VI

Fig of My Imagination

I packed up the few possessions I owned in the empty boxes saved from Olivier’s care packages and took the shortest path from Stockholm to Provence, leaving only the slightest trace of my having ever passed through. I had nothing to regret, except my newest friend, Charlotte, who like myself appeared shipwrecked and had found the soft-spoken Milton, the Jamaican banker, an anchor disguised as love.

All the times I’ve changed cities and countries, I’ve left a trail of things behind—clothes and worn shoes, crumpled maps with highlighted borders to tell me concretely where I am. I keep books and music, postcards. Over the years, I’ve also kept tasting notes, menus, and jotted-down recipes, clues as to what I crave that may help me know who I am, better understand how food has the power to ground and comfort in times of disarray.

Then there are photos, life captured in a time warp. Here’s a picture of Grammy and Poppy on a sky lift one summer in the Smoky Mountains. My parents, preadoption, tanned, lingering on a white hotel balcony in Hawaii. There’s a picture of my young mother smiling, with her arms open to the world; another photo of the two of us sitting on the ledge of a stone fountain in an Asian garden. I’m an awkward, skinny orphan leaning toward the young woman for shelter, but there’s distance between us—my new mother afraid to touch me. A photo of my sister and me in Tiffany blue leotards and soft white ballet slippers, Suzy with one hand on her hip, head tilted, smiling and waving at the camera. There are two pictures my grandmother recently sent, one of me, age four, sitting in a miniature folding chair, legs crossed, concentrating on the newspaper headlines; another of me in my first pair of American running shoes. On the back in her flowing handwriting she writes: “ You never took these off in the beginning, not even to sleep.” I have the urge to call my family when I look through the photos, but the distance built up over the years is not just geographic.

I keep all these images in a black linen box that I’ve promised myself to sort out later, into a real family album so one day there will be proof that I was part of one. This is my delusion—that I can create my own history, even randomly chosen, if I believe in it enough.

Olivier is obsessed with the camera. I, too, have taken up the habit. Look, focus, click. It’s addictive, this focus, focus, click, again and again. I understand nothing about the measuring of light or film speeds, but I like this time frame, life frozen for just an instant. One of the first gifts I offered Olivier was a 1952 Leica, made the same year he was born, found in a shop in Stockholm. It took me hours of teaching, months of saving up, but it was worth it. No one, he said, tears in his eyes, had ever known what to give him.

There are so many images of our early times together. Here’s one of us on our first weekend in Paris, on the island of Saint-Louis, like the only lovers in the world. Here we are on Santorini, July 1993. Olivier photographed me from the hot black sands of Perissa as my body slipped in and out of the ancient sea. There are photos of Spanish roads and half-lit mornings in port cities. And then the images of the stone house, Olivier’s pride, called La Fare on the outskirts of the village of Pierrerue in the High Alps of Provence. We’ve got stacks of color and black-and-white prints from my first month here.

Here I am leaning against the smooth kitchen island, squeezing lemons, crushing ice with fresh flowering thyme to bring to the workers. I’m not really looking at the camera—I kept thinking of water, remembering the Aegean just a few evenings before. I had cut my left thumb and was sucking the blood so it wouldn’t turn the lemonade pink. Just in case, though, I floated a few wild strawberries into the glass pitcher. I couldn’t find any Band-Aids in the kitchen, and as I wrapped my finger in layers of thin cheesecloth, I realized that if there was an emergency, it could be a problem. I didn’t really know where anything belonged yet. It was my first attempt at making anything in Olivier’s kitchen, my second time in Provence, and our last day alone before the beginning of our new life together.

Earlier that morning, in the azure cool of the bedroom, I kept waking at different hours, each time blinking away the haze of disembodied voices and watery spaces of port cities—Stockholm, Marseille, Pusan, New Orleans. I felt for Olivier in the dark, the warmth and solidity of his body to remind me who I was and why I was there instead of anywhere else.

I remember the blood starting to soak through the cheesecloth and wanting to call to Olivier, but he was circling the house—a tiny hameau built during the French Revolution—instructing Serge, the caretaker, as his wife, Sophie, hung batches of hot white laundry to dry in the sun. Olivier and Serge were checking water filters and air vents. Olivier, in his subtle yet determined way, demands everything be perfectly restored by the end of summer. He’s ordered extra shipments of ocher powders from the nearby town of Rousillon to color-wash the walls and beechwood to build shelves for my office. The three villagers he hired from the local bistro were setting large cream stones up the walkway. They kept watching me, though, through the glass doors, as if for some sign of truth to the rumors they had heard over pastis about who I may be: l’Américaine, l’Asiatique.

They turned, tools suspended, as I walked toward them in my big black Jackie O sunglasses. I was wearing a bright white bathing suit, happy that my skin was brown from Santorini sun and trying to be cool and exotic. But as I offered them lemonade, my makeshift Band-Aid slipped off and bobbed in one of the glasses. Merci, they nodded, sincere, wiping sweat from their foreheads and taking huge gulps. They smiled, looking me up and down, but before they could say anything else, Olivier suddenly appeared and clasped my wounded hand: Viens, mon amour.

We walked past Serge, whose back was to us, but from the look on Sophie’s face, we could tell he was reprimanding her again. Sophie managed an embarrassed smile in our direction, the same one from that morning when I walked into the kitchen and saw them for the first time, speaking to each other in harsh, hushed tones. Serge introduced himself, then quickly left to buy fresh bread and croissants. They had been preparing for my arrival—Olivier always with his careful planning had sent a telefax from the island. Sophie handed me a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice. “From Flor-eed-a,” she announced proudly in English, and then went on to tell me in French that she’s part Russian, speaks some English because her father is American—a UFO specialist living isolated in Missouri. And that she and Serge ran away together to Tangiers when she was fifteen, where she aborted several times before keeping their son, Aden, and later Lenin, and now Lulu. I wondered why she told me all this my first morning here in Provence, but she did, carefully braiding her long dark blond hair while waiting for a pot of hot Yunnan to steep for Olivier before he came into the kitchen. Sophie said it all in a hurry—the thrust of words not quite matching the movement of her lips—relating a dubbed version of her life.

Sophie waved at us, and her small, callused hand in the air was like a child’s. She’s beautiful, yet flawed. Serge is her scar, her birthmark—a short man from the north with pudgy hands, a big heart, and an even bigger appetite for oily frites dipped in thick mayonnaise and lots of draft beer. Olivier waved back and tapped his watch—a sign for Serge to keep checking water pressure and pumps—and continued to lead me to the swimming pool that’s finally finished. The outdoor kitchen, however, is still under construction, so we stood among chipped tiles and ripped-opened sacks of cement, holding hands overlooking the village of Forcalquier deep in the valley. Beyond are fields of fat white asparagus and overripe cantaloupe that sweetens the air, like stewed chocolate, and makes my stomach turn.

“What’s over there again?” I asked Olivier in French, taking off the oversize glasses, pointing beyond the forest. I can’t quite situate myself on the map, never could.

“Still disoriented?” Olivier laughed and lifted my long heavy hair, bending down slightly to kiss the nape of my neck. I could feel him swell as he pressed his pelvis to my lower back.

“The Alps are that way, right?” I pointed to the far northeast. I remembered then that to the south was the Mediterranean. To the west, the Atlantic Ocean, and beyond, the family I hadn’t seen in almost two years.

“How do you feel?” he asked me in French for the third time that day, turning me around gently to face him. “I want you to feel at home. I’m giving you my office. I’ll have a desk and more shelves built. Your books will be here soon.”

I started to tell him about my dream the night before, the one I often have about the darkness and the fat rat that comes home faster than Omma does, but I am trying to be light and multicolored like the Provençal countryside and not tainted like my sleep.

Instead, I buried my head in Olivier’s chest and inhaled his odor. I remembered this smell from the first time we had met in Stockholm and loving it about him—instantly, unwittingly—the scent of the earth he comes from, this landscape of lavender and ancient olive trees, ripe citrus, and the Mediterranean Sea. I wondered, if I smelled like a country, which one it would be.

“Je veux tout t’offrir.” I want to give you everything. Olivier swept his arm across the valley as if it were his kingdom. Suddenly I wished I had my camera. Photograph Midas, the local industrialist who had recently sold his local perfume and soap industry, transforming it into a multimillion-dollar golden enterprise. But he stood there, with the goofy smile of a teenager, in his leather Jesus sandals and cutoff blue jeans, staring, almost afraid to touch me.

“Tout,” he repeated. Somehow, I thought, he’ll never realize that the everything he wants to give me will never take away the nothing that I’ve always had.

“Sit,” he told me. “We will celebrate, and then I will take you to the marché; we still have about an hour before they start packing up.” Olivier walked over to the outdoor kitchen, took out a bottle of chilled Ruinart from the refrigerator. He raised the bottle to me, about to speak, when the phone rang. He answered, and in the distance, shrugging his shoulders in apology, he watched me.

“Pas de problème,” I mouthed. I can wait. I walked over to the deep end of the pool, balancing myself along the edge. “Tout,” I said out loud, trying to pronounce it like Olivier, sweeping my arm across the kingdom. I could hear the tension rising in his voice, although he wasn’t close enough for me to hear exactly what he was saying. I glanced over at him, watched as he paced and kicked around clay tiles. His legs are strong from years of cycling the hills of Provence. I dipped my toes in the pool. The water was cool. I stretched out in the hot Provençal midday, starting to feel hungry with promises of the open market, ripe blueberries for a chilled soup I’ve been wanting to make, succulent olives, and sweet ham shaved from the bone.

The cold of the glass bottle on my neck brought me back as Olivier sat next to me at the edge of the water. He took my hand in his, examining my cut thumb. “It’s better now, but you’ll have a scar.”

“I always do,” I told him.

“I love that about you,” he whispered, sucking my thumb. “Always a trace. Like a map.” He glided his wet finger along my legs, outlining the mosquito bite marks around my ankles, and traced his finger to the ugly birthmark on my inner calf. As he leaned over to kiss it, the phone rang again. “C’est encore elle.”

He told me softly that Dominique wanted to drop off Laure a week early for the rest of the summer. She was driving back from Italy, and that was probably her calling again. He had decided that we would go and pick up Laure at her mother’s, down in the village, when they returned, in about two hours. I leaned back on the grass, gently rolling the damp bottle back and forth over my tanned stomach.

I nodded. What else could I say? He popped open the Champagne and poured two glasses. He dipped his forefinger into my glass, touched the back of each of my ears with a drop of the cold liquid, and offered a toast. Olivier winked, and I could feel everything melting, the space between my legs. I leaned back and closed my eyes, ready for him to kiss me, but he filled my mouth with a sweetness I had never known before, deeper than honey. I opened my eyes to a handful of fresh fat figs dripping with their own milk. He whispered that we would roast them with red wine, taste them with acacia blossoms he would fry and powder with fine sugar.

I looked out toward the unfinished outdoor kitchen. The air was hot and dry, with just the slightest wind. I could see the tips of the Alps far, far in the distance. I pushed the hair off my face, and the sweetness from the wild figs stuck to my fingers and lips. I licked them again, willing myself to memorize that full-mouth flavor.

FIGS ROASTED IN RED WINE WITH CREAM AND HONEY

12 to 18 fresh figs (ripe but firm)

½ (750-ml) bottle red wine

3 tablespoons honey

1 cinnamon stick

3 tablespoons sugar

2 tablespoons thick crème fraîche (or heavy cream)

Garnish: fresh mint leaves

Remove stems from figs and cut a small X in top of each. Place figs cut-side-up in an ovenproof pan. Pour wine over. Drizzle with honey. With a knife, scrape cinnamon stick over figs, and add stick to pan. Roast figs at 375 degrees for 20 to 25 minutes or until figs are tender but not falling apart. Gently remove figs, using a slotted spoon, and place on serving dishes. Place pan over medium high heat, stir in sugar, and bring wine to a boil; let cook on high heat about 7 minutes or until syrupy. Remove from heat. Stir in crème fraîche. Spoon wine and crème fraîche mixture over figs. Serve warm (or chilled). Garnish, if desired. Serves 4 to 6.

CHILLED BLUEBERRY SOUP

Add 1 or 2 teaspoons of this to a glass of Champagne or Prosecco for a sweet summer sparkler; use to top crêpes, pancakes, or ice cream; or serve for dessert in chilled espresso cups.

6 cups fresh blueberries, divided, or 2 (12-ounce) bags frozen blueberries

4 cloves

½ cup liquid honey

1 vanilla bean, scraped, or 1 cinnamon stick

1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice

3 tablespoons crème de cassis

1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar

Garnish: lemon or orange zest, crème fraîche

Rinse blueberries and place all but 1 cup in a large pot. Add cloves and stir in honey. Split vanilla bean lengthwise, scrape seeds into pot using tip of knife, and add scraped bean halves (or scrape cinnamon into pot and add stick). Add 1 cup water and stir. Bring to a boil, reduce heat, and let simmer about 10 minutes. Strain, using back of spoon to crush berries, through a fine sieve, into a bowl. Discard solids. Let soup cool. Stir in lemon juice, crème de cassis, and vinegar. Add more honey, as needed. Chill in refrigerator 4 hours and up to 2 days. Serve in chilled bowls with reserved 1 cup fresh blueberries. Garnish, if desired. Makes 3 cups.