Exposed (15 page)

“When the sun touches that hill,” Uncle Marcel smiled, pointing westward to a hill covered with vines. “About an hour.”

I walked from the porch past a shed with mechanical equipment and ancient wooden rectangular bins to the hillside behind the house. I took off my sandals. The earth was still warm from the sun.

Uncle Marcel’s words, the dirt into which my toes sank, and the setting sun blended into a serenity I could not remember having ever experienced. I smiled out at the valley that lay before me and sat on a patch of grass beneath a giant oak tree left standing in the vineyard.

“Thank you,” I said, intending it for Grandmama, but feeling it was received beyond her.

As the sun neared the hill across the valley that signaled dinner, I headed down. When I neared the porch, Genevieve came out the kitchen door. “You can wash your feet there,” she said, wearing a warm and wide smile and pointing to a small washbasin and hose on the side of the house.

Uncle Marcel appeared behind her.

“How did you find their tree?” he asked.

“Whose tree?”

“That oak,” he pointed up the way I had just come. “Your grandmother sat under that tree whenever she needed calm. My mother, too, sat under that tree for guidance,” said Uncle Marcel. His smile matched Genevieve’s.

We had dinner that night, and many nights after. I heard countless stories of my family that I never knew, but don’t worry, I won’t subject you to a slideshow or photo album of those stories or to details of the weeks I spent at Chateau DuBois.

Except for one thing. It was morning, and I’d gotten up early when I heard Uncle Marcel leave the driveway in the Citroen. Genevieve was also up, even though dawn was just throwing a glow in the eastern sky.

“Marcel has work in Bordeaux,” she said when I told her I’d heard the car. “We are negotiating with one of the grand crus to buy our grapes this season instead of bottling our own wine. It has just gotten so expensive,” she said.

After breakfast, she invited me out to feed the chickens, which we often did together. I loved the way she said “chick chick chick,” and they came running from wherever they were in the yard to be fed grain.

“Where’s Sam?” I asked.

“Who?”

“Sam, the rooster. The red one,” I said.

“Oh, no. You never name them,” she said.

“Why?”

“Because naming them makes them into something else, makes it too easy to have a relationship with them.”

“But they just eat and give eggs. What’s wrong with naming them?”

Genevieve looked at me with a mixture of sadness and mild frustration.

“This is something about Americans. Your idealism is wonderful, but you ignore reality. Sam, as you call him, was dinner last night.”

I looked away so she would not see the expression on my face. “That just seems so cold.” I’d liked Sam.

“Jessica. The French are simply aware there are consequences if we do not control our feelings, if they control us. This can be a matter of survival. So, we do not name animals we intend to eat. We do not fall in love expecting it to last, but know it must become something else. We mourn, but accept that the world can be indifferent.”

“
Tout passé, tout lasse, tout casse.
Everything passes, everything wears out, everything breaks,” I said to her. “My grandmother used to say that.”

“Exactly,” said Genevieve, putting a hand on my shoulder. “But that’s only part of the saying.”

“I’m sorry?”

“That’s how the saying is most often given, and what most people know. But there is also another ending: Everything passes, everything wears out, everything breaks everything must find its place.”

“I never heard that.”

“That’s why Renée stayed in America and raised you. So you would know these things.”

“What? Why?”

“Oh. Marcel did not tell you this? I should not have said anything.”

“Please.… ”

“This too was written in the letter, in the box you brought. This was her decision, to stay in America, and care for you. She felt from the time you were born that you were her legacy. That you needed her nearby, and, I suppose, that someday she would give to you the ring.”

All the times I’d asked Grandmama why she did not return to France, and not once had she said this to me. I was instantly overwhelmed.

“I think I need to walk up through the vineyard,” I said, and headed to the oak that looked out over the valley.

That evening at dinner I asked Uncle Marcel why my grandmother stayed in America, especially after her husband had died. He looked over the top of this wine glass at Genevieve, and out of the corner of my eye I saw her give a small nod.

“She felt that you needed her nearby, that she had things to teach you that you could not learn otherwise.”

“But why was that so important, when she could have been here!” I was nearly in tears from a mixture of guilt and gratitude.

“It was more important for her to be there for you,” he said with the French shrug, indicating the answer was obvious.

“My God, I let her down.”

“
Non
, I think not,” he said, with a slight smile.

“I lost my license to practice law. I lost my marriage. I’ve been wandering around with no job, no purpose, pissed off at society and everything about it. I’ve not done much to earn the sacrifice she made.”

“This is not how she saw it,” said Uncle Marcel.

“How do you know?” I said, with some skepticism, thinking no one knew my Grandmere like I did. I’d forgotten somehow I was talking to her brother.

“Well, the letter she sent with you for one thing. And this letter is not the first correspondence she and I have had, you know. She was very proud of you.”

“I lost my marriage.”

“My sister felt that was a victory, of sorts. She thought your husband was, how did she put it, ‘hollow,’ I think she said.”

“She didn’t know I lost my law license.”

“
Oui,
this is true. But it would not have mattered. She believed in you and would have believed you would overcome such a setback.”

“I hate the injustice, that I got crushed. I hate that society won.”

“
Non,
this is not true,” he said shaking his head. “This can not be true.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Society can’t ‘win,’ as you say. Society is not an adversary. Society is simply water in which we swim. It is not conscious; it can’t be an enemy. Yes, it has rules. You may accept those rules. You may break those rules. Y
ou
may seek to change those rules. Each choice has consequences. But society does not win, as you put it.”

“If I broke the rules and lost my law license? Didn’t society win?”

“To feel helpless is a choice as well, I suppose,” he said with his shrug. “But if you fight and you lose, society does not win. There are people; there are rules. You fight the people; you change the rules. Such as my sister. She broke rules, then showed her allegiance to your membership in our family —
something
she did not want to be lost.”

“Uncle Marcel, I didn’t deserve that. That she should live out her life for that, away from all this…”

“This was not your choice to make,” he said, with a soft, sad smile. “I asked her often to come home. But it was not my choice to make either.”

“Why don’t you two go outside and have this conversation while I do the dishes?” said Genevieve. “Marcel, aren’t you in the mood for a cognac?”

“I’ll be right back down,” I said. And I went up to my room. When I returned, Uncle Marcel and Genevieve were still at the dining room table, talking softly.

“I want you to have this. To pass it on within the family,” I said, putting the small wooden box on the table in front of him.

“You are sure of this?” was all he said.

“Yes. I have no children, and I think it belongs here, in France. You know best who would protect it.”

Uncle Marcel nodded. “I want you to meet her,” he said.

“You already know?”

“It’s been obvious since she was born.”

Two days later Uncle Marcel’s grandson brought his wife and two children down from Tours, where they lived. They did not speak much English, but I was picking up a little French and Marcel and Genevieve translated easily and quickly enough for us to share an immediate bond.

I knew who the ring would go to as soon as she got out of the car. Soleil was twelve years old, I guessed. She had a very direct gaze, thick dark hair. She looked very much like I imagine my grandmother looked at that age. She looked very much like I did at that age.

Now with more of the family in town, we had the ceremony for which I had ostensibly come to France. We took my grandmother’s ashes to the small graveyard behind the chateau, and I took a small handful up to the oak in the middle of the vineyard. There I mixed them into the earth.

They stayed five days. Soleil followed me around the house, watching me intently, asking questions in English that I barely understood and that made us laugh, knowing we had so much in common. When I went for walks, she went too. When I sat under the oak, she sat nearby, not saying much, as we gazed out over the valley.

I left a few days after they did.

“Thank you for coming, for bringing her back,” said Genevieve as I loaded my bag into the Citroen. “Please come back any time. This is your home.”

“I will. You know I will,” I said to her.

She gave me a quick kiss on each cheek.

On the way into Bordeaux, Uncle Marcel asked “What will  you do now?”

“I have some unfinished business to take care of. After that, I don’t know. We’ll see,” I said.

At the airport, he extended his hand. “You are changed, I think, from when you arrived.”

“I don’t know how to thank you.”

“There is nothing to thank anyone for,” said Uncle Marcel. “You simply received what was already yours.”

• • • •

I’d set up my laptop in a booth at Sullivan’s and looked just like all the other lawyers who came in from upstairs with work to do and an eye out for a possible date. On occasion I even let a few of them buy me a drink. I wanted to see if I would be recognized.

Men, I will let you know something: There’s a very good chance that unless you have seen her right out of the shower, you may have no idea what your date really looks like unless she wants you to. Between what we do with our eyes and our lips, to say nothing of the hair, we can be anyone.

Add to that the fact that men often see what they want to see, depending on their age, lust, and inebriation, and well, many men would have a hard time picking their dates out of a police line-up.

A good-looking guy about my age asked if he could buy me a drink. I had actually met him a couple of times, a lifetime ago it seemed, when Mark and I were still married — first at a fundraiser for the Seattle Children’s Hospital, and then again at the Boats Afloat Show on Lake Union when Mark and I were thinking of selling the island property and buying a boat.

The guy, I’ll call him Steve, came up to where I was sitting at the end of the bar at Sullivan’s, “working” on my laptop.

“If you’re not on deadline with that, may I buy you a drink? If you are, may I virtually buy you a virtual drink?”

I laughed, said sure, and closed the laptop. I was curious if he would recognize me. I worried a little that Mark would come in; different makeup and hair couldn’t fool my ex-husband. But Mark usually went to the gym after work and besides, with his status as a married man with young children, I kind of doubted he spent much time in bars.

Steve and I chatted. I told him my name was Rebecca Wilson. He asked which firm I was with and I told him I was up from San Francisco on a special project that I really didn’t want to talk about.

There’s enough of that kind of interchange between Silicon Valley and Seattle, most of it with firms that guarded plans like nuclear secrets, that my explanation didn’t even raise a ripple.

I asked him who he was with and he said “Moore & Associates.” I shook my head as if I’d never heard of them.

In that way that some guys affect when they want you to know they are both important and self-effacing, he added, “We’re the big dog in Seattle Law, but I’m just a mutt. I do real estate contracts.”

It was about then I saw a man come in that I definitely recognized. Max Moore walked up to the bartender, who quickly gave him a drink and pointed to the other end of the bar.

There by himself stood Rick, one of the three men I had made love with, sort of, had sex with… had an orgasm with… at SASSA long ago, the day of my wreck, the wreck that wrecked my career. The man I’d looked for before my trial.

The two of them talked and laughed. I thought it was a coincidence that Rick was here, too. For about two minutes.

“Steve, do you know those two men behind you? Don’t look right now, but I think they are realtors working on the same deal I’m working on. I thought they were at a meeting in Bellevue.”