The Provence Cure for the Brokenhearted (11 page)

I opened one of the windows to let in the cool breeze and then hung his tux on a hanger I found in an old wardrobe, its mirror fogged with age.

“Remember when you, me, and Dad went to that aquarium,” Abbot asked, “the one with the huge tank of beluga whales?”

“Yep,” I said. “We walked through that glass underwater tunnel. I loved the jellyfish.” Their pink headdresses, all glow and flounce, seemed like lurid turbans, and their bodies moved like bright ball gowns, pulsing over our heads—puff and glide, puff and glide. Henry had caught me looking a little teary-eyed. I told him that they made me think about Abbot’s childhood, how it seemed to be slipping away from us.

“I thought about that today when Pop-pop and I were watching the show on Animal Planet,” Abbot said. “Remember how Daddy loved the belugas?”

“Yes,” I said.

“He said that the beluga’s leg bones looked so real when it kicked its fins. He said it was like a man was trapped in the whale’s body. And how they had belly buttons. Whales are just like us.”

Could Abbot know that this memory resonated with me so deeply? Children register things, I believe, even though they don’t understand a conflicted moment rationally, or maybe because it’s not rational, they register it not in the conscious mind but more deeply, and so it gets stuck.

That night after the aquarium, in the hotel in downtown Atlanta, I’d asked Henry if he felt like he was trapped, the way he saw the body of a man inside of the beluga. I worried that it had been symbolic, a metaphor, even a subconscious one. He looked at me, startled, and then said, “I’m not trapped inside of a whale or a life,” he said. “Are you?”

I realized that maybe I was projecting my own fears onto him. Did I feel trapped? Was that the reason for the inarticulate longing I sometimes felt? “No,” I said, unwilling to admit to anything that awful. I was lucky. We were lucky. But then I whispered, “I just wonder if this is what life is, just this moment and then the next and the next and then it stops. And that’s all.”

I could tell that I’d hurt him. “We’ve built this around ourselves together, but we’re not trapped. There’s a difference.”

And now I saw the giant belugas in my mind. Henry was right. You could see their powerful legs beneath their skin, and it was so very human. Did I feel like a woman trapped inside of myself? I couldn’t think of any other way to live. Henry and I had built this life—a trap or not, it was what we’d built. And even though I felt lonesome now within it, I didn’t want out. All I wanted was our old domestic life back again.

I told Abbot that I remembered what Daddy said, too, the beluga’s leg bones, its belly button. “Did you like the wedding?” I asked.

“Yep,” he said. “But it wasn’t as good as yours and Daddy’s wedding.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Theirs was too fancy. Yours was just right.”

I agreed but didn’t reply. Ours was just right—for us, that’s all. “Are you sleepy now?”

“Mm-hmm.”

“Go to sleep,” I said.

He opened his eyes wide and stared at me. “They have a smoke detector in here even though it’s just a studio, right? Not a house.”

“They have a smoke detector in here,” I told him. “We’re fine.”

“Okay,” he said, and then he closed his eyes. I sat there listening to his breathing, which quickly smoothed into an even rhythm. He was exhausted after all. Once I was sure that he was asleep, I lifted the dictionary out of the bed and held it for a moment on my lap. It had sharp edges. I didn’t want Abbot to bang into it in the night. I thought of opening it, letting myself indulge in what Henry had left behind. But I didn’t. I couldn’t. I set it on the end table, and then I looked up and caught myself in the wardrobe’s mirror—foggy, ghostlike, someone who used to be but now was almost gone.

rom my seat in the dining room, where Elysius, my mother, and I were having brunch, I could see Abbot and my father in Elysius’s heated pool. Abbot was already trolling around the surface. My father was wearing swim trunks that I found a bit skimpy. It was quite possible that he purchased these trunks in the seventies. He had nearly hairless pink legs and a paunch. He and Abbot were quite serious this morning. They were going to pretend they were in the Caribbean, and this would take some imaginative effort, especially since neither had ever been.

My mother, Elysius, and I were eating pastries that my mother had picked up at the local bakery, as if there weren’t a huge block of uneaten wedding cake. I was eating the pastries while trying not to judge them. But every once in a
while, my critical mind would kick in and I’d think,
Pretty enough, but if it’s dry, what’s the point?

Elysius had made a pot of coffee with some exotic beans that she claimed had a powerful effect on Daniel’s work. “Top grade, high octane.”

There was an agenda. I knew that there had to be. Elysius and my mother had talked, and Elysius had written notes, and there was a list of items that we were going to get to, like it or not. I was not given a copy of this agenda, but I knew it existed, and so I proceeded through the conversation with caution.

We talked about the wedding—anecdotes, details, other people’s dresses. My mother and I let Elysius complain about Daniel’s postponing the honeymoon to work until she came full circle and defended his art. “When you marry an artist, you also marry his work. I know that well enough by now. And I love his work. Not as much as I love him, but I do love it.” And, as if love were an appropriate segue, my sister said, “Jack Nixon said that you were charming.”

“Charming?” I said, and I could feel myself blush. “I could barely make eye contact.”

“I told you,” Elysius said, “the art of flirting—use it or lose it.”

“Well, it’s already lost.” Jack Nixon was good looking and nice and he’d called me a beautiful woman, even after I let him off the hook, and now he’d said I was charming. Still, I was scared not only of him, but everything he represented.

“So, did you like him?” Elysius asked. “He was hinting
that he wanted to ask you out on a date. Something casual. He’s never been married. He has no kids, no baggage. He’s
uncomplicated
! He’s perfect!”

Was that a sales pitch for me? I’d been married. I had a kid. I didn’t just have baggage; I hauled around steamer trunks! Not that there was anything wrong with Jack Nixon. There wasn’t. He seemed perfectly fine, but he wanted to date me? Dating? How could I be expected to date someone? I must have looked slightly stricken, because my mother jumped in. “Now, now,” she said, “she’ll find love again on her own time.”

“Wait,” Elysius said. “You were in on this. You thought Jack was a good catch.”

“I’m not ready,” I said, and then quickly asked where Charlotte was.

“She’s still asleep,” Elysius said. “She tends to need a full day’s sleep to function.”

“She’s that age,” my mother said.

“I was never that age,” Elysius said. “I always woke up early.”

“You had plenty of other ages, though. Your back talk phase. Your diet of cream cheese and chocolate phase. Your cigarette phase,” my mother said gently.

It was quiet for a moment.

“Well,” my mother said to fill the space.

“Well?” I said. I was impatient for her to get on with it. What was her idea and how could I remove myself from what it required of me?

“Well …,” Elysius said.

“The house,” my mother said. “It needs someone to look after it.”

“The house?” I said. My house was a little on the messy side, sure, and the back porch needed a coat of paint, and the dishwasher was on its last leg, but it seemed a little extreme to say that I wasn’t looking after it.

My mother reached into her pocketbook and placed a stack of photographs on the table and pushed them across to me. “The house in Provence,” she said. “How many times do I have to tell people that it caught on fire?”

“Maybe it really was just a little kitchen fire,” I said, thinking of the house as my Aunt Giselle had rendered it—a child having a small tantrum.

“We don’t know the extent of the damage,” my sister said. “But the house has been virtually ignored for decades. I’d go, but Daniel and I have already booked this yacht with its own crew.”

“And I can’t go. Your father would refuse to go with me, and I can’t go without him. That’s too … loaded,” my mother said.

Elysius and my mother were quiet as I started flipping through the pictures, blurry color photographs from the late eighties, the last time the three of us had been there. My mother wearing a fitted skirt, Elysius with her long hair and thick bangs, me wearing a baseball cap. Behind us, Mont Sainte-Victoire was luminous. There were photos of the stone house, the three of us eating dinner in the yard by the fountain,
the big house next door, Véronique—square-shouldered, a slight smile on her lips—and her boys, looking sheepish, per usual. One picture of their father wearing black socks and sandals, his mouth open as if he were singing. There were cathedrals, one’s architecture blurring into the next, the rows of vineyards, a field of sunflowers, the three of us standing beside them on the roadside.

The next photograph I turned to caught me off guard: my mother wearing a yellow swimsuit, sitting on the edge of our swimming pool, surrounded by a wrought-iron gate and a garden with small paths running through it. She looked elegant and young, so unbearably young, but she had to be at least the age I was now. “I don’t remember this swimsuit,” I said.

“That picture is from the following summer,” she said, without emotion, as if that weren’t the summer of her disappearance. In the photo, she was shielding her eyes from the sun, a coquettish salute. I wondered who took this picture. Who was she smiling at?

She must have felt a little uncomfortable about the way I was examining this photo, because she filled in with some idle banter. “No one has done any real updates on the house for, well, nearly a decade. Even if the house isn’t a pile of charred stones, there’s real work to be done.”

“She’s right,” Elysius chimed in. “Everything is just on the verge of collapse—the kitchen, the bathrooms … It was beautiful when Daniel and I were there, but in a decaying way.”

I tidied the stack by tapping them on the table like a deck of cards. “I stole a photo from this stack once upon a time.”

“Really?” my mother said.

I nodded. “The one where Véronique’s older son was showing off for the camera, balancing a pogo stick on his forehead.”

“I remember him doing that!” Elysius said.

“Pascal is the older brother,” my mother said. “But it was her younger son I talked to about the fire, Julien.”

“The one who was always pouting and splashed me all the time in the pool,” I said.

“It rings a dim bell,” Elysius said.

“Where have these been all this time?” I asked, sliding the pictures back across the table.

“Locked away,” my mother said. “There’s no need to have them on display. All’s well that ends well.” She was talking about her marriage, our family. Why put these pictures in albums for my father to see? This was the place she went to and almost never came back from.

“You both know I’m not going,” I said. “I have work to do. And Abbot is going to a day camp where they teach juggling.…”

“Henry’s been gone for nearly two years,” my mother said. “You have to keep living in the world.”

My fork rattled against my plate. Each time someone told me that it was okay to move on, that I
should
be moving on, the less I felt able. It was as if they were telling me to
leave Henry behind, and it felt like a betrayal. In my mother’s defense, she’d never made this claim until now.

And that was when my mother delivered the line that she had obviously practiced. She leaned forward and said, “Every woman needs one lost summer in her life. This is yours.”

“Is that mandatory?” I asked, an old resentment resurfacing.

“It is.”

“You
needed
to disappear that summer when we were kids?” I said.

“I came back,” my mother said, defensively. “That summer allowed me to come back.”

“This is about what
you
need, Heidi, right now,” Elysius said.