A Bouquet of Rue Read online

  “Yes,” I said. “I’m looking forward to it.”

  On his way out, he said, “If the sky clears, we’ll eat on the terrace. The apple tree is in bloom.”

  With that, it was back to the chore of settling myself in. I shuffled some boxes into the ground-floor room, Marian’s former office, that was to be my work room. To spare me, Jean-Paul had so thoroughly purged the space of evidence of Marian’s occupancy that there wasn’t even a bent paper clip wedged into a corner of a desk drawer for me to discover. Purged of detritus or not, it was still Marian’s desk, and that bothered me more than I thought it should. The room itself was a bit of challenge to work with. To begin, it was pie-shaped, a corner cut off the even more irregularly-shaped salon, as the living room is called in France.

  The house, very modern and quite interesting, was in the form of a giant scalene triangle; it had no equal sides, no equal angles. Two sides of this wedge, the sides visible from the street, were stark, bunkerlike, made of concrete and stone with narrow slits for windows. But the third side, the longest side, the one that faced the walled backyard, was wood-framed glass from floor to soaring ceiling. The design created a very private enclave, secretive even. I thought the house was a strange choice for the very laid back and open Jean-Paul as I had come to know him. On my first visit, with a bit of self-effacing chagrin, he explained to me that the house was not chosen for its avant-garde architecture, but for its location adjoining the Haras de Jardy, a vast public recreation area. Historically a premier breeding farm for thoroughbred horses, the haras still had an equestrian center where Jean-Paul and his son, Dominic, boarded their horses. Horses were an interest we shared, though mine, left behind in Los Angeles, were rescued nags and his were rather more genteel in both behavior and origin.

  At noon I made myself a sandwich out of a length of baguette spread with Camembert, fresh basil, and tomato, carried it into my new office, sat down on the floor and tried to decide how to arrange this oddly shaped space to suit my needs.

  Though the house might seem stark and a bit formidable from the outside, the furniture inside was clearly chosen for comfort. Easy, casual comfort. Except for this room which with its heavy silk drapes and dark, oversized office furniture was an odd contrast of ponderous pomposity to the other living spaces. Marian was an accountant who worked for a big international corporation. I thought it unlikely she would have brought clients she wanted to impress into her home. What, then, did this weighty room, Marian’s private lair, furnished for her I assumed, say about the woman?

  In the end, I decided that it didn’t much matter, because Marian was no longer there, and I was. First thing, I took down the heavy drapes to bring in light from the big windows facing the backyard. Did I, or maybe could I, fit in here? Here being not only this house, but this country.

  My immersion in France began about a year and a half ago when I discovered that the woman who raised me, Mom, was not my biological mother. I was, instead, the by-product of an affair between my father, a physics professor, and a French graduate student named Isabelle. I was raised in California by my father and his sainted wife and knew nothing of Isabelle’s existence until recently. Her death in Los Angeles was the catalyst for all that has followed, including meeting Jean-Paul. Sometimes good things do come from bad.

  Since the discovery of my origins, I have been trying to sort out my odd new situation and the people who came with the discovery—my ninety-three-year-old grandmother, a half brother named Freddy, a brace of nephews, an uncle, and a confusing collection of cousins, cousins by marriage, cousins by proximity, godmothers, and so on, and so on—and the way I feel about it all, in the best way I know how. That is, through the lens of a camera.

  To that end, a year earlier under contract with an American television network, my film partner, Guido Patrini, and I spent several months filming on my newly discovered family’s farm estate in Normandy. Last fall, at home again in California, as we edited the unstructured mass of footage we had shot, I could finally bring some order to my thoughts about the very strange circumstance that brought me back into their midst, and where I fit and did not among them.

  But before the edit was finished, on the whim of a new network executive the Normandy project was dropped, and Guido and I were sent off to work on something altogether different. That second film was now set for broadcast, but Guido and I would not be in the States when it aired. Our contract with the network had expired, and we were not invited to negotiate a new one, nor did we pursue one. After a few calls to people with the right connections, and some bargaining, a French television network agreed to pick up the unfinished Normandy film, with us attached.

  Somehow, what started as a one-off, the film about my family and their farm—I now know more about carrot cultivation and cheese making than I ever thought necessary—and my discovery of my French origins, ended up as a contract for a series about the status of small-scale family farming generally. The first episode scheduled for broadcast in France, of course, was to be the very personal Normandy piece, and we would explore outward from there.

  Three weeks ago, Guido and I went back to Normandy to shoot some fill-in footage. Then on Friday, immediately after kissing my ancient grandmother, my half brother, some nephews, and many, many cousins good-bye, we decamped for Paris, our new home base, to edit the piece for broadcast. At the moment, Guido was happily turning the Left Bank apartment I inherited from my bio-mother, Isabelle, into bachelor quarters and transforming a vast empty space in the building’s basement into a work room. And here I was in the suburbs stewing over how to accommodate myself to a room as it existed, when I knew even before I took the first bite of my delicious sandwich that it was impossible for me to work there as it was.

  I pushed everything I could into the middle of the room, found a tape measure in the kitchen junk drawer, and measured the space. After getting a good look, and with numbers to work from, I sat back down on the floor with my laptop in front of me, and went shopping for basic, functional furnishings and supplies that would accommodate my needs: a long work table, chairs, open shelving, and several good lamps. Because French outlets deliver 220 volts, and my American appliances were made for 110 volts, I’d left behind everything that needed plugging in. So, while I was at it, I ordered a new desktop computer capable of handling film editing. I found an odd sort of comfort browsing the offerings of the French branches of the same stores I would have gone to in the U.S., collecting things I knew I would find in each one. I also picked up some new vocabulary: while a lamp is a lampe and table is a table, a paperclip is a trombone and a computer is an ordinateur. Whatever it was called, I was promised that all of it would show up on my doorstep by Thursday afternoon.

  After inflicting severe damage on a credit card, I rolled up off the floor and shook out some kinks. The rain had stopped and the sun was promising to emerge from behind the clouds. With nothing pressing until it was time to pick up Jean-Paul at the train station, I decided that it was time to go out and explore the new neighborhood on foot. I went upstairs and changed into running clothes, did some stretches on the back terrace, then went out through the side gate in the garden wall, directly onto a foot path that led into the haras.

  The sun was more-or-less out again, and the park was full of people enjoying the remains of the daylight. I stayed to the left side of the cinder path, out of the bike lane, and started running. Truthfully, my gait for the first half mile could hardly be called running, but I found my stride as I passed the tennis courts and set a course that would give me an overview of the huge park.

  A group of women emerged together from a parking lot adjoining the courts, spread out and began taping flyers to light poles, walls, and fence posts. As I passed one of the women, I saw the words enfants disparus—missing children—in bold atop a flyer about the teenagers who hadn’t returned home Friday night that she was taping to a light pole. I barely glanced at the flyer because my eye was drawn upward to the top of the pole where a CCTV camer
a watched over the park, and I resumed my run. Once you’ve been stalked by video, as Jean-Paul and I too recently had, you become aware of the damn things. As I ran, I paced off the distance between the cameras and looked for open spaces that were out of their range. If the missing kids had been in the park, Big Brother surely would have captured their images, at least as they came and went.

  Instead of circling back the way I came, I left the park, turned down a side road, and turned again into the end of Jean-Paul’s street. I confess that as I passed each house and yard I gawked, trying to decide who might live around us. Generally, the houses were newish, big, and well groomed. Most, like Jean-Paul’s, were set well back from the street, each of them with landscaping that provided a heavy layer of privacy, a cultural convention, I supposed, and something I would ask him about.

  The first living soul I spotted was a woman who was on her knees in a flower bed in front of the house next door to ours, working mulch around carefully trimmed roses. When she saw me, she stabbed her trowel into the earth, stood, and with a wave made a beeline toward me. After pulling off her garden gloves, she extended a hand.

  “Hi, neighbor,” she said in pure American English. She looked to be in her thirties, trim, pretty, Asian DNA somewhere in her history. “I’m Holly Porter.”

  “Maggie,” I said, taking the offered hand. “Let me guess, you’re west coast, not east.”

  “Long Beach, California,” she said, grinning. “You?”

  “Originally, Berkeley. Lately, L.A.”

  “I am so happy to meet you. When I heard an American woman had moved in next door, I almost did a little dance. I’ve been looking for an excuse to knock on your door.”

  I laughed. “Do you need an excuse?”

  After checking to see if anyone was near us, she leaned in closer, and said, “Showing up uninvited is just not the done thing around here.”

  “Then, Holly, you are hereby invited to come in for a cup of tea.” I was a post-run mess, but with her grass-stained knees she was hardly dressed for the prom, either. “Or a glass of water?”

  “Well, thank you, I would love a cup of tea.” She tucked her gloves into a pocket of her shorts and walked me home. Because she was a guest, I showed her in through the front door, the first time I had ever used it; we always went in through the garage. On the way from the entry hall to the kitchen, she paused just long enough to give the salon a good looking over. As she took a seat at the kitchen table unbidden, she said, “Forgive me for being so nosy, but I have been dying to see inside this house ever since we moved in next door. It’s not at all what I expected. Suits of armor wouldn’t have surprised me, but this is just homey-looking.”

  “Surprised me, too,” I said, taking a package of cookies and a plate out of a cupboard. During the time it took for me to boil water and put tea bags into two mugs, I learned that Holly had a seven-year-old daughter and that her husband, Kevin, was a sales exec for Toyota. France, she told me with a sigh, was their third posting in six years.

  “Kevin might as well be in the military, for all the moving around we do. At every new assignment, there’s so much to get used to. I’m still working things out here, hoping not to humiliate myself or Kevin or our American mothership in the process. You know, where we grew up, we didn’t kiss much of anyone outside of family. But in France, instead of shaking hands with people they hardly know, they kiss them; les bises they call it. Except when they don’t. So, when does one kiss the air beside cheeks and when offer just a handshake? And then, who gets three smooches instead of a mere two?”

  “I wait for the other person to lean in or offer a hand as my cue before I do anything,” I said.

  “Good strategy,” she said, taking a cookie from the plate I set on the table. “I don’t mind all the moving around, except I never have time to really learn the language in one place before we go on to the next. I do get hungry for someone to talk to. I mean, really talk to. Besides Kevin, of course. Maybe that’s the hardest part of being the foreigner all the time, just having someone to talk to. Are you finding that?”

  “At first, yes,” I said, sitting down opposite her. “Things get easier over time. I still speak French like someone’s maiden aunt, you know, in complete sentences, no slang, the way I learned it in school. But I can hold up my end in a conversation now, with some mistakes.”

  She laughed. “They’ll jump right up to correct you, too, won’t they?”

  “They will. I practiced the French R roll until my throat hurt, but I still get corrected. It’s a good way to start a conversation, though. Make a flub, meet someone new.”

  “With that attitude, you’ll be okay here,” she said, using her cookie like a pointer. “Now, Maggie, the minute I become a pest, you must say, Holly go home. Promise me.”

  “I promise,” I said, laughing. “I’m happy to know someone else who speaks fluent California.”

  She studied me as she finally bit into her cookie. It was when she had her mouth full that her face lit up. After swallowing, she said. “I know you. I mean, I know who you are.”

  “Oh?” I had a pretty good idea what was about to follow. It happened to me sometimes in the U.S., though fortunately not in France. But here it was.

  “You’re Maggie MacGowen.”

  “Guilty.”

  “Don’t say guilty. I think that’s pretty amazing. I like your programs on TV. We stream them on international access wherever we are. I make Kevin sit with me and pay attention so he’ll have something other than cars to talk about.” She took another bite. “So, are you just visiting Mister Bernard? I’ve never met him, but I see him and his son and that other man who lives here come and go. I heard that you moved in—I saw the truck—but maybe I heard wrong; I don’t even speak French like your maiden aunt yet. You just visiting?”

  “I’m here for the duration,” I said. “I work for a French television network now.”

  “Making more documentary films?”

  “That’s what I do.”

  “Well, that’s big news.” Cradling her tea mug, she said, “You know what would be a good subject for you? These kids that went missing. The teenagers. A real Romeo and Juliet story.”

  “Is it?”

  “I think it is. The girl’s parents don’t approve of the boyfriend, I hear,” she said, leaning forward. “Think of it, right when you move into little Vaucresson, boom, that happens.”

  “I don’t know what happened,” I said.

  “No one does.” The phone tucked into her shorts pocket buzzed. She tapped a button to silence it, and with a sigh, she rose. “Duty calls. Time to go get my munchkin from school.”

  “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Holly,” I said, because it was.

  “The pleasure is all mine, believe me.”

  I walked her to the door. As she left, she turned and pointed a finger at me. “You think about what I said. Those missing kids could be your next subject.”

  “We’ll see,” I said. “We’ll see.”

  It was nearly four when she left, or sixteen hours—seize-heures—according to the French twenty-four-hour clock. I made myself a second cup of tea with the intention of sitting outside for a bit with a book. But when I approached the tall glass doors that led from the salon to the terrace, I saw that Ari was already there, and he had a visitor, a dark-haired young man. They were deep in discussion, their heads close together in front of a laptop screen. I knew Ari did some tutoring, so the youth was probably one of his students.

  Not wanting to interrupt, I took my tea upstairs, set the alarm for five o’clock, and stretched out on the bed to read for an hour. The fuss and bother of moving, culture lag, three weeks of filming in Normandy with my ninety-three-year-old grandmother underfoot, the smell of apple blossoms through the open windows: I fell right asleep and didn’t move until jangled awake by the alarm. I showered, pulled on clean jeans and a pullover, put a bottle of white wine from Languedoc into the fridge, and drove out to meet the five-fifty-two train from
Paris.

  When I left, Ari was wiping down the chairs on the terrace, and the boy was nowhere to be seen.

  Jean-Paul, looking perfectly fresh somehow after a long day of meetings about issues involving French exports and the European Union, came off the train searching for me among the crowd near the exit to the parking lot. I waved to catch his eye and started toward him along the platform. A man, similarly suited but clearly in need of pressing and a shave, rushed up behind him and caught him by the arm. After their exchange of perfunctory greetings, Jean-Paul glanced my way and held up a hand to stay me. I went to the railing on the far side of the platform to get out of the way of the exiting commuter stream and waited. Jean-Paul’s contribution to the conversation with his friend, if indeed he were a friend, amounted to nothing more than a calm nod, a shrug, upraised palms from time to time while the other man spilled an apparently angst-filled plight. Jean-Paul listened for a bit before he put his hands on the man’s shoulders and, looking him in the eye, said a few words that seemed to bring a measure of relief to the other. Then they shook hands and walked off in separate directions. I stayed where I was, alternately counting CCTV cameras—there were six—and watching the man until he exited the platform.

  Jean-Paul kissed both my cheeks, and then kissed them again. With his face next to mine, he said, “I came off the train and saw my Maggie waiting. Tell me it’s not a dream.”

  “If it is, I hope you don’t wake up.”

  Arm in arm, we headed for the car park. “Good day?” he asked.

  “A full day,” I said. “I learned in the village that some American movie actress has moved in on you.”

  “Vraiment? Is she beautiful?”

  I tugged at the front of my sweater. “She is surgically enhanced.”

  He laughed. “Is it possible you were buying fish when you learned this?”

  “Ari asked me to pick up some haddock.”

  “I hope that means he’s making us his wonderful soup tonight. What time does he want us?”