Bread Alone (10 page)

“Like a private eye?”

She laughs merrily. “Don’t be silly. He’s a police detective. With the Encino PD.”

“Where on earth did you meet a cop?”

“He helped us set up our Neighborhood Watch program last year. He was so nice and so … thorough.” Obviously that was the deciding factor.

My eyes narrow. “Are you sure he’s single?”

“Of course. He’s a widower.”

“Did he show you the corpse?”

She ignores me and opens the Williams-Sonoma catalog.

She comes home from the garden club board dinner with the names of two therapists and one attorney.

“I guess you got tired of discussing perennials, so you just sat around dissecting my life?”

“Of course not. But all of those women have children and most of them have been through this at least once. By the way, Georgia and Tim Graebel are coming to dinner Monday night. Will you be home?”

“I might go to a movie.”

“It would do you good to be with friends. The Graebels know what’s happened. They don’t expect you to be vivacious and entertaining.”

“How do the Graebels know what’s happened when I’m not even sure myself?”

“I told Georgia, of course.”

The phone rings and I grab it.

“Mrs. Franklin, it’s Elizabeth Gooden. Sorry to call you so late. I was in court all day. The title to the house on Woodrow is listed in the name of David Franklin only.”

“Oh” is all that comes out.

“Have you had a chance to make a list of community property?”

“Um … no. Not yet.”

“Then there’s really nothing else to be done at this point. I hope you’ll consider what we talked about yesterday. I’ll wait to hear from you.”

I replace the receiver. My mother’s looking at me, waiting for me to
tell her something, but I head for the stairs. “I’m going to lie down for a while.”

I open the window a crack, stretch out on top of the bedcovers. Without thinking, I reach for the remote, turn on the TV. An old black-and-white movie flickers soundlessly.
Love in the Afternoon.
Audrey Hepburn and Gary Cooper cavorting through Paris. I’ve seen it so many times I know it by heart. I love the ending, where he’s going away and she’s walking along beside the train, giving him this line of bullshit about all the lovers she’s going to have when he’s gone. The train picks up speed and she’s talking faster, and then she’s running alongside until suddenly Coop realizes that he can’t live without her and he reaches out and sweeps her off the platform onto the train, beside him. Kiss and fade to black.

Pretty soon she’ll be coming home to their gorgeous apartment in New York to find the locks changed and all her clothes in the hall. I hit the remote control and the screen goes blank with an electrical pop.

My mother is playing the piano when Detective Ed Talley comes to pick her up Friday night—a Bach prelude, something she could play in her sleep—and I’m upstairs in the bathroom with the water running full bore in the tub. As soon as I hear the front door shut, I dart across the hall to peer out around the shade of my bedroom window.

He looks like a character in a detective novel, the one they always describe as “beefy.” His navy blazer seems stretched tight across his broad shoulders, and even from up here, I can see he doesn’t have any neck. His hair is Grecian Formula black, arranged in kind of a whorl around the little pink circle of barren scalp on the top of his head. He takes my mother’s arm possessively and opens the door of his gold Camaro for her. He shuts it, then looks directly up at my window. He can’t possibly see me, but I have the creepy feeling he knows I’m here. The gaslight glints off his amber-tinted aviator shades.

God, Mother. How could you?

At four o’clock Monday morning, I’m lying awake in the dark. I hear every creak of the still house, every sigh of wind, every barking dog. I sat around all weekend pretending to read, trying to watch TV, waiting for David to call. My mother finally talked me into going to the El Torito Grill last night, and I was a wreck all during dinner. When we got home, I went straight to the answering machine. Nothing.

He didn’t call. He’s not going to call. I know it in my stomach, which has always been the seat of my emotional responses. Not my heart, the way most people feel things. When I’m happy, it’s my stomach that feels all fluttery. When I’m nervous … well, that’s not something I talk about in polite company. I’m just as likely to throw up as to cry when I’m upset. And when I’m sad, like now, for instance, my whole abdominal cavity seems to be lined with lead.

I burrow under the covers like a mole, trying to shut everything out, then I’m too warm. I push the blanket away, turn on the lamp, hang over the edge of the bed, stretching for the box of books just beyond my reach. My hand settles on a worn paperback:
The Tassajara Bread Book
by Edward Espe Brown. I roll up my pillow under my neck and tilt the lamp shade so the light falls directly on the pages.

A relic. Published in 1970 by Shambhala Publications, its pages are spattered with hard little specks of dried dough, stained with grease and smudged with fingerprints. One corner of the back cover is charred where I set it down too close to a burner on the gas stove in my first apartment. I scan the contents and the first page of each chapter. I like the way the recipes are laid out—there’s a basic procedure, actually no more than a set of suggestions, followed by a list of variations. The whole thing is liberally laced with Brown’s Zen philosophy of bread making.

“Bread makes itself, by your kindness, with your help, with imagination running through you, with dough under hand, you are breadmaking itself …”

I read bread recipes until the sky turns quicksilver.

At 6:15
a.m.
the Ventura Freeway is already jammed. Must be a SigAlert or a CalTrans closure. I should have listened to the radio. I get off and take Sepulveda south to Ventura Boulevard, zigzag over the Santa Monica Mountains on Laurel Canyon. Not any faster, really, but at least it’s green and the air is cool and fresh, crisp with eucalyptus. Then east on Santa Monica to Highland and south into Hancock Park. I stop at the curb, half a block from the big white contemporary where I used to live. The gold Lexus sitting in the driveway isn’t really a surprise.

At 7:20 the front door opens and Kelley steps out, stunning in a red miniskirted suit, checking her watch. My husband follows, checking his watch. Like they’re synchronizing for some planned battle. While I sit there staring, he kisses her—not some impassioned embrace, but sort of a married-people kiss, casually affectionate, which is even worse. His eyes follow her as she walks to her car and that’s when he sees my little red Mazda sitting down the street.

I have to hand it to him. He’s cool. He smiles, waves at her as she drives away. When she’s out of sight he walks in my direction, calmly, purposefully, no longer smiling. I promise myself that the tears pressing from behind my eyes will never see daylight. He steps off the curb, walks around to my side of the car. He’s wearing his charcoal Jhane Barnes suit, a gray-and-gold-patterned tie with little random diamonds of emerald green, and a smudge of red lipstick at the corner of his mouth.

I turn my face as he bends down to the window. “Early morning meeting?”

He looks stern. I have a flash of my father preparing to scold me. “Wyn, this kind of behavior doesn’t help anyone.”

I swear to God, if I hadn’t just seen him kissing his girlfriend, I’d burst out laughing. As it is, I feel like if I don’t keep a tight rein on things, any expression of emotion could escalate into full-blown hysteria. I fumble in my purse for a tissue and hand it to him.

“Better get rid of the lipstick. It’s not a good color for you.”

He sighs audibly, wipes his mouth. “It’s not what you think.”

The scene through the windshield goes suddenly wavy, like an El
Greco canvas—the gentle curve of the street, the overarching pepper trees, the precise lawns, the exuberant flower beds. The snarl of traffic on Highland is muted to a gentle hum. “Wyn,” he says, “why don’t we have a cup of—”

I miss the end of the sentence as I pull away, narrowly missing his foot.

The drive back to Encino is a bit of a blur. If I make any illegal turns or run any red lights, no one notices. There’s a note from my mother that she’s gone to run errands and to shop for dinner and that there’s coffee made. I pour a cup and sit down at the oak table in the kitchen where I did homework and carved pumpkins and decorated Christmas cookies. My mother’s well-thumbed copy of
Mastering the Art of French Cooking
sits open to page 263:
Coq au Vin.

I stare at the page. It says that in France, this dish is usually accompanied only by parsleyed potatoes, so that’s undoubtedly what we’ll be having. In my mother’s house, Julia’s word is law. I drink my coffee and flip the pages backward, letting my eyes skim the recipes for chicken, fish, shellfish, hors d’oeuvres, soufflés, omelets, stocks, sauces, while my brain slips into neutral and memory engages.

I was half-excited, half-terrified when the plane landed in Paris. For a kid who’d never been anyplace more exotic than Rosarito Beach, France could just as well have been Mars. I’d had four years of French in high school and two at UCLA, but the instant the Air France jet’s wheels met the tarmac at Orly airport, it all vanished from my brain.

At immigration, the guy stared for a long time at my squeaky clean American passport before he stamped it and handed it back. It was 1976. The Vietnam War was relegated to some nightmare past, but Americans still weren’t winning any popularity contests in Europe. Since I was obviously a student, the
douane
(customs) agent decided to take everything out of my suitcase to make sure I didn’t have a kilo of dope sewn into the lining. I was close to tears by the time he finished.

When I finally wobbled up the ramp into the light of day, the first
thing I saw was a girl holding a sign with my name on it. I introduced myself, and she kissed me on both cheeks. She was Sylvie Guillaume, and she’d come to take me back to Toulouse on the train. The Guillaumes were my host family and I would be working for her brother, Jean-Marc. Overwhelming relief blotted out every other emotion.

Sylvie Guillaume was a college student like me, but she didn’t look like any of my school friends back in L.A. Small and finely made, with dark eyes and black hair cut in a sleek, head-hugging cap, she projected effortless chic. Yes, she wore jeans and a T-shirt, but she had a long lavender and green scarf around her throat, one end tossed back over her shoulder. Her face just looked French—something about the way they hold their lips when they talk, as if they’re perpetually expecting a kiss. She actually wore purple lipstick.

As soon as we were settled in the train compartment, she produced a slim gold cigarette case from her purse. And she puffed with such aplomb that I didn’t even mind inhaling her secondhand smoke. She managed to run through her entire supply between Paris and Toulouse, all the while drinking Perrier and telling me about her family and their bakery. I’d already memorized most of the information from reading my info packet at least once a day for the preceding two months. Her English was excellent, charmingly accented but clear. I worried in silence about how the French would enjoy hearing my heavy American voice steamroll over their musical language, flattening the vowels and clipping off the
wrong consonants.

Even though it was late afternoon when we arrived in Toulouse, she insisted on going to the bakery—La Boulangerie du Pont—as soon as I was installed in my bedroom on the third floor of their house.
Du pont
means “of the bridge,” and even though the bakery wasn’t near any bridge, the whole town was built around the Garonne River, so I guess that’s where the name came from. I snapped a picture of it from the corner of the Rue Aquitaine, one of the narrow, curving lanes that radiated out from the circular park called Place President Wilson. It looked positively medieval, all the buildings made of stone and the famous pink brick of Toulouse. When I blurted this out to Sylvie, she laughed.

“Toulouse is much older than that,” she said. “There has been a settlement here since before Christ. It was the capital of the Visigoths.”

“Oh, that’s right,” I muttered. Like it had just slipped my mind. Then I walked over and looked through the front window and fell in love, first with Jean-Marc and then with the
boulangerie.

Inside was a man several inches shorter than me, built precisely to the specs of a French baker—barrel-chested, muscular. He looked like he might be able to deflect small automobiles if they veered into his path. In the dim light of late afternoon, his face was an artist’s melancholy sketch, with dark hair and eyes only suggested by thick charcoal strokes. He was deep in conversation with a customer, both of them saying at least as much with their hands as their mouths. Sylvie showed me around while we waited for her brother to finish.

My fingers brushed the raised design of the old brass cash register, the fine grain of the walnut cabinets, the cool marble countertop. The tiny white hexagonal floor tiles had been worn smooth over the threshold by generations of Toulousain feet. The cases were fronted with etched glass; the price cards hand-lettered in spidery script. A huge wrought-iron rack behind the counter displayed the day’s remaining loaves like works of art. A mural of rivers and bridges covered the walls.