The Provence Cure for the Brokenhearted Page 2

  “He’s in there!” Abbot said.

  “He can’t be. It’s his wedding day.”

  Abbot knocked, and Daniel appeared behind the glass door, opened it wide. He was broad-shouldered, always tan, his hair tinged silvery gray. He had a regal nose that sat a little arched and bulky on his face—an elegant face. He took off his glasses, tucked his chin to his chest in a way that made his chins fold up like a little accordion, and looked at me, messy but in a lovely dress, and Abbot, in his not-yet-garnished tux. He smiled broadly. “I’m so glad you’re here! How’s it hangin’, Abbot?” He pulled Abbot to him, gave him a bear hug. That’s what Abbot needed, bear hugs, affection, from fatherly types. I was good at pecking foreheads, but I could tell how happy he was to be lifted up off his feet by Daniel. Abbot had a silly grin on his face now. Daniel hugged me, too. He smelled of expensive products—hair gels and imported soaps.

  “Are you allowed to be here?” I asked. “You’re dressed like a wedding-party escapee.”

  Abbot slipped around Daniel and stepped into the studio as he always did—with an expression of awe. He loved the narrow stairs to the loft, the espresso machine, the exposed beams, and, of course, he loved the huge canvases in various stages of development propped against walls.

  “I had a little idea, so I popped in,” Daniel said. “It calms me down to take a look.”

  “Shouldn’t you have shoes on?” Abbot said.

  “Ah, yes.” He pointed to a pair of shoes just a few feet away. “See, if I get paint on the suit, it’s one thing, but the shoes are handmade. A cobbler out in the desert had me stand in powder, barefoot, and from that imprint he made a pair of shoes specifically for my feet.” These are the kinds of stories that he and Elysius had—a cobbler in the desert measuring bare feet in powder.

  Abbot ran to the shoes, but didn’t touch them. I knew that he wanted to, but shoes tromp around on the ground and the ground is littered with germs. He would have had to scrub his hands in the bathroom immediately. The gesture of fake hand-washing wouldn’t do. “Where’s Charlotte?” Abbot asked, returning to the paintings. Charlotte was Daniel’s daughter from his first marriage. Daniel had been through a nasty divorce and custody battle over Charlotte, and he swore he’d never marry again—not because he was jaded, but, more accurately, because he was beleaguered. A few months after Henry’s death, though, he had a change of heart. There was a natural correlation, of course—what could make you want to cement love more than the reminder of life’s fragility?

  “She’s up at the house,” he said; then he turned to me and added, “trying to fly under the radar.”

  “How’s she doing?” I asked. Charlotte was sixteen and going through a punk phase that alarmed Elysius, though punk was outdated. They had new terms for everything now.

  “She’s studying for the SATs, but, I don’t know, she seems a little … morose. Well, I worry about her. I’m her father. I worry. You know what I mean.” He looked at me like a coconspirator. He meant that I understood parenting from the inside out, in a way that Elysius didn’t. It was something he could never admit except in this sly way.

  “What’s this one supposed to be?” Abbot asked. All of the paintings were abstract, chaotically so, but Abbot had stalled in front of an especially tumultuous one with big heavy lines, desperate and weighted. It was as if there were a bird trapped somewhere in the painting—a bird that wanted out.

  Daniel looked at the painting. “A boat far off with full sails,” he said. “And loss.”

  “You’ve got to cheer up!” I said to Daniel quietly.

  He put a hand on my shoulder. “You’re one to talk,” he whispered. “Are you designing?” I always felt honored that Daniel saw my work as a pastry chef as art. He wasn’t rarefied about art. He believed it belonged to all of us, and he always raved about my work. And, at this moment, he was speaking to me as an artist. “You’ve got to get back to creating. There’s no better way to mourn.”

  I was surprised he put it so bluntly, but relieved, too. I was tired of sympathy. “I haven’t started up again, not yet,” I said.

  He nodded, solemnly.

  “Abbot,” I called, “we’ve got to go.”

  Disappointed, Abbot walked back to me. He said to Daniel, “Your paintings make people feel sad, but you don’t know why.”

  “A great definition of abstract art,” Daniel said.

  Abbot smiled and rubbed his hands together; then, as if noticing it himself, he shoved them in his pockets. Daniel took no notice, but I did. Abbot was learning to mask his problem. Was this a step backward or forward?

  “I’m late for mimosas,” I said.

  Daniel was looking at an unfinished canvas. He turned to me. “Heidi.” He hesitated. “I’ve had to postpone the honeymoon for a few days to finish up work for a show. Elysius is in an uproar. When you see her, remind her I’m a nice person.”

  “I will,” I said. “Can we leave these here?” I asked, looking down at my suitcase and Abbot’s bag.

  “Of course,” he said.

  “Come on, Abbot,” I said, disentangling his tie and cummerbund from the snorkeling gear.

  Abbot ran to the door.

  “It really is good to see you two,” Daniel said.

  “You, too,” I said. “Happy almost wedding!”

  ecause Elysius and Daniel had been living here together for eight years, the wedding seemed like a strange afterthought. I considered Elysius and Daniel as not only having a marriage but having an enduring one. For my sister, however, the wedding was monumental, and now, walking past the lush lawn, the back-and-forth tracks of a wide riding mower pushing the grass in stripes, I felt guilty for being so removed.

  I should have at least agreed to make her wedding cake. Once upon a time, I’d had a growing reputation as a high-end cake designer. People from all over Florida still call the Cake Shop for events a year or more in advance to reserve a spot. Weddings had been a specialty. But shortly after Henry’s death, I’d retreated to making the cupcakes and lemon squares in the early morning hours and working the counter. I’d sworn off brides—they were too overbearing, too wrapped up in the event. They struck me as ingrates, taking love for granted. Now I was embarrassed for not having offered to make Elysius and Daniel’s cake. It was my gift, the one small thing I had to give.

  I looked up at the bank of windows, the kitchen and the dining room lit with a bright, golden hue, and stopped.

  “What is it?” Abbot said.

  I wanted to turn back and go home. Was I ready for this? It struck me this was how I felt in life now, like someone stalled on a lawn outside of a giant house who looked into beautiful windows where people were living their lives, filling flower vases, brushing their hair while looking in the mirror, laughing in quick flutters that would rise up and disappear. And here was my own sister’s life, brimming.

  “Nothing,” I said to Abbot. I grabbed his hand and gave it a squeeze. He squeezed back and just like that he took a step ahead of me and pulled me toward the house—full of the living.

  At that moment, the back door flung wide, and my mother emerged. Her hair was a honeyed confection swooped up in her signature chignon, and her face was glazed in a way that made her look “dewy and young,” which she attributed to a line of expensive lotions. My mother was aging beautifully. She had a long, elegant neck, full lips, arched eyebrows. It’s a strange thing to be raised by someone much more beautiful than you’ll ever be. She had a regal beauty, but, set against this posture of royalty, her vulnerability seemed more pronounced—a certain weary softness in her expressions.

  Her eyes fell on me and Abbot there on the lawn. “I’ve just been sent out to find you!”

  My sister sent my mother to find me? This was bad. Very bad.

  “How late are we?” I asked.

  “You mean, how angry is your sister?”

  “Have I missed the mini toasts?” I asked, hoping I had.

  My mother didn’t answer. She bustled across the de
ck and down the small set of stairs. Her toffee-colored dress swished around her. It was a sleek design that showed off her collarbones. My mother is half French, and she believes in elegance.

  “I needed to get out of that house!” she said. “And you were my excuse. Direct orders to find you and get you moving.” She looked agitated, maybe even a little teary. Had she been crying? My mother is a woman of deep emotion, but not one to cry easily. She’s the definition of the term active senior—she puts on a show of busyness meant to imply satisfaction but has always given me the impression of a woman about to burst. Once upon a time, she did burst and disappeared for the summer, but then she came back to us. Still, once a mother’s taken off without you—even if she was right to do so—you spend the rest of your life wondering if she may do it again. She turned her attention to Abbot. “Aren’t you a beautiful boy?”

  He blushed. My mother had this effect on everyone—the mail carrier harried at the holidays, the pilot who steps out to say bye-bye at the end of a flight, even a snotty maitre d’.

  “And you?” she said, brushing my hair back over one shoulder. “Where are the pearls?”

  “I still need a few finishing touches,” I said. “How is Elysius doing?”

  “She’ll forgive you,” my mother said softly. My mother knew that this might be hard for me—one daughter was gaining a husband, one had lost one—and so she was trying to tread carefully.

  “I’m so sorry we’re late,” I said guiltily. “I lost track of time. Abbot and I were …”

  “Busy writing the speech for Auntie Elysius,” Abbot said. “I was helping!” He looked guilty, too—my coconspirator.

  My mother shook her head. Her eyes filled with tears. “I’m such a mess!” she said, trying to smooth the ripples from her dress and then laughing strangely. “I don’t know why I’m responding like this!” She pinched her nose as if to stop herself from crying.

  “Responding to what?” I asked, surprised by her sudden emotion. “The wedding? Weddings are crazy. They bring up a lot of—”

  “It’s not the wedding,” my mother said. “It’s the house. Our house … in Provence—there’s been a fire.”

  y sister and I went to the house in Provence with my mother when we were children—short summer stints every year that my father, a workaholic, was too busy to join. Then one summer my mother went alone, and we never went back. As my mother started to cry, there on my sister’s lawn, she wrapped her arms around me, letting me hold her up for a moment, and I remembered the house the way children remember things, from odd angles, a collection of strange details: that there were no screens on the windows, that the small interior doors had persnickety knobs that seemed to latch and unlatch of their own will, that along the garden paths surrounding the house, I thought there were white blooms clustered on the tall weeds, but when I leaned in close, I could see they were tiny snails, their white shells imprinted with delicate swirls.

  The house and everything in it seemed virtually timeless, or maybe it would be more accurate to say that it was time-full—time layered upon time. I remembered the kitchen, which housed the dining room table, long and narrow, surrounded by mismatched chairs—each a survivor from a different era. The small, shallow kitchen sink was made of one solid slab of marble, brown and speckled like an egg. It was original to the house, which had been built in the eighteenth century, just past the edge of a small vineyard. In the yard, there was a fountain erected during the 1920s that fluttered with bright orange, bloated koi and was surrounded by wrought-iron lawn chairs, and a small table covered in a white, wind-kicked tablecloth. The house—fifteen minutes from Aix-en-Provence, nestled in the shadow of the long ridged back of Mont Sainte-Victoire—had belonged to my mother since her parents died, when she was in her mid-twenties.

  There, my mother fed us stories about the house itself—love stories, mostly, improbable ones that I’d always wanted to believe but was suspicious of even as a child. But still I clung to them. After she told us the stories at night, I would retell them to myself. I whispered them into my cupped hands, feeling the warmth of my breath, as if I could hold the stories there and keep them.

  I could still picture the three of us in one of the upstairs bedrooms, my mother sitting on the edge of one of our beds or moving to the window, where she leaned out into the cool night. Elysius and I would let our hair, damp from a bath, create the impressions of wet halos on our white pillows. The cicadas were always clamoring, always ratcheting up then fading then ratcheting up again.

  “In the beginning,” my mother would start, because the first story marked the birth of the house itself, as if the family didn’t exist before the house was arranged from stone—and she would tell the story of one of our ancestors, a young man who had asked a woman to marry him. He was in love, and it was a great love. But the woman declined. Her family wouldn’t allow it; they didn’t think he was worthy. So the young man built the house, stone by stone, all alone, night and day, sleepless for one year. He was fevered by love. He couldn’t stop. He gave her the house as a gift—and she fell so deeply in love with the house and the man that she disobeyed her family and married him. He was weak and sick from having built the house in such a frenzy of love, and so she tended to him for their first newlywed year, bringing him back to life with bowls of pistou and bread and wine. They lived to a hundred. The husband died and the wife, heartbroken, followed within a week.

  The house was built as an act of love. That’s what we were supposed to understand. A portentous story, no? It was a little weighty for two girls to take to heart. But there were more like it.

  My great-grandparents owned a small shoe shop in Paris and were incapable of having children. My great-grandmother was called back to the house one winter to care for an old-maid auntie. But they were so in love, he couldn’t stand to be apart from her. One night he showed up on the doorstep, and he stayed for a week. Every night they heard the ghostly chatter of cicadas—who shouldn’t make any noise in winter. They conceived a child there—and went on to have six more.

  And so we were told that the house could make love manifest. It was capable of performing miracles.

  Their oldest daughter, my grandmother, was a young woman in Paris during the celebrations at the end of World War II. She was stubborn, brash. She met a young American GI in the crowds around Place de l’Opéra. He kissed her passionately, and then the crowds shifted like tides. They got separated. They searched for each other, but they were both lost in the mad swirl. After the war, he made his way back to France, and through a series of more small miracles, found her in this house, far from where they’d met. And they made a vow never to be apart again.

  The house had the power to seal two love-struck souls together forever. We loved the stories, even as we were outgrowing them. We passed the stories between us like two girls playing Cat’s Cradle, handing off the intricate patterns from one set of hands to the other and back again. When Elysius’s interest was fading, I would force her to ruminate on motives, what each person must have looked like. We invented details, elaborated, made the stories longer and more complex.

  Leading up to our last trip the summer when I was thirteen, however, Elysius and I started to poke holes in the stories. “What was the series of small miracles?” My mother didn’t know. “There are medical reasons why someone can’t have a baby for a time and then can again, aren’t there?” The answer was yes, but still … And of course it’s not physically possible for a man to build a house of stone, by hand, alone, forgoing sleep and proper nourishment.

  “Yes,” my mother said. “But that’s what makes it an act of pure love!”

  Years later, my sister would be converted. This was the place where Daniel, after eight years together and his solemn vow not to remarry, would propose to her while she was soaking in the bathtub.

  And I was almost swayed into believing once. One day during our final trip together, the three of us were in one of the upstairs bedrooms, folding and sorting clothes th
at had dried on the wooden rack. This was my sister’s room and the windows faced the mountain. I don’t know who saw it first, but soon the three of us were collected at the window, watching an outdoor wedding on the mountain. The bride was wearing a long white gown, and her veil blew around in the breeze. We had a pair of binoculars for bird-watching. My sister grabbed them off the shelf and we took turns looking at the scene.

  Finally, my mother said, “Let’s get a closer view.”

  And so the three of us ran down the narrow stone stairs, through the kitchen, and out the back of the house. The wedding party was fairly high up the mountain so we walked down rows in the vineyard, passing the binoculars back and forth. I remembered adjusting the binoculars each time to fit my small face, and the view through the smeared lens, blurry, surreal, and beautiful. The bride started crying. She cupped her face in her hands, and when she pulled her hands away, she was laughing.

  And suddenly my mother, my sister, and I found ourselves in a swarm of butterflies—Bath Whites, to be exact, white with black spotted markings on their wings. Elysius looked them up in a book at a small bookstore in Aix-en-Provence later during our stay. They fluttered around us madly, like a dizzy cloud of white.

  I could see only snippets of my mother’s bright pink skirt and dark hair. Her white blouse was lost in the white butterflies. And so her voice seemed almost unattached to her body.

  “Are butterflies supposed to swarm like this?” I asked.

  “No,” my mother said, and she told us that it was another enchantment.

  We argued with her because we felt it was our role, but I believed in the Bath whites, and I knew, secretly, that Elysius did, too.

  That’s the summer I’ve remembered most vividly. I was full of longing in that way that thirteen-year-old girls can long seemingly endlessly because their longing lacks direction. I wanted to be enchanted. I longed for the brothers who lived in the big house next to ours. The older one knew how to balance things on his forehead—sizable things like wooden chairs and rakes—and the younger one would sulk when his brother got attention, and splashed me mercilessly in the pool, which was more green than blue. They had dark hair and eyes. They smiled sheepishly. They were the exotics, the boys I would have dated if my grandmother had kept my grandfather in France, refusing to give up her home, her country, her language. I imagined that they would understand me in a way American boys didn’t.