The Provence Cure for the Brokenhearted

by Bridget Asher

  “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.

  The hotel was in the seventeenth arrondissement, a neighborhood with lots of families and strollers and kids on scooters. Exhausted, we killed time by dipping in and out of shops, one street almost solely reserved for children—toy stores, a bookstore where we bought Astérix comic books, children’s clothing boutiques. We wandered through an open-air market and bought fresh peaches, yogurt, Chinese takeout microwaved in waxy bags on the street, a bottle of Sunny D, and bonbons. All the while, Abbot kept close. He wanted to hook his arm in mine, in lieu of holding germy hands. He dipped around people we passed on the narrow sidewalks on the side streets. I knew he was thinking of French people with their completely foreign set of germs.

  I remembered bustling around Paris with my mother and Elysius. We would get our hair cut in a salon and then shop wildly, my mother gathering shopping bags along her arms until they were lined with indentations. We did our Christmas shopping, our birthday shopping. We ate in cafés. My mother would only occasionally let us take pictures with our Instamatics. I still don’t know Paris by its greatest monuments or landmarks. Anytime we pulled our cameras from our bags, she sighed, as if we were breaking some kind of unspoken promise—we were not tourists. As Abbot and Charlotte and I strolled, I missed my mother and Elysius. It wasn’t that I wanted them with me at that very moment. I wanted them in the past. I wanted to have back just one sunny afternoon together—before the affair, before my mother disappeared, just that last summer when I was thirteen. I wanted to have back the threesome that we used to be.

  In a little open air market lined with shops on rue de Levis, there was a hat kiosk.

  Abbot broke from me and pointed, shouting, “Berets! Berets!”

  “Absterizer, look around,” Charlotte said. “Real French people don’t wear berets. They’ve gone the way of the sombrero and the feathered headdress.”

  “But we have to!” Abbot argued. “We’re in France! We need berets!”

  My mother would never have let us buy something as touristy as berets. Still, I wanted something that would bond us together, something frivolous and spontaneous. “Sure! Why not?” I said. “Berets!”

  “I want a black one, like the artists,” said Abbot.

  Charlotte sighed. “I’ll take red. A beret will help me with my accent, I guess.” She plucked one from the cart, put it on, and said, smiling, “Forever elegant!”

  I chose blue. “I don’t know whether to wear mine or throw it in the air like Mary Tyler Moore,” I said. Neither of them got the reference. Henry would have. I felt like there was so much to tell him. At every turn, I wanted to fill him in. “Here’s the little hotel.” “Here’s the open-air market.” “Here we are in our berets.”

  We ate in Parc Monceau, which was filled with schoolchildren in uniforms and pale office workers and joggers looping the paths. We had no way of washing the peaches—if there was a water fountain, we’d missed it—not that Abbot could have handled the water fountain germs anyway. We washed the peaches in Sunny D instead. Abbot was liberal with his Purell and refused to sit on the ground, picnic style. Instead he hovered around us and stared at the schoolchildren. We had no spoons for the yogurt, which ended up being unsweetened. My French was not foolproof.

  Charlotte caught people’s attention. I told her that in London she’d have blended in. London has enough punk ingrained in the culture that they wouldn’t register blue hair with black tips. But in Paris, the style always hinges on beauty, not anything else. Not politics or revolution or youthful disgust. No. Beauty. And maybe that, too, was what confused the Parisians about Charlotte. Under the blue and black-tipped hair and the nose ring and the baggy clothes, there was this startling beauty. It was undeniable.

  During the morning, she still seemed to be ducking behind me, trying to exist in my shadow. But by midday it seemed to have dawned on her—and maybe the complete exhaustion helped—that she wasn’t going to see anyone she knew. No one was keeping tabs on her. If she embarrassed herself completely, it didn’t matter. This is the joy of a foreign country.

  Abbot must have felt the liberation, too. Even though he kept his hands to himself, refusing to use his hands to push the turnstile in the Métro and waiting for someone else to open the door to a shop first, he started saying bonjour to clerks and excusez-moi when he dodged around people on the street, like a wee Frenchman.

  As we sat at a café, sipping Cokes, I said, “Doesn’t it feel good to be anonymous?” Here, I was no longer part of the secret society of widows.

  Abbot looked at me strangely. “That means that you don’t sign your name to something you’ve written.”

  Charlotte said, “Not in this case, Absterizer. In this case, it means that no one knows us. We’re flying under the radar. We could be anyone.”

  Abbot glanced at me sharply. Maybe he knew, deep down, that I’d been having a crisis of identity ever since Henry’s death and that being able to be anyone would terrify me. But just the opposite was true. It was comforting.

  I said, “No one here knows anything about us.” And I meant that no one knew that Abbot and I were survivors of heartbreak. Here, no one was going to hit us with unwanted sympathy and advice and inspirational pick-me-up phrases.

  We were free of all that.

  hat night, in the hotel, I smelled smoke.

  Of course, I knew that we had a smoke detector attached to the ceiling in our room, because I’d pointed out its small flashing light to Abbot. It was silent, still flashing.

  We’d kept the windows in our room open for cross ventilation—no screens, just as I remembered from my childhood. There was no need for screens. There were no mosquitoes wafting in—just air, a warm breeze. I thought of summer nights in Tallahassee, how Henry and Abbot would watch the small l
izards that trawled our screens for moths drawn to our lights. Sometimes they rooted for the lizards and sometimes the moths. Charlotte, Abbot, and I had fallen asleep early to the sounds of people laughing and shouting, distant horns and strange sirens, and to the smell of people cooking dinner, in one window and out the other.

  But during the middle of the night when I woke to the smell of smoke, I could tell it was real smoke, not cigarettes, not dinner frying. Abbot was in bed with me and I had to walk past Charlotte’s bed to the door. I grabbed the key and stepped out onto the landing.

  The stairwell had an old-world graciousness—wide, with faded red carpet, and at each landing stood tall, heavy, old windows that were kept wide open.

  Was the smell of smoke stronger here? It was. Just slightly stronger.

  I hurried down the stairs, landing after landing.

  Was it stronger here? Could I see smoke in the air? Not in the air, no. But the smoke was there and then gone. There, and then nothing.

  When I got to the lobby, I realized that I was braless, naked under my white T-shirt and pajama shorts. I was barefoot. I rang the small bell, knowing that I was likely waking up the night clerk. And what exactly was I going to say and how?

  The weary clerk emerged from the back room, where, I supposed, there might have been a cot. He was a young man, tall and lanky, trying not to seem sleepy. He patted his hair and straightened his glasses.

  “Fumer,” I said—the verb to smoke. I knew that the verb to smell and the reflexive to feel, as in a sentiment, were linked somehow. I tried to tell him that I smelled smoke. But I knew that I might have been telling him that I felt smoked.

  Regardless, he understood. He stepped out from behind the desk and asked me where I’d smelled the smoke. The fact that he took me so seriously made me more nervous. Why was I down here? I should have woken Charlotte and forced her out of bed. I should have been holding Abbot in my arms at that very moment. Why wasn’t an alarm sounding?

  I pointed up the stairs and started walking. He followed. We paused on the first landing. I sniffed the air and held up my finger. I said again, “Fumer?”

  He shook his head but walked with me to the next landing. We leaned out the window together. We listened to the noises of the city and smelled the air. I remembered my wedding night. Henry and I skipped out of our own reception early. We drove to an old hotel on the Cape where we had a room. There was an Old Home Day going on—a kind of founder’s celebration common in New England towns. This one included fireworks. There was a window in a hallway that led to a tar roof. We climbed out the window and stood there—me in my wedding gown and Henry in his tux. Amid the humming air conditioners, we watched the fireworks as the air clouded with smoke. We were new then, our lives stretched out before us. Our families had let us go. Abbot had yet to find us. For this very short time, it would be just the two of us—just two kids.

  Was there no smoke? Was the smell only my memory of Henry? Was it some hallucination?

  “Non?” I whispered. “Non fumer?”

  “Non,” the night clerk said. He put his hand on top of mine and said in English, “The night has no smoke. The air is clear.” It wasn’t flirtatious. It was tender. He seemed to know that I needed someone to say that it was okay.

  “Okay,” I said. “Thank you. Merci.” My mother had once told my sister and me to listen for the word mercy inside of merci. I could hear her saying, “Merci, mercy. Do you hear it? One language hidden inside of another?”

  fter that night wandering the hotel in search of smoke, I decided that the role of tourist might be best—to hit some of the things on my mother’s list and not slow down to think. I recognized that the real challenge would come once I got to the house, where there would be long stretches of time. For now, though, I would push Charlotte and Abbot through Paris.

  First stop: the Eiffel Tower. We took the elevator, even though it felt like cheating.

  At the top, Abbot kept his distance from the edge, but Charlotte leaned on the railing and looked over the city. The wind whipped her hair like she was on a ship. The city was sun-dazzled, laid out before us. I walked up to her. “It’s pretty up here.”

  She sighed restlessly then glared at the other tourists. “Paris is cluttered with lovers,” she said. “You begin to wonder whether they’re paid by the tourist bureau or something.”

  I agreed. None of them were doing me any good, either, but I wasn’t sure what to say. Should I bring up Adam Briskowitz? Was I allowed to know about him? “They’re a bunch of fakers,” I said, trying to sound light.

  We saw the pyramids outside of the Louvre, but we didn’t make it inside because the lines were too long. We hadn’t purchased ahead. It was summer, and so the tourists came in packs. It began to feel like a betrayal to be in Paris without Henry. How could I do this without him? And yet I saw him in the crowds—a glimpse of sneakers; his face hidden momentarily behind a camera; and, once, a Red Sox ball cap, perfectly faded and frayed. I glanced. I didn’t let my eyes linger. I always looked quickly away, and we kept driving through the throngs, Abbot chirping, “Excusez-moi!”

  I insisted that we go to Place de l’Opéra, where my grandparents once kissed. I told Charlotte and Abbot my grandparents’ love story on the Métro as we made our way there. I set up the end of World War II, the massive crowds, how they kissed then got separated and how, later, after the war, he came back to France, and, through the ever-mysterious series of miracles, found her in the house in Provence. I ended the story the way it always ended: “They vowed never to be apart again.” When I said it, I felt a chill run across my skin, just like when I was young.

  “That’s very romantic,” Charlotte said, and for once, she didn’t sound jaded.

  “The house in Provence has a long history of love,” I said. “I’ve told you the stories, Abbot. Haven’t I?”

  “No,” he said. “I know all the Henry stories, but not any house stories.”

  “Oh,” I said. It crossed my mind that maybe I believed the stories still, after all this time, and I hadn’t been telling the stories because I didn’t want anyone to poke holes in them, as I once had in my youth. But Charlotte and Abbot needed to know where they were headed. “Well, I can fix that.” And that’s when their history lessons began, the history of the house in Provence, its long history of love, as I put it, all of its miracles.

  And Place de l’Opéra itself? It was stunning. We stood in front of the huge building, standing as broad-shouldered as it had been when my grandparents found each other in the crowd. I saw it as a cake—the tiers of arches then pillars then ornate trim and beading, topped with a beautiful greened-copper dome and brightly shining gold angels.

  We bounced through the city from story to story, monument to monument. At Notre-Dame, Abbot was impressed by the stained glass portrayal of the man condemned to hold his decapitated head for eternity and, of course, the gargoyles. Charlotte lit a candle and stuffed money into an offertory. This surprised me. Wasn’t she too jaded for this? The three of us took seats in the back of the cathedral in the cool darkness.

  Tourists shuffled at the edges, creating a hushed noisiness.

  I said, “I could use some buttresses, you know, support. Maybe I have buttress envy.”

  “You could crouch lower to the ground,” Abbot said. “Except it’s all dirty.”

  “I hear buttresses take a long time to build,” Charlotte said, and she handed me the brochure, and then seemed to disappear into herself. She could do this in a way I’d never seen before—turn her presence on and off.

  But she seemed to be taking everything in, even if she was quiet about it and kept her commentary to a minimum. She was impressed by the crêpe vendors on the street, the quick wisps of their instruments. She said, “I love the way the French shove chocolate into everything. It’s, like, the best nervous tic ever.” She loved the morning coffee and the cubed sugars. She wanted to stroll through the market and look at the fish and roasted pig. She stopped to read the menu
s that were posted outside of nice restaurants—the ones translated into English. “You could really just eat your way through this town and understand it just as well as walking around and looking at it.”

  She reminded me of, well, me at the age when I first started to understand food as more than food. Henry had loved food, for all the right reasons—comfort sometimes, but also artistry. To him food was identity, culture, family, how you define home and love and who you are—all of it at once. If we were someplace for a couple of days, he’d try to hit the local market, try to find the quintessentially local cuisine. “It all tells a story,” he said.

  Charlotte talked about food the way he had. “The sauce hits the roof of my mouth, almost too bitter or something, but then its aftertaste is sweet. How do they do that? Taste this.”

  I nibbled. This was when the tourism bustle fell away. Time slowed. But I found myself fighting my own desire to concentrate on the taste. I was willing to register texture, but resisted the rest. If Henry and I had been there together, we would have tasted.

  “Do you taste it?” Charlotte asked. “Do you know what I mean?”

  “I know what I should be tasting,” I said. “You describe it perfectly. I just don’t.… I’m not there.…” I shook my head. I remembered seeing Henry tear up once at the end of a meal in New Orleans. “Are you crying over the pecan pie?” I asked him. “No,” he said, pressing tears from his eyes. “It’s not just the pie. It’s chemistry and physics. It’s place and time and history and religion and music.…” He was overcome.

  For all the distraction of Paris tourism, I felt blurred by his presence, overwhelmed with double vision—the world as I was seeing it and the world as Henry would have.

  Charlotte seemed to understand that there was more to it and didn’t push me.

  As we left the café, we were quiet until Abbot spotted the Place de la Concorde. “Look! They have a giant pencil just like ours in D.C.”

  “Look the world over,” Charlotte said, “and you’ll find men erecting erections. That, Absterizer, is a sign of patriarchal oppression.”