The Provence Cure for the Brokenhearted (15 page)

nd so the lost summer was seized.

Or should I say that it seized us? Apparently, this is how you get
hent
—without being prepared, without time to brace.

The three of us had passports—Abbot and I had ours because of Henry’s good intentions to get us to Europe one day, and Charlotte from a trip to Canada with the French club at her private school for two weeks when she was in eighth grade. I asked Jude to take over the bakery, completely, which was not a dramatic step. She was already in deep. Still, at first I was sure that I could spare only two weeks. But my mother insisted that two weeks wasn’t enough time to get the work of remodeling under way. Six full weeks in Provence was the minimum that would do it. I made the reservations
quickly, then, knowing I’d back out if I waited too long. We arranged to fly out within a week.

My mother and I had a remodeling meeting at my dining room table a few days before I left. She’d spoken with Véronique and had a better sense of the fire damage, which seemed contained to the kitchen. I was to remodel the kitchen, update the bathroom, and spruce up the four bedrooms with paint, new fixtures and updated wiring for outlets, and wireless Internet access. The yard was also supposed to be brought back to some former glory—including the pool and the stone fountain.

She’d gone out and accumulated a dozen magazines and, bestowing them on me, said, “Feel free to remodel the house with a more modern interior. The juxtaposition of old and new will give the house life. Maybe we’ll keep the bedrooms’ crisp whites, like linens.” She pulled out some color samples she’d picked out at Sherwin-Williams—creams and ivories, a few soft, buttery tones. When she showed me a magazine wholly devoted to tile, I realized that I was in over my head. My mother had even dog-eared some sleek, environmentally friendly toilets. “Which one do you like the most?” she asked.

I thought about it and finally pointed to the wrong one. I knew it was the wrong one by the way my mother tilted her head.

“Really?” she said.

“I guess,” I said, and then I pointed at another one. “Or this?”

“Yes, me, too,” she said. Suddenly, she shut all of the magazines and piled them neatly on the table. “Listen to me,” she said. “I want a lot of things for the house. But dictator is not my role. In the end, you have to do it as you see fit.”

“Really?” I wasn’t sure I believed her.

“Really,” she said. “I have full confidence in you.”

She and my father had worked out a budget, a generous one, and she gave me instructions on drawing money from her account to pay for the remodeling. “You must be patient. There’s a good bit of bureaucracy when it comes to things like this in France.”

“What kind of bureaucracy?”

“Véronique will explain,” she said. “Just go and begin to feel the house. You’ll connect and then allow decisions to form.”

“So, my job is to feel and connect and then make decisions?”

“Allow decisions to form,”
she said. “It’s different altogether. The house will tell you what to do.”

We were set to fly in to Paris, so my mother booked a hotel for us, insisting that we enjoy a few days in the city before heading out into the Provençal countryside. In addition to sparing me some logistical concerns—she bought our train tickets, too, and made our rental car deal—she gave me a neatly typed list of restaurants, salons, dress shops, parks, museums, theaters. I dutifully tucked them into my bag. It was a list that would take months to tick off—her dream trip, not mine. There was only so much I could do.

Then came time for the flight. Movies on tiny screens, chicken Alfredo served in small, compartmentalized, plastic-wrapped trays, and thin, navy blue airplane-regulation blankets.

Charlotte slept with her earbuds in. Elysius and Daniel had sat her down to tell her the plan. They were braced for resistance, certain she’d say no. But she blinked and said, “Wait, are you telling me that I’m going to France with Heidi and Abbot? Is that what’s with the bad-news faces and all the seriousness?”

They nodded.

“Well, I’m in.”

“In where?” her father asked.

“Where do I sign?” she said.

Elysius and Daniel still weren’t sure they understood.

“Yes!” she said. “Is that clear enough? Yes! I want to
go
!”

Abbot, on the other hand, had to be talked through it. He wanted to pore over the photos. He got out books from the library and found out about scorpions in the South of France. “You have to shake your shoes out before you put them on because scorpions like to live in shoes,” he said. “Do you want to live in a place where there are scorpions in your shoes? You’re endangering our lives!”

He was afraid of germs. “They have completely different germs there. French germs. We won’t have built-up immunity!” We’d discussed, at length, the upside of germs, and so he was very comfortable with the term
immunity
. In fact, he
liked throwing it around. I finally gave in and agreed to buy him a travel-sized bottle of Purell for the trip.

He said, “We won’t be able to drink the water. The Powells went to a foreign country and couldn’t drink the water.”

“They went to Cancún,” I said. “That’s Mexico. It’s different.”

“Mexico is a foreign country, and France is a foreign country. I’m not drinking anything.”

He wouldn’t let go of the fact that there had already been a fire there. This was irrefutable proof that France was dangerous territory.

I found the dictionary packed in Abbot’s suitcase under a stack of underwear. I picked it up and looked at him. “I can put it on the table next to my bed in France.”

I shook my head. “It should stay here. We’ll look forward to seeing it again when we get home.”

He came up with more fears and excuses, and I told him time and again, “You can’t let your fears stop you from living your life.” I was talking to myself, mainly. I knew that.

Still, we went. There was no turning back. His barrage of fears only made it clearer that we needed to go.

In the airport, he was afraid of terrorist plots and kept pointing out suspicious people. He begged me to turn in a kid carrying what looked to be a clarinet case.

As the plane touched down at Charles de Gaulle, I looked at Charlotte. She seemed shut off from the world, wearing her earbuds and staring blankly through the small plane
window. I thought of what Elysius had said about her—living in the world in her own head. What was that world like? I wondered if I’d ever have any idea, and it struck me for the first time that this trip could be a disaster. What if Charlotte hated it here? What if she shut down completely? I didn’t know anything about teenagers. Elysius and Daniel were rational people, and they were at a loss as to how to handle Charlotte. I hadn’t really imagined everything going wrong, but it so easily could. I could get stuck in France with a teenager who’d come unhinged. What then?

Meanwhile Abbot was squeezing my arm with his Purell-slick hands. What if the French germs and the contaminated water and the possible house fires and the threat of scorpions proved too much for him? He could come unhinged, too.

And was I really all that sturdy?

Why were we here? The three of us suddenly seemed like an unlikely trio. This was a time for Charlotte to broaden her horizons, a chance for Abbot to overcome his fears, and me? I was on a pilgrimage for the brokenhearted and was supposed to learn to live again—to be alive. And how was I to go about that, exactly? Wait for some enchantment? Feel, connect, and allow decisions to form? I thought of Henry. I had closed my eyes on the plane and whispered to him, “We’re going, after all these years. We’re really going.” And by we, I didn’t mean just Charlotte, Abbot, and me. I meant Henry, too. How could I see Paris and the old house in Provence without seeing it as Henry would? How could I do
this without sharing it with him, without seeing the world with my eyes and his?

And, on top of all else, there was a house—a charred one, overstocked with various love stories—that I was supposed to restore?

At this point, though, these were all abstractions, and the screaming brakes of the jet, the tires skidding and bumping along the runway, the French flight attendant welcoming us to Paris, these things were real, very real.

y our internal clock, we landed in Paris in the middle of the night. We were exhausted, bleary, but had a jagged energy. There was customs to go through, that slow, shuffling line, and then the swell of a foreign language. I heard things crisply for the first time in a long time, because I had to. I remembered the Babar books from my childhood, the Jacques Brel albums, the French woman in our neighborhood, and her parrots, screeching French vulgarities.

I was surprised how much French I recalled from my mother, who made us speak to her in French from time to time in between our summer trips, seemingly on a whim. She would make a rule. “If you want something, you better ask in French. I’m no longer taking requests in English.” She also taught us French through English. “
Maigre
means ‘skinny.’ Do you hear the word
meager
in it?” She had us listen for words we knew:
sorcerer
in
sorcier, obligatory
in
obligatoire, roses
in the color
rose, rouge
in the color
rouge
 … But most of all I remembered the scolding. In public, she scolded us in French because she thought it sounded elegant to strangers. But to us it just sounded like being scolded. “Ne touchez pas!” “Ecoutez!” “Faites attention!”

As we walked out into the bright sun, these phrases flooded back to me. I didn’t touch anything! I was listening! I was paying attention!

Outside the airport we got in a taxi and I gave the address of the hotel. The driver understood, and I was impressed with myself.

“Look at you, trotting out the nice French,” Charlotte said.

“Try it,” I said.

Charlotte stuffed one of her earbuds back in. “All I know is how to sit in language lab and listen to the tapes with the earphones on,” she said, a little loudly. She stuffed the second earbud in—with finality—turned, and stared out the window as the taxi pulled away.

Abbot said, “They have smoke detectors at the hotel, right?”

“Of course,” I told him.

At first there was only highway, a stadium, traffic. Abbot pointed out the tiny cars; Charlotte, over her music, the preponderance of scooters and motorcycles. Nothing, however, was strikingly different until we entered the city itself.

In Paris everything was foreign, even if only slightly so, but the effect was cumulative: the phone booths, the grille-work balconies, the little alleyways, the lush, green parks—and
then, rounding a corner, there would be an occasional burst of scenery: bridges spanning the Seine, Notre-Dame rearing up as if from nowhere, the Eiffel Tower piercing the skyline mysteriously. I remembered visiting as a child, and then that last time at thirteen. My mother always flew us in by way of Paris, never Marseille, so that she could shop and get us haircuts. There was an afterimage burnt into my mind: the taste of the air, the energy, the brawn of large, stoic buildings mixed with the sudden delicate ornamentation of a gate barring a private entrance. The language everywhere—how it rolls in the throat and bunches the lips.

La France
.

I was the inelegant bastard child who’d lived in the wilds of America—and here I was home again in some deep genetic way. I felt proud. Inexplicably proud. Not only of having come from these beautiful people—exquisitely harried and elegantly leisured—but also of having left, of being an American. Rugged, loud, wide-eyed—I was the product of a war that bound two countries together. I imagined my grandparents swept up in the crowds, celebrating the end of the occupation—that kiss. I felt that knot within me.

It was morning in Paris, and we had to survive until the room that my mother had arranged for us was ready that afternoon. So we parked our luggage in a corner of the small lobby of the hotel, the Pavillon Monceau Palais des Congrès. Abbot pulled on my arm. “Ask about the smoke detectors. Ask!” I told him I’d show him the smoke detectors in the room later.