Picnic in Provence (6 page)

But I was already late. The dress would have to do. I found some red lipstick and a pair of flats that didn’t pinch, kissed my boys, and ran out the door. What I didn’t have time to do before I left was eat. It was six o’clock, and somehow lunch had escaped me. In the middle of my power walk to the Métro at République, I stopped at our local
boulangerie
for a
pain au chocolat
. I knew I was breaking ranks, flouting etiquette. The French simply do not stuff their faces on the run. They do not eat on the street, on the Métro, at their desks, or anywhere, in fact, but in a restaurant or at the family table. Adults do not eat between meals; that is a privilege reserved for schoolchildren—the 4:00
goûter
. Books in the stores, trailers at the movies, and philosophers on the national radio will tell you: Anything else leads to chaos, anarchy, the decline of French culture, and the rise of obesity. Scarfing my pre-dinner pastry on the sidewalk was the culinary equivalent of waxing my legs on the downtown A train or answering my cell phone at the opera—simply not done. But the New Yorker in me had kicked in—and I couldn’t stop her. She had places to go, people to see. She was late, and she was going to multitask.

I was chomping away on my pastry, waiting impatiently to cross the avenue Parmentier, when I heard a comment aimed in my general direction.
“Attention aux kilos.”
Watch your pounds. I turned around; maybe the voice was in my head? But then I heard it again.
“Attention aux kilos.”
I looked down. There was a homeless man on the sidewalk, sitting cross-legged, like a prophet, among the empty bottles overflowing from the recycling bin.
“Attention aux kilos, madame,”
he said, wagging a finger unsteadily at my knees.

I had sinned, and now I’d been punished. The light changed, and I ran.

I had just enough pregnancy hormones left in my system that I wanted to cry. Thankfully, I had the Métro ride across Paris to collect myself. The event was in the chic eighth arrondissement, land of embassies, gleaming Haussmann apartment buildings, and boutiques selling cashmere cardigans. There were no homeless men to comment on my figure, or on anything else.

I felt relaxed as I mounted the sweeping marble staircase of the
hôtel particulier
—one of hundreds of grand private residences now transformed into mundane offices. Alexandre was snug at home with his dad drinking a bottle of breast milk. Thanks to the Star Trek–like miracle of breast pumps, it really
is
possible to be in two places at once. I found my name tag and followed the crowd into a high-ceilinged reception room with ornate plaster moldings and polished wood floors. I love meeting new people. I let myself enjoy the frisson of anticipation that accompanies a roomful of strangers.

An older woman in a trim wool jacket and a gold brooch—the welcoming committee—spotted a newcomer and came right over. She glanced at my name tag and immediately launched into small talk. “When’s the baby due?” She smiled, tilting her head to indicate what a good listener she was.

“I gave birth three weeks ago,” I croaked, doing my level best to smile in return. I took a sip of my wine and vowed to throw all Empire waists in the trash as soon as I got home.

THOUGH HE IS
not quite ready for a fork, Alexandre did start smiling this past week. Why didn’t I know that humans have to learn how to smile? The effect was electric, like watching the lights go on on top of the Empire State Building. It changes everything. He doesn’t just need me; I think he likes me. Of course, he also smiles at Mimi the musical chicken, who has orange polka-dot legs and a rattle inside her left foot. I think I could take Mimi in a fight, but for now I’m hanging back. In the immortal words of John Wayne: Never come between a man and his musical chicken.

It has been a good day—an ordinary one that somehow feels special. Gwendal is away on business, and Alexandre and I spent the afternoon browsing my favorite spice shop in the Marais and sitting under a tree in the courtyard of the Hôpital Saint-Louis, a seventeenth-century building that once housed Paris’s first wards for patients with infectious diseases. At that time, the neighborhood was still open pasture—safely outside the city walls.

I plucked the falling leaves off Alexandre’s blanket; they were already brown and crinkly, despite this past week of Indian summer warmth. On days like this, I wonder why I sometimes feel so insecure in my new role. It’s not the practical bits that worry me; I just can’t seem to figure out the proper distance to maintain. Some days Alexandre makes me feel crowded, claustrophobic; some days he makes me feel lonely in advance. Maybe it’s because he’s a boy, but I have this feeling that even though he just got here, he’s already got one foot out the door.
A son is a son till he takes a wife; a daughter’s a daughter the rest of her life.
Look who’s talking—I live three thousand miles away from my mother. But no matter how far away, I’m still hers. I’m brave in the ways she’s made me brave and scared in the ways she’s made me scared. I’ll never belong to anyone the way I belong to her. Maybe it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy, but Alexandre already feels so independent of me.

That night, I laid him down, as gently as possible, in his bed. This doesn’t always work. As often as not, he stretches and coos, then jolts himself suddenly awake, arms spread, eyes wide, as if he’s been struck by lightning.

But not tonight—tonight, when I laid him down, one arm fell instantly behind his head; the fingers flexed and released. The other arm fell more slowly, across his chest, then he gave a graceful outward wave, as if he were conducting a symphony.

I realized that, right up until the moment of his birth, all my thoughts about motherhood had been about myself: my fears, my work, my time, my body, my marriage. It was mysterious, fascinating, to discover the range of
his
feelings. That he could smile, scream, laugh, and conduct a symphony in his sleep.

T
oday we sacrificed a lamb in honor of my firstborn son. I always hoped I would have a reason to write a sentence so thoroughly biblical.

Le méchoui,
a North African lamb roast, is a long-standing tradition in my husband’s family. There was one when Gwendal was born, and one for the birth of each child since. Somewhere in the archives, there is a photo from the 1970s of my father-in-law with a waist-length beard munching—Neanderthal-style—on a leftover leg of lamb. This meal is a rite of passage, both hello and good-bye. It’s a celebration of the transition to our new life as parents, from city dwellers to
villageois.

The past year had seen as many changes as one person has a right to live through in 365 days. Alexandre was five months old when we took our first trip to New York for the book launch; I had to hold him up for his passport photo. When the book hit the stores, just before Valentine’s Day, I waited for some current of electricity that would send me a jolt whenever someone read the first line. I wasn’t sure what this day would feel like. Would I wake up in a fairy-tale ball gown—or turn into a pumpkin?

I was fortunate to get some advice on this very topic from Diane Johnson, author of
Le Divorce
and other tales of expat adventure. (I suspect she has a dark side. She is also the coauthor of the screenplay for
The Shining.
) She agreed to meet me one afternoon for macaroons at Ladurée in Saint-Germain. The interior of the tearoom resembles the drawing room of an eccentric English aristocrat—one who never quite returned from colonial service in Shanghai. The walls are painted with exotic palm fronds, and red lacquer screens cover the sign to the bathrooms. After we both poured our tea, I looked up from my Darjeeling and lemon macaroons. “So,” I began, trying not to sound too much like an eager beaver, “what did it feel like when you published your first book?” Diane leaned over the small table—her chin was not much higher than its rim—and looked me in the eye: “Don’t expect your life to change,” she said. “Not one bit. When my first book came out, I was so disappointed, I went straight to the hairdresser and said, ‘Make me a blonde!’”

I suspect my mouth was hanging open. My first thought was
My God, am I that transparent?
My second thought was
My God, what if she’s right? The next time she sees me, I might be a flaming redhead.

The fact is, I did expect this book to change my life. It was my way of staking out a little place in the world, independent of my husband, my child, my parents. Planting a flag: me, here. Even if I didn’t sell a single copy, just getting it out there made me more relaxed in my own skin. My great expectations and my real life inching toward each other—page by page.

WE ARRIVED AT
Gwendal’s godparents’ house at dusk. The fields were recently shorn of summer wheat; the hay rolled and tied in bundles neat as giant spools of thread. The
apéritif
—wherever my mother-in-law goes, champagne will follow—was served on a cracked wooden wheelbarrow in a shady corner of the garden.

Affif and Annick have been my in-laws’ best friends for forty years, back to their 1968 student days. Even now, it’s easy to imagine them at a café, hand-rolled cigarettes and beer in hand, arguing the merits of the Beatles versus Brassens.

Affif and Annick live in a stone farmhouse that has been in her family for several generations. They’ve turned the old barns into a gallery and the hayloft into a sprawling bedroom for their two daughters and pack of grandsons. They keep chickens out back. There are two tortoises, the color of fallen leaves, who roam the grounds, looking for table scraps. They eat very well. There is a kitten with one blue eye, one brown, who rubs herself up against the glass of the kitchen window each morning. Affif keeps a pair of binoculars handy, to show his grandchildren the foxes that sometimes sprint across the neighboring fields.

The next morning I rose early—but, as usual, not quite early enough. Affif had been in the kitchen since dawn, roasting peppers, peeling onions, and plunging tomatoes into boiling water to remove their fragile skins. Affif was born and raised in Algeria, and though he has been in France for thirty years, his meals are often a marriage of two cultures—a lamb tagine cooked with white wine instead of water; stuffed cabbage laced with cumin but topped with a handful of grated Gruyère. When he heard the creak of my footsteps on the wooden staircase, he looked up from his knife. His curly hair was gray and cut short now, but it must have made for quite the afro back in the day.

“
Bonjour, ma belle. S’il te plait,
will you fetch me some thyme from the garden and some bay leaves from the tree in the corner of the yard?” I saw him watch me from the window as I ran to the far end of the lawn. Even after all this time, he’s never sure his favorite city girl will come back with the right thing.

Over the past decade Affif has become a cooking mentor to me. He is an artist, and he cooks the way he paints, with the confidence of long-practiced technique and a flourish of inspiration. His “recipes,” such as they are, are not much more than a list of ingredients. I stick close to him in the kitchen as he beheads a handful of parsley, mixes olive oil with a thick dab of spicy harissa. It’s the only way. Precious bits of advice drop like pebbles that I sort and collect over time.

The side dish to the roast lamb would be a traditional stew of white beans with tomatoes and herbs. The beans had been soaking overnight in a cool corner of the kitchen. In a bowl on the counter were bunches of fresh coriander and onions stuck with cloves.

After breakfast, my mother-in-law sat down to peel a pile of carrots. Alexandre sat beside her in the highchair, trying out his new teeth by gnawing on the skinny end of a carrot. With her dancer’s posture and her gray-blond hair cascading halfway down her back, Nicole remains my paragon of French womanhood. She adjusted the sleeve of her simple black top as it slipped off her shoulder. I thought to myself, and not for the first time, that she was far too glamorous to be anybody’s grandmother. She, like most French women
d’un certain âge,
would not see the contradiction in terms.

I sat down beside her and picked up a knife. I was still doing a bit of tiptoeing around my mother-in-law. My book had had some unintended but nonetheless serious consequences.

It had begun a few months before at the dining-room table of our apartment in Paris. I had given Nicole the galleys of the book, and I was looking forward to hearing her opinion.

She began softly. Nicole is a psychoanalyst; she speaks in a calm, even tone that I imagine is very soothing to her patients. “
J’ai été choquée.
I was shocked that you used our real names.” I put down my fork, leaving a large leaf of lettuce half pinned to the plate. The French don’t cut their salad, they fold it, and this intricate origami still required some concentration on my part.

The scope of my error rose like a lump in my throat. I had read every chapter aloud to Gwendal. I showed each of my friends the passages that concerned them and asked if they would like their names changed. My own parents were so excited for me that it simply never occurred to me to ask them. Why hadn’t I asked Nicole? I suddenly felt like one of those clueless tourists who take a picture of a remote African tribesman and steal his soul. It was the faux pas of the century—a white elephant so enormous, I didn’t notice it until it sat on me. Though her English was good enough for her to read for content, I was pretty sure she hadn’t caught the tone, which was warm and affectionate. I simply never considered that she might view the book as an invasion of her privacy, a deeply wounding form of voyeurism. I just assumed that, like my own parents, she would be proud of me. My dad had a saying:
Assume
makes an
a-s-s
out of
u
and
m-e.

My mistake was cultural as well as personal. The division between public and private life in France is strict and nonnegotiable. There are laws against the paparazzi taking pictures of famous people’s children, and you won’t catch a Parisian telling his life story to a stranger on an airplane. Although French politicians now Tweet and the First Lady is an ex–model/pop star, the culture doesn’t reward the kind of confessional, Oprahesque catharsis we Americans are used to. Nicolas Sarkozy’s minister of justice had a baby out of wedlock, and no one knew (or, rather, no one was allowed to say) who the father was. Imagine Hillary Clinton or Nancy Pelosi trying to pull off something similar.

“Et la maladie de…”

Nicole didn’t even have to finish her sentence. It had been four years since my father-in-law passed away, at the age of fifty-eight, of colon cancer. I welled up with shame and self-recrimination. I should have known better.
She’s still struggling to put her life back together, and here you are describing his funeral to a bunch of strangers as part of an airy-fairy piece of entertainment. You deserve to be put in the stocks and shit on by pigeons for the rest of your life.

“Je suis désolée”
…I didn’t mean…

I started twenty phrases, each more inadequate than the last. My French vocabulary deserted me, as it often does in times of stress. There was something else I wanted to say, but couldn’t:
I lived through it too
. The book was not a senseless act of voyeurism. I didn’t lose a husband or a father, but I did lose someone I had come to love, an integral part of my new family. I also lost a profound sense of cultural innocence. Gwendal and I had been married for only six months when my father-in-law was diagnosed. I was just dipping my little toe into French life. Standing in hospital corridors, furious with doctors who spoke from on high or refused to answer our questions,
that
was the moment France became real for me, became more than a collection of cream-filled pastries and cobblestoned alleys. It was then I realized that I had given myself over to a country, a language, a professional ethos, even a health-care system that I didn’t completely understand. I was powerless, and terrified.

“Je ne comprends pas,”
Nicole continued.
“Ce n’est qu’une description de notre vie.”
It’s just a description of our life.

There’s a quote by Victor Hugo that French students learn early:
“Chateaubriand ou rien.”
Hugo decided when he was very young that he would be a famous canon-worthy author like Chateaubriand—or nothing. In other words, if you’re not going to write a masterpiece, don’t write at all. In the mythic realms of French literature, there is little acknowledgment of writing as craft—something you can practice and get better at. There is a high premium on genius, provocation, and inspiration.

To be fair, my mother-in-law wasn’t the only one who was confused. As much as I tried to explain to our French friends what I was doing, they couldn’t quite wrap their heads around the fact that I was telling a true story about something as itty-bitty as my own life. The memoir genre simply doesn’t exist in the same way in France as it does in the States.
Mémoires
in the French sense are written by former prime ministers, scientists who cure polio, and explorers who climb Everest without oxygen, not twenty-something Americans in Paris learning to whip up mayonnaise or gut their first fish. The book was hardly Tolstoy, but I hoped it had something real to say about what it meant to build a life in another culture.

I’d spent the rest of the evening stammering through an apology; there is no direct translation for
inconsiderate.
By ten o’clock I felt like a wet rag wrung out from one end to the other.

“What just happened?” I said to Gwendal after I finally closed the door behind Nicole with a thud. I felt like someone had punched me in the stomach. I was so busy apologizing for my own insensitivity that I barely had time to process her dismissal. It was the
n’est qu’une
that killed me. But it’s
just
a description of our life. With a few words, she had reduced the sum of my experiences in France (not to mention two years’ worth of meticulous writing and editing) to the level of mere secretarial work, requiring no more talent or effort from me than if I’d transcribed the conversations from a tape recorder. The evening was a slap in the face for both of us, and it left a red welt that would take some time to fade.

FOR MY FIRST
méchoui,
several years back, Affif bought the lamb from a local producer, slaughtered it, and prepared it himself. But restrictions were getting tighter on this sort of thing. So this year, he decided to order. At a quarter past nine that morning, Gwendal hurried out of the supermarket carrying something the size of a small child. (What would happen, I wonder, if one tried to order a whole lamb from my mom’s local ShopRite in Hackensack?) If we had any hope of eating before nightfall, it had to be over the fire by 10:00 a.m.

I’d never seen a whole carcass up close; I must have slept through this part last time. The dining-room table had been laid out with a pristine white cloth, an enormous sewing needle, two pairs of pliers, and a roll of wire. It looked like the equipment of a Wild West surgeon, the kind who operated with impunity on both horses and people.

Affif stuffed the stomach cavity with a mix of quartered onions, tomatoes, peppers, and whole handfuls of herbs. As the spit went in one end of the lamb and out the other, I took a deep breath (on the lamb’s behalf). The lamb’s feet were secured on either end.

“Désolée, mon petit,”
Annick apologized (to the lamb) as she approached with the needle and the wire to sew up his tummy. The final image was strangely dignified: the animal resting on a white cloth, surrounded by colorful ceramic bowls full of carrots, tomatoes, and branches of fresh bay leaves, as well as several wooden cutting boards with half-finished tasks. It looked like a Dutch still life—or a Martha Stewart snuff film. I shredded the edges of a clean rag and used a bit of wire to attach it to a long stick—a homemade basting brush. A pot with wine, butter, olive oil, salt, and a bunch of thyme followed the lamb to the fire. Affif’s rotisserie is a homemade affair, rigged with rusting bicycle gears. But hey, it turns just fine.