The Provence Cure for the Brokenhearted Read online

  I knocked on Charlotte’s door.

  There was no answer.

  I knocked again, slowly pushing the door open.

  There, sitting on the floor, surrounded by books and notebooks, was Charlotte, staring at a window across the room, bopping her head to music coming through earbuds wired to her iPod. I realized that Charlotte had often had that distant look, like someone spellbound by something no one else could see, even when she was little. She was wearing a ruffled dress that puffed around her like a cupcake with overly ornate icing.

  Her bedroom was not really hers. It was obviously one of Elysius’s creations. There were no posters, no funky chairs, or wild bedspreads. The walls were mauve. There were oil paintings on the walls—real art, probably costly real art—and built-in bookcases, on which was a shelf entirely devoted to classic, probably first-edition, Nancy Drew novels. Elysius had loved them as a kid. Charlotte likely had no use for them whatsoever. All that cardigan-wearing pluck? No, Charlotte would have none of that.

  “Charlotte!” I shouted.

  She lifted her head and gave the wires of her earbuds a tug. They fell to her lap, the music sounding tinny. Her hair was, in fact, blue with black tips, cut short and a little spiky with a fringe of bangs across her forehead. Charlotte was startlingly beautiful. Beneath the blue, black-tipped hair, the nose ring, and the eyeliner, she was a stunning girl. Her posture was awful, but every once in a while she’d tilt her head, or reach for something, and there was a hidden but undeniable gracefulness. Her eyes were a gray blue like her father’s. But she didn’t have his thin frame. She was a bit boxier. In fact, the baggy clothes she usually wore—the black concert T-shirts and camo pants with tons of pockets—made me think that she might be a little self-conscious about her body—and who could blame her? Elysius was a workout freak who could live on her fridge contents of yogurt and baby carrots. And, if memory served me well, Charlotte’s mother was tall and thin. I’d met Charlotte’s mother only once, at one of Charlotte’s early birthday parties. Charlotte’s mother was not happy. That’s what I remembered. She didn’t want Charlotte to open the gifts in front of the other kids. “It’s too showy,” she said. “No one wants to sit through someone else’s happiness.”

  “Are you doing SAT prep now?” I asked. “You know, we’re supposed to be lining up in a few minutes.”

  “I’m trying to look like I’m studying,” she said. “It’s the one thing they can’t give me shit for.”

  “You look like you are studying,” I said, “except for staring out the window.”

  “I’ve gotten very convincing at looking like I’m studying. You just crack open a heavy book and uncap a highlighter. You have to make yourself look like you’re in charge.”

  “I’m in charge of making sure you’re ready.”

  “Am I ready?”

  “I think so.”

  She started stacking her books.

  “Are all those books just props?” I asked. “Do you set-design little fake study scenarios?”

  “Yep,” she said, and she stood up. “It looks very believable, though, doesn’t it? It’s very … rapacious.”

  “Rapacious?”

  “It’s, you know …” She looked at the palm of her hand where she had written some words in red ink. She was wearing black fingernail polish. “Um, it’s very redolent and recalcitrant.”

  “Do you know what those words mean?” I asked.

  “I’m supposed to use them in sentences so that I come to understand them. My father told me to.”

  “I think he meant that you’re supposed to use them in sentences, correctly, though—not just to use them.”

  “Right. That makes sense,” she said. “But it’s harder.” And I was pretty sure she knew that she was being funny, although she didn’t smile in the least.

  “You look beautiful,” I said.

  “I look like a dough-fart,” she said. Dough-fart? It seemed like the kind of expression that I, as a pastry chef, should know, but I’d never heard of it. “I hate this dress. I’m in the third ring of hell. Weddings are just reminders that love is so pathetic it needs a whole institution to hold it up.” Then she looked up at me, wide-eyed, like she’d said the wrong thing. Had bad-mouthing marriage made her think that she’d said something insensitive about my marriage and therefore my dead husband? “I’m sorry,” she said. “I forgot. I mean, I didn’t forget. It’s just that I wasn’t thinking.”

  “Your father’s getting married again. My sister’s getting married,” I said. “This might not be the easiest day for either of us.”

  “My father is already wrapped up in his own life. He’d marry his work if he could, you know. That’s the sad part. He can’t marry art.”

  I’d heard Charlotte make these kinds of comments before. She wanted more from her father, and he was capable of only so much. She seemed to accept it, but the acceptance didn’t take the sting out. “I think it’s good they’re making it official, Elysius and your dad.”

  “It’s a little bureaucratic, but I’m fine with it.” She shrugged. “I’m okay, in general, you know. I’m fine!” She seemed to want to get off the subject.

  “I’m okay, too, despite the fact that Elysius is trying to fix me up with a guy at the wedding.”

  “Really? Who?”

  “Jack Nixon.”

  “Huh,” Charlotte said. “He came for dinner once. He’s nice.”

  “Well, I’m not ready for that kind of thing. And setups are sneaky.”

  “True,” she said. “Veracity.”

  “We’re supposed to go down and meet people on the deck so we can line up like ducks,” I said, and then suddenly felt like I was underwater, sinking. We were going to line up. We were going to a wedding. We were all going to talk about love. I remembered Henry, vividly, his first confession. When he was eleven, he’d witnessed his younger brother almost drown in a swimming pool at a barbecue party. Henry had frozen. He’d taken swimming lessons with CPR training at the Y, but he panicked. “It seemed like hours, like in a bad dream, watching my brother sink, but finally I shouted for my dad, who ran out into the yard and dove in, fully dressed.” His father saved him, but the incident had made Henry overly protective. He was the one to remember the suntan lotion, the first-aid kit, the helmets, who, at the beach, waved us in, calling, “Too far! Too far!” I felt like I needed to hear his voice now, calling me in. Too far, I thought, too far.

  Still, I kept walking. Charlotte followed me.

  At the bottom of the stairs, she said, “Wait, I can get this.” I felt a tug on the back of my dress, and with two quick pulls, Charlotte zippered it the rest of the way up. It was a little act of kindness, but, in that moment, I felt like she might be able pull me to shore, if I needed it.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  She shrugged. “De nada.”

  n the kitchen, Abbot was standing in the back of the line with bridesmaids and groomsmen shifting by the French doors that led to the deck. He was all gussied up with his matching red bow tie and cummerbund—a miniature Henry. I felt a hitch in my breath. Luckily, he spotted me, ran up, and quickly said, “I want some coffee.”

  And I was able to play the role of mother, setting limits. “No,” I whispered, almost unable to speak.

  “Howdy, Absterizer,” Charlotte said, sticking out her hand to shake his. “You look very snazzy.”

  “Thanks,” he said shyly, slipping his hands into his pockets. He didn’t want to shake her hand—germs. But, still, he was starstruck by Charlotte. And so he jerked his hand back out of his pocket and shook hers. During scattered holidays throughout the years, they’d talked and played board games and card games and strung popcorn. They were both the only child in their families, and as it is for many only children, the role of the cousin was heightened. But Charlotte was more of an adult each time they met up again. They seemed to always have to start over and, as Charlotte grew up, that became harder each time.

  My mother and father were already
on the deck, standing stiffly side by side. I could see them through the French doors.

  I said to Charlotte, “Your fake study area looks very authentic, genuine. You could say that it has real … what’s that word? Verisimilitude.”

  “I don’t think that’s on my list. Verisimilitude?” She looked up at the ceiling, searching her memory. “No. I don’t have to know that word.”

  “But it’s a good word.”

  “Verisimilitude,” Abbott said. “It sounds like a color.”

  “Like vermilion?” I asked.

  He shrugged.

  “It can be a great word,” Charlotte said. “I don’t have anything against it personally. I just don’t have to know it.”

  “But you could,” I said, trying to be encouraging.

  “It’s not on the list.”

  “Got it,” I said.

  “This isn’t what your wedding to Daddy was like,” Abbot said.

  Charlotte glanced at me, trying to read my reaction. I didn’t mind. She was a curious kid. She wanted to know how the world worked, and not just its pleasantries. She’d suffered plenty, and she was likely looking for options on how to deal with it.

  “That’s right,” I said. “It was nothing like this.”

  Truth be told, Henry and I had had no real wedding plans in mind, and that was a good thing, since we didn’t really have much money to pull off anything. I didn’t love the idea of the wedding day being my “big day.” I wanted to look forward to bigger days with Henry—maybe quieter, but days that belonged just to us, nonetheless.

  Throughout the wedding itself, I’d had the sense Henry and I barely existed. We were already married, in our own way. This was an adaptation of some sort, something that was only loosely based on us. There were the usual problems: battling bridesmaids, a couple of overly drunk groomsmen, the lead singer of the band getting laryngitis, and the beauty shop that gave my sister a satellite-dish hairdo. But I mostly remembered that Henry and I were kept in the church basement right before the wedding in two separate rooms, like holding pens. There was a door between us. I opened it and saw him across the room. He was wearing a rented tuxedo with the red bow tie and cummerbund, like Abbot’s now. He was pacing, hands in his pockets. I whispered his name and he looked up.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “Hi.”

  “I’m getting married,” I said.

  “Me, too,” he said, as if this were the strangest thing—two strangers, a bride and a groom meeting up like this. And it did seem like a giant coincidence. Throughout our marriage, when one of us would say I love you, the other would say it back, sometimes adding, “What are the chances?” He didn’t walk over to the door. It seemed like we were already breaking the rules just talking like this. “I’m getting married today … but I think I’m falling in love with you.”

  “Should we run away together?” I’d said.

  He’d nodded.

  Then his father had walked into his room, and I’d given a little wave and quietly shut the door.

  The woman in charge of Elysius’s wedding, tight-fisting her BlackBerry, shouted, “Where’s the ring bearer? We need to get you people in the order of the wedding procession!”

  “That’s you, Abbot,” I said. “Good luck!”

  Abbot dodged through the mix of bridesmaids and groomsmen, avoiding elbows, out onto the deck with my parents, leaving Charlotte and me behind in the kitchen. We were standing by a large fabric-matted corkboard situated on the pantry door. It was covered with photos of Daniel and Elysius’s friends and their friends’ offspring pushpinned to it. There were kids in various poses: kids with stylized hair standing in front of tall beach grass, in bumblebee and mermaid costumes that looked like they were handmade by Broadway costume designers, and more than a few holding violins. I never knew Elysius had so many intense friends with intense kids.

  There was a photo of Charlotte, too, an old one, taken before she had started dyeing her hair violent shades and had pierced her nose. She was holding a fish on a dock, presumably on Daniel’s family’s lakefront property in the Berkshires. This was taken back when she was outwardly thrilled by things like fish. I understood Charlotte’s gloominess. She reminded me of my own intensity at that age—all longing with nowhere for it to go. And of course, we both understood what it was like to live in Elysius’s perfectly elegant shadow.

  “Look at this baby,” I said, pointing at a particularly uptight-looking newborn. “That brow is furrowed like a Yale law student’s, isn’t it? It’s like she was born complete with a full head of hair, a pink Binky, and corporate angst.”

  Charlotte leaned in and said, “I suspect that the Binky was added later.”

  When Henry died, I was flooded with cards that all suffered from the same wispy, murky sentiments. Charlotte was likely forced to write the one that she sent, but she made it her own. She wrote at the bottom, He was so anti-corporate. That’s one thing that made him so lovable to me. This was one of Charlotte’s highest compliments at the time. And he taught me how to play air guitar. In fact, he got me an air guitar for Christmas when I was ten. I still have it. It’s electric blue. Henry and I also got her a real present—I insisted on that. It was something that she unwrapped and forgot. But the air guitar stuck, as did the image I had of the two of them wailing on imaginary guitars to Lenny Kravitz. That was my favorite card. I threw out all the cards one night in a fit of anger that I can’t explain—except for Charlotte’s. Henry would have loved that card.

  “Did you fight with Elysius about communism?” I asked.

  The woman in the blue dress was pointing at us now, urging us to come forward and get in line.

  “Is that what she thought we were fighting about?” Charlotte shook her head.

  “What do you think you were fighting about?” I asked.

  “Greed, consumerism, and, per usual, we were fighting over my father,” Charlotte said. “She doesn’t like me.”

  “She loves you,” I said.

  “But that doesn’t mean she likes me.”

  There was something about Charlotte in that moment. She was so vulnerable, so hurt. I wanted to tell her that the world was going to open up for her. Yes, this time in her life was hard but she would find someone someday, she’d fall in love—she’d be loved and liked by someone who really understood her, someone she could trust.

  But could I guarantee these things?

  No.

  And if I did tell Charlotte that all of these things would come to her, then the unspoken understanding was that it could also all be taken away. No matter how much joy we can even endure in life, there’s always death. See? This was how it was for me. Death was everywhere. It popped up into the most unsuspecting moments—even just trying to give a little advice. I couldn’t think of anything to say to Charlotte about being loved and liked. I was just a sad reminder, after all, of loss.

  can say that Elysius and Daniel’s ceremony was beautiful. In fact, I can be fairly objective here because I was feeling objective, removed. I wasn’t sure what came over me, but I didn’t even have the urge to cry. I knew that if I did, the crying might turn, palpably, into grief. To be in a state of grief at your sister’s wedding is unforgivable. But it wasn’t so much that I took control of myself as it was that I felt empty. This ceremony was beautiful, yes, but seemed to have nothing to do with love as I knew it. Had I convinced myself that I was watching a play and been pulled up from the audience to act out a certain role? That’s how it felt.

  I kept my eye on Abbot, who was trying very hard not to rub his hands together. After he handed over the rings, his hands went straight into his pockets and were restless there, sometimes hopping like frogs. I looked for a man who’d been denied his plus one on his wedding invite and who could have possibly carried off the name Crook in college. At a certain point, I concentrated on SAT words—ribald, fastidious, contrived.

  I smiled in photographs, noting the golden late afternoon light, the elegance of the guests. At the rece
ption, I skirted the edges of the brilliant conversations, the dance floor, where people danced tastefully, and the bar, where people ordered expensively. Since Henry died, I’d had a gnawing in my stomach, but it wasn’t hunger. I ate lightly. I picked at things. I left my crusts behind. I’d become a nibbler, a sipper. And so, at the reception, I nibbled hors d’ouevres—airy and rich—and sipped expensive, dry, subtle wines.

  Of course, I was drawn to the wedding cake. I wished I’d had the self-restraint to ignore it, but I couldn’t. I found myself circling. It was a modern, five-tiered cake, circular, a little too hatboxy, and white with black piping—which I always tried to talk brides out of. Black piping was, to my mind, too tuxedo-esque, something that would date the cake too quickly, faddish. I assumed that the designers had talked to Elysius, perhaps even walked through her house. There was an echoey sense to the cake itself—as if the cake might actually be hollow. It was the kind of design that Henry and I would have enjoyed critiquing, joyfully.

  I knew that some would say our kind of closeness was borderline unhealthy. We lived together and worked together and parented together. But, honestly, when I was with Henry, I felt like I was more myself. Who had I been before Henry Bartolozzi? I remembered my girlhood self—awkward, shadowed by my beautiful older sister and my parents’ tenuous marriage, almost like they sucked up all the air in a room, and I was left feeling oxygen-deprived. But with Henry, I had air again. I could breathe. He thought I was funny, and so I got funnier. He thought I was beautiful, and so I felt more beautiful. He thought I was brilliantly experimental in the kitchen, and so I experimented more brilliantly. We had our problems, yes, but even our problems bound us closer. And now I knew what it was like to be only half of a pair and less of myself.

  One night, lying in bed together, about a month before Henry died, my calf seized. I shot up in bed and cried out, “Leg cramp!”

  Henry was almost asleep. The room was lit only by the hall light. He said, “Your leg or mine?”

  I was flexing my foot, rubbing the knot violently. “What do you mean, your leg or mine? How would I know if you had a leg cramp?”