The Provence Cure for the Brokenhearted

by Bridget Asher

  This made Abbot proud because it meant he had a lot of his father.

  Julien walked down a set of pantry stairs and dipped under the low doorframe into the room. I didn’t remember his being so tall, though he was slouching, a little beaten from the night before. His eyes looked bleary; his hair was a mess of curls, a bit matted down on one side. He was unshaven, wearing white pants, a white shirt without a collar, and he was barefoot.

  Evidently, he hadn’t expected to run into anyone. “I was coming down to steal breakfast.” I noticed that his nose had a French buckle on the bridge, and he had beautiful teeth that flashed when he spoke and one dimple that was slightly girlish. I remembered his face when he was a child, this time on Bastille Day, lit up by the celebratory paper globes that swayed on the ends of sticks. He gave a small shrug and then did the polite thing. He bounded across the kitchen and gave all of us kisses on either cheek.

  “What happened to your foot?” Abbot asked Véronique.

  “I fell in mounting the stairs,” she said, “like an old woman. It is broken. The month past, I asked a girl from the village to help me, but she had legs like a colt—big knees, no balance. She was too young and tired to comprehend work. So now Julien is helping me, but I don’t need it.” She wagged her finger at him. “Julien, show them the dining room. I will arrive in an instant,” she said.

  Julien led us down the hall. “Did you sleep well?” he asked.

  “Did you?” I asked.

  He smiled that old sheepish smile from our childhood. “Fine,” he said, rubbing his head with his knuckles.

  “No scorpions were in our shoes this morning,” Abbot said.

  “The scorpions are rare. Probably you will not see one,” he said.

  “Probably?” Abbot muttered.

  “Where’s Cami this morning?” I asked, knowing that I was prying.

  “At home,” he said, not really supplying any information.

  He walked into the dining room. There were two hungover archaeologists at the far end of the table, and they lifted their heads. One gave a shout. “Bonne anniversaire!”—happy birthday.

  Julien smiled. “Merci!” he said, with a quick smile and a nod.

  “You didn’t tell us it was your birthday,” I said.

  “It’s not my birthday. There’s a confusion.”

  “I lied about my birthday once,” Charlotte said, “to get a free dessert at Olive Garden.”

  “They think that the party last night was for my birthday.”

  “And what was it for?” I asked.

  “Just for living,” he said.

  Aside from the two hungover archaeologists, the dining room was elegant. The walls were covered in portraits, oil paintings of ancestors, I assumed. A lowboy was covered with trays—pastries, coffee, sugar cubes, cream, a loaf of bread, a bowl of berries, butter, jelly—as well as gorgeous pots, glazed in brilliant blues and reds. We sat in regal, tall-backed chairs at the far end of the table, giving the suffering archaeologists space. They drank a lot of coffee—bowls of it, actually, dipping in their crusts of bread with butter and jam. They mumbled to each other in French.

  While we were eating, I asked Abbot if he remembered when he was little and I tried to teach him French.

  “No,” Abbot said. “Was Dad there, helping teach me French?”

  “He took French in high school, so he helped some,” I said. “You would get so mad. You’d clamp your hands over your ears and scream. Once you told me that you hated it because French had a different word for everything.”

  “A wise child,” Charlotte said.

  Abbot laughed and shoved butter into a hole he’d scooped out of his bread. The archaeologists shuffled off, looking bleary and already dusty.

  Julien leaned on the table and said, “My mother and I have a plan. I can take you to the police station in Trets and to the supermarket there. I am happy to drive you. Meanwhile, the children can help my mother. And this afternoon, you will walk the land with my mother, Heidi. You will talk with her alone.”

  “Will the supermarket have clothes?” I asked. “Is it that kind of superstore?”

  “It will have everything.”

  “I don’t think they’re going to have stores that sell the kinds of clothes I wear,” Charlotte said. “My clothes are kind of ironic. Does France do ironic?”

  “No one you know will see you here,” I said. “You can get away with some unironic clothes for a while.”

  “I could also take the family to the cathedral in Saint Maximin later today,” Julien offered.

  Abbot let out a sad sigh. He’d had his fill of cathedrals.

  “This cathedral has a crypt,” Julien said, in response to the sigh. “I could also throw in some … what do you call them? Pigs with big teeth?”

  “Pigs with big teeth?” Charlotte said.

  “This type of big teeth,” Julien said, gesturing tusks.

  “Warthogs!” Abbot said.

  “Yes, maybe warthogs,” Julien said.

  “How many warthogs?” Abbot asked.

  “About thirty, maybe more. Do you want to come?”

  Abbot thought about it and nodded.

  ulien and I rolled out of the driveway and onto the main road. My rental car was no longer on the roadside. Julien told me that they would be sending me a new car. They would deliver it to the house. “So,” he said, “I am your chauffeur now!”

  We drove through Puyloubier, past the patisserie and boulangerie, and the petite église with its silent bell, and then the road widened, spreading into the vineyards on the slopes of Mont Sainte-Victoire. Julien shifted out of the village-paced second and third gears, taking it up to highway speed on the D12, still a country round, then up to fourth and fifth so that the vineyards clipped by on either side. He was the kind of French driver I’d already come to fear.

  I loved the order of the vineyards. The thick trunk of the vine, the neat rows, the way leaves and fruit were supported by the guidelines. But there was also chaos in those vineyards. Every once in a while, an empty spot. One vine that didn’t make it, got an infestation of some exotic beetle, or didn’t quite get enough water from the irrigation cannon. The leaves and the gnarled vines and the lurid green grapes grew up wildly from their ordered rows. It was green against dusty rouge, chartreuse against chocolate.

  The drive from Puyloubier to Trets would become one of my favorites. Not that there was anything spectacular in Trets, other than the Monoprix supermarket and the Laundromat and, for the purposes of this trip, the police station, but the drive itself across the vineyards in the arid basin between the two mountain ranges was stunning.

  “I waited a long time for you to come back,” Julien said, his shirt billowing in the gusty convertible. He was sexy in a way that most American men didn’t allow themselves to be. American men seemed stiff, as if trying to be masculine by its bulkiest definition. American men aren’t really allowed to be sexy, in a way; that’s the domain of American women. But European men are supposed to be sexy. They’re comfortable with the idea of it, and so, oddly enough, they’re sexy without even trying to be sexy—or at least Julien was. He wore cologne, something earthy and rich. His clothes cost good money, but he wore them loosely and confidently. His white linen shirt was unbuttoned one button lower than an American man would have worn it—maybe two, depending on the American man—but this was elegant.

  “What do you mean, you waited for me?”

  “You and your sister and your mother were strangers who took over our lives,” he said. “My brother and I waited for news from you when you were not here. Sometimes there were pictures at Christmas. Not much. And then some summers you would appear, magic, and then, just as quick, you were gone.”

  “I never really thought of it from your perspective,” I said.

  “And then, when you were becoming interesting, you stopped coming.”

  “Interesting?” I said. “I thought you said I was courageous and strange.”

  “You
were.”

  “Huh. I think of myself as terrified, actually,” I said. “Was I brave?”

  “Very,” he said.

  “Why did you splash me?”

  “You terrified me.”

  “Me? With my little flowered barrette?”

  “Absolutely.” He glanced at me.

  I wondered if he was flirting with me. I guided the conversation to safe terrain. “So, you’re here helping your mother?”

  “I’m trying. She’s stubborn. But it’s good for me to help her now. A good distraction.” I looked over at him—one arm out the window pressing against the current, the other stiff-armed against the wheel, his hair blustering all around his face. He had the same quick, dark eyes he’d had as a child. “I am running away, back to my childhood. Back to my mother, in fact,” he said, staring at the road ahead. “That is what little boys do. They run away.”

  “Are you a little boy?”

  “This is what I have heard.” He turned to me. “And you? Are you running away?” he asked.

  “I’m not sure.”

  It was quiet a moment. I tried to practice appreciating this moment in this place, but everything was screaming, Past, past, past. The stone farmhouses with their faded shutters and ancient equipment retired to rust in the Provence sun, waiting for the winter’s mistral to wind-whip them, to punish them for these gorgeous summer days. The very thickness of the vines showed their age, their maturity, their ability to bear fruit that years later would be the wine on a table with a simple meal of pistou and crusty bread. “So who calls you a little boy?”

  “My wife,” he said.

  “You’re married?”

  “I am so new to divorced that I can count the number of times I have called myself that word on one hand. This is the fourth. She has the house, and I am staying here when I’m not traveling for business. My mother needs the help now, and so the timing is good for this. But I’m miserable, actually.”

  “You have a strange way of showing it.”

  “The more miserable you are, the harder you have to work at joy.”

  “So last night was work?” I asked.

  “Of course,” he said. “They say that a divorce is harder to recover from than a death.”

  “Well, they’re wrong,” I said with an anger that surprised both of us.

  “I’m so sorry,” he said, painfully embarrassed, but more than that. He was truly sorry. “My mother told me, and I don’t know why I would say something like that. It was in a book. It struck me. But it’s stupid, of course. Death is death. I’m so sorry that you lost him.”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “It’s stupid to compare misery anyway—death or divorce. Everyone has a right to their own suffering. That’s the parting gift. It’s a shitty parting gift, but there it is.”

  “Exactly,” he said, and I could tell now that he felt so terrible that he would agree with anything I had to say at this point.

  “Let’s do it,” I said, trying to break him out of it. “Let’s compare our misery. Find out which of us has it worse.”

  “No, no,” he said.

  “You’re only afraid you’ll lose. You’re afraid that I’m more miserable and that would reduce your misery and make you feel more miserable for feeling miserable when really there are those more miserable, including me and people who are starving in war-torn countries.”

  “Are you trying to forgive me?” he said.

  “I’ve already forgiven you, whether you accept or not,” I said. “Let’s play.”

  “Fine,” he said. “But I should tell you, I am very miserable.”

  “Fine,” I said. “I’ll go first.”

  “Good, because I don’t know how you play this game.”

  I thought for a moment. “Okay,” I said. “Sometimes I pace instead of sleep, and I still sometimes cry so hard, I can barely breathe.”

  “I cannot sleep to begin.”

  “Well, I can’t really eat. And when I do I barely taste it.”

  “I eat and eat and eat, but never feel satisfaction.”

  “I think I see my husband everywhere,” I said, “in little glimpses.”

  He looked over at me, startled. “I do this. I see the back of her head, her hair, her shoulders in a dress, and then she turns and it’s not her—another woman has taken her body.”

  “You don’t time it right,” I said softly.

  “What’s that?”

  “Nothing,” I said. Henry, for a moment, flashed so viscerally in my mind—his arms, his chest, the sheets of our bed. “I lose everything all the time.”

  “I have lost fifty percent of everything,” he said, “including my daughter.”

  I had all of Abbot, every bit of him. I closed my eyes for a moment very slowly and just let the sun warm my face. Julien’s confession resonated with my own grief. “What’s her name?”

  “Frieda. She is four years old. She’s with her mother for the summer,” he said. “I needed to save my marriage—but I couldn’t. If I had been a better type of me, then I could have. But not me.” I remembered that feeling of recognition when I watched him from the backseat of the convertible in the rain just after we’d met—a deep restlessness. Now I knew what was familiar about it: the restlessness of guilt.

  “My husband’s death was an accident,” I said. “I was fifteen miles away. But still I feel like I should have been able to save him.”

  We’d turned onto a busier road now and were passing a motorbike course. Four-wheelers buzzed around a small dirt loop. A lonely horse was looking on from a lean-to.

  “I’m not the first person to say it wasn’t your fault,” Julien said. “People have told me the same, but, for me, they’re wrong, or at least half wrong. What does it matter? Because you can’t apply logic to something that’s illogical and have the expectation that it will become logical.”

  I leaned back in my seat. “I don’t want to get over it,” I said. “That would be a real ending. I don’t want an ending.”

  Julien stopped at a rotary, waiting his turn. “I want to get over it,” he said, “but I’m afraid I never will.”

  “Who’s more miserable, then?” I asked, one hand over my eyes to cut the glare of the sun. “You or me?”

  With the car idling, he jiggled the stick shift. “The people starving in war-torn countries,” he said.

  “Ah,” I said. “They always win.”

  e arrived at the Trets police station, at a strange three-way intersection. There was a parking lot for all the police cars in the back, but only two spaces for the public in front. I took this as a lesson from the French police—an intimidation tactic. We’ve got you outnumbered, or, perhaps, We’re so good, we don’t even have to leave the station.

  And maybe they were, because one of the two spots was open.

  “My French is rusty,” I said as Julien and I got out of the car. “By that I mean encased in a decade or more of rust.”

  “They speak English,” he said. “You’ll be fine, and I’ll be with you, if you need me.”

  We walked up to an iron gate around the entrance to the gendarmerie. Next to the button there were instructions that I couldn’t really understand. I looked over my shoulder at Julien. He gestured the pressing of the button, and so I did.

  Someone responded in that international intercom voice, and I was flustered and quickly answered, “Je suis l’Américaine qui était …”—I’m the American who was … I didn’t want to say violated again. And I couldn’t think of the word robbed so I said, “qui était robbed, hier.”

  Oddly enough, this worked. The gate buzzed, and I pushed it open.

  “What’s with the gate?” I asked Julien. “Is Trets a hot spot of terrorism, of violence against the police?”

  “They are like the movies of the American police, always eating pastries. The French take their pastries seriously. They’re protecting them.”

  “Doughnuts,” I said, smiling. “American cops are world famous for their doughnuts. That’s
nice.”

  “Doughnuts,” he said. “Yes, with the holes.”

  The long counter was unattended. A row of empty chairs was off to the right.

  “Is there a bell to ring? Should we take a number?”

  Julien shrugged. “We wait. It’s summer in Provence.”

  We sat there listening to men bantering in a back room, laughing. I should mention that Julien seemed to be a popular guy. He didn’t have his cell phone on ring or vibe, but it made a little noise much like a ticket being punched by a train conductor every time someone left a message. I wondered who was calling him. He always glanced at the incoming caller ID but never walked out to call that someone back.

  “What do you do for a living?” I asked.

  “I’m a graphic designer, also with a background in business. My main client is in London, and so it is fine that I’m staying here now, working. It’s flexible. I will have to go to London some this summer and fall.”

  “Are people from work trying to reach you?” I said. “It’s okay if you need to call people back.”

  “No,” he said, “it isn’t work.”

  Was it more women? I wondered. Was it Cami, for example?

  Finally, an officer strode up to the counter. He was right out of French stereotype, the type of old French guy that Norman Rockwell would have painted if he painted old French guys. Long, crooked nose. Dark mouth with cigarette-stained teeth. Oily hair and a two-day beard. Bad posture. Shabby, police-issued sweater vest that looked to be about twenty years old.

  “Bonjour,” he said, and then he rattled off some pat phrase that ended in a question.

  Julien looked at me to respond, but I had no idea what the man had said. The lack of response from me made it clear to the officer who I was. “Ah, l’Américaine. Venez ici. This way,” he said, gesturing around the counter to the left.

  I stood up, and Julien paused, not sure whether he should follow.

  “Ton mari aussi,” the officer said. Your husband, too.

  I quickly explained that this was not my husband.

  The officer looked at us as if he thought we were lying. “Mais oui, c’est évident,” he said, meaning that it was obvious that Julien was, indeed, my husband.