The Provence Cure for the Brokenhearted (8 page)

Abbot dodged through the mix of bridesmaids and groomsmen, avoiding elbows, out onto the deck with my parents, leaving Charlotte and me behind in the kitchen. We were standing by a large fabric-matted corkboard situated on the pantry door. It was covered with photos of Daniel and Elysius’s friends and their friends’ offspring pushpinned to it. There were kids in various poses: kids with stylized hair standing in front of tall beach grass, in bumblebee and mermaid costumes that looked like they were handmade by Broadway costume designers, and more than a few holding violins. I never knew Elysius had so many intense friends with intense kids.

There was a photo of Charlotte, too, an old one, taken before she had started dyeing her hair violent shades and had pierced her nose. She was holding a fish on a dock, presumably
on Daniel’s family’s lakefront property in the Berkshires. This was taken back when she was outwardly thrilled by things like fish. I understood Charlotte’s gloominess. She reminded me of my own intensity at that age—all longing with nowhere for it to go. And of course, we both understood what it was like to live in Elysius’s perfectly elegant shadow.

“Look at this baby,” I said, pointing at a particularly uptight-looking newborn. “That brow is furrowed like a Yale law student’s, isn’t it? It’s like she was born complete with a full head of hair, a pink Binky, and corporate angst.”

Charlotte leaned in and said, “I suspect that the Binky was added later.”

When Henry died, I was flooded with cards that all suffered from the same wispy, murky sentiments. Charlotte was likely forced to write the one that she sent, but she made it her own. She wrote at the bottom,
He was so anti-corporate. That’s one thing that made him so lovable to me
. This was one of Charlotte’s highest compliments at the time.
And he taught me how to play air guitar. In fact, he got me an air guitar for Christmas when I was ten. I still have it. It’s electric blue
. Henry and I also got her a real present—I insisted on that. It was something that she unwrapped and forgot. But the air guitar stuck, as did the image I had of the two of them wailing on imaginary guitars to Lenny Kravitz. That was my favorite card. I threw out all the cards one night in a fit of anger that I can’t explain—except for Charlotte’s. Henry would have loved that card.

“Did you fight with Elysius about communism?” I asked.

The woman in the blue dress was pointing at us now, urging us to come forward and get in line.

“Is that what she thought we were fighting about?” Charlotte shook her head.

“What do you think you were fighting about?” I asked.

“Greed, consumerism, and, per usual, we were fighting over my father,” Charlotte said. “She doesn’t like me.”

“She loves you,” I said.

“But that doesn’t mean she
likes
me.”

There was something about Charlotte in that moment. She was so vulnerable, so hurt. I wanted to tell her that the world was going to open up for her. Yes, this time in her life was hard but she would find someone someday, she’d fall in love—she’d be loved and liked by someone who really understood her, someone she could trust.

But could I guarantee these things?

No.

And if I did tell Charlotte that all of these things would come to her, then the unspoken understanding was that it could also all be taken away. No matter how much joy we can even
endure
in life, there’s always death. See? This was how it was for me. Death was everywhere. It popped up into the most unsuspecting moments—even just trying to give a little advice. I couldn’t think of anything to say to Charlotte about being loved and liked. I was just a sad reminder, after all, of loss.

can say that Elysius and Daniel’s ceremony was beautiful. In fact, I can be fairly objective here because I was feeling objective, removed. I wasn’t sure what came over me, but I didn’t even have the urge to cry. I knew that if I did, the crying might turn, palpably, into grief. To be in a state of grief at your sister’s wedding is unforgivable. But it wasn’t so much that I took control of myself as it was that I felt empty. This ceremony was beautiful, yes, but seemed to have nothing to do with love as I knew it. Had I convinced myself that I was watching a play and been pulled up from the audience to act out a certain role? That’s how it felt.

I kept my eye on Abbot, who was trying very hard not to rub his hands together. After he handed over the rings, his hands went straight into his pockets and were restless there,
sometimes hopping like frogs. I looked for a man who’d been denied his plus one on his wedding invite and who could have possibly carried off the name Crook in college. At a certain point, I concentrated on SAT words—ribald, fastidious, contrived.

I smiled in photographs, noting the golden late afternoon light, the elegance of the guests. At the reception, I skirted the edges of the brilliant conversations, the dance floor, where people danced tastefully, and the bar, where people ordered expensively. Since Henry died, I’d had a gnawing in my stomach, but it wasn’t hunger. I ate lightly. I picked at things. I left my crusts behind. I’d become a nibbler, a sipper. And so, at the reception, I nibbled hors d’ouevres—airy and rich—and sipped expensive, dry, subtle wines.

Of course, I was drawn to the wedding cake. I wished I’d had the self-restraint to ignore it, but I couldn’t. I found myself circling. It was a modern, five-tiered cake, circular, a little too hatboxy, and white with black piping—which I always tried to talk brides out of. Black piping was, to my mind, too tuxedo-esque, something that would date the cake too quickly, faddish. I assumed that the designers had talked to Elysius, perhaps even walked through her house. There was an echoey sense to the cake itself—as if the cake might actually be hollow. It was the kind of design that Henry and I would have enjoyed critiquing, joyfully.

I knew that some would say our kind of closeness was borderline unhealthy. We lived together and worked together and parented together. But, honestly, when I was with Henry,
I felt like I was more myself. Who had I been before Henry Bartolozzi? I remembered my girlhood self—awkward, shadowed by my beautiful older sister and my parents’ tenuous marriage, almost like they sucked up all the air in a room, and I was left feeling oxygen-deprived. But with Henry, I had air again. I could breathe. He thought I was funny, and so I got funnier. He thought I was beautiful, and so I felt more beautiful. He thought I was brilliantly experimental in the kitchen, and so I experimented more brilliantly. We had our problems, yes, but even our problems bound us closer. And now I knew what it was like to be only half of a pair and less of myself.

One night, lying in bed together, about a month before Henry died, my calf seized. I shot up in bed and cried out, “Leg cramp!”

Henry was almost asleep. The room was lit only by the hall light. He said, “Your leg or mine?”

I was flexing my foot, rubbing the knot violently. “What do you mean, your leg or mine? How would
I
know if
you
had a leg cramp?”

Henry was quiet a moment, and then said, “You’re right. My legs feel fine.”

The truth was that Henry and I had grown so close that sometimes it was hard to know where one of us began and the other ended. We’d been together for so long that most of our memories were the same film, just different camera angles, and from years of playing the memories, even the camera angles were mostly blurred to one by this point.

“Isn’t it gorgeous?” A woman beside me nodded toward the cake. She was older and smelled of gardenia perfume.

I nodded and, before I could utter a single critique, I slipped away. I’d missed my chance to design a cake that truly reflected Elysius and Daniel. I would have concentrated on the art in the house. The spare furnishings are supposed to allow someone to fix their attention on the art. I would have spent time in Daniel’s studio, taking in his work—the restless birds that seemed to beat just below the surface—and I would have talked to them about why they loved each other. That’s where I would have gone. I was this kind of cake designer—my thoughts always churning to the most ambitious interpretation. A cake to reflect abstract art? A cake with the restlessness of wings? A cake about saying yes to marriage after so many years? How would it be done? I felt the smallest inkling of desire—the step before wanting to create, the want to want to create.

As I drifted through the reception thinking this, I caught myself keeping an eye out for Henry. I did this often. It was one of the theories that I had for why I was always losing things. I was looking for Henry. He was lost and my mind was waiting for him to return; my eyes wanted to find him. I still saw him everywhere—his broad back in line at the movies, his hand reaching out to pay ahead of me in line at a drive-through. I’d see Henry walking along with some other family—holding hands with one of the kids or locking arms with the wife. But he would always turn into some other man—his hair too dark or too light, his nose too fine or too
knotted—a stranger, no one I knew. For a while, each time this would happen, I’d feel betrayed, tricked. And, just as I’d learned not to linger in memories, I learned when to look away—just before the man glanced back, just before his face appeared in the window—and I learned how to have a peripheral husband—one still alive, when I could time it right.

At an event like this, my subconscious was even more determined to find him. On some level, I was sure that he wouldn’t miss an event this big, this important to Elysius and Daniel. Finally, I saw him from behind, talking to a bartender, slapping someone on the back … and I looked away.

When I did, I turned abruptly, almost bowling over Jack Nixon—Nix and/or Crook. He’d been poised to say hello, but I’d knocked his bottle of beer up against his chest. It was a full beer and some of it spilled onto his shoes—nice shoes, black leather with some stylish trim, squared off at the toe in a season when squared off at the toe was in.

“I’m Jack,” he said, but somehow I already knew this. He was the right age, alone, a little nervous, and he was handsome, by my mother’s definition, which is to say he was traditionally handsome. He had all the right features—a nice nose, gentle eyes, a tough jawline, closely cut hair. He wasn’t fat or skinny, tall or short.

“Hi,” I said. “I’m Heidi.” I stuck out my hand, which seemed to make things worse. He smiled and shook my hand, and, in that moment, it hit me that my sister was right—my flirting skills had atrophied. And, to be honest, they never really were that pumped up to begin with. That’s
one of the reasons I’d fallen for Henry so immediately—it hadn’t ever felt like flirting.

“I know that your sister is trying to turn this into a blind date,” he said. “I hate blind dates, and I just want you to know that there’s no pressure on my end.”

“Oh,” I said, feeling a little disappointed. Was he trying to get out of it? “No pressure on my end either,” I said quickly, maybe too quickly. “I’m just being myself anyway.”

“Um, okay then,” he said, and he smiled graciously. “We can try to just mingle normally then, telling them that we’ve done our best. We were good sports.”

“I’m a very good sport,” I said. “I won sportsmanship awards in lieu of actual sports awards when I was younger. I lack basic eye–hand coordination.” I looked down at his shoes. “For example,” I said, “sorry about your shoes.”

“No,” he said, “it’s okay. I don’t mind being bumped into by a beautiful woman.”

I wasn’t sure how to respond to this. “A hypothetical beautiful woman,” I said, as if correcting him.

“A hypothetical beautiful woman or a real one,” he said.

“Well, then,” I said, taking a deep breath. “We have established that we’re good sports! We’ll just try to mingle normally.”

“Right,” he said.

And I walked away. A beautiful woman? I wasn’t sure what to make of that. I hadn’t felt beautiful in a very long time. In fact, I’d barely felt like a woman. I was a widow, a single mother. I decided to not think about it and to instead
locate Abbot. How long had it been since the last time I spotted him? I stood on my tiptoes and looked through the crowd.