Provence
A Mas in the Luberon
The First Lunch
A man can forget, in the cities where he works, that the afternoon is a room he is allowed to enter.
The mas sat on a slope above Bonnieux, a low stone house the color of bread crust, blue shutters faded to the shade of a sky that has been looked at too long. A swimming pool in the garden. An olive tree older than the plumbing. A terrace of irregular stones, warm underfoot before noon and hot by one, looking out across a valley of vines and lavender and the pale green geometry of the early summer fields. The owner had left us a bottle of rosé in a bucket of ice, a loaf from the baker in the village, and a note in French so brief it read like a benediction. Bienvenue. La clef est sous le pot.
She was in a sundress the color of butter, bare feet on the stone, hair loose in the heat. No bracelet. No earrings. She had decided, on the drive from Marseille, that she was going to wear as little as the village would allow.
I had done the same, in my fashion.
The linen jacket was charcoal, unlined, cut loose. My tailor in Bangkok had made it for summers like this one, shaped only where the shoulder asked for shape. The shirt was cream. The trousers were the color of pale sand. Everything was cut to me. None of it was cut to argue. I had left the Hong Kong wool in the closet in the city the way a man leaves a tie at the door of a country he has come to for the specific purpose of not wearing it. I was dressing down. She had noticed on the first morning and had said nothing, which was how she always said the thing loudest.
The table on the terrace was old walnut, the edge worn smooth by other people’s elbows across other people’s summers. She set down a board with charcuterie from the market at Apt, a small pile of olives, a ripe cavaillon melon split open, the orange flesh so deep in color it looked less grown than painted. Tomatoes the size of her fist, salted and drizzled with oil so green it carried the taste of the grass the tree had grown in. Bread torn, not cut.
“Pour,” she said.
The rosé came out of the bottle the exact color of the inside of a grapefruit. I poured two glasses and set the bottle back in the ice and sat across from her, and for the first time in longer than I wanted to count the hours of, I was not going anywhere for the rest of the day.
She closed her eyes when she tasted the melon. Just once. Just long enough to honor it. Then she looked at me.
“This is a problem,” she said.
“Is it.”
“Yes.” She reached across the table and touched the back of my hand. “Because I cannot remember what we came here from.”
I laughed. A small sound. The valley took it and returned nothing.
A cypress at the edge of the garden moved once in a breeze I did not feel at the table. The air smelled of thyme from the low wall, rosemary from the pot by the door, the hot-stone smell that Provence produces out of nothing in the hour after noon, and beneath all of it the specific, dried-warm lavender of the fields below, the scent that has not yet been cut and is holding its oil against the heat of the day.
She refilled my glass before I asked.
Isle-sur-la-Sorgue
On Sunday morning the market at Isle-sur-la-Sorgue begins at the water.
I drove. The convertible was a small Italian thing I had picked up in Avignon, the color of a green apple, the top down since Cavaillon. She had tied a scarf around her hair in the manner of a woman who had once been photographed that way in a Dior campaign in these same fields, years ago, the images still circulating in the houses of people who collected such things. She had laughed when I reminded her of it, on the drive.
“That girl,” she said, “had no idea how hot it was.”
The town is built on the Sorgue, a river so clear it runs green, the moss on its floor visible from every bridge. Antique stalls along the banks. Fruit stalls in the shaded squares. A man selling honey in jars the color of different summers: the dark one from chestnut trees, the pale one from lavender, a middle one he would not name.
We bought a tapenade from a woman who had made it that morning. She scooped it onto a scrap of bread and handed it up to us, and the taste was black and salt and the particular bitterness of the Niçoise olive, a flavor older than any of us. The woman watched Her Highness bite into it. The woman smiled without moving her mouth. Two women recognizing one another across a counter and a language.
At a linen stall she picked out a tablecloth the color of old parchment, the edges hemstitched by hand.
“For the terrace,” she said.
I paid. I did not argue. I have learned that when she chooses a thing for a place we do not live, she is choosing it for the version of us that might...
The river ran beside us as we walked back to the car. A woman on a bench was feeding crusts to a family of ducks. Two old men at a café beside the water were drinking pastis at eleven in the morning, the glasses clouded yellow, the smell of anise reaching us across the lane. She slowed. She did not stop. I saw her file the scent.
On the way back to Bonnieux we stopped at a field.
She got out without saying anything. She walked to the edge of the lavender. The rows ran away from us in purple stripes toward a hill of cypress, and a single dusty tractor was moving at the far end, and the air above the rows moved with bees so numerous they registered as a sound rather than a sight. She stood at the edge of the field in the yellow dress and the scarf and the dust from the road on her sandals, and she did not pose and she did not turn and she did not look back at me for a photograph.
She stood there. She let the field exist around her. The breeze moved a strand of hair she did not fix.
Photographers have worked with her in a dozen cities. They move her. They turn her shoulders. They adjust the line of her chin. They position her against whatever wall the magazine has chosen. None of them have photographed what the field was seeing now: the woman who does not need to be moved.
When she came back to the car the hem of the dress had lavender pollen on it. She left it there.
The Long Afternoon
The lunch on Tuesday was the one.
She had bought a chicken from a farmer outside Lacoste and had roasted it that morning in the old oven with thyme from the wall and lemons from the tree by the gate. Potatoes the size of marbles, cooked in the fat. A green salad, just leaves and oil. A tomato tart she had made from the pastry the baker’s wife had shown her how to roll. A bottle of red from a grower in the next valley, Luberon, two years old, opened an hour before.
We ate on the terrace under the fig tree. The sun was past its worst by two. The valley below was the color of old coins. From somewhere uphill came the smell of a neighbor’s aperitif, the sharp clean anise of pastis poured at the hour it is always poured in this country.
We ate slowly. We finished the bottle. We did not start another.
I leaned back in the wicker chair. The tree above us moved its shadow a small amount across the table. She was across from me with a book open in her lap, a novel in French she had bought at the bookstore in Gordes, the Camus I had watched her pay for in notes. Her feet were on the seat of a third chair, ankles crossed. A glass of water sweated on the stone beside her.
I closed my eyes for what I intended to be the length of one breath.
When I opened them the tree’s shadow had moved across the whole table and was at the edge of her book. My glass was empty in a different way than I had left it. The bees in the lavender below the terrace were louder, or I was hearing them for the first time. A cicada that had not been there before was sawing in the cypress at the garden’s edge.
I had fallen asleep in a chair in the middle of the day.
There is no city in which I have done that. A man does not sleep in a chair in a place he is working.
She was still reading. She had not moved. She had not closed the book to watch me sleep, and she had not left me to sleep alone. She had simply stayed, across three feet of walnut, for whatever length of time I had gone somewhere quieter.
I sat up slowly. The linen shirt was creased at the waist. The wine was warm in the bottom of the glass.
She marked her page with a finger and looked up.
“You were gone a while,” she said.
“How long.”
“Long enough.”
She said it without any edge. Just information. The way a woman tells a man the time when he has asked.
I looked out across the valley. The light had begun the slow tilt it takes in Provence in late June, the hour between the heat and the evening, when the fields turn from flat purple to purple with depth and the cypress throws its shadow half a kilometer. A hawk was circling over something in the rosemary below the wall. The air carried the fresh-cut lavender now, from a field someone had begun harvesting while I slept, different from the dried-warm version of the morning, sharper, greener, closer to the plant and further from the oil.
I wanted to say we could live here.
I did not say it. I watched the hawk instead. It rose on a thermal, circled once, and disappeared into the light above the ridge.
She set the book down on the stone beside her chair. She did not say anything. She did not ask what I had been about to say. She did not fill the silence with a version of it she could hand me back in safer words.
She reached across and took my hand and turned it over and traced one line across my palm with her thumb, the one that runs from the wrist toward the base of the index finger. She did this for the length of three breaths. Then she let my hand go, and she picked up her book, and she found her page.
I did not say it.
She had known I had almost said it.
She did not make me say it.
The hawk found its thing in the rosemary and dropped.
What We Did Not Say
We drove into Gordes that evening for dinner.
The village at sunset is the color of honey poured on stone. The restaurant was a small one, six tables on a terrace cut into the rock, the valley falling away below to a plain of vines that took the last of the light and held it longer than the sky did. A candle on the table. A jug of water. A bowl of olives. Nothing else on the linen.
She wore a pale blue dress the color of the shutters at the mas. Flat sandals. A thin gold chain at her neck I had given her one winter in a city that had nothing to do with this one. Her shoulders were bare. The sun had reached them over three days and had left the particular warmth that Provençal summer puts into skin, not a burn, not a tan yet, just the first indication that the body had been outside.
She ordered a tian of vegetables from the garden and a small grilled fish from the coast. I ordered a duck breast from a farm up the valley, the meat that tastes of the wild herbs the birds forage through the summer. The waiter, who knew his wine the way a priest knows his vespers, suggested a red from a grower three valleys over, and she nodded, and I nodded, and the bottle came.
We did not talk about the city.
We did not talk about the plane at the end of the week.
We did not talk about the afternoon on the terrace or the sentence I had almost said.
We talked about the tablecloth from Isle-sur-la-Sorgue. We talked about whether the baker’s wife would actually send the pastry recipe. We talked about a dog she had seen in the square at Lourmarin that had taken a piece of bread from a child with the formality of a duke accepting a knighthood. We laughed at small things. The candle burned down by half. The village below us lit up window by window the way villages do that have not yet decided whether they are in the twenty-first century.
At the end of the meal the waiter brought two small glasses of something local, cold, the color of late honey. She tasted hers and set it down. She looked out across the valley, at the village lights and the cypress dark against the last blue of the sky, and she let the view stay on her for a long breath.
“We are not keeping this,” she said.
The valley held its breath. Or I did.
“No,” I said.
“We are visiting it.”
“Yes.”
She looked at me across the candle. Her eyes held whatever version of the evening sky the terrace had left for them. And here she was, in a cotton dress the color of old shutters, telling me what we both already knew, with the gentleness of a hand placed on the top of a closed book.
“It is enough,” she said, “that we came.”
Six words. I counted.
I reached across the table and took her hand. I did not lift it to my lips. I did not kiss her knuckle. I held it. The candle moved between us in a breath of wind that had come up the slope from a field I could not see.
The drive back to the mas was slow. The road from Gordes down into the valley runs between low stone walls and through a stand of cypress and past one small chapel that is locked every night by a woman who has been locking it for longer than either of us has been alive. The top was down. The stars were already out. The air smelled of the day’s heat coming off the walls, and of thyme released by the cooling stone, and, once, briefly, as we passed an open gate, of a neighbor’s pastis finished hours ago but still held in the air of a courtyard.
She put her head on my shoulder at a straight stretch of road.
She did not say anything.
I drove the rest of the way with her hair against my jaw.
At the mas I turned the car into the gravel and killed the engine. The cicadas in the cypress were loud. The pool in the garden held one star.
I sat with my hand on the key and did not get out.
“We could come back,” I said.
“Every year,” she said.
“Every year.”
She lifted her head and looked at me. The private smile. The left corner.
We would not live here. We both knew it. The life we had was not a life that stopped, and the life that stopped was not a life either of us had been built to keep. But we could come back. We could visit this version of us. We could put the tablecloth on the terrace, and sleep in a chair, and stand at the edge of a field, and drive home with the top down, and carry a week of it into the cities that were waiting for us.
A life we visited.
Every year.
She took the key from my hand and got out of the car, and the gravel moved under her sandals, and she walked ahead of me to the door of the mas with her shoulders bare and her dress the color of the shutters, and the lavender from the fields below came up the slope on the small night wind, the fresh-cut version now, green and young, the version that will be gone by August.
I followed her in.