The Provence Cure for the Brokenhearted Read online

  I stole a photo of the two of them—the older boy, Pascal, balancing a pogo stick on his forehead, tall and handsome, already muscled, while the younger brother, Julien, watched disdainfully from a lawn chair. I’d kind of fallen in love with the older boy, the one who’d really been trying to get Elysius’s attention. And I kind of hated the one in the lawn chair—the sulker and splasher. I folded the picture up and put it in a zippered pencil pouch in my desk drawer.

  In the years that followed, though, I mainly remembered my mother, who was strangely distant on that trip—wistful, quiet—as if she knew, in some way, what might be coming. Maybe her relationship with my father was already fractured—it seemed so to me, and I didn’t know anything about marriage.

  The next summer, when I was fourteen and Elysius was seventeen, my mother went to the house without us. She disappeared not for a short stint, but for the entire summer—after the discovery of my father’s affair, something that my mother was frank about, in a typically French manner. She sent my sister and me letters on tissue-thin airmail stationery, as frail as sewing patterns. I wrote her back, every time, on the pink monogrammed stationery she’d gotten me for Christmas, but never sent the letters. I hid them in my desk. That was the summer of 1989. The last day of August, she called to tell us she was coming home.

  Once home, she began making the small pastries she’d fallen in love with while in France—tarte au citron, flan, tiramisu, crème brûlée, pear pinwheels. She never opened a single cookbook. She seemed instead to be working from memory. She’d never been much of a baker before that, but after her trip she seemed to pour herself into the small, delicate desserts. I wanted to be with her, and so I lingered in the kitchen. Maybe this was where I first learned to equate the ephemeral art of baking with abstract things like longing—although, for many years, I’d prefer to call it art, and only until after meeting Henry would I think of it as an act of love. My mother and I sat at the table in the breakfast nook and we tasted cakes—critiquing them quietly in hushed, reverent tones. After a while, she would proclaim that we would never get this one just right. She would claim to give up baking for a day or two, but then she would be back in the kitchen and we would move on to the next dessert.

  My mother was quiet and pensive, and a week or so after her return, the last of her letters arrived. It told the story of how the entire mountain had caught fire. The flames came all the way to the back stone steps of the house, but that was where the fire stopped. A miracle, she called it. As fond as she was of proclaiming miracles, this one seemed true. But when we asked her to describe the fire, she didn’t want to discuss it. “I wrote it down so you can keep the story forever,” she told us. It was strange that she wouldn’t tell us, but I didn’t pester her. We were lucky she was home. She was fragile, and, moreover, she’d proved that she could be run off. I let it be.

  One day she stopped baking. She said that we’d tried all the pastries and gotten them all wrong. There was no need for more. After she made the announcement, she seemed less restless, more peaceful, and so I took this as a good thing.

  But I kept baking, alone, at first in a clumsy attempt to lure her back into the kitchen to spend time with me, and then simply to be lost in the world I’d found there.

  All those years later, I would catch myself pinching dough in a specific way or smelling an exact scent that brought me back to myself as a young woman alone in our kitchen, and I would wonder where the picture of the brothers had gone. Where were my mother’s letters now? Where were the letters I wrote back on pink stationery and never sent? Thrown out. Buried away. Lost like everything else.

  y mother had led us inside the house and we were now standing in the kitchen. Elysius’s kitchen was restaurant grade, stainless steel and marble, with elegant lighting, kept pristine because she barely ever uses it. Her refrigerator was reliably stocked with things like baby carrots, yogurt, and healthy organic sprout salad takeout boxes, alongside exotic things like certain types of fish flown in from far-off islands, edible flowers, and bulbous roots that, I swear, were black market and vaguely illegal. In general, though, the inside of her fridge lacked color and density. It was airy, had a little echo to it, a lot of white staring back at you.

  Now the kitchen was bustling with caterers. A woman in a blue cocktail dress was giving orders. She glanced at her BlackBerry and whisked out onto the deck to take a call. There were tureens with ladles, long trays stacked with frothy appetizers, towers of shrimp, mussels, and clams, cases of wine, rows of stemware.

  My mother was trying to explain to Abbot, once again, that no one had been hurt in the fire, that it was very far away in France. “It was only a kitchen fire. We don’t know how much damage, but everyone is okay!”

  Abbot was rubbing his hands together in unrelenting worry. “How far away was the fire? Where’s France?” he asked, and she started explaining all over again.

  But I wasn’t listening. I felt unmoored. The news of the house fire seemed to have jarred something loose. Suddenly there were the memories of the house from my childhood, and once they flooded in, there was no stopping my brain. I’d taught myself how not to linger on memories of Henry, but Henry was here, and now I couldn’t resist. I felt unable to stop the image of him—vivid and real—from appearing in my mind. It was like being pulled under by a great tide. Henry and I had been introduced in a kitchen filled with caterers, after all.

  Henry Bartolozzi at twenty-four, standing in a kitchen, just before he met me. He was wearing a pair of nicely creased pants, a sport coat, and Nikes. He had black hair, combed but still curly, and light blue eyes. We were both in culinary school at the same time, and we’d both been invited—through friends of friends—to the house of a prominent chef in town. My mother had warned me not to fall in love with a creative type. By this point, Elysius had been living in New York for a few years as a struggling painter and had dated too many starving artists. My mother was sick of them. “What’s wrong with a med student?” she would say at family dinners. “What if someone chokes? I’d like at least one person here to be able to do a solid Heimlich, someone who can fashion a breathing tube from a Bic pen in an emergency. Do you want one of us to fall on a knife and bleed to death?”

  I thought the advice was pretty good. I was sick of my sister’s boyfriends, too. Plus, I wasn’t going to culinary school in order to meet men. I was tired of men. I was pretty sure I’d ruined my share. In fact, at this point, I’d recently ruined someone’s career at NASA by talking them into getting stoned, broken up someone else’s engagement, and been blamed for a sizable Jet Ski accident—no fatalities. I was afraid of men for the same reason I was afraid of frogs—because I couldn’t predict which way they would jump.

  In general, I saw love as entering into an agreement that depended on your willingness to compromise. This was rooted in my parents’ complicated marriage, of course. The story goes that my father, an attorney for the U.S. Patent Office, saved my mother from the typing pool.

  Problematic, on a feminist level, for many reasons, it was made worse because of one of our family secrets: my mother was brilliant. Her father came back from the war and opened a five and dime, which supported the family for years but was struggling by the time she reached college age and, to compound matters, her father’s health started to fail, and so college was completely out of the question. As a housewife, my mother watched all of the latest movies, even the foreign films, which she went to alone because my father refused to read subtitles. She referenced films by the names of their directors, a distinctly French trait. She gardened scientifically and read books on physics, history, philosophy, religion, but rarely mentioned these things. She led a quiet, secretive life of the mind. One Christmas, someone gave us the game of Trivial Pursuit. My mother knew all of the answers. We were startled. “How do you know all this stuff?” we kept asking. After the game was over and she won, she put the lid back on the box and never played again. Had my mother needed saving? She accepted the story that, ind
eed, she had. It was no wonder then that when I met Henry in the kitchen of that party all those years ago, I saw love as compromise, even weakness.

  Henry was the first person I met at the party. He was talking to the chef’s daughter—a towheaded third grader. He had a smile that hitched up on one side, a smile I immediately loved.

  He introduced himself. Henry Bartolozzi. The two names didn’t seem to fit together and I said something about it. He explained that Henry was his mother’s choice, the namesake of her grandfather, an old Southerner, and his last name was from his father’s Italian side.

  I told him my last name. “Buckley. A hard name to cart through middle school. I was a walking limerick.”

  He tapped his chin. “Does Buckley rhyme with something? Funny. I can’t think of anything.” Then he confessed that Fartolozzi hadn’t helped his middle school rep any. Raised in the Italian section of Boston—North End—he had an accent that was New England with a bounce, as if inspired partly by Fenway, partly by opera.

  I remembered that night, after the party spilled out onto the lawn, the towhead and her older brother lighting firecrackers that skittered across the pavement. It was dark. It was hard to tell if Henry was glancing at me or not.

  Later a lot of people piled into his old, rusty Honda, and when the radio accidentally hit an easy listening station, I started belting out “Brandy.” I confessed that I was this kind of unfortunate drunk, an easy listening diva. Despite this, or maybe because of it, Henry asked for my phone number.

  The very next night, a new friend of mine from school named Quinn invited me to dinner. I claimed I already had too much work. Quinn said, “Okay, it’ll just be me and Henry then.” And I said, “Henry Fartolozzi?” I told her I could change my plans.

  Henry brought bottles of a great Italian wine—a splurge; none of us had any money. Because I wasn’t used to the low futon masquerading as a couch, I kept dousing myself with wine each time I sat down. By the end of the night, I smelled like a winery.

  My main mode of transportation was an enormous 1950s-era bicycle—bought at a Goodwill. Henry offered to drive me home—it had gotten chilly. I declined, but he insisted. He stuffed the monstrosity into the trunk of his ancient uninsured Honda, but then the car didn’t start. At all. This was a relief. If he was trying to save me, it helped that he was failing.

  I said, “I know what’s wrong with your car.”

  His blue eyes lit up. “You know engines?”

  I nodded. “The problem’s simple. When you turn the key, it doesn’t make any noise.”

  Henry found this charming. I found it charming that he found it charming. “You’re right,” he said. “It’s probably the sound-effects alternator.”

  Henry walked me home—about six blocks. When we got to my house, I realized I’d left my keys at the dinner party. He walked me back to Quinn’s, and then to my place again. At this point it was three o’clock in the morning. We’d walked and talked a good chunk of the night away. Now, back on my front stoop, we lingered.

  He said, “So, do you like me?” He tilted his head, his dark lashes framing his blue eyes. He had full lips and the smile appeared again—just a half smile really, just that one side.

  “What do you mean?” I asked. “Of course I like you. You’re very nice.”

  “Yes, but by the sixth-grade definition. Do you like me like me or do you only like me?”

  “I might like you like you,” I said, looking at my shoes and then back at him. “Might. I don’t have good luck with men. In fact, I’ve sworn them off.”

  “Really?” This is the part I remember so clearly—how close he was, so close I could feel the warmth of his breath. “Can I ask why?”

  “Men are work. They think they’re going to swoop in and save you, but then they take effort. They need cajoling. They’re kind of, by and large, like talking sofas.”

  “For a talking sofa, I feel like I’ve got a really strong vocabulary.” He whispered this, as if it were a confession. “I did well on standardized tests—when compared to other talking sofas.” And then he really stared at me. I was falling in love with his shoulders. I could see his collarbones, the vulnerable dip between them, his beautiful, strong jaw. “I think swearing off men is old-fashioned.”

  “It’s kind of an antiquated notion. I might have been drunk when I said it.”

  “Maybe you were on a bender?” He smiled his half smile. “Taking a break from belting out ‘Brandy’?”

  “Probably. And now in the sober light of day, I can see what a bad idea that was—like trying to put on a full-scale production of West Side Story in your local 7-Eleven.”

  He was impossibly close now. “Have you ever tried to put on a full-scale production of West Side Story at a 7-Eleven?”

  “Twice. It didn’t work,” I said. “I’m over it now, swearing off men, that is.”

  “You’ve officially de-sworn-off men,” he said.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “You sure?”

  I nodded, but I wasn’t sure.

  And he kissed me—softly at first, almost just a tug on my mouth, but then I gave in. He held my face in his hands. He pressed his body against mine, against the door. I dropped my keys. We kissed and kissed, a moment that in my memory feels infinite.

  The kiss, that was the beginning. Henry and I worked as a couple because he convinced me that I was wrong about love. Love isn’t about compromise. Life is hard. Life demands compromise. But when two people fall in love, they create a sanctuary. My family was fragile. Love was something made of handblown glass. But Henry had been raised so differently. His family was loud, rowdy, bawdy, quick to anger, quick to forgive—with food everywhere—Southern food mixed with Italian set to the mantra of Mangia! Mangia!—always frying, bubbling, spattering, the kitchen pumping like a steamy heart.

  On one level, I didn’t expect to fall in love. I saw this other future version of myself, a tough, independent woman, bullying my way through life. But, honestly, I also felt like Henry was the exact person I’d been waiting for—the soul I’d been waiting for—and the package he came in was like unwrapping gift after gift. And this is what you look like. And this is what your voice sounds like. And this is the set of your childhood memories. I’d thought I’d been looking but really I’d been just waiting for him without knowing that I was waiting, really, without knowing that I’d been missing him before he arrived. I thought he was the answer to the longing I’d felt at thirteen. I thought the ache was a restless lonesomeness, but it was more like homesickness for a place you haven’t yet come to.

  In my sister’s kitchen, I was remembering our first kiss, the feeling of being pressed up against the door, the sound of the keys as they fell from my hand, jangling, and hit the cement stoop. There were so many hours, days, weeks that blurred from one moment to the next and slipped by. I wasn’t good at the daily. I was lousy at cherishing the moment. It turned out that my longing was part of who I was. It had subsided, but then—especially the year before Henry’s death—it returned. It got in the way of my ability to appreciate the details of my daily life. That’s what Henry did so well while I longed.… How could I have been so careless? Why didn’t I pay closer attention?

  I was homesick in my sister’s kitchen, on her wedding day. I wanted to go home, but the home I longed for, with Henry, was no longer there.

  “Let’s get your father and Abbot together. They can keep each other busy until the wedding starts,” my mother said loudly over the kitchen noise. She’d managed not to smear her makeup while crying; it was one of her skills.

  She pointed to my father, who was wearing a navy suit and sitting in the corner of the breakfast nook, penciling numbers into a book of Sudoku. This was how the ex-workaholic now handled the passage of time. Sudoku was a point of contention between my parents, and my father had to do it on the sly. Sudoku was a putterer’s thing to do, and my mother hated puttering. But my father was drawn to detail work, the intricacies that he’d found fulfil
ling as a patent lawyer. He liked categories within subcategories within subcategories. He talked a good game about his adoration of invention, but truth be told, he enjoyed rejecting claims for “indefinite language.” Deep down, I think my father had wanted to be an inventor, but he ended up a legalistic grammarian, a keeper of language.

  Abbot looked at me mournfully. He loved his grandfather, but he didn’t want to be abandoned in the noisy traffic of the kitchen. Plus, there was something inherently demeaning about being pawned off, and he knew he was being pawned off.

  “You two are buddies,” I reminded him. “You’ll keep each other entertained.”

  We walked over and my father looked up from his Sudoku. “Well, don’t you two shine up nice?” he said. “How do, Abbot?” How do was one of Abbot’s baby expressions. He’d been a very social baby, asking everyone all day long how they were doing—baggers, bank tellers, librarians. How do? How do?

  “I’m good!” Abbot said, putting on a happy face.

  “Maybe you two can watch a television show in the den,” my mother said.

  My father glanced at her, gauging her emotion. I assumed he could tell she’d been crying. “Sounds good! Let’s get out of the way of all this pomp and circumstance.”

  “There’s a Red Sox game on,” I said. Henry had been such a die-hard Red Sox fan that it was Abbot’s legacy, nearly genetic, and now it was my sole responsibility to make sure that he got hooked. I’d bought him all kinds of paraphernalia—ball caps, T-shirts, a pennant pinned to his door, curling in on itself like a dying corsage, as if even the Red Sox pennants needed New England’s chill and this one was wilting in Tallahassee’s humidity.