I WOKE LATE THE NEXT MORNING, alone in the narrow cot beneath the pitched roof, and looked out the square window at the tongue of mist covering the valley floor.
Downstairs, the open room smelled of woodsmoke. Morning light broke through the east-facing windows in long, slanting shafts. Airy cobwebs like the ghosts of old ladies trembled at the tops of the tall windows, and the yellowed newspapers used for insulation during the winters were visible at the tattered edges of the straw floor matting.
Through the open doorway I saw Claire at the kitchen table, reading a paperback. A bowl of coffee steamed in front of her. Her hair was tied loosely back and her face held pale light from the window. She smiled as I entered the room. “Good morning.”
She held up the book—La Cousine Bette. “About an old spinster who sabotages her niece’s one chance at true love,” she replied with a touch of irony. “Balzac in his romantic mode. Nice way to start off the day. Sit, and I’ll make you breakfast.”
Putting the book aside, she stood up and moved to the stove. Shirttails stuck out from beneath her red sweater and her hiking boots were streaked with fresh mud.
“Looks like you’ve already been out,” I said, sitting down at the table.
“I have, and it’s beautiful. Around here it’s still the sixteenth century.” She lit a match, turned on the gas; a low flame appeared under a saucepan of milk. “How’d you sleep?”
“Not bad.”
There was a pause.
“I had a strange dream,” I added.
“What sort of dream?”
When I hesitated she turned around and looked at me expectantly.
We were bundled in furs on a dogsled being pulled across a snow-covered tundra, I told her. She and I. We came to the coast. Not an arctic coast; more like Cape Cod. Sitting on the beach was a raft made out of planks and old tires. She wanted to take it, but I worried about our chances. She persuaded me. Soon we’d shed our furs and dragged the raft down to the water. The waves nearly swamped us. But we made it. Time passed. We were becalmed in the middle of the ocean. Not a ripple or wave or boat. Then a moment when I called her name and as she turned toward me she slipped and tumbled off the raft, disappearing beneath the water. She didn’t surface. There was nothing. Many times I called her name. Then, in seconds that were like years, I began to grieve. My grief filled the dream until it was everything—until another moment when I turned my head and she was simply there again, alive in the water, waving to me. Mute, stunned with happiness and relief, I steered the raft over to her. I was reaching down to pull her to safety when I woke up.
There, I said. My dream.
Claire turned away. She switched off the burner under the saucepan. Into a small bowl she poured the hot milk and black coffee from a hexagonal metal pot. Steam rose. She added two lumps of sugar, stirred, then passed me the bowl without a word. I had no idea what she was thinking. Was she offended? All I had told was the truth. I studied her back as she cut an inch-thick slice of bread. The saw-toothed knife cracked through the crust as if it were wood and crumbs flew halfway across the room. She slathered the bread with butter and strawberry preserves and served it to me on a plate.
Only then did she look at me. A long look, hinting at an intimate smile. And I believed she understood my dream; that she’d been listening.
She leaned back against the stove to watch me eat.
I took a bite. The thick crust gave the bread a chewy heft while the preserves made it sweet and comforting. The coffee had a dense, sobering consistency leavened by the sugar and frothy milk. I held the bowl in both hands and sipped slowly, my eyes closed, relishing the warmth running down through me, savoring the earthy sweetness.
“I like the way you close your eyes when you taste things,” she said.
I opened my eyes. She had moved and was standing with her back to the window.
Behind her daylight flooded in; the mist over the valley was gone. In the backdropped glare the subtleties of her expression were lost to me. With the bowl held before her in both hands, her face and body in silhouette, she might have been a saint painted on the wall of a village church to encourage the supplication of the devout. But the warmth of her gaze I could feel. And this perceptible difference in her today: how she looked at me without hurry, with tenderness and care.
“Everything tastes wonderful here,” I said.
She smiled. “Our secret.”
I got to my feet. My heart was stumbling over itself and my mouth was dry. The house seemed to be waiting for me to declare something more than a dream.
“Claire …”
But I never finished. Coward. I saw that her eyes had dropped to the floor—as if she knew what I wanted to say and was embarrassed for me.
“Nothing. Thanks for breakfast.”
I walked out of the room and kept going until I was outside. I tried just to breathe. To find in each breath the end of the long winter and the beginning of spring—the day just begun; the sun blocked by the house; the dew gleaming on blades of grass in the dank shade; the mushrooms as white and round as marbles; the ground holes made by snakes.
To the left of the door there was a stone bench—a slab of rock smoothed and hollowed by millennia of hard weather. Seeing it, I heard Claire’s voice in my head: la France profonde. Ancient France, true France, she’d said, earthy France, feminine and wise at heart, its spirit that of a woman so real that she has become immortal and cannot be changed by the vagaries of time.
And here, now, this bench—solid, archaic, inexplicable. Above it, climbing the house, a swath of early roses. Pale pink flowers not yet opened, petals packed tight, all desire tamped down, waiting and hoping to be born.
I heard a sound. I walked up to the gate and opened it and stepped out onto the road. From the left, about half a kilometer away, a blue truck was approaching. I watched it come. Almost an event, in a place like this. It moved slowly, puttering. I tried to remember the feeling I’d had waking just an hour before—the assured sense that simply being with her could be enough; the discipline to stop myself from wanting more. Because it was the endless wanting that would break you, I thought. The constant craving for a love that might never be fulfilled that would bring you low, bit by bit, until one day you’d no longer be able to recognize any part of yourself.
The truck had three wheels rather than four; it looked like the runtish offspring of a small pickup and a tricycle. The man driving it was somewhere between seventy and a hundred. He wore blue coveralls and a cloth cap. He did not so much as blink as he went by.
At lunch we were fine again, full of laughter. Claire teasingly recounted an adventure she’d had that morning, before I’d woken up.
“I found a dead rat.”
“A rat?”
“In the kitchen. Right here on the floor. Dead. There must’ve been some poison around. Rigor mortis had set in. The poor disgusting thing. It died with this horrible rictus grin on its mouth, showing its sharp little teeth. I took a handful of paper towels and picked it up by the tail and took it out to the terrace.”
“The terrace?”
“Why not? Rats are biodegradable, aren’t they?” By now she was barely hiding a mischievous grin. “Anyway, I swung it like a kind of bola and let go. It had good velocity on takeoff. But you know that tree? The tall one, about ten feet from the terrace? It hit that.”
“What?”
“Not the whole tree. Just a limb. And because of the rigor mortis it was pretty much frozen in the shape of a hook. So when it hit the limb, it just kind of hooked on.”
“It’s still there?”
She couldn’t help herself: she was laughing. “Want to see it?”
“Maybe later.”
After lunch, though, the rat was forgotten; there was something else. Early that morning she’d gone investigating the property and discovered that the house, built into the side of a hill, had a natural cellar—to which Claire, having rummaged through a chest of drawers in the living room, now possessed the key.
We descended the stone steps that curved around the house till we came to a wooden door.
Inside, the cellar was as cool and damp as earth—cooler, because of the massive wall of limestone. Spiders’ webs made opalescent tracks across the quavering beam of our flashlight. The floor was strewn with chunks of stone, broken chair legs, empty gas cans, an armoire door, a rusted washing tub. Claire shivered. “So much history.” In front of us a reflection gleamed: an enormous glass jug lay cracked on the ground. I took her arm and steered her around the jagged shards. Small steps, our bodies leaning imperceptibly against each other. Her hand cold but the rest of her warm. The flashlight beam illuminating one object, then another—a visual excavation, oddly stirring. The cellar a book of forgotten poems broken by time into dusty words like mementos in a trunk.
We came to the back of the underground room. Claire tilted the light up against the wall that was built into the hill. “This is what I wanted to show you.”
From floor to ceiling, its rusted, attenuated limbs like the shadowed heights of some buried toy city, rose a metal wine rack. The beam of the flashlight shone through it, casting a netlike pattern onto the rough stone behind. Only a dozen or so bottles remained. While Claire held the light I carefully extracted one, rubbing it against my corduroys to remove the dust. According to the label it was a 1964 Pomerol. In the bed underneath was a 1962 St. Estèphe, and beneath that a 1966 St. Émilion Grand Cru, and beside that a 1965 St. Julien. Around these were others without labels, home-bottled, each capped with a hood of red sealing wax that was brittle and cracked though still garishly bright, like an old prostitute’s lipsticked mouth.
One by one we carried the bottles out of the cellar and up the stairs to the house. Some of the wine would be stupendous; some of it would have turned. It hardly mattered. To us it was a major archaeological discovery. For the rest of our trip we would dine like ancient kings.
And we would stand in the barn where she took me next and stare at the dust-blackened windshield of the 1940s Ford van that in another life had been laid to rest here and never brought out again. The sediment of time had worked an embalmment: seen from outside, the vehicle, so still and resolute, gave evidence of a state of unearthly physical perfection. As did everything we encountered that afternoon: the sky passing over our heads through the holes in the three-hundred-year-old roof—eyes of celestial blue looking down on us, in shafts of mote-drenched light like stalks of dry rain; the lingering smell of animals from the dark hay-filled stalls beneath our feet, where the animals no longer were; the old tools hanging on the walls, their wooden handles worn smooth by somebody’s hands, and waiting for another’s.