“We make a good team,” he said, picking up our boules and handing mine to me. “Let’s show them evidence of international cooperation.”
One by one, we threw our boules. Silence fell over us as we concentrated on our last throws. My heart raced as my first one landed not even an inch from the cochonet. Valentin cheered, which only made my heart beat faster.
His misbehaving curl swung across his forehead, which he diligently pushed back into place. I wanted to tell him to leave it there: he looked so good, even those tiny flaws made him more perfect. He caught me looking at him, and I watched as his smile stretched wider across his face, those perfect lips spreading with joy.
I found myself wanting to touch them, to press my lips against his, to see how soft they really were. But then Chloë was stepping up to throw, and I had to move away, and the moment vanished.
“A kiss?” she asked, “for good luck?”
I turned just in time to see Charlotte reach up on tip toes and press her lips against hers. My heart fluttered: not just at seeing the cutest couple I hadn’t realized was actually a couple, and marveling at how perfect they were together, but at the realization that Chloë wasn’t at all who I thought she was. For some reason, I had imagined her a competition, when neither of us had been competing at all. Why it was ingrained in me to immediately think a gorgeous woman was someone to beat, I did not know, but I hated myself for it.
And loved her for setting my heart free.
Her throw landed her close to the cochonet: closer than any other one but mine. So I guess she was competition, after all.
They played their last hands, until the ground was littered with metal boules. The last throw was mine, but there was no chance I was getting any closer than Chloë’s. My brow furrowed in concentration.
“You’re going to have to push that one away,” said Valentin, his voice lowered to a whisper, despite the fact that we were playing the last move. Maybe I should have asked him for a good luck kiss, though that would probably make me feint instead of win.
“I’m not sure I can aim that accurately,” I replied, my voice lowering to match his. My eyes were riveted on the little silver ball with two concentric rings around it. The only thing between us and victory.
“You need to throw like this.” Valentin reached for my hand, turning the wrist so it was upside down, holding the ball from above. “You can do this. I believe in you.”
His fingers were warm against mine, more than warm. The electricity of his touch ran up my arm and filled me with a flutter I had never felt before.
No way I was throwing accurately now.
“You want to take my turn?” I asked him.
“Hé! Your turn. You play!” said Maxence, “Allez!”
Valentin stepped back, and it was like all the breath left me at once. I had to play, I had to throw now, before I couldn’t breathe any longer. I clutched the ball tightly, pulled back my arm like I was bowling, and launched it into the air.
Time stood still as it vaulted through the air. It arced over the gravel, spinning and spinning until it came down with a hand crash. It rolled and rolled, until it came up on Chloë’s, only to slightly tap it.
“Is that it?” I asked, “did we win? Nous a… gagné?”
“On a gagné,” said Valentin.
“Non!” Maxence interjected, somewhat indignantly. He stormed up to the boules and pulled out the measuring string for scoring. “On ne sait pas! We do not know!”
“Je la corrigeais, Max.”
“Ignore the boys,” said Chloë, “that was good throw. You play good, for American.”
“She played excellent,” added Charlotte, “you jealous.”
“Jealous, impressed,” Chloë grinned, “You cool, America.”
“Merci,” I replied, “les filles.” Thanks, girls. They smiled, enough of a congratulations to go around.
Meanwhile, Maxence and Valentin, along with François, were crouching over the balls, intently measuring them with the strings.
“Celle de Chloë est plus près,” said Maxence, “un point, donc égalité!”
“Non, celle de Jammy est plus près,” said Valentin, “deux points, on est les champions!”
“What is happening?” I asked the girls. Charlotte shrugged. Apparently, shrugging was just as integral to French language as actual words were.
“Deux points!” called François, standing. “L’équipe Franco-Américaine remporte la Victoire!”
“La vache,” said Charlotte.
“The cow?” I spun around, but the only animals in sight were the horses in a nearby pasture. “Where?”
“Non, la vache, it means…”
“It does mean cow, but, wow, cow!” said Chloë.
“We win!” said Valentin, and before I knew what was coming, he lifted me in the air, spinning me around before my weight caught up with him and he had to put me down.
“We won?”
“We won!” I couldn’t believe it. I had beat them at their own game. Though I felt like I had won for another reason. Valentin stood so close to me, I could feel his breath against my skin. “Beginner’s luck?”
“Americans! They come to France, they take our games!” Said Maxence, obviously pleased with himself.
While time had stood still for our game, it had to catch up with itself to make up for what we had missed. The rest of the afternoon passed in a blur. It was suddenly four o’clock, and a blink later, it was six, and then again, it was eight. None of us were hungry anymore: we had all eaten well, and snacked on melon or cheese, whatever hadn’t been devoured at lunch, unwilling to say goodbye.
Even when Valentin’s mother showed up, we didn’t leave right away. She meandered into the garden, kissing everyone, grabbed a glass of wine and sat down with us.
“Jammy, did you like ze food?” she asked, reaching for a strawberry.
“Très bon,” I replied, “and the company was even better.”
The afternoon had been perfect. For the first time since arriving in France, I felt like I belonged. Not perfectly, not by a long shot: but somehow, I was fitting in, and people actually seemed to like having me there. Maxence’s parents metaphorically wrapped their arms around me and made me feel like family, making me miss my own even more.
I wondered if this is what it was like for you, when you came here on your year abroad. If people took you in, if Aix welcomed you with open arms the way Lourmarin did me. How the people here taught me to speak and listened to what I had to say, how our cultures started to tangle and mesh, finding similarities and laughing at the differences.
Then I remembered Mamie waiting for me in her large, empty home, and everything fell backwards yet again.
We said goodbye, exchanging kisses and Facebook friendships. I didn’t know how to ask when we would hang out again: I craved their company now more than ever, and it seemed like they at the very least found me mildly entertaining. Maybe, just maybe, that would be enough.
Mathilde drove us back to her house, apologizing for not having picked me up from Mamie’s in the first place. She went on and on about my bike, though I’m not sure what about, because my tired – and still a little teensy bit tipsy - mind couldn’t make heads or tails of her accent. I didn’t mind. Buoyed by bubbly feelings in my chest, she could have told me they were amputating my arm and I would have smiled and nodded.
“Give me a minute to find mine,” said Valentin, as I rolled my bike from out of his yard.
“You don’t have to do that,” I said. He shook his head.
“I’m taking you home, whether you like it or not. There might be boar on the way, after all.”
I laughed, but he remained dead serious. Oh. Were there actual boar around these parts? Like in Dad’s stories?
“I’ll race you, then,” I said, running on the high I had from such an amazing day.
“Ah! Traitor! You turn on your team like this? My heart, it breaks!”
He found his red bike, an old, dusty thing
, covered in mud and scratches. The only part of it that didn’t make a sound was the bell. He got on the creaky old thing and, before I had a chance to mount mine, pushed off towards the road.
“You cannot catch me!” he exclaimed, “I am the unbeatable!”
I did catch up with him, but before I could pass him there was a car and I had to slow to let it get past us. Then the race was on again, the two of us neck and neck, flying towards the setting sun.
When we reached Mamie’s gate I didn’t want it to end. My heart was pounding in my chest, and not just from racing. It might have been from the beautiful disheveled hair of the cute Frenchman before me, feebly attempting to rein it back into place as he dismounted his bike.
“It’s a tie,” I said, trying not to breathe as heavily as my body wanted to. It wasn’t a good look for me.
“No, it’s not,” he said. With on swift move, he touched the gate of her estate. “I win!”
“I got off my bike first, so I win!” I replied.
“Fine, it’s equality,” he said, “but I get points for having to go back.”
“Agreed.”
Neither of us knew exactly what to say next. It was odd, this feeling inside me, one where I just wanted to blurt out everything that was going through my head: how happy I was he had invited me into his circle of friends, how proud that we had won the weird lawn bowling game, how thankful I was that he had taken me home.
How handsome he looked, with the setting sun casting him in shades of pink. How I could see his Adam’s apple bob when he breathed, and how much it made me want to press my lips to his neck. How I wanted to run my hand through his - albeit sweaty – mop of hair, feeling his curls around my fingers.
“I, eh, I will go,” he said, grasping the handlebars of his bike. His knuckles were white against his skin.
“Wait,” I said. Now was the time to say it. To say everything. To tell him that there were feelings bubbling inside me for which there weren’t words in any language.
“Yes?” he asked, and there was an eagerness to his voice which I must have been reading into.
“The cicadas have stopped.”
And negative a thousand points for Jamie! There goes all my experience with flirting, not that there was anything to begin with. Even so, Valentin was smiling his oh-so-familiar smile. It wasn’t big and toothy like the guys at my school back home. His smile was a line, revealing nothing, except maybe, just maybe, that he wanted to stay, too.
“Valentin,” I said, slowly, gripping my own bike so tightly my fingers went numb. “Thank you. Thank you so much for today. For everything.”
“It was just a barbecue,” he replied, with that whole-body shrug of his. “And I didn’t even cook.”
“You brought me to meet your friends,” I said. Something caught in my throat: oh god, I wasn’t going to cry, was I? I wasn’t that emotional. “You helped me understand them. You helped them understand me. You gave me a voice, Valentin, in a country where I have none.”
“You always had a voice, Jamie,” he said, and my name rolled off his tongue perfectly, no jam attached. “I might have just helped you find it, but it was always there. And I love your voice.”
“I owe you one hell of a good autograph from Mamie,” I muttered, rolling his words through my mind, biding myself time to process what he had just said.
Loved. Loved. Loved.
We moved into another language, then. A language where lips didn’t say words but connected one to one. A language where tastes and smell were more important than sound and sight. One where I finally felt that hair of his, just as I had been wanting to since the first moment we met.
He held me gently pressed up against him, one hand on my back, the other gently cradling my head, as mine wildly grasped for his. His lips were soft against mine, welcoming discussion, tasting of melon and sweet summer wine.
I could have kissed the sun from the sky, the way I was kissing him. I wanted him on my skin like I wanted sunlight in my life, drinking him in, soaking him in.
When we came up for breath, he ran his fingers through my hair, gazing at me with a look I had only dreamed of ever being on the receiving end of. The same look in his eyes that I saw when we went to Cassis or even when Jean-Pascal drove me to the castle on the very first day I was here. It wasn’t a look of fiery, passionate adoration, but a warm, overwhelming look, one of a bond deeper than roots in soil. The same look I am sure he was seeing as he looked into my own eyes.
The look of coming home.
People who think that Paris is Romantic have certainly never been to Provence before. There is simply nothing like kissing a French boy under a pink sunset, as the cicadas wrap up their daily sonata, rosemary and lavender wafting in the air.
I pushed my bike up the hill to the house, too wobbly to bike on my own. I was past feeling bubbly, now, I felt like dessert, sweet and melty and warm in the middle, like the Nutella crepe in Lex Baux. No other words fit: I didn’t know how else to describe the feelings in my chest, confusing and comforting all at once.
Valentine liked me. More than liked me. And he kissed me: he kissed me. After thinking I was going mad, seeing things that weren’t there, projecting onto him what I wanted to see, even after all that, I wasn’t imagining any of it at all.
My hand rose to my lips, the tingle of his kiss still there. Pure magic.
It was getting dark, twilight descending on the little Durance valley, and so Mamie wasn’t in her tower. Nothing to worry about, especially since she didn’t want to see me, anyway. I half expected to run into her in the kitchen, but the room was empty when I got there, even the heavy dictionary cleared off, making it look abandoned.
She had probably simply gone to bed early, I shouldn’t have been worried. She had her schedule and I had mine. But as I stepped over the threshold, all the warmth from Valentin’s kiss was washed away by a frigid cold. Something was dreadfully wrong.
“Mamie?” I called out, sweeping my eyes over the small room. “Mamie? I am home!” And then, just to be sure she wasn’t going to play her French card, I added my new vocabulary for good measure. “Je suis la!” I am here!
Nothing.
I took the stairs up to the landing, scanning my eyes over the living room. The front door was wide open, letting in a gentle evening breeze. Strange, she always kept it closed.
Panic was beginning to rise in my gut, filling the hole left by the now missing warm fuzzy feelings. I dashed across the room to the door, throwing it open all the way so I could see the garden. Nothing. Not even a ripple in the pool. I closed it behind me, struggling with the handle, all the worst possible things running through my head.
I had left her alone, and someone had attacked. Burglary gone wrong? Kidnapping the acclaimed author? I didn’t know, all I knew was that it was my fault, again, and I…
I shouldn’t have jumped to conclusions. As I turned around I saw her slouched on the couch, one hand cradling a now empty bottle of wine, the glass sitting on the table a good distance away.
She had been sleeping, but my slamming of the door had inadvertently woken her. She grumbled something under her breath as she pushed herself up to a sit. Dizzy, she brought a hand to her head, the other one still clasping the wine bottle.
“Qu’est-ce que tu fais là?” she muttered. What are you doing here?
“I came home,” I replied, “from the barbecue, remember?”
I had never dealt with a drunk person older than myself. Heck, I had never dealt with a drunk person when I wasn’t drunk myself. Taking care of a wasted senior was not part of the job description.
“For a minute, I thought you were ta mère,” she said. Your mother. Half the words came out English; the other half, French, strung together in a drunken slur.
“Mamie, what did you do?” I asked, “what happened?”
“Rien, nothing happened,” she said. She tried to push herself up to a seat, failed, and fell back on her elbows again. I reached down to take the bottle from h
er hand.
“You need to get to bed.”
“And you need to speak French!” she snapped right back, eyes shining with the glimmer of tears, “I know what you’re doing with that boy, and it’s not classes. You’re just like your mother. You bring your stupid American ways to this country and expect everyone to follow you. No. I will not let this happen again.”
“Again?” I froze, still holding the wine bottle. Slowly, I sat down on the couch beside her, putting the glass out of her reach.
“Every year, they come. Students. Au pairs. Tourists. Wanting their perfect French man. They come, they take what they want, and they wash away thousands of years of history, just like that. Your mother was no different, and neither are you.”
I should have taken her words as the blabbering of a delusional drunk, but they stung deep. Her English was better than when she was sober. I slid away from her, sudden scared of the small woman.
“What did you say about my mother?”
“American whore,” she spat, tears now running freely down her face. The words chilled the blood in my veins. “Espèce de pute! She comes to this country. She takes our food. She takes our wine. And she takes my son.”
Mamie was shaking now, and so was I. I wanted to run, screaming from this room. I wanted nothing more than to fly back home and forget this woman was even related to me. But before I could even move, she thrust a bony hand and grabbed my wrist tight.
“You belonged here,” she hissed, “she should not having taken you away from me. You are my blood. The waters of Provence run through your veins. You are wasted in a country so disgusting.”
Her words ran together in a twisted Frenglish. I struggled to understand her, though I didn’t want to. I wanted to get her far, far away from me.
“That American Whore as you call her, that’s my mother,” I said, the word tumbling out of my mouth like vomit. I ripped my hand from her grasp, but she was stronger than she looked. I could feel my heart beating in my wrist, claw marks up my forearm. “And she was there for me every second of my life. Which cannot be said of you.”
Aix Marks the Spot Page 15