Cooking for Picasso (44 page)

“How is your health, Mother Ondine?” he asked with a look on his face that Ondine didn't like.

“It's perfect,” she answered, trying not to sound annoyed. Arthur's gaze travelled to the cane propped against her chair which Ondine carried with her since her heart attack.

“Next time we'll bring the twins here to visit you,” Julie offered. “Perhaps for Christmas. We just couldn't tear them away from their friends in the summertime.” She glanced anxiously again at Arthur because he was glowering at her for making holiday promises he had no intention of keeping.

Ondine patted Julie's hand reassuringly, but their chatter remained tinged with nervousness as they waited for Arthur to settle down somewhere; yet he continued to wander around the room. He now seemed unduly interested in his surroundings, Ondine thought, as his travelling gaze occasionally rested on a prized silver vase or a valuable piece of china.

Why, he's assessing their worth! As if he's got an adding machine in his head,
she thought indignantly.
It's like having a vulture circling around, just waiting for me to drop to the ground. I'm only sixty-four years old. These days, that's not exactly ancient!

“Interesting paintings,” Arthur said abruptly as he stopped his pacing before the wall of framed pictures in the dining area. “Are these artists anyone I'd have heard of?”

“I doubt it,” Ondine said dryly, outraged by his audacity.

“So when do we get the royal tour of the
mas
?” he asked, acting friendly now. “We've hardly seen much of it.” Ondine was glad to hear the delivery truck from the café pull up in the driveway.

“That will be our dinner,” she said firmly. She reached for her cane and rose to her feet.

“Let me help you,” Julie offered, rising quickly.

“The wind is dying down, after all. Let's dine on the terrace. Why don't you two take these things outside and set the table, all right?” Ondine said, filling their arms with trays of linen, china and silver. She saw the gleam of the flatware catch Arthur's eye. Really, it was intolerable to watch.

Ondine opened a side door to let in the waiter who'd come to serve the meal. She gave him his instructions, then slipped out of the kitchen and went into her bedroom. The nagging feeling she'd had all day had become a full-blown presentiment. The painting was still here, but now Ondine didn't need Madame Sylvie to interpret Picasso's warning in her dream.

She knew what she must do. With one decisive gesture Ondine yanked her portrait off the chest of drawers. “Oh, where can I hide it so that awful Arthur will never look?” she whispered, her heart fluttering worriedly in her chest. “Him and his ‘royal tour', indeed! If he tells Julie to peek in my bedroom closets and drawers for anything valuable, she might just obey him. I must find a place he'll never think of.”

Ondine carried the painting back with her into the kitchen. The waiter had gone outside and was consulting with Julie and Arthur. Ondine went into the pantry, assessing it for a potential hiding place.

But then she heard her guests' voices returning to the house. The pantry shelves were useless; they were too narrow. Ondine glanced around her own familiar kitchen, overcome by an uncharacteristic panic inspired by Arthur. Wildly, she searched for a temporary solution.

“Maman?”
Julie called out, her voice closer still. “Dinner is served. Where are you?”

Ondine's desperate gaze fell on the dumbwaiter. It was big enough, and it could ferry the painting down into the old wine cellar which she no longer used. A stack of old crates were piled up against the door of the dumbwaiter down below, so Arthur wouldn't even know it was there. The cellar was just an empty, uninviting cave with an unfinished earth floor and lots of spiderwebs.

“I'll get it back later, when Arthur is off to one of his business meetings in Cannes,” Ondine decided hastily, opening the dumbwaiter's door. She reached inside it and deposited the painting in its temporary hiding place within. Closing the door of the dumbwaiter, she pressed the button, and listened to its reassuring rumble, waiting until she heard the soft thud of its landing.

A moment later, Arthur walked in.

G
IL CAME ROARING UP ON
his Ducati, not stopping when he reached the gravel parking lot. He rode right across the impeccable grassy lawns and headed straight for the renovation site of the
mas
.

The effect on the workmen was immediate. They were so astonished that they simply stopped what they'd been doing, and we all watched, dumbfounded, unable to take our eyes off Gil as he madly vroomed right up to the construction site, then careened to an abrupt stop right where we were standing.

Meanwhile, Aunt Matilda and Peter had arrived back at the
mas,
hungry for lunch. They discovered Martin on the terrace, who told them where I was. The three of them came over to fetch me to lunch, and I hastily took Aunt Matilda aside to tell her what I'd discovered—maybe.

But now I experienced a familiar pang of doubt—
Lord, what if I'm completely wrong about this?
My batting average so far had been spectacularly bad. Then as Gil jumped off the bike and hurried toward us, I felt a strange, defiant sense of confidence. Something that Madame Sylvie had told me now popped back into my head:
Ondine didn't do anything in the usual way. She was fearless about trying the unexpected, putting this-with-that. It not only made her a great chef; it made her a
“femme très formidable”.

“Céline,” Gil said, sounding both alarmed and yet impressed by the sheer audacity of the situation, “what the hell? We're going to break into a wall because—why?”

“Look at this cupboard. Your workman say it's unusual, because although it's made of wood, its interior seems to be lined with aluminum. They discovered this when they ripped off some old wood at the very top—the ‘roof' of it, so to speak—which was badly deteriorated. That's when they found the aluminum lining beneath it.” This, I'd realized, explained why the rain made music when it struck the exposed metal; and now the sunlight was reflecting off it.

“Odd,” Gil agreed.

“And look,” Martin piped up, scratching with his fingernail to flick off a chunk of white paint. “There's blue paint underneath! Céline says she's been looking for hidden treasure in a blue cupboard.”

Now I was embarrassed, but I soldiered on, saying, “Well, the point is, the whole thing is very intriguing. See right here—somebody sealed up the door of this cupboard ages ago with cement or something, the way you close up an old fireplace. So it hasn't been used in years. Gil, I've just
got
to see what's inside!”

But the foreman of the crew exhibited his displeasure by rapping sharply on the cupboard so that Gil could hear the hollow, empty sound behind it. “
Rien
. Nothing's in there!” the man objected.

Gil looked from him to me, then made up his mind to get this over with quickly, so he crisply ordered the foreman, “Break it open.” The workman raised his eyebrows, but Gil nodded firmly.

“Carefully!” I warned. “Don't let them just hack into it and hurt what's inside!”

“Très doucement,”
Gil told the workman who'd picked up his tools to force it open.

Seeing the resolute look on Gil's face, the man began to carefully chip away at the sealed edges of the cupboard's outer frame where it met the door. I watched as the wood trim splintered and gave way. Then there was some discussion about whether the men ought to break off the hinges of the door or just try to swing them open. But while they were deciding, one of the workers discovered that the wooden door was already crumbling away from the hinges, so he was able to pry it off with his crowbar.

We all stared at the interior of the cupboard, which indeed appeared to be an aluminum shaft. It didn't really look like a cupboard at all, because it had no shelves.

“C'est vide,”
the foreman said in a tone of perplexed satisfaction.

Empty, yes. No pots and pans. No leftover canisters of salt and pepper. No mops and brooms.

And no Picasso.

Gil grabbed a flashlight from a workman and shone it at the interior. I glimpsed some ropes and pulleys, until Gil suddenly blocked the whole thing with his body as he stuck his head right into the cupboard and flashed his light down it. When he spoke, his voice sounded muffled.

“
Ceci n'est pas
a cupboard,” he said positively. “It's a professional, restaurant-sized dumbwaiter.”

“A dumbwaiter!” I echoed.

He withdrew his head and scanned the exterior again; then, he ran his fingers along the frame until he found what he was looking for—an embedded stainless-steel square button that had also been painted over. He pressed the button and paused expectantly, like a man waiting for an elevator.

Nothing happened. “An early electric model,” he said, sticking his head back in it, shining his flashlight below. “Nicely insulated, though.”

“If that thing starts moving now, you'll get guillotined,” I warned.

Gil remained where he was. “It's stuck down there. The dumbwaiter goes all the way down to the old wine and root cellar. I can see the cab sitting there at the bottom of the shaft,” he reported.

“Il s'est déplacé!”
Aunt Matilda said suddenly to me. “That's what Madame Sylvie told you. Maybe, when she passed her hand over her face and said those words, it wasn't that a ‘cupboard' had ‘moved' away from the premises, as we thought. Maybe it was a dumbwaiter that had simply moved on its track, from up here in the old kitchen, down to the unfinished cellar below,” she added, nodding sagely.

“Who the hell is Madame Sylvie?” Gil pulled his head out of the dumbwaiter shaft and now stared at the two of us as if we'd completely lost our minds. I shrugged off his question.

“Never mind. We've got to get down there and check it out!” I insisted.
“Now.”

With all the construction going on, the cellar below was a formidable, gaping black pit. The foreman warned, “The old staircase, it is not safe for you to walk on.”

“Then we'll use that ladder over there,” Gil said decisively.

The crowd of workers parted as we reached the ladder. All the while, perhaps because of their skeptical faces, a voice in my head kept warning me, “But why would Grandmother Ondine have thrown a priceless Picasso down
there
?”

G
IL GALLANTLY CLIMBED DOWN THE
ladder first, into the cavernous pit that had once been Grandmother Ondine's old wine cellar. Then he held the ladder as I followed cautiously. When I reached the bottom I stepped gingerly on the irregular floor that had patches of muddy dirt, rock, sawdust. Gil took my arm to steady me and he shined his flashlight ahead so we could dodge old wooden wine racks, empty green bottles and broken glass shards. We picked our way carefully toward the area where we calculated that the cab of the dumbwaiter should be.

We were faced with a tower of heavy, decrepit, wooden crates that looked as though they'd been there forever and had to be removed one by one. My hands were quickly covered with dust from the splintered wood. But our efforts were rewarded, for behind it we found the bottom part of the dumbwaiter. Gil had brought some tools with him, and now he carefully pried open its door.

The cab was sitting right there in its tracks. Gil crouched down and aimed his flashlight in every corner. Impatiently I peered over his shoulder but couldn't see much. Finally he straightened up, stepped aside and dusted off his hands.

“Nothing inside there,” he announced, sounding irritated now. “It's empty.”

I moved closer and squatted beside it, running my fingers along each corner of the interior space, fruitlessly searching, as if my hands themselves could not accept the truth.

Gil turned to the two construction men who'd followed us down here. “Back to work,” he said tersely. They mumbled what was probably the French version of
We told you so—why do you listen to this crazy woman?
But the look in Gil's eyes brought a swift end to their grousing. The silence that followed was, in a way, worse.

“Let's go, Céline. We're just in their way now,” he said. He was starting to look truly pissed off. I didn't care.

“She did have her little hiding places,”
I repeated aloud, more to myself. I heard Gil's exasperated sigh as he walked away. My fingers were still idly exploring the floor of the cab, feeling the cool, dusty surface. I murmured a plea to Grandma Ondine, whose face I could conjure up clearly, thanks to that photo; and now her image in my mind was so sharp that I felt as if she were about to speak to me.

That was when my index finger found a hard bump on the floor of the cab. It was like a dried-out pea sitting in the far left corner. I pressed harder to see what it was. A little button.

Immediately the dumbwaiter responded just as if I'd said,
Open sesame,
for the floor of the cab slid aside on its spring, revealing an insulated compartment. I dipped my hand inside and brushed it against something with a slightly rough surface. My fingertips seemed to know what it was even before my mind could catch up, because my skin thrilled to the touch.

“Gil,” I gasped, then halted. I tried again. “Give me your flashlight!”

He'd stepped aside to check his phone for messages, but now he came hurrying back and handed me the light. I pointed the beam inside the dumbwaiter's secret compartment.

The image of a woman's face stared right back at me. “She's in there!” I exclaimed, suddenly light-headed. My hands were trembling so much that I stood up, backed away and had to steady myself against the wall.

“Who's in there?” Gil asked in astonishment. “The painting?”

“I'm afraid to yank it out and damage it,” I whispered, awed. Behind him I saw the startled, wary faces of the workmen who were now frozen in place, not knowing what to do.

Gil moved closer. “Let me do it,” he suggested. I watched as he diligently worked to ease the painting from its hiding place. I remained rooted to the spot, like an awestruck explorer who'd made a climb to the North Pole and was now frozen in time at the top of a silent world.

“Got it,” Gil said softly as he carefully lifted the canvas out of the dumbwaiter. The renovation crew, still unsure about the significance of this, understood that something lost had been found, and they broke into spontaneous applause.

Gil said in a low voice, “Come on, let's get this upstairs where we can really see it.”

I snapped to, and scrambled up the ladder. He followed, reverentially carrying the portrait into Grandmother Ondine's old kitchen. But, mindful of the sawdust and plaster all around us he said, “Let's take this over to the
pigeonnier
where you can have a quiet look at your grandmother's painting.”

The whole thing was so—well, surreal—that my feet seemed scarcely to touch the path, and I felt I was walking in another dimension. Aunt Matilda, Peter and Martin traipsed behind us. Gil unlocked the door of the
pigeonnier
and propped the painting on a chair as if it were on an easel. Then he stepped back so we could all look at it.

A stretched canvas on wood, unframed, about eighteen by fifteen inches. The painted surface, with its masterly strokes, was just as thrilling to touch now as when my fingers first made contact with it. The subject was a girl leaning out a window with her arms resting on the windowsill; but the composition was such that she was also facing toward us, as if simultaneously peering out into the world below her, yet watching us, too, with those big, intelligent eyes that were so alive and observant.

“That's
her
. My Grandmother Ondine!” I exclaimed.

“She's beautiful,” Peter observed.

“Yes,” I said, mesmerized. The model's cheeks were flushed with good health, her mouth soft with happiness, her entire expression one of triumph and verve, as if she had conquered the world. I felt a share in her triumph welling up in my chest. Picasso had made something more than just a likeness; he'd captured in paint the very archetypal joy and tragedy of all hopeful young girls.

“You look like her,” little Martin said to me, wide-eyed. Gil nodded, looking surprised, as if he were seeing something new about me.

Aunt Matilda had been giving the painting an appraising look with a professional eye. Now she said in an awed voice, “Céline. Look at this.” She pointed.

Sunlight was streaming in the window, filtered through the branches of nearby trees, and as the wind stirred the leaves, the light fell in shifting ribbons across the painting. At that moment, one bright shaft of light illuminated a series of words and numbers, painted with a forceful black flourish that told me exactly what I needed to know:

Picasso
in one corner, and
7 mai XXXVi
in another.

“God, it's him,” I said, peering at the signature. Gil stared at it, too, and I saw a fleeting glint of lust in his eyes as he registered what that signature was worth, especially to him in his current dire straits.

Then he recovered. “You were right, all along,” he said, looking impressed.

Aunt Matilda by now had sized up the situation in her inimitable way, and exchanged a knowing glance with Peter, who seemed to understand. “Come on, Martin,” Aunt Matilda said briskly. “It's well past your lunchtime, and mine, too. I'm starved, aren't you?”

“I could eat a bear!” Martin proclaimed. “A whole one!”

Aunt Matilda turned to Gil and me and said, “You guys take as long as you like. Peter and I are going to teach Martin how to play a card game called ‘Go Fish'.”

I scarcely heard her. I just couldn't take my eyes off that painting. Gil and I walked around the canvas in amazement, saying inane but jubilant things like, “Can you imagine Picasso painting these strokes? Can you just see Grandmother Ondine sitting for this? What did they say to each other? When did he decide to give it to her? Why would she put it in a dumbwaiter and just leave it there? What would she have told my mom if they'd had more time together that last day?”

At the thought of my mother, I exclaimed, “Do you understand what this means? She was right, all along. She's
not
deluded, she's healthy and smart and she's…
free
now!”

I nearly choked on that last word,
free,
and after that I couldn't say anything except “Huh!” My dazed euphoria was finally lifting, and I could sense the beginnings of an emotion I'd been holding back for such a long time. It came rolling toward me now with terrifying force.

Gil looked up, alerted by my change of tone. “Maybe it means
you're
free now,” he said astutely.

But I was like a warrior who's been on a long slog and has suddenly been told the war's over. I found myself trembling uncontrollably, even shivering, on such a warm day. My eyes were stinging with tears of relief. The surprised look on Gil's face changed to utter comprehension.

“Hey!” he said softly, moving toward me, tentatively at first, then taking me by the shoulders. “It's okay. It's okay,” he kept saying soothingly, over and over, drawing me to his warm and reassuring embrace. Dimly I felt him kissing the top of my head, and then my face, as his lips found mine.

Normally, I might have hesitated. But this time I just couldn't help stepping right into his arms and resting my head against his chest until the shaking stopped.

“Céline,” Gil murmured quietly, tenderly. “Sweet Céline.”

When he stroked my neck and face with his chef's toughened fingers, so bruised and scarred, it somehow felt healing to my own invisible scars, and reawakened in my flesh a long-lost sensation of being alive and hungry; and our initially tentative kisses were the kind that kept feeding each other's hunger all the more.

With all the tumult of emotion I was already feeling, this was one more cascade of delight on such an incredible day of surprises. I think we even laughed at ourselves while we kept kissing each other as we were finding our way to the bed. Some warm and vital river had resumed flowing through my veins, as if I'd been a half-frozen Alpine trekker all my life, and had now come upon a cabin with a warm fire where I could begin, at last, to feel human again.

W
HEN
I
AWOKE,
at first I couldn't remember where I was. I felt sated and relaxed as I shook off the sleepiness. Then suddenly I sat up, trying to grasp something new and awful. Gil was gone. I jumped up wildly, my danger-instinct kicking in. I pulled off the sheet, gathered it round me and ran into the other room, searching.

The chair where the painting had stood was there. But the
Girl-at-a-Window
was not.

“Gil!” I shouted. Silence.

Then he came in from the kitchen door, having stepped outside the
pigeonnier,
holding his phone.

“What's the matter?” he asked. I was still standing there wrapped in a sheet.

“Where's the painting?” I asked sharply.

He looked embarrassed. “The sun was shining on it, full stop, so I moved it to a safe place.” He opened a closet which had several wide drawers. In one of them, the painting lay safely nestled on some clean towels. “I was afraid it would just disintegrate right before my eyes,” he confessed. “Silly, isn't it?”

I sighed in relief, but I felt a strong premonition urging me not to put down my sword just yet. At first I couldn't make sense of it. When I saw the angle of the sun in the sky, I thought I knew why.

“Gil, it's late!” I said. “Don't you have to deal with Rick? That means we've got to—”

“Take it easy,” he said firmly. “I've made some calls to hold him off a few hours. Consider your options. I can still sign Rick's contract. I can just go back to Cannes and do the deed.”

“You certainly can
not
! Give away my grandmother's
mas
to that bastard? Are you crazy?” I said indignantly, going into action mode and looking around for my cast-off clothes. “No way. I'm your partner now, remember? But how are we going to get the cash in time to pay off the loan shark?”

“Don't be daft. You just got possession of a Picasso! You need time to think things through, in case you decide you want to keep it.” Gil was acting reasonable, like a parent with a hyperactive kid.