During our first week in Aubais, I took the kids to the boulangerie to buy breakfast. At that time of day, the village was swarming with old women doing the daily shopping. Baskets in hand, they walked to the boulangerie to buy fresh bread. They stopped by the pharmacy to fill their prescriptions. They stopped by the épicerie for eggs. They passed by the tabac to buy a Midi Libre and—if they were not widowed, which I later learned most of them were—a pack of cigarettes for their husbands. Then they formed a tight circle on the corner and traded gossip, clucking their tongues and pursing their lips in disapproval of some new scandal, because in the village there was always some new scandal to keep the old women talking.
When I walked by, a wicker basket on my arm, the old women’s voices fell quiet. My children trailed behind me, talking and laughing in what I would later think of as our “American voices,” those loud and boisterous voices that we used back home. Our English was a magnet that drew the gaze of everyone we met, but we would have been conspicuous even without saying a word: Our clothes were bright and casual, our shoes—the kids’ orange and pink Crocs and my flip-flops—so out of the realm of the village fashion code of neutral colors and sensible leather shoes that there was an air of the circus about us. There were tourists in the village every summer, and the locals were accustomed to seeing lost foreigners in July or August, but it was May. We were off-season.
Bonjour, madame, the old women said as we passed.
Bonjour, I replied, straightening my dress, self-conscious. How different these tough, stout women were from the women in Paris, with their trendy clothes and high heels, their scarves and leather bags. The village women were as gnarled and sturdy as roots, skin gone nutmeg from the sun—beautiful, earthy women. They looked at me a moment too long, their curiosity evident, before turning back into their tight circle.
Later, after living there for some time, I would recognize many of the villagers. There was the gendarme whom some of the villagers called “Robocop” because of his flat, inexpressive manner and his ability to deflect human interaction with a single blank stare. Bonjour, I would say to Robocop when we walked past, and he would look into the distance with a profound emptiness, the kind of unknowing beatitude I associated with a holy man meditating in a cave. Then there was Pépé the wealthiest landowner in the village, a round, jolly man who owned the bulls in the field at the bottom of the hill and the only bar in town. Pepe spoke with an accent so strong, so inflected with the regional twang, that I never, even when my French had become good, understood him. Then there was Axel, who sold black truffles door-to-door. He would bring the truffles to our door, a scale under his arm to weigh out the hard black nuggets, each one encrusted with dirt like a diamond pried from a mine. He would take a blade from his pocket, slice into the edge of the truffle, exposing white veins swirling through the black matter like so many arteries in a brain, leaving the kitchen with a strong earthy scent. There were Lord and Lulu, an English couple who lived in a crumbling maison de maître near the château. Lord had come to Aubais to write his memoirs, a goal he pursued when he wasn’t dancing and drinking and talking horses with the locals. In his gentleman’s tweeds, he limped through the village, chatting in broken French with whoever would listen, and many people did: Lord was infamous in Aubais, celebrated as a true English Eccentric, a category of foreigner the French adore. Then there was Jett, who became one of my closest friends during my time in France, a hard-drinking, free-spirited, middle-aged Irish expatriate who made large abstract sculptures and did various odd jobs on the side to survive. A large woman with black hair and black eyes, she wore loose dresses and had an easiness in her movements that made her seem as if she’d been everywhere and done everything. We met Jett shortly after we arrived in the village, and she gave me all the basic information about France—the best markets, restaurants, doctors, wine, walks. Jett had lived in the area for over a decade and knew the secrets the locals guarded.
But during those first months in the village, we knew absolutely no one. We were free-floating, without friends, unable to communicate even the most basic information about ourselves. And yet somehow none of that mattered much to me. I was so caught up in the dream of our new life that I didn’t care that we were outsiders. The church bells that chimed at the hour, the smell of baking bread in the morning, the geckos climbing the chalky limestone walls of the village houses, the old women gossiping in the street. I was exactly where I wanted to be: far, very far, from the real world.
The boulangerie shelves were stacked with fresh croissants, pain au chocolat, pain aux raisins, and ten kinds of bread—ficelles, baguettes, pain de campagne, pain au lin. There were marzipan confections, local wine, local jams, local everything. This wasn’t the cult of “local” and “organic” that could be found in expensive American groceries—this was the real thing. Nothing had been packaged and shipped from China, because there was simply no need. It was all made there, near the village. This was the simple life, where choices were narrowed down to the essentials.
Alex stood before a glass case filled with pastries. He was small for nine, delicate-boned as bird, with thick hair that fell in curls over his large brown eyes. Putting my hand on his back, I gave him a weighty look, a look that said, I know this sucks, but give it a shot. Alex looked at me, doubtful. He didn’t understand a word of French, and I didn’t understand much myself, but I wanted him to try to communicate in some small way. I was throwing him in at the deep end. I was watching to see if he could swim.
Bonjour, said the woman behind the counter, deeply tanned with spiked, bleached-blond hair and a spate of earrings. She looked at me and then at my son, a flicker of interest crossing her features. She’d seen us before, or rather she’d seen people like us before: bright-eyed, confused foreigners desperate for direction.
Alex pointed to a pastry glistening with a sugar glaze, something that looked similar to the apple fritters we bought at bakeries back in the United States.
“Chausson aux pommes?” the woman asked.
“Chausson aux pommes,” Alex replied, his tongue twisting around the new sounds.
Chausson aux pommes meant, I later learned, apple slipper, a pastry stocking stuffed with apples, cinnamon, and sugar. But at that moment I heard a mishmash of sounds whose closest aural equivalent was “Jones’n’ for some.”
Alex nodded, his eyes glistening. Jones’n’ for some. That’s exactly what he wanted, my American son, the biggest and the sweetest thing in the pastry shop.
The woman behind the counter reached for this treasure, and I raised my hand, stopping her. I squeezed Alex’s arm and nudged him. A look of uncertainty filled his face. We’d discussed it earlier. He was going to speak French. He was going to use the phrase j’aimerais—I would like—or, at the very least, s’il vous plaît. He would be going to the village school in the fall, where there would be no English spoken at all. He needed to start somewhere. I decided to be tough on him: no French, no pastry.
Shifting her weight, the woman glanced from me to Alex, uncertain. Her look seemed to say, What kind of people are these anyway, performing Pavlovian experiments on hungry children at nine in the morning? Did she want to be part of this experimental educational moment? No, she did not.
“Go on,” I said, touching Alex’s shoulder.
“J’aimerais . . . un” Alex stammered, and pointed to the glass case, using the words we’d practiced that morning, taken from our French phrasebook. He was the type of child who could get straight A’s without trying, who read novels in a single sitting, who memorized the fifty states and their capitals in fifteen minutes. He could speak three words of French if he tried.
“Try again,” I said.
“Je voudrais Jones’n’ for some, ” he said.
The woman raised an eyebrow at me—That good enough for you, lady?—and I smiled, satisfied, as she handed over Alex’s breakfast. Nico looked on, taking everything in, smiling from ear to ear, sharing Alex’s victory. At six, Nico was ready for anything. She ordered a pain au chocolat without hesitating, breaking out with “Je voudrais that one right there, the chocolate one!”
The rest of the order—two croissants, one for me and one for Nikolai, who had stayed back at the house—was conducted in a spirit of relief, with mangled sounds and quick, desperate gestures, an excruciating lexicon that I would cobble together to get me through moments of cultural and linguistic confusion. But for the moment I didn’t care if I sounded like an idiot. I was thrilled to be there, happy that Alex and Nico had triumphed. Even the woman behind the counter was smiling.
I used the same piecemeal system to buy vegetables at a stand across the street. There was a plank table set up opposite the tabac with lettuce, red onions, haricots verts, melons the size of ostrich eggs. The table was loaded with tomatoes so fragrant I could smell them as I approached, grapes piled high in wooden wine crates, homemade confiture and tapenade. I bought three kinds of lettuce, a kilo of cherries, and basil. The old woman working the stand was preeminently practical, ignoring my awkward attempts at communication as she dropped items onto the scale, weighing them and sliding them into a paper sack in one sweeping gesture. She wrote down the weights and the prices and showed them to me, to be certain I understood.
With our haul of fruit, the kids and I followed the curvature of the road down, descending past the bulls and following the stream around the base of the hill. In the heat of the summer, the stream was a moat without depth, so shallow and clear that rocks snagged the surface. Alex and Nico wanted to watch the bulls, and so I walked to the laverie alone. Long and narrow, it straddled the stream. When it was in use, the water flowed in clean, filling stone basins, and swept out the other side, soiled. I walked into the cool, shadowy interior of the laverie, taking a reprieve from the heat.
Once a meeting place for women—perhaps even the old women who met every morning on the corner to gossip—the laverie was all but abandoned now, a picturesque relic of another era, when women spent hours washing their sheets and tablecloths and undergarments by hand, soaping their children’s clothes with savon from Marseille before hanging them out to dry in the sun. It was a female space, a place where women blistered their hands and traded stories of sons dead to war, daughters lost to marriage, husbands gone off to work or to womanize. I was a person of modern appliances, and yet that space felt deeply comfortable to me. I peered over the edge, trying to see to the bottom of the basin. The water ran clear. I could see the glint of euro coins at the bottom, gleaming. Hoisting myself up, I climbed onto the edge, dug into my pocket for a coin, and dropped it in the water. Make a wish. I closed my eyes. There was one thing I wanted more than anything else: to find love in France.
I edged closer and closer to the water, daring gravity to take me.
Suddenly I was a little girl again, ready to jump into a deep country pond. I grew up in a wilderness of fields and forests. I would tie a bandanna around my head, tell myself that I was a warrior, and hike out beyond the cow fields into the hot, clover-heavy hills. I’d tromp through the woods looking for snakes, badgers, skunk, always seeking that sharp, poisonous thing that would transform the journey into an adventure. Victory was making it up to the top of the hill without stopping; victory was climbing into the trees without a scratch. My parents had bought the land cheap, built a house and paved a road, and I believed that the pure, unpeopled countryside was all mine. Our land seemed endless to me, a natural barrier of greenery, and while I loved getting lost in the wilderness, I was aware that I was only one step away from a rattler. When my parents divorced and our family split apart, all my premonitions were made plain: Eden cannot exist without the snake.
MY MOTHER OWNED a long, narrow cedar trunk that looked to me, when I was small, like a coffin. It sat at the end of her bed, piled with quilts. If the quilts were spread over a bed, I would see flowered panels carved into the wood of the trunk. A small copper lock, cool as a wasp, secured my mother’s box from the destructive forces of curious children like me.
Eventually I found a way to open the trunk, but when I saw the contents, I couldn’t understand why my mother had locked it up to begin with. It was filled with the most mundane things imaginable: a stack of white embroidered napkins; china cups and plates with silver at the edges; a cut-crystal candy bowl; an album that contained mementos of me, my sister, and my brother—locks of hair, scraps of baby blankets, inked baby footprints. The air was musty inside the trunk, and the contents bored me. I’d expected to find real treasures—bars of gold, a jeweled chalice, or at least a Barbie or two—hidden among the tissue paper. Disappointed, I closed the lid and left it alone.
The next time I paid attention to my mother’s wooden trunk was an evening in December, many years later, when I was twenty years old and back home from college. It was dark outside, and snow had fallen in drifts over the driveway. My mother and I were wrapping Christmas presents together in her bedroom, and she opened the wooden trunk, looking for some special ribbon she’d tucked away. I recognized the smell of cedar and dust, scents I hadn’t known how to name as a child. Now I could identify the climbing flowers—they were lilies—and I understood that the trunk didn’t resemble a coffin at all. Looking inside as an adult, I saw that the contents had changed—instead of linens and china cups, there were stacks of report cards, my brother’s high-school letter jacket, a trophy my sister had won playing basketball, a watercolor I’d painted in eleventh grade, every one of our school portraits from kindergarten through graduation preserved in slips of plastic. Every moment of glory her kids had experienced, she’d stashed away in the trunk.
“Where did you get this?” I asked her, running a finger over the varnished edge. “You’ve had it forever.”
“Haven’t I told you about my hope chest before?” she asked.
I must have made a strange face—the kind of face a young woman makes at her mother when the subject wavers toward certain subjects. “Hope chest?” I asked. “Hope for what?”
“You know,” she said, her face turning slightly pink, as if she anticipated my criticism before it came. “Marriage. Kids. Life.”
I gave her a look that said, You’ve got to be kidding.
“Well, these kinds of things were much more common when I was young!” Mom said, ready to defend herself from me, something she had to do with some frequency. I was always looking to define myself against her, always searching for the ways that we were different, turning her into a mirror I could fracture, even if it cut us both in the smash-up.
Mom said, “I worked at the Elite candy shop making caramels on the weekends and saved up for it. After I’d bought it, I filled it with all the things I wanted to have when I was married—pretty sheets and tablecloths, that kind of thing. I bought the china dishes piece by piece—a cup here, a saucer there—until I had the entire set. It’s a shame. The pattern was discontinued. If I break something, I can’t replace it.” She met my eye. “Don’t look at me that way, young lady!”
“It’s like you grew up in Victorian England,” I said, thinking myself free of my mother’s preconceptions about what it meant to be a woman, free of the need to “hope” for anything, let alone a husband.
“It wasn’t so long ago that girls did things like that,” she replied, closing the lid of the hope chest softly. There was a hint of sadness in her voice, a subtle acknowledgment that the hopes of her younger self and the realities of love were two very different things. “If you were born in the fifties, you might have had a hope chest, too.”
It wasn’t until later that I understood that I did, in fact, have a hope chest of my own. Not of wood, not locked up and hidden under stacks of quilts, but a hope chest nonetheless, one filled with dreams about my life. I believed in romance and destiny. I believed in love at first sight. I believed that when I found the right person, time would stop and we would be suspended in a state of endless passion. There was no place in my hope chest for disappointment or failure. There was no place for imperfection or broken promises or compromise. And while my hope-chest ideas might have had all the trappings of a good romance, they didn’t have the capacity to hold real love.
ON LONG, HOT August afternoons, the village closed down for a siesta. From two to four o’clock each day, the pharmacy and the boulangerie and the tabac locked their doors. The streets were silent, as if the whole village were holding its breath, waiting for the blazing sun to pass by. That first summer we lived in the village, my wired American self couldn’t quite sync with the rhythm of the south of France. I would gather up my packages and walk to the post office after lunch, only to find the door locked. I’d look across the plaza at Le Bar de la Renaissance and find all the tables empty. Aubais was a ghost town, baking in the heat. With time, I understood that there was no sense in staying awake during the afternoon, and I began to take a nap after lunch, stripping down to panties and a tank top and crawling between the cool cotton sheets.
At first I would toss and turn, thinking of all the things I should be doing, making mental lists, the electricity in my mind unstoppable. I hadn’t taken naps since I was five years old, and I remembered how desperately I’d fought against them back then. I’d always resisted the slow dissolve of my consciousness in the murky solution of dreams. I would lie in bed, close my eyes, and soon my mind would begin to drift.
I never slept peacefully. It felt as though I lay suspended between two worlds. If I dreamed, my mind filled with strange, amorphous terrors. Murder and torture and missing limbs. Iron maidens and Judas cradles and racks. I hadn’t had dreams like these before, and I wondered if they were inspired by the books I was reading about the Knights Templar, and their gruesome end. I began to understand that these phantoms arose from the depths of the house, lifting through the stone floors, seeping into my mind like a noxious gas. I dreamed of rats scurrying through dark dungeons and children trapped in towers. I felt the Knights Templar crawling below me, scratching their way through secret tunnels. I dreamed of Nazis sleeping in the corridors and resistance fighters trapped in oubliettes bored into the rock. I dreamed of the previous owner’s wife, who—I learned after we moved into La Commanderie—had died of cancer in the house. She was waiting for me at the bottom of the steep stone stairway, her arms open wide.
But one dream in particular haunted me, a recurrent dream in which a baby—not my child, but someone’s child—had wandered onto the roof of La Commanderie and was walking timorously over the clay tiles toward the edge. As the child came closer and closer to the ledge, I tried to reach it, to save it, but the end was always the same: No matter how I tried, the baby fell. I was powerless. I could never stop its inexorable, gravity-bound end. I came to see the baby as my family, and the feeling of helplessness—the wrenching horror I felt as the baby stumbled toward its death—my fear of losing what I most loved.
I would wake in a panic, my heart racing, my body trembling, a scream balled in my throat like a wet sock. I was thankful to come back to the real world, to my world, where nothing terrible had happened, where there was nothing to be afraid of. Where harm was just a figment of the mind.
IT WASN’T LONG after we moved into La Commanderie that Nikolai started wearing all black—black jeans, black T-shirt, black socks, black shoes. He found a black top hat in a junk shop in Lunel and started wearing it around the courtyard. He was so monochromatic that sometimes when he sat in the courtyard playing chess, it seemed to me that he’d materialized from the shade of our micocoulier, the majestic hackberry tree that loomed overhead. In the summer it dropped a minefield of berries over the courtyard. Walking barefoot, I would pop purple juice over the hot flagstones, staining my feet wine-dark. In the fall it shed its dry, yellow leaves and Alex and Nico would rake them into a pile, covering Fly and watching him shake himself free.
Some nights we spent hours under the tree, sitting around the long wooden table with friends, eating, talking, drinking wine, arguing about whatever was in the news. The people we invited for dinner were never from Aubais, and rarely from the Midi. They were all foreigners like us: expats from Australia or England or Belgium, Americans on holiday for a few weeks, French couples who had moved south from Paris for the weather. Several times a month, we formed a collective of happy outcasts gathered around a country feast, our wineglasses sweating in the heat, plates of sliced tomatoes and olives before us, the star-filled sky expanding overhead. The micocoulier’s branches spread at just the right angle to hang a plastic chandelier, and so we rigged one up, leaving a watery glow to fall gently from above, twinkling over the linen napkins, making patterns on the Provençal tablecloth. The food and wine and conversation acted as a fixing agent and some nights it felt like time had stopped. On those nights we lived in an eternal present. The cooling air, with its smell of wet chalk and rosemary, would never blow through to morning.
But alone in our courtyard, time barreled ahead. Shaded from the afternoon sun, we sat together, drinking glasses of Perrier with ice and lime. Bottled at the source in Vergèze just ten minutes from us, Perrier was the local water, and we drank it by the caseload. Every once in a while, Nikolai would wander into the house, where he would sit down at the Yamaha baby grand and play a piece of something that had been going through his head. The piano was my gift to him, bought with money from the sale of my novel, and I was rewarded daily with short interludes of music. Nikolai played for a minute or two before returning to the chessboard. The music had cleared his mind. He was ready to make his next move.
When Nikolai played chess, everything else faded. He noticed nothing in the courtyard, not Fly as he terrorized the cats, not me pulling up a chair to sit by his side. In the dreamspace of the match, only the chess pieces existed, only the strategy. He could go on for hours, setting up openings and endings, mapping the middle game, sipping coffee as he planned his victories. He played speed chess on his phone when he needed to relax and live chess matches on the Internet on his laptop, locking himself away in his office for hours at a time only to emerge red-eyed, hungry, jumpy with adrenaline.
I didn’t play chess, or any other game that involved abstract victories. For me, writing was a high-stakes game I waged every time I sat at my desk. I didn’t feel triumph in complicated openings and endgames, but in the weight of just-written pages in my hands. I craved tangible rewards, quantifiable proof of my effort. This is how I was raised, the practical midwesterner who needed to hold the result of her labor, to capture it like a butterfly between plates of glass, lift it to the sunlight to marvel at the color of imagination made solid.
Glancing at Nikolai’s chessboard, I saw a rook and a knight and a queen. I saw the bishop, and I saw the pawns. The cast was there, each character in position. I watched my husband pick up the black king and roll it between his fingers. He tipped the piece in his hand, considering his options, and then, with a decisive gesture, pinned the white queen. A look of surprise passed over his features, as if the move startled him, as if he hadn’t predicted the elegance of the play. The white queen was trapped between the black king and a small but very significant pawn. Something in my mind grew alert as I watched him, as if the move were meant to warn me: Beware, in the labyrinth it is easy to lose one’s way.