Opposites Attack: A Novel with Recipes Provencal (2 page)

Within minutes of meeting Monsieur “Call me Yves” Devreaux, Alyce knew to stay on her guard. He may have been married, but it didn’t seem to make a difference from the way he puffed on a cigarette, checking her out. He had thinning hair and nicotine-stained, slightly bucked teeth. He did have nice wheels, though.

Nelson, quite the car buff, had spoiled her in that regard (and many others).

As they cruised down a two-lane road, she ignored Yves’ ogling as she focused on the creamy stucco villas with tile roofs and bougainvillea-covered walls; the wrought-iron terraces crammed with more flowering plants. On the wide sidewalks men and women moved along, casually elegant.

There was something so sexy and sophisticated about a French accent, so natural and carefree about the South of France. For years she had collected
Provence Living
magazine, neatly stacking them on the floor next to her bed in her tiny studio apartment, watching them grow steadily toward the top of her nightstand. As the number of issues increased, so did her longing. During countless subway rides to and from work, she’d flipped through glossy pages of rustic French homes, fields of lavender, luscious feasts resting on bright sunflower-patterned tablecloths, and yearned to step right into each photograph.

And now she had! Wanting to fit in somewhere, however, and actually doing it were two different things.

Yves Devreaux tapped her bare (good) knee. “You have never been to France before?”

He said it with a tone she noticed the French have that made it hard for her to tell if they were intrigued or appalled. She tried to answer in French that she’d never been outside America before. He quickly lost patience.

“Tell me in English why you are here for so long. You are trying to get over a man,
non?
”

She hardly wanted to bare her soul to this guy, but it was such a relief to speak her native tongue, he could have been a serial killer asking to eat her liver and she wouldn’t have cared.

“Sort of. First, I lost my job. I was an assistant media buyer at a big advertising agency in New York called BOLD.” She said harshly, “They fired a
third
of their employees and renamed themselves
BOLDER.
Can you believe it?”

“What is this job, media buyer?”

“When a company hires an ad agency to market a product, a budget is created to place the ads. Media buyers choose how it’ll be divided among various media. They hold a lot of sway. But I was just an assistant. I should have been promoted since I practically did the job anyway.”

“Where is the man in this story, eh?”

She took a sip of her bottled water, hoping to flush away the bitterness. “There I was with a job that I’d worked so hard to keep and, poof, it was gone. I felt, what’s the point of having a career if it can be taken from you at any moment?”

She didn’t tell Yves that she then drank too much French wine and told Nelson she was sick of working and wanted to be married and a mommy.

“We’d been dating six months. When he didn’t propose or ask me to move in with him or offer to help me out, I said, ‘Maybe I’ll just go live in France.’ He thought it was a great idea! I wanted to stuff a baguette down his throat.”

Alyce still kicked herself for thinking she had a chance with a cute, rich guy like Nelson. Mind you, she’d had no idea he was loaded when she met him. She just saw those gold-flecked brown eyes under a shock of blond bangs and that sweet smile. Their eyes locked and that was it.

It only took a few
years
for him to ask her out. Once he did, it was like a fairytale. Rose petals all over their bed at the Delano hotel in South Beach. Hot-stone massages in the Hamptons. Long drives in the country in his sleek black Porsche Boxster. She should have known it wouldn’t last.

Yves jarred her with another tap, this time on her thigh. “It is a drastic step,
non?
Why not just take a two-week vacation?”

She scrinched over to the right. “Because when he said we should see other people —”

“Ah! You wanted to stuff
two
baguettes down his throat.”

She couldn’t help but crack a smile. “No, I wanted to start over with someone new.
Moi.
How can I meet the right guy if I’m not happy with myself? Two weeks wouldn’t be long enough to change that much.”

“Other than your scrapes, you look fine to me, mademoiselle.”

She made an attempt to pull her shorts down lower and felt a dull ache in her right elbow. He took another quick glance at Alyce’s legs and athletic shoes.

“Are you a runner?”

“I jog.”

“So do I! We will run on the beach.”

“I won’t be running anywhere with my injuries.”

“They are not that serious.”

The car was slowing down. Yves said, “I must stop here for a moment.” He parked in front of an antique store. “Please come in.”

Antique. Another French word commonly used in English. Her first class at MEF had covered French words she already knew:
à la carte, chic, cuisine, déjà vu, femme fatale, petite, rendezvous, touché.
It had given her the false impression that learning this language would be easy.

There was a man behind an old carved wooden desk who had to be the owner, and another man in a denim shirt and faded blue jeans with wild white hair and an unkempt beard. She couldn’t place his age. His face looked too young for the gray hair. And he was smoking—a habit Alyce could not fathom anyone developing. They both blatantly checked her out. The owner smiled. The old/young man? It was like he was studying her intently and pushing her away at the same time.

All she understood was
“étudiante”
when Yves explained who she was. The owner let out a French-sounding “hohn-hohn-hohn” and the white-haired guy made some remark that had “American” in it, causing everyone to crack up but her.

She noticed a dog at the strange guy’s feet. Actually, she smelled the dog first. He—or she—looked like it slept in mud. And they let it in here? But she loved animals and put the back of her hand in front of the dog’s mouth.

“Hi, there. How are you today?”

Instead of licking her hand, it farted.

The men howled. Her face flushed with embarrassment.

She wandered around the store. She heard Yves say “baguette” twice. The men had another good laugh.

Right, she thought. Real funny. Ha. Ha. Ha.

She lingered in front of a jewelry case, her eyes going straight to the diamond engagement rings, her mind straight to Nelson.

A necklace with an emerald pendant, her May birthstone, caught her eye. There was another big tug at her fragile soul as she thought about her birthday not far away and being all alone for it. She noticed a tag on the necklace that said:
Solde.
She held it up to her neck for fun and admired it in a mirror.

The owner called out to her in French. She thought he was reprimanding her for touching something that belonged to someone else. She quickly put it back and apologized. The men looked confused. Yves began to speak to her in English but the old/young guy stopped him. She understood he was telling Yves to speak in French, as he was supposed to, because she’d heard that 20 times a day for the last week.

They moved closer to her. The owner was saying numbers that had to be prices. The nauseous dread that hit in class surged forth, but this was worse. She was in public.

The owner slowed down his speaking and increased his volume as though she were a baby with a hearing problem. She looked at Yves with pleading “Please tell him to stop” eyes.

“But it’s sold! How can I buy something that’s sold?”

The men’s eyes widened. They spoke in French, then roared with laughter again.

Yves, his face crinkled up with glee, said, “Al-
ees
, s-o-l-d-e means it’s on
sale.
”

She dashed out and waited in the car. This trip wasn’t transformational. It was
torture
-ational, with three more months to go. She’d sublet her place in Hoboken. She had to stick it out.

On their way again, Yves said, “That was Jean-Luc Broussard in André’s store. He must still be having writer’s block. He only comes into town when he can’t write, and he’s been seen around a lot the last couple of years.”

“Who?”

“A famous novelist, though everyone would love to know his own story.”

“Why?”

He turned on the stereo. Jazz filled the car. “Never mind. I am more interesting.”

He began selling her on his wonderful house. View of the sea, swimming pool,
pétanque
court.
Pétanque
was like bocce, but with beautiful, metal, engraved balls, and one of the few things she showed any talent for.

“Here we are, Al-
ees.
”

“Wow!”

A fantastic villa on the Mediterranean Sea sure beat a farm in the middle of nowhere. Maybe Liliane liked her, after all.

Her enthusiasm rose higher when she stepped inside. The foyer floor was made of cool, white marble. She could see straight through the living room to the blue water below that was glistening like a blanket of sequins. The décor was a mix of antiques, palms, and wicker furniture. Kind of tropical chic.

Yves called out to see if anyone was home. No response.
Uh-oh.

Her room was downstairs, off from an area that led to a patio.

“You will have complete privacy,” he said, with another leer. “Would you like a glass of wine?”

“Now? It’s so early. No, thank you.”

“La, Americans. So uptight.”

He led her to the bathroom that had a bidet (
ooh la la
) and a special way of heating the water that made it instantly hot.

She stood outside the small room as he said, “There is not a big tank that controls the whole house like is common in the United States. Each bathroom has its own. You can burn yourself if you are not careful.”

Alyce forced a smile and moved to the bedroom door. With her hand on the doorknob, she said, “I really need to study. When will your wife be home? I can’t wait to meet her.”

He frowned. “I have no idea.”

She closed the door in his pleading face and made sure it was locked. Then she flopped on the bed and picked up her main textbook,
French is Fun
.

The feeling took over of a thousand hot needles boring into her brain.

Where did she ever get the nerve to spend three months at a French language school and think,
voila
, she would be fluent? And she’d spent all of her severance pay on it, too! How had it slipped her mind that she was so bad at introductory Spanish in the seventh grade that the teacher urged her to pick another elective?

Her dream to live up to Glorianna’s wild expectations (and her own) vanished as quickly as the smile on a Frenchie’s face when she attempted to speak their magnificent language.

The only good thing about being thrown into Survival Mode was that it pushed Nelson way back in the things-to-obsess-about queue.

Sometimes.

3

Scorched Earth and the Baffling Bidet

Five kilometers away

The fragrant late afternoon turned cooler as Jean-Luc Broussard held court in his favorite spot: his kitchen. He shook local extra-virgin olive oil into a cast-iron skillet and gently turned it in several directions to coat the surface.

To his newly arrived houseguests, he said, “An American girl—a student, it turns out, at my sister’s language school—walked into my friend André’s store today. Her French was horrendous. She was wearing a New York Yankees baseball cap, big ugly sneakers, and hardly any clothes.” He motioned to the top of his thigh. “Tiny shorts and”—he pulled his shirt back as he thrust out his chest—”a tight top.”

Robbie cut him off. “Did she at least have a good body?”

He thought about that as he worked his long, prematurely white-gray hair into a rubber band. “It was toned, but there was no mystery. I prefer a woman to dress like a woman.”

The achingly feminine Spanish beauty, Isabella, tossed her long black hair and smiled seductively. Robbie did not see it. Jean-Luc pretended he didn’t either.

He continued with his story. When he reached the “But it’s already sold!” punch line, he laughed almost as hard as when it happened. “You should have seen her face when she found out
solde
meant it was on sale!”

“Who are her hosts?” Robbie inquired.

“The lucky devils are the Devreauxs, after the farmers Fabien and Fabienne gave her the boot. According to Yves Devreaux, worse than driving a moped through their barn was that she couldn’t distinguish the difference in the pronunciation of their names.”

Robbie who spoke passable but not fluent French, replied, “It
is
subtle to the untrained ear.”

“I wonder who will win her,” Jean-Luc mused. “The father or the son? It has become a Marlaison pastime to place bets.”

Robbie had a good laugh as he watched Jean-Luc chopping the wild garlic he’d pulled out of the ground minutes before.

“I would say the son, even though the father likes to jog and she looks like she has that dreadful athletic streak in her.”

Isabella’s sly contribution was, “Maybe she will sleep with both of them.” Seeing Robbie’s reaction, “Why not?”