The Last Time I Saw Paris (27 page)

What did you expect?
the voice said nastily.
A miraculous recovery so you could run down the road away from the storm? Too late, look what's coming your way now.

A solid sheet of rain stung her sunburned shoulders, blinding her. In an instant she was soaked. Leaning
on the twisted branch, she began to hobble down the road in the direction Dan had gone.

“I'm damned if I'm going to get burned up by lightning out here on my own,” she muttered. “Not now, not when I've found him. . . .”

Her long wet hair swung around her shoulders and rain dripped off the end of her nose. Lightning flashed dangerously close and she counted off the seconds. She had only got to three when the thunderclap sent her hobbling, terrified, even faster.

The rain had turned to hail the size of marbles. Solid lumps of ice bounced off her head and she didn't see the van's headlights until it was almost on top of her and she heard it skid.

“Madame, q'est-ce que vous voulez ici?”
a shocked voice asked.
“Viens, viens vite
…”

Blinded, she held out a trusting hand.
“Au secours, monsieur,”
she said, remembering the handy little phrase from the Berlitz guidebook: “Help me.”

“Ah, madame …”
He half lifted her across the road and pushed her into the van. Stacked behind them Lara caught a glimpse of bidets and toilets in shades of pink and green.

“Merde,”
her savior said, plus a few other fluent phrases that thankfully she did not understand as he drove slowly through the storm.

She looked at him just as he glanced at her: she, the bedraggled foreign witch-lady in soaking-wet shorts and flimsy top, one shoe off and one shoe on, and one foot purple and swollen. He, short and sharp-eyed in the bright blue overalls French workmen wore and a battered wide-brimmed hat in camouflage green.

“Touriste.”

It was a statement not a question, but she said politely,
“Oui, monsieur. Américain.”

“What were you doing out there, alone, in the storm?” he demanded, in French, of course. “And what happened to your foot?”

She tried her best to explain what had happened and that she had been walking down the road to Ménerbes, hoping to meet up with the monsieur.

“Bah,” he exclaimed, “madame was going in the wrong direction. Now we go to Ménerbes. There I will see to it that madame gets help for her poor foot,” he added more kindly. “It does not look good.”

Lara stared at the foot. It did
not
look good. In fact, it looked awful. Sighing, she stared out the windshield. The hail had changed back to rain again and the thunder was behind them. As they swung into the muddy parking lot, overlooking a sheer drop into the valley below, she saw Dan.

He spotted her, flung open the van door, and she fell into his arms. “My God, Lara, I couldn't believe I'd left you there in that storm.” Her rescuer waited politely, clutching his battered hat in one hand, scratching his bald head with the other.

“Madame needs attention for the foot, m'sieur,” he interrupted their emotional reunion. “Is bad, the foot.”

“Is bad?” Dan stared at her swollen ankle, then grabbed the man's hand and shook it heartily.

“Merci, monsieur. . . monsieur
…” He glanced at the inscription on the side of the white van:
Pierre Etienne Gamier, Equipement Sanitaire. “Merci, Monsieur Gamier. Merci
for both of us.
Un cognac, monsieur.”
He waved toward the tiny corner bar and after a few polite protests, Monsieur Gamier agreed to a small
marc,
just to take away the chill of the rain. The weather was unpredictable near the mountains, one minute sun, the next—poof—it was like a magician waved his hand and there was snow or thunder or hail.

Half carrying Lara between them, they entered the bar and were at once the center of attention. Shocked voices exclaimed in rapid Provençal patois over madame's foot, ice was brought wrapped in a clean dish towel, brandy was served, and advice offered by the bristled elders, who were the bar's habitués and who were grateful for the distraction because the storm had interrupted their usual afternoon game of
pétanque.

“Wrap the ankle tightly, madame,” someone said. “But first soak the bandage in ice water. Cold is the only thing for a sprain. In a day or two it will be as good as new.”

They smiled their thanks, and Dan ordered
marc
for everyone, and amid an
entante cordiale Internationale,
they were helped into a taxi, which would take them back to Bonnieux and their bike-rental agency, and their car.

B
ack at the Mas, Dr. Montand was sent for. He was very young and walked soundlessly across the room on thick rubber-soled shoes as if walking on air, nervous as a novice midwife at a first birth. He peered at the foot that now closely resembled morta-della from the supermarket deli section, a dark liverish pink mottled with spots of white.

He pulled an ugly piggy-pink elastic support sock over the ankle, ruining, Lara thought gloomily, any possibility of her ever appearing chic again. Then he elevated it on two pillows and proposed calamine lotion for her sunburn.

She began to enjoy all the attention. The hotel manager sent flowers to their room along with a delicate meal suitable for an invalid and a bottle of delicious local rosé wine; the maids fluttered around making sure she was comfortable; and Dan hovered anxiously, wondering if he should take her to the hospital.

With her ankle wrapped in ice bags, she slept alone in one of the twin beds Dan had requested, so he would not disturb her. She missed having him next to her. But still, somehow, it was Bill and that field of poppies she dreamed about that night.

 

When she awoke the next morning Lara knew she had to find that field. Suddenly, it had become the most
important thing in her life. She had to
know
that she had been there with Bill, that they had lain together in that field, that their hearts had once beat in rhythm, that their bodies had twined passionately around each other. She had to know that once upon a time they had really loved each other and that the past twenty-five years of her life had not been a sham.

You have the children,
the inner voice reminded her.
Josh and Minnie are not a sham, they are the fruit of your love. You don't have to see that field.
…

Oh, but I do, she told herself. I need to know it existed. That
I
existed.… I need to find myself. And she needed the Girlfriends, needed to speak to them, needed their reassurance that she was right. So while Dan was swimming she called Susie.

“Don't look for that field, Lara,” Susie told her sternly. “Forget about it. Reality is not the past, it's where you are now.
Who
you are now. What you have now.”

Reluctantly, Lara admitted Susie was right. “I won't look for the field,” she promised. But as she put down the phone she thought sadly that now she would never know whether Bill had loved her.

Dan had insisted on their spending the day lounging comfortably by the pool where she could keep her foot elevated. Lara pulled on the red bathing suit, then stared doubtfully at herself in the mirror. There had to be a payoff for eating her way through France and now it showed. She was spilling out all over. Thinking of the Riviera yet to come and all those gorgeous girls in tiny bikinis, her heart sank. Promising herself to eat nothing but fruit and maybe a small salad, she put on a more discreet white suit, wrapped a black pareo around her more ample than she liked hips, and, with Dan's help, limped out onto the terrace.

There is a quality of silence in Provence. Maybe it's the shadowing Luberon Mountains that enclose the villages and valleys, sheltering them from the noise of autoroutes and aircraft and police sirens, but stretched on her lounger by the pool, with her eyes shut, Lara could almost
hear
the silence. Occasionally, she picked up the call of a voice, miles away across the valley; heard the bleat of a goat on the foothills, the clangor of a distant church bell.

But still, she was restless, anxious to get into the car, find that secret place. She thought she knew approximately where it was. …

 

The next morning, even though her foot was still red and swollen, she insisted they travel on. She flung clothes into the suitcases with an urgency that surprised Dan, snapping them firmly shut.

“There's a little restaurant I heard about,” she said. “If we hurry, we could make it in time for lunch.” She was breaking her promise to Susie and she knew it.

 

They had been driving for an hour, circling an area that was without a sign of habitation, not even a farm, let alone a restaurant. They wound around rocky bends while Lara peered out the window as though she had lost something precious to her. How could she tell him she was looking for a dream, when she and Bill were young and life was full of promise?

And how many of those promises have been kept?
the voice asked her.
And why, if the dream were true, do you feel that life cheated you after all? Didn't it
thrust you into the background, make you dispensable? The forgotten woman. The lost woman.

“Why are we doing this, Lara?” Dan asked finally, fed up. “Why is this place so important? I don't get it.”

“It's just somewhere that I remember as being wonderful.”

His eyebrows lifted in surprise. “I didn't know you'd been there.”

“I haven't been there.” It was almost a lie and she crossed her fingers. “I just meant I remember I was told it was here somewhere. There should be a field of poppies. . . .”

They rounded yet another tight hairpin bend and Lara peered into the valley. A few poppies speckled the ground but not enough to make a carpet. It was there, that place, wasn't it? Or perhaps it was just around the corner? Oh, God, it was here somewhere. Surely she would remember; it had been the highlight of her honeymoon, of her life with Bill.

But she couldn't be sure it was the same place; she and Bill had never found the little rustic restaurant, and now she and Dan couldn't find it either.…

Now she would never know the truth.

H
er mood changed the next day, though, and she fell in love all over again in Aix. And in love with the little city that personified the heart and soul of Provence.

Double rows of plane trees cast a dappled canopy of shade over the broad sidewalk and onto the dignified flat-fronted seventeenth- and eighteenth-century town houses lining the main street, the Cours Mirabeau, topped and tailed with ornate fountains.

The remnants of the mistral blew a welcome spray over them as they strolled past the fountain where, long ago, Marie de Médicis had been carried by liveried flunkies in her sedan chair; where van Gogh had walked; where Frédéric Mistral the poet, who gave his name to the wind, had lingered in sidewalk cafes; where Cézanne and de Sade might have partaken of glasses of cloudy absinthe.

Arched, shadowy alleyways led into tiny sun-splashed cobbled squares where too many little boutiques took up too much space in the lovely stone façades of the old buildings. But there was a grace about the city, a dignity and also a joie de vivre, a joyous mingling of the well-worn old with today's youth. Multinational and multilingual, the local university students posed on brightly colored little Vespas, the girls' long hair flowing behind them in the breeze, the narrow-hipped guys with cigarettes hanging
deliberately casual from the corner of their mouths.

Walnut-skinned farmers in town for the day drank deeply of rough red wine, berets tilted rakishly over the left eye, while their wives in best black studied the shop windows, perhaps looking for another little black number much the same as the one they were wearing. Local businessmen lunched in the same cafes they had frequented every day for years, solemnly reading the daily newspaper, and schoolchildren, reprieved for the afternoon, darted among the pedestrians, tripping over their own feet and hurling insults at one another at the tops of their voices. Across the way, a fat ginger cat sunbathed on a tiny iron balcony, taking in the scene. And the crumpled, sunburned tourists in bright colors and dark glasses wrote postcards home saying “Wish you were here.”

Dan and Lara joined the throng at the Café Deux Garçons, where Lara rested her foot and sipped lemonade and wrote sunflowered postcards to the Girlfriends, while Dan downed an icy Stella Artois and people-watched—happily wasting away the day. Which, he guessed, was exactly what such a day in Provence was about.

“We're coming back here,” he said positively to Lara. She glanced up from her postcards, smiling. “Will you come with me, Lara?”

“If you ask me, I will.”

“I'm asking you now. I need a commitment.”

Lara took off the bifocals. His deep blue eyes linked with hers, shutting out the crowds, the buzz of the Vespas, the flirting students. Last night's doubts disappeared. “I promise I'll come back here with you, Dan. Someday.”

He pressed his lips to her warm cheek. How he
loved the many scents of her: her perfume, the delicate undertone of her skin, the moist scent like warm lilies under the mass of soft, dark hair at the nape of her neck, and her own delicate aroma; the special
taste
of her.

His eyes were still linked with hers, and she smiled reading his look. “We have no hotel room. We're not stopping in Aix, remember?”

“Let's stay, enjoy the magic. Enjoy each other.”

“Okay,” she joyously agreed, collecting the postcards and stuffing them in her bag. After all, didn't they have all the time in the world? At least for today.

 

The hotel Le Négre-Coste was in one of the eighteenth-century houses on the Cours Mirabeau. It was simply furnished in the old-fashioned French style and the old cage elevator creaked upward to their room under the eaves. Enchanted, they peered out the window over the tops of the plane trees. Then, closing the shutters, they sank into the “matrimonial” bed.