Chapter IV
IV
Six minutes is both very short and very long when you’re desperately unclean.
When you’re caked in very literal dirt. Before dinner, we take turns scrubbing mud from our knees and grape skins from under our fingernails.
I try not to linger on the variety of mismatched French bath products lined up precariously by the frosted window like some hygienic nativity scene.
When I emerge from the small, dark bathroom, pink and rubbed raw, there is Henri, waiting with his arms folded, stationed so close to the doorframe we nearly collide. I cling tighter to the towel wrapped around my sternum.
“That was seven minutes,” he chides, tsking his tongue. “Americans are so wasteful.”
I shoot him a dirty look. “You timed me? I thought the French were famous for fashionable lateness.” I mimic his accent.
“Just keeping you honest.”
“How morally righteous of you!”
“Oh?” He inches closer, leaving hardly a knife’s width of space. We stand like that, face-to-face, no vines to separate us, for several beats too long. Some strange electricity roots me in place.
Beads of water drip from my hair down my back, and the sensation breaks the spell.
“You’re holding up the line.” I push past him, and I feel the sweat on his skin against my bare shoulder as I march toward my room.
Ruby is in the doorway, grinning mischievously, her hair piled in a towel atop her head.
“That was a bit saucy, now, wasn’t it?” she taunts and taps my nose with her pointer finger. “Henri, huh. I see that for you.”
“Henri? He’s got a girlfriend. Or . . . he kind of has a girlfriend. Had? Not that it matters.”
She laughs. “Right, right, not that it matters. It’s just that we happen to be spending weeks working in the throes of what is arguably the horniest premise on earth. And you’ve got a thing between you.”
I roll my eyes. “This isn’t summer camp.”
“Isn’t it?”
I shrug. She’s right, but I need not concede as much just yet. “We’re basically colleagues,” I correct. “There’s no thing.”
“Suit yourself!” She smirks, bending forward to release her towel from its sculptural perch and rubbing her hair dry. “Have you noticed that all French towels feel like sandpaper? It’s like they want you to walk around naked rather than wrap yourself up.”
As I kneel over my suitcase, I feel the curious tug of a smile—some private joy at the fact that the tenor of my rapport with Henri is palpable from the outside.
I rummage around, extracting a clean white T-shirt and a pair of denim shorts, wishing ever so briefly that I’d taken Emma’s advice. That I had anything to wear that might make me look even moderately feminine—or at least, considered in my appearance.
Downstairs in the kitchen, Bea is playing something operatic over a set of small plastic speakers and singing along with unabashed commitment.
When she sees me enter, she smiles and begins to sing louder, doing a rotating, triangular dance with her feet while she hacks away at an enormous globe of red cabbage.
“Come help me, aide-moi.” She waves me over.
“You’re on dessert duty.” Oh, how I love this place already.
She hands me a bowl with a whisk and a glass dairy bottle. “Tonight, whipped cream and fresh figs! They’re like candy this time of year.”
I empty the silky, viscous liquid into the bowl, winding my arm and watching ribbons of white curl into themselves, just beginning to froth at the edges like waves. I hum along to Bea’s symphony and note the gratifying postlabor ache in my biceps.
“New York, be careful with that thing.” I feel a touch on my elbow, and I nearly drop the bowl.
But of course, I know who it is. Henri smells like bitter lavender and clean cotton. Something about the smell, the palm against my elbow, makes me want to sleep next to him. Not with him, exactly, but beside him. Perhaps on an airplane—a long, overnight flight.
I look at him over my shoulder. His hair is wet and glistening where it slouches over his forehead. “Sorry, did you want to comment on my whisking technique?”
“No, no, great form. Very sturdy. Don’t let me interrupt.”
“OK, OK, enough, assez,” Bea interjects, peering into the bowl and removing it from my hands. “You two: The figs. Enough for everyone. Henri, you show Alice.”
“OK, Alice, follow me! Much to teach you! Allons-y.” He pronounces my name at a slant—Ah-lease—with a thin, trailing ssss at the end. It’s a sound I want to follow.
Outside, he leads me past the edge of the house, where Antoine is rinsing buckets from a spigot.
Tucked just out of view, beyond the pasture, is a garden so bright and verdant, it seems like something drummed up by the Disney overlords.
Low plots studded with cabbage frame walls of tomato vines that have knotted themselves around lean wire structures.
Herbs in tight rows feather the edges, and squash and eggplants lay plump and heavy, splayed out lazily in a way that verges on glutinous.
Early evening sun streaks in like something poured.
“What, they don’t have gardens in New York?” Henri teases, looking at me askance.
I realize I’m grinning in that stupid, slap-happy way that comes with forgetting yourself. “Honestly . . . no. Not like this.”
He reaches an arm around my shoulder, carrying his musky male scent with him, and I can sense the proximity of his fingers where they dangle above my collarbone. “Awe-struck looks good on you. Makes you seem more gentle.”
Gentle. I turn the word over in my mouth. It’s not one that’s usually ascribed to me, and it feels out of place, like some small bone stuck in the windpipe. Part of me wants to protest: I am cold, aloof, unknowable. But in spite of myself, I like his assertion, like how it registers in his voice.
By some magnetic instinct, I feel myself lean into him—or I stop leaning away—unthinkingly resting my head on his shoulder.
He props the angular dip of his chin on my head and uses his other hand to brush the hair behind my ear.
We fit. The shape of him feels sturdy, like scaffolding, something vines can grow around.
He exhales, and I notice his muscles tightening around the unit of us, that we’re both working hard to stand still.
Behind us, Antoine drops a bucket with a loud, rolling thud, and we both pull away rubber-band fast, unbraiding ourselves sloppily.
As I lean out to extricate myself from Henri completely, he grabs my hand and pulls me forward. “Bet you’ve never picked your own figs before. Come with me.”
He shows me to the back of the garden, where a tree with long, zealous arms drips fruit that dangles like bracelet charms. The branches stoop low enough for us to pick without climbing, and Henri models the way to pull the figs free, collecting them in the gathered hem of his shirt.
Together, we pick until our T-shirts sag.
Each fruit looks, to me, like a light bulb.
The cartoonish depiction of some miraculous realization.
“Have you ever had a fresh fig? As in, just picked from the tree?” Henri asks, and I shake my head.
Carefully, he frees one of his hands, resting his load on the other forearm, and holds one out to me just in front of my lips. “Bite.”
I lean in, open my mouth, and sink my teeth through the leathery skin to the pulpy-textured insides. It’s sweet and sticky in the way of still-young things. When I pull back, I see the constellation of tiny seeds dotting the jammy interior and Henri watching me intently, searching for a reaction.
“Well? Queen of tasting notes, tell me.” There’s hardly a foot between us, and both of us cradle our bounty like some insurance against getting closer.
“Hmm. Like honey, grass, currant jam.”
“No, no. I want Alice words.”
He bites down on the other half, chewing methodically and tossing the stem on the ground, looking me dead in the eyes as he swallows. A smirk tugs at his jaw.
I laugh, move my tongue along my teeth. “Tastes like . . . the prologue to something. First pages, a preamble.”
He contemplates briefly and then reaches to take another bite of a fig at the top of his pile. “You’re either a genius, or you’re completely nuts.” He tosses the remainder of the fig into a compost pile on the ground.
We turn to carry our harvest back to the kitchen, the two of us beaming quietly as if cherishing something far richer than a bounty of figs.