about a pousse café?”
“My father. He didn’t drink them, but he liked to make them.”
“So what does he drink?”
“Not much, these days. Unless they serve Manhattans on the other side.”
“The what?”
“He’s dead.”
“Sorry.”
“He liked a dry martini every once in a while, too.”
“Sounds like a man’s man.”
I rest my elbows on the bar. “He was an everybody’s man. People loved him.”
He slices a lemon with surgical precision, filling an old-fashioned glass with quarter circles of yellow. “Your mother live in L.A.?”
“She’s getting married.” I drink some more tea. It’s odd saying it to him, but not uncomfortable. I guess because he doesn’t know me.
“Do you like the guy?”
“Never met the guy.” Two tears surprise me by running down my face. I look around, as if someone might be watching, but there’s only him, and he doesn’t say anything. He just sets a clean bar towel down in front of me and goes back to slicing a lime.
“How long has your dad been gone?”
I give my face a quick pass with the towel. “Almost fifteen years.” “Your mom’s been alone all this time?”
“She never even dated much until … recently. I guess. I mean, she doesn’t tell me anything.” He lets that one percolate while he opens a white canvas bag, starts counting money into the register drawer. “You like this? Being a bartender?”
Over here, under the hanging light, I see that his eyes aren’t really brown, but somewhere between gray and green. “There’s worse ways to make a living.” He laughs. “And I’ve done most of them.”
He cleans his hands and pushes the Play button on a dinosaur of a reel-to-reel tape player. A piano kicks off some kind of jazz lite riff and he looks apologetic. “I know. It’s awful. Harte likes elevator music during the week. He buys these god-awful prerecorded tapes from a mail-order catalog. Like The 101 Strings Play John Lennon.”
“That sounds pretty scary. Who’s Harte?”
“The owner. On weekends I play what I like.”
“Which is?”
“Friday night is blues night. Saturday’s sort of eclectic—rock plus whatever else talks to me.”
“Does Mozart ever talk to you?”
He shakes his head, laughing. “Never. Although I throw in a couple of arias now and then.”
“Opera?”
“Sure. It’s a distant cousin to the blues. Same worldview, don’t you think? Life sucks.”
The door rattles open and a white-haired man in a plaid wool jacket comes in, shakes off the rain. He gives Mac a nod, like he sees him every night, and shuffles over to my vacant chair by the fire.
“Hi, Morey. ESB?”
The guy takes off a Seattle SuperSonics baseball cap and slaps it against his knee, sending a shower of spray hissing into the flames. “No hurry. She’s prettier ‘n me.”
“Where do you work?” Mac says.
“Queen Street Bakery.” Before he can ask, I say, “I bake bread.” “How’d you get into that?”
“It’s a long story. Too long for tonight. I have to get ready for work.”
“Next time, then.” He draws a Red Hook ESB and takes it to the guy in the plaid jacket.
Outside, the rain hasn’t stopped so much as paused, and the air is cold and scoured clean.
Okay. Next time.
There were basically two ways to do anything at the Boulangerie du Pont: Jean-Marc’s way and the wrong way. So I learned his way, one step at a time, one day at a time: le pétrissage, the mixing and kneading; le pointage, the first rising; donner un tour, to punch down the dough; le pesage, the scaling or weighing to make loaves of the prescribed weight; le façonnage, the shaping; l’apprêt, the proofing; le coup de lame, slashing the loaves; and la cuisson, the baking.
The mixing and kneading were all done by machine, but the loaves still had to be shaped by hand. It was hard work physically and it was hard to remember the different techniques for all the different shapes: la baguette, l’epée, la couronne, le bâtard, le boulot, la boule.
One morning, Jean-Marc brought me a metal bucket of dough that had somehow failed to meet his standards for bread. He cut it into one-pound chunks and showed me how to form a small round boule and a boulot, or torpedo. I watched as he dragged the dough along the worktable. The bottom stuck to the table, causing the top skin of dough to tighten, and the mass rounded itself into a perfect dome. Simple enough.
Then I tried it. I pushed too hard and flattened the dough, so I pushed more gently and succeeded only in rolling the ball over so that it looked like an upended turtle. He watched me in silence, and I had the sense that he was biting the inside of his cheek to keep from laughing or shouting at me. After I’d tried three more times without producing that perfect, smooth dome, I looked up apprehensively. His face was impassive.
“You must practice a long time, Wynter,” he said. “You do not have the …” His hand made a circular motion just above the table.
“The touch.” I sighed.
“Oui. The touch. Ne vous inquietez pas. It will come.” He placed his hand on my forearm, and I stared at the fine dusting of flour that covered the olive skin all the way to the elbow. “Vous êtes trés forte. Very strong. C’est bon.”
Besides learning to make bread and studying French language and culture, I was hopi
ng to put my virginity to rest on French soil. It had become an embarrassment. It was the seventies, after all. Everybody was doing everybody. And here I was still walking around virgo intacta.
I found no shortage of candidates in my afternoon classes at the university. There was a dark, doe-eyed Parisian boy, pale and slender like a starving artist. An English guy, all crisp profile and soft, shaggy blond hair. Sylvie had a few cute cousins—rugged Gascon football-playing boys. The problem was, I was in love with Jean-Marc. I compared them all to him, and they came up looking green and silly. And after waiting this long, I wasn’t about to jump in the sack with the first beauzeau that floated down the river. I was determined to have Jean-Marc, so I set about trying to figure out how and when to seduce him.
As it turned out, the when part was easy. Jean-Marc and Sylvie’s grandmère lived near Saint-Antonin-Noble-Val, a beautiful little village on the Aveyron River about an hour from Toulouse. Nearly every weekend, the whole family went to stay at her demeure, an ancient pile of stone near a fortified mill. She was a stiff old broad and stone-deaf, but that didn’t excuse anyone from making polite conversation with her. It was pretty tedious.
The best part of the weekend was Sunday afternoon. After the two-hour, five-course déjeuner, everyone would embark on a stroll down one of the paths by the river. Everyone, that is, except Jean-Marc, whose work ethic would have shamed the Puritans. Indolence of any kind made him uncomfortable, so he usually found some work around the house to attend to while the other dozen of us headed off for the afternoon constitutional. It occurred to me soon enough that this would be the perfect time to make my move.
One Sunday when everyone was arranged on rocks by the river, like an Impressionist painting, napping or watching the rowboats drift by, I headed back to the house on the pretext of retrieving my book. Sylvie gave me a strange look, but she didn’t say anything. When I think about it—even after all these years—I still feel incredibly stupid. I mean, Jean-Marc was thirty-something years old and French. He’d probably seen it all. But I blithely assumed he was secretly pining for me. Wasn’t I from California?
I found him on a ladder, trimming the creeper vines that were threatening to swallow Grandmère’s caretaker cottage.
Bread Alone: A Novel Page 17