Into Woods Read online

  Every morning he was in one of the gardens, his job in forced retirement, raking potatoes, watering, weeding. If I caught his eye he’d shout out a hello, come marching over, gleeful: “Bonjour! Bonjour! How didst thou sleep? Was thy peeker nice and stiff? Thou found’st her unspoiled, one hopes! What’s this? Writing again?"

  “It’s my work.”

  Thumb in mouth, pinky in the air, “A little taste?”

  “No, I’m sorry, it’s too early for me.”

  “With these Americans it’s always ’sorry’!”

  “Well, thank you, but I’d be sleepy. I wouldn’t be able to work anymore.”

  “But it is thy honeymoon! No work for thee till thy wife returns! How without wine will thy cornstalk grow?”

  “Grandpere, Juliet and I have been lovers eight years!”

  He spat and shuffled off to drink alone.

  The Rochelles were three generations: Grandpère and Grandmère; Louis Petit, their son; his ample wife, Charlotte; and their three boys, the grandsons, Antony, Pierre, and Hubert. Hubert was much younger than the other boys, was the darling of his mother and grandparents, had the freedom of the place. Antony and Pierre at fifteen and seventeen were farmers already, on a strict schedule of work, manning the tractors each morning at eight, driving off to spray and clip the vines or spread manure or to plant cabbage between rows of new vines or to harvest the wheat or bale the hay. Their father, Louis Petit, would saunter out of the house around nine, never earlier, gaze over at our house to see what I was up to, only then hop in his little truck and be gone. I waved to him every day for a week before I met him. Some days he waved back. He was the only farmer I’ve ever seen who wore shorts on the job, every day, tiny blue shorts tucked up under his big firm belly. His wife did the paperwork and all of the cooking and the laundry, and worked in the garden, their grocery. They all of them were wary, seemed to think we spent our time making plots against them in league with Grandpere. What was I so jolly about, after all, and what did we say to each other in English?

  Grandmère brought over green beans or plums or eggs or onions or lettuce, convinced we were starving to death. Grandpère brought shallots: “Good for the penis!” Charlotte rather begrudgingly, even suspiciously, told Juliet we could use her washer and clothesline, as if she thought my underwear would be two stories high, or otherwise disreputable. Juliet gave them all drawings, which they adored. They loved beautiful Juliet. It was I who remained the problem!

  Evenings we newlyweds made good dinners with the bountiful local ingredients, or ate at Les Routiers, the chain truckstop on the Saumur road (a splendid place with long tables and cheap seven-course dinners and free wine and sensitive French truckers in groups), or found some of the artists in town and had parties. In the cool of the night we looked at the stars a long time, watched the owl who lived in the grapevine draped over our car shed, watched the bats beeping at insects, then closed up the French doors and were alone. In the morning the roosters crowed, and not long after that Grandmère came into the garden, brought us eggs.

  If the grandparents had us over for wine, the daughter-in-law wanted to know what they’d said. If we had dinner at Louis Petit’s (which we did only once: a soft-core porno film playing on the TV throughout, jiggling boobs, men’s tightened buttocks, burned steaks and plenty of garden produce), Grandmère wanted to hear how bad it was. If Grandpère gave me a bottle of wine, Louis Petit gave me two. If Charlotte gave us six plums, Grandmère gave us every cherry from their yellow cherry tree.

  The Rochelle grandsons seemed always to take offense at me, old codger that I was, but they were very solicitous of Juliet. Antony was the first to call, one early evening, bearing a bottle of red wine. “For you,” he said in tortured English. “This wine.” In French he said that it was from his father’s stock, and none of that lousy stuff his grandfather made. “Your name?” He got my name quickly enough, “Like the Buffalo Beef, n’est cepas?” but Juliet’s took more doing. When he got it, he blushed, brightly, looked at her as though he would swoon: Shakespeare! He himself was named thus!

  Many evenings young Antony found a reason to visit, his hair wet and combed, his thin self dressed in a fresh shirt. He brought Juliet a radio, since she had said she missed music. He brought her a bottle of wine. They’d chat in hip French, or a little in English, so he could practice. I tried making jokes in my stilted, formal French, but Antony was still wary of me. I learned too slowly not to smile or to laugh or to try to joke in front of him, or anyone, until he or they knew me. But Antony kept coming back. He loved Juliet’s drawings. He liked her long hair, and said so frequently, asked to see her brush it. He gazed frankly at her long legs in her all-American cutoff shorts, all but stroked them for her, all but kissed them. His Gallic eyes burned. A movie star, right here on his family’s farm! To hell with her bodyguard!

  Antony’s dad, Louis Petit, called me into the caveau one afternoon, took me through the maze of his wine operation, which beneath the cracked roof tiles and behind the ancient walls was quite modern and complex. His specialty as listed in the wine books was Rose d’Anjou, but his best-seller locally was a good hearty red, sweet and spicy. He also made a white wine, which he admitted was terrible, but which he said was popular amongst a certain clientele, ladies from Vihiers. From a 1,OOO-liter, stainless-steel tank he poured red wine into glasses whose stems had broken off, walked me back into the musty caveau.

  I attempted a complicated pleasantry, something about the mix of modern and ancient elements in his operation.

  “So,” he boomed, saying each word clearly so that I would not fail to understand. “You think that farmers are ridiculous?”

  “Why no,” I told him haltingly, “not at all, my own uncle is a farmer.”

  “I suppose his farm is much bigger than this, and his cattle fatter?”

  “Why no, not at all. In fact, his farm is small and quite poor.

  “But bakers, I suppose you find bakers ridiculous?”

  “Why no, not at all! Why do you say that?”

  “Your French isn’t so good, you know.”

  “I make, I think, I hurt, I insult, I make the baker?”

  “You are impossible to understand.” He went back and poured us more wine, stood before me with his chest thrust out in manly challenge.

  “I like it here,” I said.

  “Who comes to a farm for his vacation?”

  “It is my honeymoon.”

  “My honeymoon, too, was on this farm. I worked each day of it, and could not say which day it was over. How old are you?”

  “Thirty-six.”

  “Well, I am thirty-seven.” The way he said it made it mean everything he wanted it to mean, nasty things about Americans who thought they were better than bakers and farmers, soft, childless, teacher types who pretended to write, who rented cars in Paris and blotted the landscape doing nothing useful, nothing at all for an entire month in the most important season of the year.

  “I will be thirty-seven in August,” I said, an inadequate answer, but all I could come up with.

  “Do you expect a drink because of this?” He puffed his chest out again, not happy that I was bigger than he, not happy that I was American, not happy with me at all. Finally—and suddenly—he smiled, just at the moment the air got too thick to breathe. He poured us more wine, lifted his broken glass. “To the new husband,” he said.

  On weekends, with the art school closed, Juliet and I made day trips. Often we drove to Saumur, eighteen miles away. We sat by the Loire and watched the fishermen dapping with sixteen-foot poles. We ate crêpes in the square, hiked up the many stairs to the château—whole, handsome, and high on a limestone bluff over the town and the river, its four towers and deep walls commanding a view up and down the valley, the Loire like a sliver of sky parting the earth, spanned by medieval bridges. We drove to see ruined castles at Chinon and Martigné-Briand and Passavant and Beaufort, stopped at pâtitisseries and little bars and food shops, stopped anywhere that
had a sign, or a place to sit. I played with my wedding ring, pulling it off and dropping it often, fishing it out of cracks in sidewalks or the upholstery of chairs. Juliet turned to cut her eyes at me whenever she heard its distinctive ping. I had never before worn a ring of any kind. It made my left hand look like my father’s left hand, pinched my finger, meant nothing as a symbol, nothing I thought it might: our love was greater than any statement jewelry might make!

  And we went to Angers for art supplies and books and maps, visited museums and monasteries and the ruins of abbeys and limestone caves and sacked cathedrals on the way. The best was the cathedral of Doué-la-Fontaine: no roof, no interior walls, no guards, no gates. We entered through a thirty-foot high window, thought about all the years of the world. In Tigné, the next village north of Trémont, part of a Roman aqueduct stood in the middle of a farmstead, filled with millennia of dirt, growing poppies. The farmer was a shouting prick, and his dogs were nasty, too; one could only view the ruin from the road, and only briefly, once the dogs got wind. Near our house were several modest châteaux (most smaller than the average suburban house in Greenwich, say, or Grosse Pointe), outfitted with moats and turrets. Windmills were everywhere, none working, some reduced to conical stone bases with goats on top, or grapevines.

  At a sweet little bakery in Tigné we bought most of our bread, insulting the boulanger from Cerqueux further. In Vihiers, the nearest large town, we shopped sometimes in an American-style grocery store, the Super U, until we discovered the Wednesday morning marché, merchants who moved together from town to town throughout Anjou, joining local farmers. Each Wednesday morning, spread out across the Vihiers town square and running into side streets, a hundred booths sprouted, much junk for sale—purses, t-shirts, baskets, hardware—but also food: eggplants, onions, goat cheese, sausage, cold cuts, seafood, dove’s eggs, cow’s tongues, cake. And living things, too: chickens stuffed in sacks, chicks in long boxes, ducks held by the feet, snails still crawling, rabbits in baskets or lofted by the ears.

  We saw complete castles at Brissac and Vihiers and Champigny and Langeias and Montsoreau, all of them smaller than I’d expected, not the grand castles of the eastern Loire, but awesome still, and open. At what I’ll call Tigné-LeClerq the lady of the house, the actual Countess Tigné-LeClerq, gave us a tour of the castle that was still her home; she preferred not to, she said, but had to give tours to receive government restoration monies, which were significant. She was tall and erect and really very elegant, used French words unapologetically whenever her English failed her. The tour was all business: famous stone carvings, castle keep, working drawbridge, spectacular vaulted cellars, but nothing of the living quarters, no furnished rooms at all, nothing of the soul of the place.

  Juliet kept up an appreciative conversation, one countess to the other (clear French to the countess’s clear English), which is the way, in some string of sentences I missed, that our hostess learned we were newlyweds. She softened. She cooed. She found herself very fond of Juliet, eyed me with rather less suspicion than I’d grown accustomed to, actually took Juliet’s hand, asked her all about growing up in New York City. She knew Central Park West, certainly, where Juliet’s parents still lived. She knew several people at the Metropolitan Museum, across the park. She knew the village too, and Soho, and deigned to hear about the funky loft I had lived in with friends and no heat and motorcycles and grand piano, my own sort of castle. And suddenly through a massive door we were in her home, the part of the castle she’d kept private. She showed us her kitchen—enormous, part medieval, two solemn cooks at work in chef’s hats—showed us her living room—intimate, all modem, uniformed maid standing by—showed us her gallery—dark paintings in great gilt frames. We stared and stared at those paintings, two portraits, four landscapes, a still life.

  The countess put her chin in hand then, considering, finally brought us up a tight stone stairway to a spotless tower bed chamber with a view through open stone windows (gossamer curtains blowing), a grand view across the fields to the Loire and beyond, another big castle in sight over there (Montreuil-Bellay, she said), round bed in satin sheets, nightstands carved of stone, thick candles, chamber pot, water pitcher, fireplace the size of our bathroom back in New York (our own apartment certainly not on Central Park West!), fire laid unlit.

  “You must stay,” said the countess in English.

  “But we are too poor,” Juliet said in French, gasping

  “My gift,” said the countess.

  One hot August morning at Les Moncellieres, as I sat ruminating at the kitchen table, sneezing in the haytime dust, I heard conversation behind me in the garden. I focussed in slowly on the French, began to hear it, but even then it took several sentences to realize that Grandmère and Charlotte were talking about me. “Look at the beer lover just sitting there.” This was Charlotte, speaking rapidly in her querulous mumble, increasingly easy for me to understand. “He says he writes,” Grandmère said.

  “To me it appears he is sitting,” Charlotte replied, un-impressed.

  “Well, don’t forget, he is newly wed.”

  “Have you seen? He’s put their bed on the floor!”

  I turned and waved, showed them my pencil, my pad of paper, turned and went back to work.

  “Having a fine nap?” the daughter-in-law said brightly

  “How is your vacation?” Grandmère said.

  And Charlotte: “I hear you like castles better than farms!”

  The women worked daily like this for an hour or two, right behind me, their great bottoms in the air, filling baskets with weeds or with produce, sporadically chatting, clearly not fond of each other, but pleased to have a subject for gossip so close to hand.

  Now Grandpère came, waddling up the driveway behind his olden wheelbarrow. In it was a twenty-liter wine jug, one of his son’s deposit containers for local customers, quite full, the purple of the wine showing through the white plastic. He stopped abruptly when he saw that the women were in the big garden, turned his wheelbarrow behind a plum tree and set to work in the smaller garden across the drive (two rows of artichokes in bloom forming a tall purple stripe between ten rows of potatoes and ten rows of cabbage). After a while he’d pulled enough weeds to hide the side of the wine vessel that would be toward the women, so proceeded, wheeled his barrow to my door. “Bonjour!” he called, ignoring Charlotte and Grandmère.

  “Your American is having a fine nap,” Charlotte told him.

  “He’s only tired,” Grandmère said generously.

  “I’m writing,” I said, but my accent hadn’t fully awakened yet and they couldn’t understand me. This reinforced their firm belief that I couldn’t understand them.

  “Look at him, just sitting there, plucking at his nose hairs!”

  “Be glad he paid the rent!” Grandpère called, wheeling his wine and weeds to the potato caveau, a shed attached to the very far end of our long house. He disappeared inside for a moment, reappeared with the wheelbarrow empty. He made much of rolling the garden hose, ended up with it neatly at my door. I kept at my writing pad, scratching, scratching, trying to ignore his presence, which was like a warm and itchy wool blanket around me. Finally I turned.

  Louis grinned, sidling toward the potato cellar, thumb to mouth, pinky in the air. I joined him—what the he11!—I joined him, drinking glasses of wine in the near-dark next to two big piles of potatoes, discussing the beauty of a hoe handle he’d carved, feeling its smoothness. Grandpère had a few words to say too about the absolute inevitability of my fatherhood. One glass of wine, two, and not even eleven o’clock yet. Three glasses, four, the two of us grinning complicitously. Finally the old man declared it time to go back to work. He pounded me a fond pat on my back, walked me to my door, wheeled his barrow on, steadily. The women, thank goodness, were gone.

  In my kitchen I put my head on my pad of paper and slept the morning away. Just before Jules got home I heard Charlotte’s sneering voice from the garden: “You see? Sound asleep!” When I
turned, Charlotte was there with a little crowd—Grandmère, Louis Petit, Antony, and Hubert. They all of them had come to see for themselves.

  Afternoons at the atelier the artists spread out around Bellevue to paint landscapes near enough the atelier for the arthritic (and very appealing, I should say, and talented) American artist to find them and give advice and instruction. Bellevue lived up to its name, not in the sense of being a mental hospital, but in offering good vistas on all sides, distant farms, shapely trees, new-mown hay in round bales receding to the horizon, windmills, ponds, cathedral spires—distance and light and space; color and shadow and depth. Juliet set herself up in front of a field of sunflowers, hectares of cheerfully drunken yellow faces bobbing in the breezes. I dropped her off at the atelier most afternoons and stayed twenty minutes, strolling around the farmstead looking at the various artists’ interpretations, good and bad, chatting with Kellogg and the other friends we’d made.

  The American artist had a house in town, had conceived of this school as a way to pay for living there. The little house was part of a street-front row of houses, an ancient place in much need of repair whose windows looked out on the fallen houses around it. He’d painted all the interior walls with classical subjects: Autumn as a woman whose breasts spilled out over her bodice, Summer as a dancing nymph, paintings that made me think unaccountably of Juliet’s and my tower room in the castle Tigné-LeClerq. His parlor was a gallery, and people came from all over Anjou to buy paintings from him. The townspeople, in turn, nearly all of them, had thought of ways to make money from the American artist’s students. It was a cozy, symbiotic system.