“Ah, salut,” said Mathilde. She was leaning against her counter, coffee in hand, reading something on her phone which she put down when I walked in. “Are you ‘ungry?”
I nodded. She pointed to the coffee machine and I nodded: I was developing a real caffeine habit in this country.
“You’re awake early, did you not sleep well?” she asked.
“I slept great,” I replied, “I’m just used to getting up early.”
I remembered then that this woman thought Valentin and I had spent the night together, in the truly religious sense. I cringed, thinking of what Grandma would say if she ever met this heathen who encouraged premarital sex. She was still on my mom about me being born out of wedlock, and that was almost seventeen years ago.
How was I supposed to talk to her, exactly? Short of yelling “I haven’t had sex your son!” I didn’t know how to approach the topic. But it didn’t matter, because she didn’t seem to care. She handed me my coffee and I thanked her, inhaling the wonderful scent of roasted beans.
“We can get pastries,” she said.
“Really? That would be amazing!”
She slipped on her shoes and grabbed a tiny brown change purse, and we set off across the street. It was the same bakery I had explored my first day at the market: the friendly baker chatted amicably with Mathilde as I scanned the various rows of treats, my eyes falling once again on the glazed bun I so wanted to try.
“What would you like?” asked Mathilde, as the baker grabbed a twisted chocolate rope for Valentin.
“Um, what is that?”
“Brioche Glacée,” she replied.
“Je voudrais un brioche glacé, s’il vous plait,” I said to the baker, “Merci!”
She said something back to me and I nodded, not sure what I had agreed to. She threw something out to Mathilde and she replied the same, excitedly bobbing her head the whole time.
When we returned home, our arms were full of pastries and fresh bread, still hot from the oven. Mathilde didn’t even wait to walk through the front door before ripping off a steaming chunk of bread and devouring it.
“Goute,” she said, handing me the loaf, “it’s the best when iz still hot.”
She was right, it was heaven. I never believed that bread could be so heavenly and full of flavor. I wanted to eat the entire baguette right then and there.
“Pauline says your French has improved since last week.” She put the pastries down on the counter, reaching in the fridge for milk. “She’s impressed, you learn fast!”
“Me?” I scoffed. “I only know how to order food.”
“That’s all anyone really needs to know, isn’t it?”
She heated the milk for us in the microwave, filling cereal bowls with cocoa powder. By the time she was done, she had made each of us massive amounts of chocolate milk.
“Can you tell Valentin breakfast is ready?” she asked, “I have to go to work soon.”
It felt weird coming back into his room after last night. The space had become entirely his again, and I wasn’t meant to be in there, certainly not while he was sleeping. Luckily, he stirred as I opened his door, glancing over at me through tired, squinting eyes.
“Um, breakfast?” I squeaked, and when he didn’t immediately reply, I threw in, “Petit dejeuner?”
“J’arrive,” he muttered in response. He was coming, he said, but there was no telling how long it would take.
“There is hot chocolate,” I added, “if you don’t come now, it won’t be chaud no mo’!”
“Quoi?”
I darted out of the room before I had to find an explanation for my terrible rhyming. Way to make things awkward, Jamie.
Mathilde was already halfway through her croissant by the time I came back down, bowls of chocolate on the table in front of her. She dipped her pastry and ate the soggy end, her eyes riveted on her phone until I stepped into the room.
“I never make breakfast,” she said, “it’s nice having you as a reason to.”
“You didn’t have to,” I replied, taking a seat across from her, “I don’t want to be an inconvenience.”
“This isn’t an inconvenient,” she replied, “it’s nice to have you.”
Valentin wandered past us then, still squinting, groggy. His hair stuck up in every which direction. He glanced at us for an instant, grunted, and shuffled into the kitchen.
“Quoi? On ne dit pas bonjour?” His mother chided.
“Café!” he called from the kitchen, and she shook her head.
“He usually never wakes up until after 10 o’clock,” she told me, “he must like you very much.”
I said nothing, instead sipping at my chocolate. It was surprisingly weird to sip it from a cereal bowl, like I was a child breaking the rules.
“So where are you going today?” she asked.
“Aix-en-Provence,” I said, reaching for my Brioche Glacé. “My parents met there, and I’ve always wanted to see the city.”
“It’s a fantastic town,” she replied, “the best in the world.”
“Not Lourmarin?”
“Lourmarin is the prettiest village. Aix-en-Provence is more special than that. It is not the most beautiful, or the most cultured. But when you are there… it’s a city with a voice. If you’re lucky, it speaks to you.”
“That’s… poetic.”
“You’ll see. Maybe.”
The brioche was even better than I imagined. The sweet bun was not too sugary, and the icing was thin enough that it added the perfect flavor, plus a gentle, gummy texture that clung to my teeth. I felt like a child when I ate it, but that relapse was worth it for the taste.
Valentin sat down with us and muttered a hello to us both, before chugging down his coffee. Only then did he move onto food, and a few minutes later, to conversation: mainly about how weird it was to be chatting with his mother in English.
“When did you learn to talk so good?” she asked.
“Last summer, avec papa,” he replied. At this, she went cold, putting her coffee cup down on the table a little harder than needed. He forced a smile. “He was at work the whole time. He wanted me to show Paris to the son of one of his colleagues. The son was American, and we talked a lot.”
“Oh, I remember,” she nodded. “I am impressed. Your accent is much better than mine.”
With that, she cleared her place and left for work, in a slightly worse mood than she had started. Valentin didn’t say much, blaming his lack of coffee. He said nothing about our night together, even now that she was gone.
“We still going to Aix today?” I asked, just to be sure. He nodded into his hot chocolate bowl.
“As soon as I get dressed. And there’s a bus. Ok?”
“Hell yeah.”
He grinned at this, picking up his twisted chocolate pastry and smiling so wide it dwarfed the sun.
The bus deposited us right into the heart of the city, though the station wasn’t all that big. It had been the same bus that had been the first leg of our journey when we came to Cassis: barely a week ago, if even, but a lifetime ago now. This time, I was in Aix to see Aix. I was finally here.
This was it: the place my parents had met and more, Mom’s home away from home, the place she clung to in photographs and postcards from before I was born. Giant plane trees shaded the streets as we left the station and headed in the direction of the conservatory. It was refreshing in the hot sun to have the cool breeze waft down the roads.
We reached the end of the road and were met with a towering fountain: Three tiered and reaching to the sky, water flowed out of lion heads from beneath the feet of three women, into a copper basin where the water now flowed out of heads. Giant fish and cherubim on swans blasted jets out over the heads of mighty lions, as cars drove around the gigantic ensemble, clearly not impressed.
“La Rotonde,” said Valentin, “Aix is known for its fountains, and this one is the biggest. Maybe the most beautiful, but the others are amazing as well.”
I coul
dn’t reply: my breath had been taken away.
We walked through rows of fancy stores in crisp clean buildings, where it seemed the entire world was out shopping. Past them, and we were hitting an even more modern part of the city, passing buildings with architecture I had only ever seen in futuristic films. Valentin led me to a silver-grey thing that looked like the ship from Interstellar, landed on earth and ready to take off.
“This doesn’t feel right,” I said, as we reached the entrance. At least, I think it was the entrance. It was hard to tell with everything going on: a massive triangular piece of glass, rising at an off angle, like someone had sliced the bottom corner off the building itself. Valentin held it open and we stepped inside.
Instantly, I knew this wasn’t the place. The smell was that of fresh paint and metal, not the old church smell my dad has described.
“This isn’t it,” I said.
“But it’s the conservatory,” he replied, “isn’t that where the letter said to go?”
“Yeah, but it’s too new,” I said. “Dad said it was an old building. This one looks younger than either of us.”
“Je peux vous aider?” asked the man at the desk. “Can I help you?”
“Yes, is this the conservatoire?” I asked.
“Yes,” he replied, “are you here to sign up for classes?”
I shook my head, “I’m just wondering. Was this the conservatory seventeen years ago?”
“I do not understand,” said the man.
“The building is new, isn’t it?” I urged.
“Oh!” His eyes widened as it clicked for him. “We had a smaller building. Where the Musée Caumont is now.”
“Can you tell us how to get there?”
The man kindly pulled out a map on his phone and showed us it was only a few minutes away – though everything in town was just a few minutes away. We ended up retracing our steps back through the city to the massive fountain.
“Are you hungry?” asked Valentin, quite suddenly, as we reached the crosswalk.
“A little,” I replied, “why?”
“Just come with me.”
He led me only a few steps from the fountain, down some stairs into what I thought would be a metro stop, but no. The stairs led under the street and right back up the other side, with three shops in between.
And from one of them wafted the heavenly scent of dough and melted cheese.
“Crepes!” I exclaimed, before throwing my hands over my mouth.
I took one with cheese, ham, and a whole egg in it, watching as they spread the batter onto large black rings, melting the cheese and cracking the egg right there on the same plate. They folded it up, wrapped a paper plate around it, and that was how I was served my meal.
The first bite was pure bliss. Valentin and I climbed back into the light of day with cheese dripping down our fingers, and big, bashful grins on our faces.
There was no clean way to stuff your face with crepe while walking down the street and eating with the Frenchman proved it. By the time we were done, settled on a bench in front of the massive glass Apple store, both of use were covered in strings of melted cheese.
“You have egg,” said Valentin, “here.”
He reached over with his napkin and dabbed at my chin, and all at once my nerves were back. I found myself inching away from him on the round bench.
Still, no mention of our night. I wished he would just tell me what we were, now. If he considered us more than just friends, or if this was just… what could it even be, a fling? A bit of summer fun? I found myself blushing as we stood up again, my focus on the mission wavering in the breeze of his on-again off-again affection.
We passed the crepes place again, climbing up the other stairs, emerging on the other side of the street in a neighborhood so different from the last. Here, the buildings were old: the trees were larger and shadier, covering a wide main street with fountains at every intersection. A man selling shaved ice sat at the corner, under a parasol. We walked right by him, following the main road until we took a sharp right.
“At the end of the street, there, that’s where Cezanne went to school,” said Valentin. I couldn’t tell if he was joking.
The Caumont Museum was in a magnificent old building partway down the street. Massive iron gates towered over us, larger still than the ones in Arles, or anywhere else I’d been so far. A tour group outside was receiving a talk about them, but in Italian so I couldn’t even try to follow.
Sometime in the past ten years, the old conservatory had been transformed, fully renovated into an art museum. The actual conservatory had been moved to the ultra-modern building in the more architecturally modern part of town, leaving the Museum to grow and become a cultural hotspot. I had never been to Paris before, but it made me think of all the pictures I had seen of museums over there.
We stepped into the visitor’s center, and Valentin began speaking to a woman in rapid-fire French. She scratched her head, glancing the two of us over, and ran off. Valentin turned to me.
“If she asks, the desk was really important to your grandfather,” he said.
“A cover story. I like it.”
The woman who came back out was dressed exactly as I imagined every gallery manager to dress. Tight cigarette skirt and a cute white blouse that made her look like she was working in the Louvre, and not a small museum in the south of France.
“Je peux vous aider?” she asked, and Valentin launched into his rapid-fire explanation of our story. Well, a little bit of a twisted story. From what I was able to tell, my grandfather had been a piano prodigy here, and then - I don’t think I got this right - he had gotten attacked by an elephant and lost the ability to play. Ok. And then he married…
Oh. He was throwing in Mamie’s name. I mean, there’s not many other things that sound like Colette Martin. The manager’s eyes bulged.
Whatever she said back to him wasn’t good, though. She slapped her hands on the sides of her thighs in a way that was more defeatist than anything I had ever heard or seen before today. Then she went back to her office, holding up a finger for us - wait.
“Let me guess,” I said, “the desk is gone.”
“They got rid of a lot of the old furniture when they took over,” he explained, “but she has the list of where they sent them all for us.”
The woman had gone above and beyond. When she came back, it was with a thick stack of printed paper, with a photo of each piece of furniture, accompanied by the people who purchased them. The auction list.
“J’espère que ça puisse vous aider,” she said, handing me the stack. I trembled as I took them.
“Merci,” I replied.
I was thankful. I really was. But whatever help the universe had been giving me had dried up the second we arrived here.
I thought Aix was supposed to be special. Instead, it was going to ruin everything I had been working so hard to accomplish. I could almost imagine it laughing.
We went across the street with the stack of paper, finding a table in the bookstore there.
I was so overwhelmed with the whirlwind we had just been through that I didn’t notice at first how much English I heard around me. Not loud, tourist English, just… English. The books around me were in English; the staff would ask for drink requests first in French, then casually in English; signs and merchandise were in English. The place itself was called Book in Bar, and I didn’t need a translator to tell me that.
“What can I get you?” one of the staff came up to us next with a tray.
I ordered a lemonade, and Valentin an iced tea, though my mind was not all there. No, my entire focus rested on the stack of text in my hand, the pile of furniture printed in black and white where my father’s last clue was somehow hidden.
“Do not panic, Jamie,” said Valentin, “We will find the desk. It is here.”
He patted the stack of paper in front of me, and I tried to hold back the bitter taste of disappointment. For all I knew, the desk could have been so
ld for scraps at this point. The clue could have been destroyed long ago.
The waitress came back with our drinks, placing them on the small wooden table along with a small cookie each. Valentin took the stack of papers, splitting them in half, retrieving a pencil case from his backpack.
“If you find a wooden desk, you circle it,” he said, handing me one, “and then after, we find out which desk is the right one.”
He made it look easy, but on the first page alone there were three desks. We moved through the packs, drinking our drinks and trying to ignore the people meandering around us.
But the books had a calming effect on me: Books were the most soothing surrounding in the world. I found myself simultaneously mad and calm, a paradox only literature could explain.
“I have fifteen,” I said, once I had finally gone through my stack. “You?”
“Only six. What does the letter say?”
“About the desk?”
He nodded. I pulled out the letter, carefully stowed away in my bag, and together we scoured the text for every single little detail.
“Well, dad says it’s old,” I replied, “Victorian, even. So we can discount these two desks which are rather modern looking.”
“And brown?” added Valentin, “quite a few are black, and this one is white. You see? We are getting there.”
He was right. The more we dug into the letter, the more we cut out impossible furniture. Until, finally, we only had one left.
“You see?” he said, with that warm smile of his that usually made my stomach flutter. Instead, my stomach did a quite ungraceful belly flop. Plop.
This is why the clue wasn’t here, I realized, as I stared into those eyes that I had fallen so hard for. I had gotten distracted. The universe no longer wanted to help me with this quest, seeing as how I was losing focus. If I hadn’t started falling for Valentin, the clue would probably found its way here now.
“It seems we have to go to Isle-Sur-La-Sorgue for this one,” he explained, tapping his long finger on the image of the single desk left. “We can still do that today, though there’s so much more of Aix you need to see. Shall we go tomorrow? Finish the day here?”
Aix Marks the Spot Page 19