Cooking for Picasso (22 page)

“Bonjour,”
I said, idiotically handing him a robe as I hastily stepped out of the armoire.

“Qui êtes-vous?”
He frowned suspiciously, grabbing my arm with a grip like an iron clamp. Then Mr. Naked—he still hadn't put on the damned robe yet—threw back his head and shouted,
“Au voleuse!”

“I am
not
a thief!” I objected involuntarily. Even when I said it again in French, he shouted once more. Now the maid reappeared with a slew of restaurant workers behind her, including the maître d'. Mr. Naked had finally put on that bathrobe and he screamed at his staff what sounded like a French slang version of “
You
deal with this!” before he stomped back into the bathroom and slammed the door.

Apparently, I had just met the owner of the café. The maître d' was exclaiming into a tiny mobile phone, and although I never heard him say the word
Police,
it wasn't long before I heard the wail of sirens outside the café. Still, the whole thing had the quality of a bad dream, so I couldn't believe I was truly “in the soup”—not until the maître d' said curtly to me, “
Mademoiselle,
follow me, please.”

We marched downstairs past the velvet rope, into the dining room, where two uniformed cops were waiting for
me
. “Oh, God,” I said to myself, hastily reaching for my phone to call Aunt Matilda.

She didn't answer. I remembered that she was at the casino with her newfound boyfriend. She'd probably shut off her phone to save money overseas. After a moment's hesitation, I called the number Gil gave us in case we got lost. Maurice, the concierge, answered.

“I'm in trouble,” I confessed. “I think I'm about to be arrested.”

N
OTHING CAN PREPARE YOU FOR
the terrifying experience of being accused of a crime—especially when you can't tell anyone the whole truth.
I came here to steal a Picasso, Officer.
I tried to convince the French policemen and the café owner that I'd trespassed upstairs simply to see the room where my grandmother lived. I don't think this convinced anybody, least of all Chef Gil, who showed up just in the nick of time—looking really, really pissed off.

He said he'd been in Antibes checking in with a restaurant-supply shop which was going to provide him with new uniforms for his waiters. So when Maurice frantically called him, Gil hopped onto his motorcycle and came zipping over here to do damage control, because, as Aunt Matilda later put it, “It wouldn't look so great for Gil if one of his cooking students got thrown in the clink.”

He argued valiantly on my behalf. For awhile it looked pretty bad for me, since the police viewed Gil as a flashy English chef with a troublemaking girlfriend. Apparently, just a week before, a busboy from this café had been arrested for selling drugs. So the owner of the place—the naked guy who found me in his armoire—naturally assumed the worst. They even searched the rooms upstairs looking for—what? Drugs, diamonds, counterfeit money?

“They don't really think I'm some kind of drug mule, do they?” I asked, horrified.

As we argued, the cops kept making impatient gestures toward me as if ready to put me in handcuffs. But Gil persevered with calm reasoning that enticed the older cop into an animated discussion of my actions in particular and foreigners in general.

“C'est une vraie Américaine—naïve!”
Gil insisted, pleading with the fat, still-damp owner of the café to be
raisonnable
. Finally the owner threw up his hands in disgust, ordering us to never set foot in his café again. The police looked as if they were still considering hauling me off in chains, and I pictured myself locked in that prison fort on an island off Cannes where the Man in the Iron Mask was sequestered.

“Come on, let's go before they change their minds,” Gil hissed. We had to walk past the sidewalk terrace where curious onlookers were thronging, aiming camera phones at us as we left.

Gil quickly put on his sunglasses, looking exactly like what he was—a local celeb caught in a bad scene. He jumped on his motorcycle and I stalked off, heading for the spot where I'd parked my rented bike. I heard Gil start up his Ducati, but I didn't realize at first that he was following me.

“
Now
where do you think you're going?” he snapped when I paused to unhook my bike. The little stone cul-de-sac was like an oasis, shady, cool and calm. I put up my kickstand and wheeled my bicycle out, still breathing hard but trying to calm down as I sat on it.

“I have to get this bike back to the rental shop in Antibes,” I said, not bothering to hide my irritation. Gil had a bossy attitude which was really starting to grate on me, even if he had just saved my neck.

“Hold on! Once you drop the bike in Antibes, how are you going to get back to Mougins?” he demanded, grabbing the back wheel of my bicycle as I began to pedal away, causing me to clutch at the handlebars. Immediately the whole bike lurched to one side, and my bag slipped out of the basket.

The outer compartment fell open—and out dropped Grandmother Ondine's notebook, which I'd stuffed back in there hastily after consulting it for her letter with the café's address. Now the whole thing lay open, right there on the pavement.

“Damn! Look what you've done!” I exclaimed, leaping off the bicycle and letting it crash to the ground. The wind was already tearing at the delicate pages.

Gil sprang into action and scooped it up. “What's up with you, Céline?” he asked impatiently. “My assistants were worried—they sent me a message saying everybody else got on the bus except you.”

“So I'm out of the class?” I said distractedly. “Well, I assure you, I never was chef material anyway,” I added with false bravado. I sat on the stone curb to assess any damage to the notebook that Gil now handed me. The envelope was still tucked in the back. I carefully checked the pages to see if any of them had come loose.

“Hoo, what's
this
?” he asked with sudden interest, snatching a runaway page from the curb. “No plans to be a chef, my ass!” He glanced over my shoulder and saw that the notebook in my lap contained other recipes. “Obviously you're writing a cookbook? Or opening a restaurant?”

“Frankly it's none of your business,” I retorted.

“Hell, it's cooking and that
is
my business. Most teachers would think you've been stealing their recipes. It wouldn't be the first time that's happened to me.” His eyes narrowed suspiciously as if he still half-believed that I was some sort of culinary spy. Why else would I skulk around other people's cafés?

“You
wish
these were your recipes!” I countered. “They're my grandmother's. I bet she could out-cook you any day.”

“Really?” Giving me his million-wattage smile he added, “Can I have another look?” I sensed an opportunity and I took advantage of it.

“If you let me stay in the cooking class, I'll let you see these,” I coaxed in my most charming, winning way. “But you must swear on your Michelin star that you won't steal them.”

He held my gaze when he said meaningfully, “You promise no more wandering off the reservation? I'm not some hotel concierge who fixes parking tickets and drunk-driving arrests. Got it?”

“Yeah, sure. Fine,” I said a bit stiffly. That whiff of paternalism again really grated on me.

“Right,” he replied enthusiastically, sitting down beside me now. I reopened the notebook, wondering if he could possibly shed some light on it. He studied it eagerly, then turned a few more pages. “Wow,” he said admiringly. “Wow-ee wow-wow.” I saw a glimmer of his wolfish ambition.

“Are they good?” I asked, curious now.

“Nice. Very nice,” he replied, hungrily scanning a few pages. “Traditional Provence, but with a slightly different twist here and there. Could be regional. Could just be the times your grand-mum lived in. Mmm, nice
cassoulet
. And here's a genuine
coq au vin
made with the rooster's blood to get that dark sauce—and decorated with his comb and his kidneys,” he said enthusiastically.

“Yuck,” I said inelegantly.

“She uses a carrot to sweeten it,” he said, more to himself now, “and lots of thyme. Huh, and a sprinkle of homemade red vermouth made with Alpine herbs. That's interesting.”

I closed the notebook, and Gil glanced up as if waking from a spell. “You still haven't explained what the bloody hell you were doing sneaking around upstairs in that café. What exactly were you looking for?”

“I can't tell you,” I said quietly, “because it's something my mother told me in confidence. She never had a chance to come back here for—um, closure,” I said, being deliberately vague now, “so I did it for her. I hope you understand.”

He gave me a searching look, then said, “Okay, obviously you've got some emotional connections here. But the last thing I need right now is the local police giving me the fish-eye when I'm applying for business permits! Not to mention the bloody tourists snapping pictures on their phones so they can be the first to blab about us on the Internet before I even open the doors of my hotel.”

“I'm sorry,” I said, and I meant it. But I couldn't resist trying to lighten things up by adding, “I thought all publicity was good publicity.”

He scowled. “Not in business circles! Investors hate notoriety. Looks too unstable.
Nothing
must jeopardize the reopening of the hotel. My employees are depending on me to succeed—and if I don't, it won't be easy for them to find other jobs. So I can't let anyone screw it up by doing something reckless or stupid,” he added meaningfully.

“Okay, okay,” I said. I was ready to get on a plane right now and go home.

Gil saw my discouraged look. “Brace up,” he said briskly, looking at his watch. “I'll follow you to your bicycle shop and then I'll run you back home to the
mas
.”

So I pedaled on the road that crossed the peninsula to Antibes, with Gil puttering on his Ducati behind me, and all that traffic roaring around us. The bike-shop people looked glad to see me, perhaps worried that I'd run off with one of their cycles since I was late. I paid them, then returned to Gil.

He gave me his helmet and started up the bike without waiting. “Right, hop on!” he shouted above the roar of the motor. I had no choice but to slide onto the bit of seat behind him, clasp my arms around his waist, and try to keep my legs safely away from any hot metal or the steaming exhaust pipe.

Hanging on to Gil's broad chest I tried not to notice that he smelled agreeably of sweat, aftershave and laundered shirt, a mingling of bergamot, citrus and spice. With a roar we took off, bypassing the main, shorter route because it was now thoroughly choked with traffic. Gil had chosen a much more scenic road that wound around the coast at the Cap d'Antibes.

It was the first time I'd really absorbed—into my flesh as well as my thoughts—that here I was, in one of the most beautiful spots on the Mediterranean, with its green hills, rocky coves, palm trees, and tucked-away beaches at the edge of the deep blue sparkling sea.

The wind that blew against my face whooshed all my troubled thoughts right out of my head. My heart felt glad for the first time in many months. And as we whirled around the curves and coves, past steep hills with half-hidden villas tucked behind tall, pastel walls, I could just picture Grandmother Ondine carrying a basket of food up these mysterious roads—just a young slip of a girl, with long, flowing dark hair spiraling in rippling tendrils—like a mermaid rising up from the sea, and bearing all sorts of wonderful things for Pablo Picasso to eat.

S
UMMER WAS COMING.
I
T WASN'T
here yet, but it was on its way, and everyone could feel it. The villagers of Juan-les-Pins were behaving like happy animals awakening after a winter slumber, tilting their heads up to the sun, their nostrils flaring, all the better to breathe in the soft, salty, healthy, sun-warmed air, their voices giddy with the delight of casting off their woolens and no longer having to brace themselves against the wind.

Already the first of the yachting sailboats were drifting lazily across the sea. Soon, more visitors would be arriving—the rich young things looking for fun, eager to be naughty, drinking and dancing at the casinos, frolicking openly with one another's husbands at the beach. Ondine, along with the other locals, usually viewed these fair-weather guests with a mixture of scorn and wistfulness for such carefree, even careless lives. Now she found them utterly predictable.

But Ondine never knew what to expect from Picasso—or even from herself when she was with him. Two days ago, she'd been in his bed, and then posing for a portrait! Yesterday he'd greeted her warmly—with just enough of a twinkle in his eyes to let her know that she still pleased him, making her feel that she was still his goddess—and when he'd eaten his lunch he complimented her, patted her shoulder fondly. Then he became preoccupied with his mail, which he carried upstairs, deeply engrossed. “Business,” was all he said to her on his way up, shaking his head with a scowl. She didn't dare ask if he'd finished her portrait. She wasn't really worried about that—nor anything else under the sun.

For, amazingly, all she felt was this new strength, even a supreme confidence, about everything. The future and her destiny, her beauty and desirability, even the benevolence of the world at large—suddenly it all seemed possible, all spread out before her, full of wonderful opportunities like a buffet from the gods. This must be what it felt like to be rich, she told herself. Yet Ondine could see that it wasn't only money that did this for you. Such a joyous surge of confidence came from feeling you knew people who understood and valued you.

It was almost like love; not the kind you had when you were a child and got a lullaby to reassure you while you remained subject to the whims of adults. No, this feeling of triumph had no guarantees of stability, no net beneath the high wire; and yet, it was your own, so it was fiercer. If you took it by the reins, it made you strong. She could sense this with an astonishing certainty.

Today, as Ondine cycled to the end of her street, her jubilant thoughts were disrupted when a farmer in a donkey cart blocked her path. The man wore an old floppy straw hat and a brown jacket whose large collar was pulled up around his ears, making his head seem sunk into his shoulders without benefit of a neck in between. The donkey was already sweating from his efforts on this warm day, and he smelled, well, very donkey-ish. Ondine wrinkled her nose, impatient for him to clear the way.

“Allez, allez, mon ami,”
the farmer growled to his donkey in a scratchy voice.

Exasperated, Ondine stopped pedaling and waited for him to pass. But now the driver drew his wagon even nearer, leaning far over and reaching out to pinch her cheek. “Can you keep a secret, young lady?” he said in a stage whisper. Now that voice was all too familiar.

“Patron?”
Ondine whispered back in disbelief. Picasso howled with glee.

“Well, if my disguise can fool you, it can fool anybody!” he proclaimed, waggling his eyebrows. He had an unusually festive air, like a truant schoolboy. “Today, I'm not going to work. So, throw your bicycle and your hamper in the back and hop on! We're going to Antibes for the parade of the Virgin.”

Seeing him in the flesh again had a strange effect on her; she suddenly felt shy. The tumult of their lovemaking came rushing back to her now like a memory stored in her body, not her mind. She could feel herself flushing with both pleasure and embarrassment. So many other mysterious emotions came tumbling all around her that for a moment she had to steady herself.

Yet something about Picasso's over-hearty behavior today was unnerving. He still had a twinkle in his eye as his gaze roved over her approvingly. But when she hesitated he became impatient, jumped down and helped her lift the bicycle into the cart before he returned to his seat. He wasn't drunk, just cheerful and animated. His enthusiasm was so infectious that she climbed aboard. Picasso flapped the reins, and the donkey continued plodding on.

“Where did you get this cart?” Ondine asked, still bewildered by this carnival atmosphere.

“I went for a walk into Juan-les-Pins this morning and saw a farmer with it. I asked if I might borrow it. I gave him enough to buy a better donkey, but he still wants it back.”

Picasso looked delighted by the whole transaction. “I do prefer to travel in disguise,” he said as they took the road that cut across the peninsula. “Perhaps you should, too. Let's see if there's anything in my ragbag you can wear. A hat? Or scarf? It sounds like a religious festival. Shouldn't you wear something on your head, as if you were in church?”

Ondine glanced dubiously at the sack behind their seat. Picasso reached in and pulled out an old purple shawl. “Put that on. Yes, much better,” he said, half-approvingly and half-ironically. It was all a game to him, but he was so eager to share his pleasure that she didn't want to spoil it. He just wanted to have fun today, she concluded. After all, he worked so hard and unrelentingly.

Their donkey plodded along with other carts, wagons, trucks and autos that were bustling by in the everyday business of trundling flowers, fish and vegetables from one place to another. All around them rose the pine and palm trees, like supplicants stretching their arms up, up, up to the sun. When Picasso reached the old-town section of Antibes, he fearlessly steered his stalwart donkey through the jostling crowds of pedestrians. As they drew nearer the coast, Ondine could smell the salty tang of the breeze blowing in from the sea, and soon she saw the waves rushing to the shoreline.

“Look, over there,” Picasso said, pointing at a small group of fishermen and their families, led by a priest in a solemn procession down to the sea, bearing a flower-bedecked statue of the Blessed Virgin. The women on the shoreline carried small candles; the children had baskets of blossoms which they scattered on the path. At the beach, a row of seashells were filled with sand to hold lighted candles upright, marking a path down to the water's edge. The fishermen brought their statue of the Madonna right into the water, with the waves lapping against the holy figure until they reached her neck. And then the sailors hoisted her aboard a boat.

“What's it all about?” Picasso asked.

Ondine said, “They are asking the Virgin Mary and the saints to bless their boats. There is a legend that three saints who witnessed the crucifixion of Christ were chased away from the Holy Land and put out to sea to die; but miraculously their boat washed ashore in the South of France, and ever since then the saints have favored us.”

“Everyone wants to believe that God chose their land as especially holy,” Picasso commented. “Well, you know, God is really only another artist. He invented the giraffe, the elephant, and the cat. He has no real style. He just goes on trying other things.” Ondine smiled. On a day like today, she could certainly imagine God sitting up there in his studio, just like Picasso, frowning at his newest canvas.

Picasso paused, watching the procession in silence. He reminded Ondine of a man who, upon entering a church, dips his finger in the holy-water fountain and sits in a back pew to pray or think in silence. And like such a worshipper, a short time later, he responded to some interior signal that it was time to go. He flapped the reins and, turning the cart away from the festival, he drove it farther down the coast.

Presently Picasso noticed a group of young boys playing by the wall of an old castle surrounded by tumbled stones and overgrown weeds. He slowed the donkey and leaned out to ask the children, “What is this place where you play?”

“It's a secret,” one said impudently. They were local kids, barefoot and happily dirty.

“I like secrets,” Picasso replied. “But they are no fun unless you tell them to someone.”

The children sized him up, then shrugged. One of them said casually, “You can come with us, but you must be quiet.” Picasso parked at the side of the road and tied the donkey to a nearby tree.

“Come on, let's go,” he said enthusiastically. “They look like they're having much more fun than the fishermen.” Ondine, who'd grown up around kids like these, could not share his enthusiasm now.

“You go,” she said. “I think I'd better watch the cart and the donkey and my things.” She knew perfectly well what would happen to her if she returned home without that bicycle and hamper.

Picasso had already climbed down and followed the children. Ondine got out, stretched her legs and spoke soothingly to the donkey, but she did not pet him; his coat was scraggly with patches of dried mud he'd kicked up. But he seemed to like the sound of her voice, and listened intently as she kept saying things like, “Well, who knows if Picasso will ever come back? I hope those kids aren't little thieves. They didn't look so bad. Don't you think?”

Then she realized that she was spending her afternoon talking to a donkey. Her parents would never believe it, but of course, she would never tell them. In fact, she was enjoying pretending to be a farmer's wife with her donkey; so some of Picasso's whimsy had rubbed off on her.

When eventually he returned without the kids, he exclaimed, “Well, you should have come! They took me through a hole in the wall, and what a place! It's an old Roman fort. But now it's called the Château Grimaldi. They say it belonged to some medieval clan of rich cutthroats. Someone's turned it into a museum. But the castle has seen better days. Someday I'll come back here.”

Picasso climbed into the cart and continued to drive along the coast, until he reached the parking lot of another beach, a much fancier one which catered to tourists in the summertime and had a scattering of white cabanas and striped umbrellas. He pulled in, stopped, and took off his hat. So Ondine shed her shawl, too. She covered her bicycle under the tarp in the back.

“Look at all the fine autos parked here! Nobody's going to steal our things at this place,” Picasso assured her as they removed their shoes and made their way across the hot sand.

Today the beach had a smattering of visitors chattering in foreign tongues—some leftover Russians from the winter, a few hardy Germans and English, some early-bird Americans. One large French family was capering at the shoreline. A group of English young adults wore identical navy wool bathing costumes that made it hard to tell the men from the women, who were fashionably thin with short, boyish haircuts, so they all looked companionably androgynous in a Peter Pan, preadolescent way.

“I used to come here, years ago,” Picasso commented. “These people today are not the crowd I knew. The Murphys—the Dos Passos—the Hemingways and Fitzgeralds—I like Americans, but it got to be a circus. The stock market crash chased a lot of them away.”

Ondine was already feeling a trifle uneasy, for she recognized another French family camped under linden trees. Wasn't that the butcher's wife from the farmers' market, with all her kin?

Picasso pointed toward a row of brightly painted beach huts. “Do you know what a cabana is?”

“Yes, of course,” Ondine said indignantly. “It's where you go to get changed.”

He put his hand on her shoulder. “Yes,” he whispered, “you go into that dark place to
change
. Some people go in and change their minds. Some change themselves—men turn into women, and women turn into men. Some go in young and come out old. Most go in respectable and come out pagan. It's like a magician's booth. Go on, I'd like to see what you change into! Here's my bag. There surely must be some swimsuits in it.” He gave her a playful push.