A Wedding in Provence (3 page)

“Sébastien?” Emily called. Still, she kept her distance from them.

“Elle s’en va,”
Sébastien said loudly. “She does not belong here.”

The woman was short and curvaceous, wearing a white dress with a thick black belt wrapped around a narrow waist. He’s fucking her, Olivia thought. She headed toward her best friend.

Emily stood with her arms across her chest, her back rigid. Her eyes were dark with anger.

“Who is she?” Olivia asked, standing by her side and watching the scene down the hill.

“No fucking clue,” Emily said through tight lips.

Sébastien was spitting words at the woman. He looked ready to haul off and punch her.

“Oh my God, she’s crying,” Emily said. “Spare me.”

The woman buried her face in her hands and her shoulders heaved. Sébastien turned her around and marched her out the door.

When he shut the door, he put his head against it and stood there, his back to them. After a moment he turned and walked up the hill wearily. He stopped in front of his wife.

“Ta petite amie?”
Emily asked.

Your girlfriend
. Olivia’s French wasn’t as good as Emily’s, but she understood enough.

Sébastien looked at his feet.

“Answer me,” Emily insisted.

“Non,”
he told her.

“Cochon,”
Emily said, and she turned from him. She charged up the hill toward the inn. Olivia followed her, a few steps behind.

She could hear Sébastien call Emily’s name, his voice wobbly.

Emily stormed through the door and into her apartment behind the reception area. She closed the door behind her. The lock slammed into place.

When Olivia turned around, Brody was standing in the doorway of the inn, watching.

“What do I do?” she asked.

“Let’s get out of here,” he said quietly. “We’ll get dinner in town.”

“I can’t leave her,” Olivia said.

“This is their rodeo,” Brody told her.

He took her hand and led her out of the house. Sébastien was nowhere to be seen. They walked down the hill, and Olivia
clung to Brody’s hand as if some calamity was ready to strike them. The world felt tilted somehow. At the bottom of the hill, near the gate, they saw the shards of Sébastien’s champagne glass scattered over the stones. Olivia bent down and was about to pick up the stem of the glass when Brody tugged on her other hand.

“Leave it,” he said, his voice surprisingly strong. “Let them clean up their own mess.”

He opened the door and led her away from the inn.

Later that night, after bouillabaisse at a small restaurant on the edge of the harbor, after a long walk through the small cobblestone streets of the old town and then back up the hill to the inn, Olivia and Brody held each other in bed. They were naked, their bodies curled around each other.

“We’re brave old fools,” Olivia said, her mouth pressed to Brody’s ear.

“How’s that?” he asked.

“We still choose love when we know everything that can happen,” Olivia whispered.

“We still choose love,” Brody said, kissing her.

“C
ome with me to my mother’s wedding,” Nell said.

“Whoa,” the man said. He was wearing black-framed glasses, the kind of glasses that could be hip or geeky. Nell considered the possibility that they were fake and that he wore them to make himself look a little less handsome. That’s absurd, she thought. No one would do that.

“I’m serious,” she told him. “We’ll have a great time.”

He watched her. She kept her gaze firm. They were sitting next to each other on the airplane, their faces uncomfortably close. She could feel herself begin to tremble and she tightened her hand around her plastic cup. He lifted the small bottle of wine off his own tray and poured the rest into her cup.

“I’m Gavin,” he said. “Nice to meet you.” He tapped his cup against hers.

“We met a few hours ago.”

“But I missed the transition to family weddings.”

“It’s a small wedding. In Cassis.”

“All the more reason to invite a stranger,” he said.

“You don’t feel like a stranger,” she lied. She knew the point at which she upped the ante. She had been enjoying herself, chatting up the hot guy beside her on the flight. He flirted, she flirted right back. They drank, told each other stories, he ran his finger along her arm. And then she pushed against her own sense of decorum—no, not decorum—she didn’t believe in decorum. She pushed beyond what she imagined any other daring young woman might do. Beyond what even she was comfortable doing. Why? Damn the therapist who asked her that so many times that she finally quit seeing him. Damn her mother who challenged: “What are you waiting for, Nell? For me to tell you that you’ve gone too far? It’s too late for that.” Damn her father who just last week said “Grow up, Nell. I don’t want to deal with your foolishness anymore.”

“So tell me about this wedding,” the man said, taking off his glasses and rubbing the bridge of his nose. Gavin. Nice name. Nice blue-gray eyes, the color of slate. He had already told her he was going to explore the south of France. “How?” she had asked. “I’ll figure it out when I get there,” he had told her. And so she became the woman who might enchant such a man. The woman who would invite him to her mother’s wedding.

Now she told him about the man her mother was marrying, the friends who ran the inn, the younger sister from Silicon Valley, the cowboy friend of the groom and the old lady from Wyoming.

“And me,” Gavin said.

“And you,” she told him.

“The stranger from the airplane.”

“The good-looking man in seat 43A who charmed his way into my mother’s wedding.”

“I’d love to come,” he said.

“I’d love you to come,” she said.

He leaned forward and kissed her and kept kissing her. A shiver ran through her body. He tasted of wine and coffee. They had been drinking both for hours, not wanting the buzz to fade.

She had done the right thing, she decided, though her mind filled with the voices of so many people telling her to stop, to walk away, to grow up, to set boundaries. She felt his hand on her thigh and knew from the current that ran through her that he would be someone she’d like to take to bed. Her legs opened. He gripped the inside of her thigh a little too hard and something in her chest tightened. He might be dangerous, she thought, and her legs slipped open a little more.

They drove along the coast from Nice, headed west, away from the high-rise apartment buildings and overdeveloped hillsides, away from the autoroute that scared Nell with its fast cars and unintelligible signs. She found the slow road to Cassis, one that hugged the Mediterranean, one that kept them inching slowly toward her family.

She had sobered up. He was still appealing in a rough-around-the-edges way, but now the notion of introducing him to her mother seemed ludicrous. She could lie about when and how they met. But then he would know she was not the daring
woman she had presented herself to be. Story of her life: Creating a fantasy and then crashing into it full-force with her own dumb reality. You can’t take a total stranger to your mother’s wedding.

And you can’t fall in love on an airplane.

Who said anything about love? Wasn’t she just anticipating one or two wild nights in bed? And then he would go on with his grand adventure, exploring the coast, however the hell he planned on doing that in the first place.

She hadn’t slept with anyone since Chaney.

“I fell asleep,” he mumbled, stirring, adjusting his glasses, clearing his throat. Then his hand reached out and stroked the back of her neck.

“We should have slept on the plane,” she said.

“No,” he said. “We were having far too much fun for that.”

She smiled. He pressed his fingers into the nape of her neck and she felt a flush course through her body. This will be fine, she told herself. Her mother will be too occupied with everything else to care very much about one extra person at the wedding. One stranger.

“Where are you from?” she asked.

“You’re worried about introducing me to your mother.”

She shot him a look. Mind reader. He was smiling, a devilish smile.

“Not at all,” she said. “My mother has a weakness for good-looking men.”

“And you? Do you do this often?”

“Take strange men to my mother’s wedding? Not often.”

“So now I’m strange.”

“Very.”

“I’m from Seattle.”

He was lying. He wore a black T-shirt and skinny black jeans. He carried a leather bomber jacket and wore black Doc Martens. New York maybe. L.A. This guy was not from Seattle.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

Whoever he was, he could read her shifts in temperature. A good sign.

“Not a thing,” she said. “I love Seattle.”

She hated Seattle. She hated the rain, the sincerity, everyone’s outdoorsiness. She once spent a month in Seattle with a boyfriend and fled the place, leaving her rain gear behind.

A burst of nervous laughter escaped her.

“What’s so funny?” he asked.

“What did we talk about for all those hours on the plane? We know nothing about each other.”

“Are you worried?”

“No,” she said quickly.

“Neither am I,” he told her. He placed his hand on her thigh and even through the material of her jeans, she felt as if he was pressing the flesh of his palm into her skin. Her body temperature rose.

She threw the map on his lap. “Help me find Cassis,” she said. “We’ll tell each other the stories of our lives later on in bed.”

“I like that,” he said.

He was good at maps. He directed her left and right, through small fishing villages and larger vacation communities. When they were stopped at a light in the center of one town, he jumped out of the car and for a moment she thought:
He’s gone
. Her heart lurched. She wanted him back and she wanted him gone forever. She wanted to sleep with him and fall in love with him and yet she didn’t want to bring him to the damn wedding. And then she conjured the worst of what would happen: her younger sister. Carly—practical, rational, reasonable Carly—would kill her. She pulled to the side of the road, then looked in the backseat. His backpack was there, piled on top of her suitcase. They hadn’t been able to open the trunk.

The car door opened again and he climbed in, bearing ice-cream cones. She felt ridiculously happy, like a child, like a lover, like a woman who knew the man behind the cones.

“How did you know I like pistachio?” she asked.

He smiled. His own cone held chocolate ice cream. Had he given her chocolate ice cream she might have sent him on his way. Instead, she had fallen a little deeper. In love? In lust. She was a fool. But at least she was a fool with a cone full of pistachio ice cream.

“It’s hot in here,” he told her. “I needed to cool off.”

The air conditioner was broken. Or was he talking about the heat between them? She pressed her legs together.

She ate her ice cream and watched a mother try to maneuver a double stroller across the busy street, a boy hanging on to her skirt, delinquent dad following a few steps behind, his eyes focused on a cellphone. Through the open car window she could hear one baby wailing, the boy yelling, the mother trying to soothe him.

“That woman is probably my age,” Nell said.

“You didn’t leave a husband and three kids behind in Los Angeles?” Gavin asked.

“I didn’t even leave a job behind.”

“A boyfriend?”

She looked at him. He had a smudge of chocolate at the edge of his lip. “Just so you know,” she said. “I don’t like chocolate ice cream. I love all things chocolate except for ice cream.”

“I knew that,” he said, smiling.

“And I don’t have a boyfriend. The last one killed himself. In our bedroom. I’m still working on the aftermath of that one.”

“I’m sorry,” Gavin said. “I can’t imagine.” She saw tenderness on his face, something new, something that made her open her heart a little more.

Good response, Nell thought. She hated the friends who told her it wasn’t her fault or the folks who tried to top her with horror stories of bad relationships. It hadn’t even been a bad relationship. It had been wonderful, except for the suicide part. Chaney had died six months earlier and she had moved out of the apartment the day she found him lying in bed, bottles of pills—many of them her pills—strewn across the sheets.

“You have a family and kids back home?” she asked.

He shook his head. “Tell me about the boyfriend.”

She raised her eyebrows. Brave man. So she told him that she and Chaney had been living together for a year, having met at an audition. Both of them were actors, they read well together, got turned down, went for beers at the nearby pub. She didn’t mention that she moved in with him the night they met. Or that she had left behind a different boyfriend, in a fancier apartment, one who waited for her for days to return. She finally moved her things out of the old place when he was at
work. She left him a Dear John letter, a pathetic excuse of a note. The old guy—and he was old, forty-five to her twenty-seven—had two kids, a miserable divorce, a high-stress job, a drinking problem. Chaney seemed so easy to her. She felt like a kid again with him, carefree and broke, free to have sex whenever they wanted. Even her mother liked Chaney, especially after she saw him in
True West
at a small L.A. theater. In the weeks before his suicide, he had been called back three times for a breakout role in a film and finally his agent had told him by voice mail that he hadn’t gotten the role. He killed himself a few hours later. Had he wanted that role so much that he couldn’t live without it?

Maybe she had been missing something while having fun with Chaney. Maybe he wasn’t so easy after all.

But she didn’t tell Gavin that. She told him about finding out that Chaney was bipolar, something he had never revealed. His mom told her at the funeral. “Oh, I know,” she had lied to the woman. “But he was doing so well.”

Now she rented a room in someone’s broken-down house in Venice. She had a bit part every once in a while in a cop show on TV. She was studying to be a yoga teacher. So was everyone else.