My Grape Escape (22 page)

A few days later, Franck had rounded up as many muscular friends and family as possible to help move the turquoise fixtures out of our bathroom. Gégé reported for duty the morning of the move.

“
Ça va
?” I asked as I did every morning.

“Still depressed,” he informed me, as he had done every morning since he had broken down at our breakfast table. He said it in a resigned, matter-of-fact way, as though reporting the weather.

I had felt strangely on guard around him since that first morning. I tried to convince myself that it was merely because I wasn’t as comfortable sharing negative emotions as a French person, but the truth was that my unease went deeper. I was jealous of him.

It was clear that he never even considered for a moment trying to hide his depression. To actually admit to the distressing feelings that often spun inside me…it would be so freeing, so indulgent, so…terrifying. I was certain in that deep, visceral spot inside my soul that the universe would cave in if I dared. I was jealous of Gégé’s courage and jealous of the freedom that his courage bought him. I knew he wouldn’t understand this.

That morning, like the past few mornings, I found myself circling warily around Gégé, desperate for him to ask me what was wrong and dreading that he would.

Luckily Franck’s father and Olivier and Martial arrived and in a wave of testosterone everyone swept into the bathroom and removed all of the turquoise fixtures in under half an hour. Gégé complained the most about the weight of the cast iron bathtub yet he was actually the happiest I had seen him in a long time, joking and egging the others on.

I was smiling as they drove off to the dump but as I went back inside and surveyed my now empty bathroom my smile vanished. The stained wallpaper around the edges of the holes reminded me that everything we were doing here would eventually be undone by time or by new owners. Everyone died in the end. What was the point of it all?

My breath couldn’t seem to come fast enough; nausea climbed up my throat. This was all terribly wrong. Something catastrophic was going to happen because of the choices I had made.

I stumbled outside and took gulps of air yet couldn’t seem to fill my lungs. I didn’t think I could bear this panic for one second longer. I lowered myself to the top step. I was certain that at any second the universe was going to cave in and it would be
entirely my fault.
Black spots danced in front of my eyes. I was certain I would suffer like this forever. The anxiety kept subsiding for a few moments, then rushing forward again in waves, each one more disorienting than its predecessor. I clutched my chest.

Gégé’s whistle came around the corner. I knew I needed to escape inside but I couldn’t seem to move.

“There was a man at the dump who took everything!” I heard him say but his voice came through to me as though he were above water and I below.

I raised my head.

One look at me and his expression of delight melted away.

“What’s wrong Laura? Do you need me to call the doctor?”

“
Non
…Yes…” I gasped. “I don’t know. I don’t know…it’s just…so stressful.”

Then Gégé, a shy man who seemed to have to gear himself up for the touching required by our daily
bises
, placed his hand on my shoulder.

“I know,” he said. I still couldn’t look at him. The panic began to ebb, only to be replaced by excruciating embarrassment.

“Laura,” he ordered, “Look at me.” I did. His brown eyes were full of understanding.

“I just…”

“I
know
,” he said. I knew then I had never needed to tell him anything. He knew exactly how I felt and he had felt that way too. The fact that I wasn’t alone meant everything in that moment. I burst into tears. I sobbed so hard that I had to cling to the cold metal railing for support. Gégé didn’t try to hug me or tell me to stop. He just rubbed my shoulder and murmured “I know” over and over again.

“It’s hard being alive sometimes,
n’est-ce pas
?” Gégé said when my tears began to subside.

I nodded and took a shuddering breath.

“He was thrilled with the bidet.”

I wiped my eyes, confused. “Who?”

“A man at the dump ended up taking all the fixtures home with him. He was thrilled with the turquoise bidet in particular.” The thought managed to bring a little smile to my face, and it was reflected in Gégé’s.

“I guess that’s something.”

“It
is
something,” he said. “The others will be coming back soon. Do you need to go and blow your nose?”

“Yeah.” I scrubbed my face with my hands to try and even out the splotches. “
Merci
Gégé. Maybe we could keep…”

“
Ne fais pas du souci.”
He gave
my shoulder a final pat. “No one will know there was anything amiss with
La Lolo
. We all find life hard sometimes.”

It wasn’t until I went into the WC to blow my nose that I realized Gégé hadn’t called me Laura. He had called me
“
La Lolo
.” My new nickname.

Chapter 22

The day after the bathroom had been stripped of its turquoise fittings and I had earned a nickname not by being strong, but by being vulnerable, Franck informed me that he had invited Gégé,
Le Paulo
, and an electrician they called Momo over for dinner the next night.

I surveyed our kitchen, which was covered in plaster dust and had frayed electrical cables hanging from the holes Franck and Gégé had excavated in the ceiling.

“Are you insane?” I asked.

“A bit,” he admitted. “But I may need to call Paulo in to help again if we’re going to get the plastering back on track and” - he pointed up at the dangling cables overhead - “I think you’ll agree with me that we need an electrician sooner rather than later. Thierry has a friend named Momo who’s an electrician. We’re going over to their place tonight to get the information and I want Momo to be at the dinner too.”

I turned around to the kitchen again. “How are we supposed to cook in this mess? Can’t we just take them out to a restaurant?”

Franck shook his head. His usually black hair was almost white. “That’s not the way it’s done in Burgundy. It would be an insult.”

I ran my hand through Franck’s hair, unleashing a shower of fine white dust. “More of an insult than feeding them chunks of plaster in their food?”

Franck nodded. “Definitely.”

Renovation-wise I had less to do than Franck who was up to his ears in plastering, so I knew the onus was on me to feed the guests at dinner the next night. This was Burgundy, where sublime food and wine counted more than life itself. If my cooking was bad we might, in all seriousness, be abandoned by our helpers for good.

“You’d better plan on serving lots of wine.” I pulled down Franck’s T-shirt and found a clean spot of skin on his collarbone to kiss.

“You can count on that.” He swatted me on the bottom with his trowel. “
Merci, mon amour
.”

Momo, we learned that night at Stéph and Thierry’s house, was an electrician who lived two villages over and was a childhood friend of Thierry, Stéphanie’s husband. In the village, Momo went by two nicknames. In polite circles his actual name Maurice was shortened to “Momo,” but his friends knew him as
L’âne
or “the donkey”.

“Is it because he’s stubborn?” I asked. We had been in front of the fireplace and Tom was crawling around us, executing laborious u-turns every time he bumped into our legs.

Thierry smirked. “Ah…
non
.”

“Why then?”

Franck caught Thierry’s eye and the two of them started to laugh.

“
Quoi?”
I didn’t like the idea of having this donkey person fool around with our electrical cables until I knew the whole story.

“Have you ever seen a donkey?” Thierry asked.

“
Bien sûr.
My grandmother used to have one on her farm. His name was Tex and we used to try to feed him carrots and stuff. He would spit at us. He died eventually and we buried him under my grandmother’s apple tree. He was a nasty, spiteful thing. He used to bite us all the time. Three years later my cousins and I pretended that we were archaeologists and dug up all his bones.”

Thierry shot a mystified look at Franck, not sure quite what to do with my impromptu walk down memory lane.

“Did you ever see the donkey…you know, excited?” Frank asked me.

I thought about this for a moment. “I don’t think so. There were no female donkeys around, just a lot of sheep.” The coin dropped. There
had
been two horses, Areeb and Pal, and I had definitely seen them. If donkeys were anything like horses…Franck and Thierry hooted with laughter.

“
D’accord
. I get it now.” I waved my hand at them to shut up. “Is that really true about our electrician?”

 Franck stopped laughing. “What kind of question is that?”

“
Allez.
I bet you want to know the answer too.”

“I certainly do not.”

I raised a brow at Thierry. “Is it true?”

Thierry took another sip of his
kir
. “Just ask any woman who lives in these villages. ”

“You don’t seriously mean he shows it off when he’s making house calls?”

“Laura!” Franck said.

“He’s quite well known for seducing his female customers,” Thierry admitted.

Franck frowned at Thierry. “You couldn’t have told me this before?”

“I thought you knew.” Thierry protested with a shrug. “Everybody around here knows.”

“I didn’t hear that part of it. You just told me that he fenced in his free time and almost made it onto the Olympic team when he was younger.”

Thierry raised an eyebrow. “What better way to defend himself against all the angry husbands?”

The next morning Franck got up in a chipper mood, but by the time lunch rolled around his cheery humour had been defeated by the challenge of making a smooth surface of our horribly ancient and humid walls.

As we sat down over a
salade frisée
, a roll of parma ham each and a round of camembert
,
I saw that my husband was glaring at the world through an
oeil noir.

“Ça va?
” I ventured but he merely frowned and wiped his hands on his plaster spackled jeans. Apparently, now that Gégé and I were emerging from our respective funks, it was Franck’s turn. The timing couldn’t have be worse, I reflected as I sat down over my after lunch café and sucked my pencil, wracking my brain to come up with something I could cook for Gégé, Paulo, and Momo that night in our tiny kitchen. It had to be something strong tasting and dark in colour so that the inevitable plaster in the dish would remain undetected.

“Do you have any ideas for dinner?” I asked Franck who nursed his coffee across from me.

“
Non
.”

He was definitely in what I always thought of as one of his
French
moods. His whole family indulged in them on occasion, as did pretty much every French person I knew. The Canadians I had grown up with most definitely did not. Not in public anyway. Maybe this was why I still felt a strange mix of embarrassment and relief when I thought about breaking down in front of Gégé.

“You seem to be in a bad mood,” I observed, trying to keep my tone light. In general I tried to keep a sense of humour about Franck’s French moods but after a while they never failed to destabilize me. I wasn’t sure where it came from, but deeply embedded in my brain was the conviction that I should be able to make everyone around me happy.

“I’m fine.”

When Franck was in one of his rare funks I knew from experience that nothing I could say or do could pull him out of it.

Gégé came in the kitchen then, took one look at Franck and raised an eyebrow at me.

I shrugged. “I’m trying to figure out what to cook for dinner tonight. Any ideas?”

“
Oui
!” Gégé served himself some coffee. “A couple of smoked
morteau
sausages and potatoes in the pressure cooker with
crème fraiche
and freshly chopped parsley.”

“That’s perfect! Can you tell me how to make it?”

Gégé did just that, then left Franck and me alone again while he went down to the cellar to examine some pipes.

“Gégé’s idea is nothing short of brilliant,” I remarked as I marked down
crème fraiche
on my shopping list. The recipe was easy, filling, delicious, and required only two pots.

“I need to get back to those walls.” Franck got up and poured the remaining half of his coffee in the sink.

I had to pull off this dinner, surly husband or not.

By the time seven o’clock rolled around I was at my wit’s end trying to clear out enough debris in our living room to make room for an empty table and five chairs around it.

The potatoes and the
morteau
had been purchased and were cooking away in our trusty SEB pressure cooker – an essential tool in any self-respecting French kitchen, even the most rudimentary ones like ours. The comforting smell of smoked pork and garlic filled the house. Even the odour of burning rubber from the convection heaters provided no match.

I had poured the
crème fraiche
into a small casserole so that it would be ready to heat up a few minutes before we served the dish.

As I was snipping up my parsley in a glass with scissors - like Mémé had showed me - Franck stomped into the kitchen. He looked around, muttered “
quel bordel!
” then took himself off again. A mess? Of course the kitchen was a mess. There was nowhere for me to put the pots and pans I was using to cook. The whole house was a mess -  we were in the middle of renovating it. It wasn’t only the pressure cooker that began to steam. We had people coming to dinner though, people whose help we needed. Now wasn’t the time for me to explode.

I wrenched open the sticky window and drank in the spring air, hoping it would cool down my temper. The church across the street hunched in front of a restless sky.

Why did my life always seem so much messier than everyone else’s?

The door clattered open and Paulo’s voice arrived in mid-sentence. I listened for a few seconds as he recounted how a barrel of wine had fallen off a truck in front of his house. I took a last gulp of air and shut the window. These guys were the only ones who could help us out of our fix. Somebody had to be the gracious host and I didn’t think it was going to be Franck.