Chapter One: Summer
“[T]he only creatures that seem to survive / Are those that give themselves away in flash and sparkle / And gay flicker of joyful life; / Those that go glittering abroad / With a bit of splendour.” - D.H. Lawrence (Self-Preservation)
Before he leaves for work, Matt wakes Annie with a light nudge on the shoulder. She slowly uncurls her body, stretches, rolls out of bed and heads to the kitchen to say goodbye only to find that he has already left. She pours herself a cup of coffee, wondering if he remembers that he won’t see her and his children for four months.
A year earlier, on their 19th wedding anniversary, they went to a Greek restaurant to celebrate but Matt brought his work, not romance, to the candlelit table. He ranted and raved about working long hours in the cold and wet on film sets with incompetent directors who did not respect his expertise. He hated his job. Annie suggested he leave. He laughed bitterly. She cried. A few glasses of wine later, he calmed and together they came up with an escape plan. They would take their three children to France for a year. In a bubble of excitement, Annie spent the next twelve months studying French, and organising their financial and home affairs so all would be taken care of in their absence. Matt spent the year working and worrying. At the last moment - too anxious about leaving his livelihood - he accepted another four month film. Annie and the children would have to cope without him.
After a second coffee, Annie scrambles about throwing last minute items into suitcases before waking her three children. By the time the taxi arrives to drive them to the airport, the house is littered from one end to the other with surplus clothes, books, toys and toiletries that cannot be squeezed into their carryons. Matt will be upset, she knows, when he returns that evening to find himself surrounded by the debris. For the first time, she doesn’t give a sweet fuck. There is nothing like illness, death, and a plane to catch, to put things into perspective.
Yesterday, she nursed a friend through an anxiety attack, too anxious herself to administer real sympathy. In the afternoon, she said goodbye to another friend whose disease will literally choke her to death before Annie returns. In the evening, she and the children met friends for a last supper. They left early to pack but it was well after midnight before Annie climbed into bed beside a snoring Matt. She had hoped they would make love their last night together but as she watched his chest rise and fall, she couldn’t wake him. How could she disturb a man who insists he needs ten solid hours of sleep? She burrowed her head into the pillow willing sleep to come but it refused. Rolling onto her back, her eyes alit on Klimt’s Danae, framed in gold, illuminated by the moon. She had bought the print to celebrate her freedom the first time that she left Matt. During long lonely evenings, she talked to the ancient goddess, mother of Perseus. Over time, her words became a silent chant:
Danae, you lie in defenceless sleep upon Byzantine silk, your body curled into itself, one breast exposed to the world. Does your white flesh speak of your virginity? Have you always been chaste or are you a virgin in the ancient sense of the word? The latter, I think. Your siren red hair, one leg provocatively raised, and the gold, which pours from your core, do not suggest innocence. After being imprisoned by your father so no man could plant his seed in your lush flesh, were you also ambivalent about men?
Annie rolled onto her side and stared at her husband so peaceful in sleep. She wanted to snuggle into his warmth, rub her nose in the soft fleece of his chest so she could carry his scent with her. In the twenty years that they'd been married, they had never been apart for more than two months. How would she endure four? How would he?. Sometimes she wishes she could climb into his head so she would know better how to love him. She closed her eyes and drifted to sleep.
Driving through the southern French countryside, past fields of sunflowers and vineyards, Annie feels the same sense of freedom that she felt when she first got her driver’s license. She would drive for hours pretending, like Walter Mitty, that she was on various missions of vital importance to the nation before returning to Matt and their small, one-bedroom apartment: her world expanded behind the wheel of the car. Twenty years later, she is once again behind a steering wheel on a mission but this one is playing in real time. Joseph her eleven year old is sitting in the front seat beside her, studying a map and calling out directions. Edward her eight year old is tormenting his four year old sister Camille in the back seat.
“Hush, hush, you two. We’re almost there.”
They round a bend, and catch their first glimpse of the medieval village of Montague that will be their home for a year. Annie pulls over to the side of the road. Four blond heads and four sets of green eyes tilt upwards. Perched high on a hill, the village looks like a castle in Malory’s King Arthur. Annie has never seen anything so old and beautiful. She drives the steep ascent to the town proper but when she peers through the narrow entrance and sees even narrower twisting roads beyond it, she parks outside beside the thick stone wall. From this perspective, the summer gardens, farmlands, and vineyards that surround the town look like undulating waves on a green ocean. She turns around and around until she is giddy. The town becomes a Cezanne. The landscape a Monet. Laughing, she observes her children also spinning with excitement. Grasping Camille’s hand, she leads the way through the arched entrance, along cobble-stoned streets toward the church: “Look upwards, find the steeple, walk toward it,” was the landlord’s instructions. “The house with the green shutters is yours.”
As each week passes, she and the children grow more native. Every morning they devour bowls of steamy milked coffee or hot chocolate, accompanied with a warm crusty baguette or croissant fresh from the patisserie’s oven, a few seconds around the corner from their house. They no longer run to the window morning and night to watch the six mooing defecating cows clomp by, followed by a poker-faced farmer staff in hand. Similarly, they no longer give notice to the green tractor with trailer, the town’s garbage truck, rumbling down the cobblestoned street twice a week, pausing in front of each house to toss green-bagged garbage into the trailer.
For the first few weeks, they visited neighbouring villages but the sightseeing was short-lived as the days were hot and the children bored easily. Annie found the happiest solution for all was to go to a nearby lake with two lifeguards, paddle-boats, a waterslide, sandy beach and snack bar that sold french fries, cold drinks and ice-cream confections and kept her children entertained while she sat and read.
One steamy hot morning, towards the end of summer, Annie opens the door to a tall good-looking stranger. He leans forward and kisses her on both cheeks, gently brushing her lips with his as he changes sides. She is taken aback and before she recovers, he repeats this gesture and then explains this is the greeting in the north of France, in the south two kisses suffice.
“Oui?” Annie stammers. “Peux-je vous assister?”
He excuses himself and explains that he is a friend of her landlord who asked him to help her with her French.
He returns the next day and the next - the second time with two young boys, his sons, she presumes - greeting her with the same four kisses that continue to startle her with their intimacy. Their conversations are a mix of French, English, and hand gesture. Although Annie's French has improved, she still finds the rearrangement of verbs and adjectives, when spoken, difficult to decipher. She does understand when he asks if she and the children would like to join his family for a swim at a nude beach. She thanks him but says that her sons would never agree. She doesn’t voice that the idea of appearing naked in front of her boys let alone strangers would embarrass her.
He does not return for a week and just when Annie thinks she has seen the last of him, he reappears at her door, a bicycle at his side. He leans forward, gives his four kisses and stands grinning, red-faced, sweat dripping from his forehead, wet spots showing under his arms. She invites him into the cool interior, offers him a chair in the dining area, and goes to the kitchen to fetch him a glass of water. Returning, she sits facing him.
While the Frenchman talks, she gives her usual smile and nods, trying hard to decipher what he is telling her. After a while, she wearies of the effort and simply observes him. He looks more like a schoolboy with his unruly chestnut-coloured hair, poly shorts and t-shirt than an academic who teaches mathematics at a northern university. He has cycled, he tells her, from his summer home below the village. His body, soaked in sweat, smells pungent like boys in high school after gym class. She finds herself breathing him in. He leans closer. His brown eyes are so close to her face that she feels herself being drawn into them and then catches her reflection, eyes glazed like a love-sick teenager. She pulls back quickly in an effort to reclaim herself.
“Comprends?”
She has no idea what he’s been saying and asks him to repeat himself. As his family is leaving the next day for their home outside Paris, he explains, he hopes Annie and her children will join them tonight for dinner: this will be her last chance to study French with him. Although she accepts the invitation, she feels uneasy: she is awkward enough in a social setting when all speak a common language. The Frenchman quickly draws a map with arrows to his hamlet and scrawls “19:00 heures” on top, to make sure she understands place and time.
As the dinner hour approaches, she pours a bath for the children, lays out clean clothes and leaves them to ready themselves while she quickly showers and spends too long ironing a skirt and blouse, not knowing that before the night is over, she will be exchanging her white linen for a colourful ensemble from his wife’s wardrobe.
She finds the hamlet easily and after parking the car, walks carefully on the stone-splattered dirt driveway - the children following - towards an ancient stone cottage with peeling blue shutters. A tall woman leans or rather poses against the doorframe, rolling a black olive between scarlet lips. A thin white halter barely covers her nipples, and a tiny cream-coloured bikini, trimmed down the middle with imitation leopard skin, scarcely covers the rest of her sun-gold flesh. The statuesque figure moves towards Annie, eying her, as if measuring her worth as an opponent. When she is a breath away, she pauses, leans down, and rouges Annie's pale cheeks with her red mouth. Without a word, she turns back toward the door and calls for her husband. Several minutes later, he ambles out the door, his sons behind him. In one hand, he holds a bottle of bubbly wine, and motions for her to sit under an arbour of grape vines at a crude wooden table in their front garden. His eldest boy asks his papa for permission to take her children next door to play in a neighbour’s yard. He gives his consent and, as the children disappear, he catches her worried look and reassures her that the older couple adore enfants and will guard them well.
While admonishing her for arriving on time - a French guest always arrives half an hour late - he un-twirls the wire on top of the bottle. A split second later, the cork explodes, hitting her chest, followed by a gushing stream of foam. She is so taken aback, she can’t move. Similarly the Frenchman, staring at her chest, appears frozen until her front has absorbed most of the liquid in the bottle. Shaking his head, he apologizes, reaches for her hand and pulls her towards the house, through the messy kitchen where his wife is stirring some red concoction on the stove, and up a dark staircase to a bedroom.
Annie doesn’t know if it is her imagination but she smells sex. She tries not to stare at the tangled sheets and rumpled bed cover that are duplicated in a mirror on the far wall. She glues herself to the door frame - wet clothes adding to her discomfort - while the Frenchman goes directly to the wardrobe beside the mirror, flings open the door, and begins rifling through his wife’s clothes. He stops at a multi-coloured skirt with elastic waist and red blouse with plunging neckline. Holding them up, he eyes Annie and then hands them to her saying that they will fit. When she looks doubtful, he tells her that any French man can look at a woman and know her measurements. He stands quietly waiting as if expecting her to strip in front of him. Feeling awkward, she too stands silent waiting for him to leave. After several minutes, he moves around the bed, takes her elbow and leads her down the hall to the bathroom.
Not sure whether she looks like a gypsy or whore, she tugs the back of the blouse to show less cleavage, hangs her clothes to dry and descends the stairs, past the wife who ignores her, and back to the picnic table where her host is barbecuing meat over short logs, on an ancient stone oven. He looks up, nods as if in approval at her new look, pours the rest of the bubbly into her glass and, forgetting her poor grasp of his language, goes off on a diatribe about someone or something.
When the children return, followed by his Amazonian wife carrying a tray of baked potatoes and a bowl of ratatouille, the youngsters rush to the far end of the table. The French boys, Annie sees, immediately take the napkins from beside their plates and place them on their laps, while her three ignore theirs. The wife, with a nod toward them, mutters that this shows the lack of manners of North American children.
Speaking of manners, she turns her back on Annie and engages her husband in a lengthy conversation. For a time, Annie sits quietly, guzzling her wine but, in a moment of exasperation, she mentions the plaque in the central square of Montague with the inscription noting that Simone de Beauvoir and Jean Paul Sartre visited on a rainy day. This excited her as Beauvoir had changed the way she looks at the world. The couple stare at her and burst out laughing. She looks from one to the other, wondering what is so funny. The wife explains that Annie is brave attempting to discuss a French intellectual with two French intellectuals. She can imagine her mother saying “those two think a lot of themselves”.
She drinks well that evening: she always does when she feels socially inept or when a host refills her glass without asking. Usually Matt gives her the nod when she’s had one too many; but he is on another continent and she must govern herself. Wisely, she switches to water as the evening winds down, knowing she must be sober enough to change into her own clothes and, more importantly, to drive her children safely up the hill home.
Later when they are safely tucked in their beds, she pours herself a glass of armagnac and sits outside on the low steps, under a brilliant starry sky, thinking about the curious couple.