Invitation to Provence (30 page)

“Trust me, child, it is.” Rafaella patted her hand. “And now I have a suggestion to make. You need a change while Jake is away. Why not go to the villa at the Cap? Take Little Blue with you. I want both of you to see how lovely the Côte d’Azur is. I would come with you but it’s too far for me now—my arthritis won’t permit it.”

This was the second great invitation of Franny’s life. The Côte d’Azur was a dream place she’d only glimpsed on travelogues on television, and now she was going there. Rafaella not only had confided the story of her love, she had given her something to look forward to while her own love was away.

She put her arms around Rafaella and hugged her. “Thank you,” she said, and Rafaella knew she meant for telling her the story of her and Lucas.

S
COTT HARRIS WAS TAKEN
by surprise, pleasantly so, when Clare arrived at sundown the next evening, carrying a picnic basket. She appeared in the crushing shed when the machines were going full blast.

“Hey,” she said, standing in the doorway and peering into
the dimness. “I brought supper. I figured every guy has to eat sometime, even the superman winemaker.”

Scott grinned and brushed back his hair wearily. “I guess you’re right. I’d probably have ended up with the same old ham and cheese somewhere around midnight.”

“If I had not come to save you.” Clare put the wicker picnic basket on the rickety Formica-topped table that already held a laptop and several dozen empty Badoit bottles. “Watch me wave my magic wand,” she cried, flinging open the lid and waving an elegant arm at its contents, like a circus performer taking a bow after a particularly difficult stunt.

“Will the magic wand also turn me into a prince?” Scott asked hopefully, and she laughed and shook her head.

“That’s asking a little too much, even of me, but I promise it can turn you into a happy man, if only for a brief moment. Look, here’s a magical rotisserie chicken—direct from Alliers, and”—she showed him the box—“potatoes roasted in the juices!” She bit into one, moaning with pleasure. “Mmm, oh my god, that’s
so
good. Plus”—she waved a baguette at him and took out a bottle and two glasses—“cheap local wine from Mademoiselle Doritée’s and a hunk of cheese. Now I ask you, what more could a man want?”

“You,” he said, and he kissed her.

She stepped back, surprised but not displeased. “You always thank people with kisses?”

“Only the pretty ones.”

She frowned, suspicious. “I wouldn’t want you to have gotten the wrong impression.”

“My only impression is that you are lovely and that you are also an eater. True?”

“True,” she admitted with a sigh. “I love food. That’s why I’m taking the cooking lessons. One day I’ll be a comfortable fat old lady, still enjoying her roast potatoes and rotisserie chicken at eighty.”

“And with a glass of wine, I hope,” he said, inspecting the bottle of white she’d brought before opening it. He poured it into glasses and said, “Tell you what. It’s too windy outside, why don’t we take our picnic into the
cave?
We can light the candles and pretend it’s romantic.”

“But we don’t have to pretend—it
is
romantic,” Clare said minutes later, sitting opposite him at the stone tasting table in the candlelight, with their picnic spread out on paper plates.

“What are you really doing here, Clare?” he asked, hacking a hunk of chicken for her with his Swiss Army knife since she’d forgotten to bring one.

She bit into the chicken, chewing silently, thinking. She shrugged. “Like JFK and his famous wife, I accompanied my friend to Paris.” She looked up and met his eyes. “Actually, the truth is that I had left my cheating husband and was looking for revenge on the woman he’d been having an affair with. One of the many women he’d had an affair with. I filed for divorce before I left and I made sure to max out his credit cards.”

“A woman scorned?”

“You betcha!”

“And what will you do now?”

She knew it was a loaded question. “Now? I’ll become a chef, of course, take a job as the lowest
commis
in some smart L.A. restaurant, work my butt off for no money, and eat for free.”

“At least you won’t starve.”

“Would that worry you?” She eyed him, smiling.

“You know I wouldn’t allow that to happen.”

Clare stared demurely down at her paper plate scattered with chicken bones. “It’s nice to know you care. Well, now that I’ve made sure you’ve eaten tonight, I’d better let you get on with the crush and go home.”

“Home? Is that the way you think of the château now?”

She hesitated. “It’s more than just the château. It’s the village of Marten, it’s here, it’s Saint-Sylvestre, it’s… . Provence.” She shrugged. “Of course it’s not my home. I have no real home, but this place sure beats the real one where I started out, in the onion fields, working alongside my sharecropper dad. God, I never want to see a Vidalia again.”

She was laughing but Scott could tell she was still hurting inside from the hard childhood memories. He helped her pack the remains of the picnic back into the basket, and they walked up the stone stairs and into the grape-scented night.

Clare took a deep breath, standing by the car, the keys ready in her hand. “You could get drunk on just this.”

“You’d have to wait for it to become wine first. And thank you for the picnic, it was great.” He stepped awkwardly back from her, unsure of whether to kiss her again, but then she did it for him, a quick brush of her lips against his and she was in the car with the keys in the ignition, already turning the wheel and heading across the courtyard to the arched exit.

She leaned her head out the window, looking back at him still standing there, watching her. “You’re kinda cute, Scott Harris, you know that?” she yelled, and he heard her laughing as she drove, too quickly, under the arch and back down the hill to the château.

C
LARE WAS NOT SURE
which she enjoyed most, cooking with Jarré or tasting wines with Scott. In fact the “cooking lessons” mostly consisted of the work that Jarré told her would be her lot as a
commis
chef—the lowliest assistant on the restaurant scale.

Clare was enjoying herself. She liked the prickly
frisson
between her and Scott, who was still pursuing her—whenever he could, that is, because after all it was the winemakers’ busiest time of the year. He’d sent her flowers, called her, asked her over to share his sandwich, showed her his home, a charming old stone house fronted with an arbor of bougainvillea and fig, the inside of which was a masculine jumble of old furniture, piles of books and horse magazines, with a beautiful old English saddle on a wooden stand taking pride of place in the hall. He showed her his stable and of course his horse, and though she couldn’t ride he took her out on a small steady mare, ponying her up and down the rocky hills until her backside could take no more. And she enjoyed it all, though she didn’t kiss him again.

But then each morning when she walked eagerly to the village, she found herself looking forward to seeing Jarré, who would be waiting behind his bar to greet her, his innocent
black eyes regarding her as though she was the most beautiful woman in the world, astonished that she was here, working in his kitchen. He’d have her
grand café crème
ready, plus now he always had freshly baked croissants. She was aware of him physically as they bumped into each other in the too-small kitchen, and she chatted to him in her newly acquired bastardized French, complete with a perfect Provençal twang, just like his.

Trouble was, she liked both men, she could fall hard for either one. But neither of them was from her world, and she knew neither of them would truly understand where she was coming from. She needed to share her problem with Franny, who was getting ready for her trip to the Côte d’ Azur. But first it was time that Franny knew her real background, so Clare decided to tell her about herself. There could be no deceit between friends. Or lovers. Win or lose, it was the moment of truth.

Criminal leaped up growling when he heard Clare come into Franny’s room, but then he subsided again, wagging his tail.

“Hi, Criminal, hi Fran,” Clare said.

“Oh, hi.” Franny shoved the final T-shirt into the bag. “Sure you won’t come with us? It’ll be such fun, and anyway, how can you bear to miss the Côte d’Azur?”

The moment she said it Clare knew the reason why she couldn’t go. It came to her like a revelation, but she couldn’t tell Franny about that yet. She’d come to see Franny for a reason, and she’d better get it over with. She plopped down onto Franny’s big green-and-white silk-covered bed, staring miserably at her.

Franny looked worriedly at her. She’d never seen Claire
so solemn, not even at the Italian restaurant the night she’d told her about Marcus. Even then she’d been cheery and sarcastic and fun.

“Franny, I have a confession to make.” Clare sounded so serious that Franny stopped what she was doing and went to sit next to her.

“A confession?”

“I have not been exactly truthful with you about … about who I was.
Am,”
Clare corrected herself. “I told you I was Miss Georgia… . Well, I wasn’t that. I mean I
was,
but in another way.” Her shoulders slumped, and her hands dangled limply between her knees as she thought of how to say what she needed to say. “Oh well,” she said finally, with a resigned shrug, “I guess the only way is to start at the beginning.” She glanced up at Franny, sitting next to her with that look of loving concern in her eyes, and suddenly she wanted to cry. “This is the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life,” she muttered miserably, then added, “well, not
exactly
the hardest, as you’ll see in a minute.”

Franny took her hand and Clare took a deep breath. “I told you I was a poor kid. I never had a real home, you know, just that kind of shiftless life, always moving on to new places, new schools, new friends. Most people think that kind of rural poverty doesn’t exist anymore because they never come in contact with it. They think it’s something from the past, but believe me,” she said bitterly, “it’s still very much alive and kicking. Anyway, the short version is that I kicked my way out of it.” Her eyes met Franny’s again. “Just like you did,” she said, “only you did it the hard way, getting an education, working nights, all that. I went for the easy version. At least, that’s what I thought it was going to be.”

She bit her lip, staring silently down at the floor, and Franny sympathetic as always, said, “It’s okay, Clare. You don’t have to tell me. I understand, really I do.”

“No. No, you don’t,” Clare said tonelessly. “Unless you’ve been there you can’t know. Anyhow, when I was sixteen I ran off to New York. Of course I was broke—hah, broke doesn’t even begin to say it. But I was a pretty kid. I lied about my age and ended up dancing in a club, one of the real sleazy ones where every girl was like me, a dropout from their real lives, a loser, desperate in their hearts for someone to put their arms around them and tell them they loved them.”

“Oh god,” Franny said, and Clare lifted a resigned shoulder. “Hey, it was okay. I liked dressing up in spangles. I liked taking them off and having men admire my body. I’d never known I was pretty before.

“‘A gentlemen’s club,’ they called it, and believe me, it was the saddest place you ever saw in your life. I went by the name of Miss Georgia, and I danced around a pole, taking off the spangles until I was naked, acting like I really loved what I was doing, like I really fancied those guys so they would shower me with money. Then when I was done, I’d have to scramble naked on the floor to pick up all those dollars while the guys laughed at me and cheered.”

She looked at Franny. “You ever see a lap dancer, Franny? No, of course not. Well, it’s the same old same, faking hot sex while some guy gets his jollies off, and for an extra fee you go in the back room with him and—” she shrugged again “—do whatever he wants to do. I didn’t like it, didn’t like those guys groping me. In fact I hated it, yet I went on doing it. I didn’t know how to do anything else.

“In the end, though, I quit. The other girls looked at me as
though I was crazy. ‘You’re turning down good money, babe,’ they said, and I looked into their faces, their
real
faces, the raw, un-made-up, sad faces they never showed to the customers and I saw my own reality behind those faces with the painted-on beauty and the sparky glamour and the hairpieces and the false eyelashes, and I was sick at heart. Some of these women had kids, some had a drug habit. They weren’t free to make a choice the way I was.” She took a deep breath. “And so I made it. And there I was—broke again. All that and nothing to show for it. I said to myself, I might as well have stayed home and worked in the onion fields.

“Anyhow, I picked myself up, threw away my jeweled thongs, put on a black dress, and got myself a job as a hostess at a restaurant. I also tended bar occasionally—you know, all the stuff you have to do just to stay alive. I worked, dated, made out, got by … and then Marcus came along.

“Marcus made me feel good, made me feel he liked me, that I was really someone. I think he asked me to marry him by accident. It just sort of happened—and suddenly there we were in front of the preacher in a cheap Las Vegas wedding chapel. What a fool I was, I still can’t believe it. Then of course came the big letdown. Oh, believe me, Franny, Marcus used me much more than he did you—all those other women, all those lives he touched and ruined. But then I met you, and we came here to Provence, and I met all these
real
people and I suddenly realized that I’m in charge of myself and I’m free of my past.” She looked humbly at Franny, her eyes pleading. “So there you have it,” she said in a wobbly voice. “And if you don’t want to be my friend anymore, I’ll understand.”

Franny opened her arms and reached out for her. “You’ll always be my friend,” she said. “How could you even think it
mattered? I liked you right off, that first night when you came to tell me about Marcus. I shouldn’t have liked you, but I did. Because
you
are
you.”