The Hotel Riviera (5 page)

The night was too hot to go indoors yet, and I decided to take a stroll through the gardens before bed. The scent of jasmine hung on the air, reminding me of those early days when the hotel had just opened; when we had no guests, and were still gluing it all together with spit and hope and no money.

Up the lane at the entrance to the hotel, a small blue sign tacked to a pine tree said, in bright yellow letters, “The Hotel Riviera.” Next to it another, bigger sign said,
BIENVENUE/WELCOME
in what I thought were justifiably extra-large letters, and under that yet another sign said in French: “Our Welcome Is Bigger Than Our Hotel,” which was, of course, the truth.

Twin rows of parasol pines yearned toward each other over the lane, providing a welcome avenue of shade in the heat of the day. Wander down that lane, turn a corner, and there it is; square and solid and the color of faded-pink roses, with a row of French windows above and a matching row beneath, flanked by old shutters that have always been somehow askew, no matter how I've tried to fix them. Their green paint has weathered to a silvery patina, and each morning they're thrown open to greet the sun, then closed again in the afternoon to keep out the heat.

Although it's the end of summer, vivid pink and purple bougainvillea still tumbles over the trellises flanking the doors, and the white-pointed petals of jasmine gleam in the darkness. The door stands open, as it always does until midnight, after which guests need to use their own keys, and on a chunk of pink granite set above those doors is carved the name Villa Riviera, and the year it was built, 1920.

Walk up the low stone steps and into the hall and you'll be met by the faint familiar scent of beeswax and lavender. Each piece of furniture, each lamp and rug, each object in this house has a history; a memory of where I had bought it; of how much I'd had to borrow; of who I had been with. All my
good
memories are here.

I ran my hand over the round rosewood hall table that serves as the reception desk, its dents and chips camouflaged under layers of beeswax, rubbed to a hard sheen by Nadine. On the table is an old brass schoolbell, used to summon the
patronne
from the kitchen. A green and white chintz sofa stands alongside a red leather wing chair, studded with brass nailheads, and the bombé cabinet has the dull sheen of silver leaf, personally applied by me. Currently, it's topped with a mixed bunch of lilies and marguerites, plonked hastily into a blue pottery jug by someone who obviously had little time to bother with fancy flower arrangements. A fake Louis-the-something love seat on spindly gilt legs is covered in traditional blue and yellow Provençal fabric found in the local market, and next to it a reed basket holds a pile of sweet apple logs.

Now, walk through the arch from the hall and you're in the salon, a big room fringed with those tall French windows leading onto the terrace and the gardens. This is the room with the oversized limestone fireplace that looks like one of my mismatched auction finds, but is in fact original to the house. This room is furnished with a pair of rather grand high-backed, tassled silk sofas, “rescued” from a decrepit château, as were the rugs, admittedly a bit threadbare and faded but still beautiful.

Beyond the salon is the small dining room, used only in bad weather, when the mistral blows the sand from the beach and the leaves from the trees, wrecking my jasmine and wrenching the vines from the arbor, and rattling everyone's nerves. It's kind of cozy in there, though, with the lamps lit and the wind howling, a bit like a storm at sea.

Anyhow, by the time you finally leave the terrace and the delights of a long, winey dinner, and climb the central staircase, you'll be almost asleep. You'll find six identically sized bedrooms, with an extra-large corner room anchoring each end of the hallway. Instead of numbers, I've named the rooms for famous French artistes and writers: there's Piaf and Colette, who, by the way, once owned a house in Saint-Tropez and sold her makeup line in a little store there. There's Proust, Dumas, Zola, and Mistral. I also named one for Brigitte Bardot, who famously lived just down the road from here. Plus Miss Nightingale's room is named for Marie-Antoinette, because I've always had a sneaking suspicion the woman had been misquoted and then blamed for all the French royal family's problems. Somewhat similar, Miss Nightingale had reminded me, to a recent princess's own problems.

Most of the rooms have balconies overlooking the leafy fig arbor and the terrace, with perfect views of the Mediterranean. If you want, you can lean from the windows and pick the ripe figs. When you bite into them, still hot from the sun, the sweet juices run down your chin.

In some rooms, the beds are all gilded ormolu and padded damask, which somehow turned out to look more country bordello than seaside villa, but which has a certain charm. Others are plain country iron, painted white and draped in gauze so that lying in bed with the soft slur of the sea in your ears, you could imagine you were in the tropics.

Everything else in the bedrooms is very simple. A table under the window; an amber-shaded lamp, a comfy chair, a soft rug for your feet. The soap in the small, Provençal-tiled bathrooms is made from local olive oil and is scented deliciously with verbena; the bed linens smell of being dried in the sun and the wind, and the bunches of flowers on the nightstands smell like wild strawberries.

Occasionally, a nightingale pays us a visit, or a blackbird, which in my view has the prettier song. I like to hope it sends those guests already drifting off to sleep closer into each other's arms, because there's surely nothing as romantic as a nightingale's song, heard while lying in your cool bed with the tall windows flung open to the sea breeze. “Hear that,” I sometimes imagine a delighted lover whispering, holding the long, cool length of his woman against his warm tanned body, as they love each other.

I'm back on the terrace now, the focus and general meeting place of the Hotel Riviera. Worn terra-cotta pavers, verdigrised iron railings under a burden of blossoms, old-fashioned globe light, and, overhead, a thick canopy of fig leaves.

Enchanting
is the word that comes to mind as I look down over the tangle of colorful plants spilling onto the sandy path below. At the end of this path, there's the clump of boulders and a flight of wooden steps leading down to the cove. Just above this is my own house, a miniature single-story version of the hotel, in the same faded-rose pink, with the same tall silvery shutters framing its windows, and a tiny porch tacked onto the front. The sea laps practically at my door and I sleep with my windows open to its soothing music.

I pick a sprig of jasmine and tuck it into my hair, as I take that sandy path, back to my little house, and Scramble, and my lonely dreams. Is there any wonder I love this place?

The night had turned sultry, that sticky kind of heat that foretells a summer storm. I peeled off my clothes and headed into the shower. Five minutes later and many degrees cooler, I was in bed.

I lay there, eyes wide open, sheet thrown back, rigid as a soldier at attention, staring into the semidarkness at the vague shapes of the old blue-painted ceiling beams with the yellow spaces of plaster between them, Scramble rustled around on my pillow, clucking softly and occasionally touching my hair with her beak. I was glad of her company.

Sleep was impossible. I was too worried, too distracted, too
lonely.
I flung myself out of bed and sat by the open window, leaning on the wooden ledge. I felt the sun's warmth still locked there and rested my head on my arms, listening to the distant rumble of thunder and the soft background sigh of the sea, thinking how fortunate I was to live in such a beautiful place. I reminded myself that I had Patrick to thank for that.

I suppose I'm what you might call a nester, partly because as a child I never really had a home. Due to Dad's financial ups and downs, we were always on the move; one month I'd be a country cowgirl on a ranch, the next I was an urban schoolgirl striving to make instant best friends. We lived in so many different apartments I lost count. I yearned for a place to call my own.

My mother had simply picked up and left one day without taking six-year-old me with her. She'd dubbed my father, scathingly, Mr. Charm, and it was true, he was Mr. Charm, but oh, how I loved him. I'd hang on to his hand and on to his every word, gazing proudly up at my handsome daddy, who to his credit, and unlike my runaway mother, always showed up for PTA meetings, charming every mother there, beaming his “shy” smile while looking searchingly into their eyes. Looking for what? I wondered. It was a long time before I found out it was “would the answer be yes? Or no?”

After Mom left, somehow too, it was always me looking after Dad, instead of the other way around, making sure he got to appointments on time; that he'd booked the sitter; that there was milk for the breakfast cereal.

“You have to make a left turn here,” I'd remind him from the backseat of the car, because even at age six I realized he had zero sense of direction. “I have to be at school by eight,” I'd say, or “What shall we have for supper tonight, Daddy?” I knew if I didn't remind him he'd forget all about it and it would be take-out pizza one more time. Even a little kid can get awfully sick of pizza.

Anyhow, Mr. Charm or not, I adored him, and of course, he was the standard by which I measured every other man. I found out too late he wasn't the best yardstick to go by.

When I met Patrick I was at a vulnerable point in my life, but then somehow I always was. Vulnerable, that is. I'm sure a therapist would tell me it all stemmed from my childhood, it's simple common sense; though of course common sense has never stopped me from falling for the wrong man.

I was just emerging from a two-year odyssey with a movie actor (
odyssey
was the only way to describe that long, hard haul) when I'd arrived at this conclusion. The “actor” was a wanna-be actor when I met him, then he started to climb the ladder: a small part in a small film; then another, larger part; soon he was escorting young actresses to premieres and parties and showing up in
People
magazine and the tabloids. Even blinded by love, I guessed where it was heading—absolutely nowhere—and called an end to it.

With a pang of genuine grief, I decided there was no such thing as “true love.” It was a myth invented for novels and movies, perpetrated by poets who wrote sonnets about it, and by writers of popular songs.
True love did not exist.
It was gone from my life forever. And then I met Patrick Laforêt and plunged in, Eyes Wide Open, Head Over Heels. All the clichés. All Over Again.

It was stardust all the way, that first year we were married, and Patrick made me feel like a bride every day of it.

I wish I could explain why a man falls
out
of love with a woman. With Patrick it was as quick as this. One day we were laughing and holding hands as we walked through the steep streets of Eze, a village perched on a mountainside above Cap-Ferrat, where we had gone for a precious day off from the demands of renovating our hotel. The next, he was heading off alone for Saint-Tropez with a casual “be back later,
chérie.
”

For a year we had made love, morning, noon, and night, and as often as we could in-between times, when the workers weren't around and we could sneak some privacy in our still-unfinished cottage. And then suddenly we didn't make love so much anymore. It was as though Patrick had turned out the lights and left me in a puzzling twilight zone, not knowing why or what or how.

Of course, my first thought was there was another woman. After all, Patrick couldn't pass any woman without giving her the eye, and it would be a rare woman who could resist his looks and gentle charm.

Plus, let's not forget I was a simple, amber-haired, round-eyed chef from the suburbs when Patrick met me, and he was French, and handsome, and rich (at least I thought he was then), as well as a man of the world. I don't think a day went by that I didn't question why he'd picked me to marry.

It wasn't all bad. I mean, there were times when it would be perfect again, just for a day or so, and Patrick would be his old self, flirting and laughing and enjoying life and enjoying me. We would drive to a country auction, up in the hills of Provence to Orange, or even farther to Burgundy, where we once stayed the night in a grand converted château, living temporarily in the lap of luxury. It was so far removed from the daily chaos of our in-transition Hotel Riviera, it was like another world, and one where, to my surprise, I became another woman, throwing my cares and problems away and living just for the moment. We held hands, we kissed in shady bowers, and made love in a sumptuous feather bed.

I went to the local auctions and bid crazily on old stuff no one else seemed to want: the threadbare Oriental rugs, the out-of-fashion twenties marble-topped washstand; the crazy lampshades with the dangling bead fringes; and the gold lamé curtains from the thirties, swagged and tassled in purple, which to this day drape our—
my
—bed, looking like leftovers from a Fred and Ginger movie.

Sometimes, on those rare days we were together just before the opening of our hotel, we'd drive around and find an odd little sheep farm in the Sisteron hills where we'd spend the night tucked into a tiny room beneath the eaves, listening to the bleating of sheep outside our window and the splatter of rain on the tiled roof. Or we'd stop at a tiny
hostellerie,
just a couple of rooms over a little restaurant where we ate like kings and made love like bunny rabbits, as though this giddy world might never stop.

Did Patrick ever
really
love me, even then, when he was making love to me? It's a question destined to haunt me forever. I so want to believe he did, in his own way, which sadly in the end was not enough. And in the end my love was not enough either. I still care about where Patrick is, though, about what's happening to him, and who he's with. In my heart I believe he's with another woman, a younger, prettier, richer woman who can give him everything his material heart desires. Which, as I said before, doesn't make him a bad guy—just a bad husband.

So, there we are; I've bared my untidy heart to you—what's left of it anyway. For the past six months I've lived an independent life, running my little hotel, looking after my guests, cooking good food every night, and keeping myself busy so I don't have time to think about Patrick.

What I'm really dreading is the winter, when my guests have gone back to their own worlds and I'm here alone on my little peninsula, listening to the mistral blowing from the Siberian steppes, crashing through the Rhône valley, gathering speed until it finds my cottage, rattling the doors and windows, shrieking through the pines and toppling the heavy planters with a sound like cannon shots, making the silence inside even more lonely.

It will no longer be the season for cold rosé wine and instead I'll light the apple wood in the grate, praying that the wind won't blow the smoke back down the chimney. I'll brew up the chamomile tea that's supposed to soothe my shattered nerves and maybe I'll make some of those comforting toast soldiers and soft-boiled eggs that always remind me of my father and my childhood, because he would make them for me when I felt bad. Later, in bed, Scramble will snuggle into my neck, nibbling occasionally on my ear, and together we'll get through another long night.

Did I mention I wasn't looking forward to this? Did I mention how angry I am with Patrick? Did I mention I don't know what to do about his disappearance, where to look for him, or even who to ask to help? Well, here's the truth: the only good things to come out of this whole scenario are three facts. The first is that I still want to believe Patrick loved me, once upon a time. The second is I'm no longer in love with him. And the third is that I still have my true “true love”: the Hotel Riviera.