Along the ride he thrust a government ID at us and we learned his name was Erique. Erique had a terrible cough that would shake him so hard he would lose control of the car for a second and we would weave hilariously around the road. Marylou and I both knew about three dozen French words between us, not enough for any kind of meaningful sentence, but every once in a while we would try to charm and entertain Erique by saying things like “hot” and “train” and “Paris” and “tree” in no particular order or context. He looked at us sadly through the rearview mirror whenever we spoke, so we stopped.
We passed through the village itself, which was as quaint and beautiful as anything you could possibly want from the French countryside. People were coming out of the bakery with long loaves of bread, drinking at tables outside of a café with a red awning. There were tiny French children circling on bikes, old men sitting by an ancient central fountain, hills in the far distance. The only things that disrupted the tranquil, language-textbook perfection of it all were an ambulance and police car with silently blinking lights parked in front of one of the picturesque houses. A small cluster of paramedics and officers placidly smoked and talked by an open front door, some leaning on an empty gurney. In this town even the emergencies were handled with languid grace.
We drove right through the village, off the nice paved roads onto much bumpier ones that passed through olive groves. Then we went off the pavement entirely and onto a pitted dirt road to nowhere and nothing. We were hot and crushed and shaken around for another fifteen minutes, when Erique turned down an even narrower nonroad and a house materialized from between the branches.
The house was made of a creamy white stone, with massive duck-egg blue shutters on all the windows. It stood alone against a backdrop of trees, trees, and more trees, along with the occasional rosemary or lavender bush. Walking down the gravel path that led to it, you were pretty much knocked over by the sweet smell of the herbs baking in the sun, and then you went under the thick canopy of green that shielded the house. Off to the side there was a stream that actually gurgled and had about ten million tiny black frogs hopping around.
Erique walked us all around our new French home, opening doors, turning on fans, picking up the occasional spider or frog and flicking it out the window. The house looked like it had been redecorated once every decade, starting in maybe 1750 and ending around 1970. The furniture was all big and heavy, like something out of The Hobbit. Some of the rooms were wood paneled, but mostly they were wallpapered. One room was covered in a bright yellow, sixties, psychedelic swirl, another in a plasticky representation of wood paneling, another in dull arrangements of brown-tinted apples and pears. Our bedroom had the most bearable pattern—a delicate one of bluebells and intertwining vines. I wouldn’t have wanted it in my own room at home, but at least it didn’t give me the shakes like the yellow room or depress me like the rotting-fruit room.
The main decorations were old, framed maps of France, all with creeping yellow stains in the corners from where moisture had gotten under the glass. There was a framed ad for Casio keyboards in the bathroom—one that looked like it was from the mideighties, with a guy in a big orange suit and a mustache with a keyboard tucked under his arm. I spent a lot of time staring at this, trying to figure out why someone had taken the time to remove it from a magazine, frame it, and hang it next to the sink.
Erique loaded up the tiny fridge with food, stacked loaves of bread and warm Orangina and bottled water on the shelf, and then putt-putted off in his car. We looked around for something to do. For entertainment there was a shelfful of French romance novels, detective stories, guidebooks, and history books—all in the early stages of pungent old-book smell. There were also some old board games and a television with antennae and no cable that got only one station, which showed only American cartoons dubbed into French, mostly Bob l’éponge, who lived in a pineapple under the sea.
To be fair to the place, I think most French people who rented it rolled up with their own bikes and kayaks and Casio keyboards or whatever else they needed. Claude had indicated he would be bringing all these things just as soon as he could get here, so all we had to do was “relax”—which, as everyone knows, is another way of saying “sit around and wait and feel the creeping hand of time run its fingers up your back.” I couldn’t stand it, all woody and quiet and smelling of rosemary and thyme. It was like being in a spice rack.
We walked around outside, but the smallness of the frogs freaked Marylou out a lot, mostly because they kept jumping across the path when we were least expecting it, and she stepped on one by accident, and she went through all five stages of grief about it. Marylou is famous for her squeamishness and her nonviolent nature. Spiders, silverfish, roaches, even flies…she’s helpless against them. At home she would make someone else, often me, come and deal with the problem. So killing a frog almost did her in. The rest of the afternoon was spent calming her down. That night we had dinner, read all the books we’d brought, and waited.
