The Ingredients of Love (2 page)

That evening, as I switched off the lights in the restaurant and set off home with a bag of raspberry macaroons, I still had no idea that my apartment would be as empty as my restaurant. It was, as I said, a day just like any other.

Except that Claude, in just three sentences, had departed from my life.

*   *   *

When I woke up the next morning after what felt like a sleepless night, I knew that something was wrong. Unfortunately I am not one of those people who immediately spring into wakefulness, and so it was at first more a strange feeling of uncertainty and uneasiness that gradually penetrated my consciousness than a clear thought. I was lying on the soft, lavender-scented pillows; from outside the muffled noises of the courtyard entered the room. A crying child, the reassuring voice of a mother, heavy footsteps moving away, the courtyard gate creaking shut. I blinked and turned to my side. Still half asleep, I stretched out my hand and felt for something that was no longer there.

“Claude?” I murmured.

And then the realization came. Claude had left me!

What had still seemed strangely unreal the night before, and after several glasses of red wine had become so unreal that I could well have dreamed it, became irrevocable in the gray light of this November dawn. I lay there motionless and listened, but the apartment remained silent. No sound from the kitchen. No one rattling around with the big dark blue cups and cursing because the milk had boiled over. No smell of coffee to dispel tiredness. No quiet humming of his electric razor. Not a word.

I turned my head and looked over toward the balcony door: The thin white curtains were open, and a cold morning was pressing against the window. I pulled the covers more closely around me and recalled how I'd unsuspectingly entered the dark, empty apartment with my bag of macaroons the night before.

Only the kitchen light was on, and for a moment I stared blankly at the lonely still life that presented itself to my view in the light of the dark metal lamp.

A handwritten letter lying open on the old kitchen table, the jar of apricot jam that Claude had spread on his croissant that morning. A bowl of fruit. A half-burned candle. Two cloth napkins rolled up carelessly and stuck in silver rings.

Claude never wrote to me, not even a note. He had a manic relationship with his mobile phone, and if his plans changed, he would ring me or leave a message on my voice mail.

“Claude?” I called, and still somehow hoped for an answer, although the cold hand of fear was already grabbing at me. I lowered my arms and the macaroons fell out of the bag in slow motion. I felt a little faint. I sat on one of the four wooden chairs and pulled the letter unbelievably slowly toward me, as if that could have changed anything.

I had read the few words that Claude had penned on the paper in his big, sloping handwriting over and over, and eventually seemed to hear his rough voice, close to my ear, like a whisper in the night:

Aurélie,

I've met the woman of my dreams. I'm sorry that it had to happen just now, but it would have had to happen sometime anyway.

Take care,

Claude

At first I had sat motionless, just my heart beating like mad. So that was how it felt when the ground was pulled out from under your feet. That morning Claude had said good-bye to me with a kiss that seemed particularly tender. I didn't know then that it was a kiss of betrayal. A lie! How contemptible, just to slink away like that!

In a surge of impotent rage I crumpled the paper and threw it into the corner. Seconds later I was sitting over it, sobbing loudly and smoothing the page out again. I drank a glass of red wine, and then another. I took my phone out of my purse and rang Claude again and again. I left messages—some desperately pleading, some wildly abusive. I walked up and down in the apartment, took another gulp to give myself courage, and shouted down the phone that he should call me back at once. I think I must have done that about twenty-five times before I realized, with the dull clarity that alcohol sometimes brings, that all my efforts would be in vain. Claude was already light-years away and my words could no longer reach him.

My head ached. I got up and padded through the apartment like a sleepwalker in my short nightshirt, which was actually the big—far too big, in fact—blue-and-white-striped jacket of Claude's pajamas that I had somehow pulled on during the night.

The bathroom door was open. I looked around to make certain. The razor had gone, as well as the toothbrush and the Aramis aftershave.

In the living room the burgundy cashmere throw that I'd given Claude for his birthday was missing, and his dark pullover was not hanging carelessly over the chair as it usually did. The raincoat had gone from the hook to the left of the front door. I pulled open the wardrobe in the hallway. A couple of empty coat hangers knocked against each other, rattling gently. I breathed in deeply. Everything had been taken away. Claude had even remembered the socks in the bottom drawer. He must have planned his departure very carefully, and I asked myself how I had managed to notice nothing, nothing at all. Not that he was intending to go. Not that he'd fallen in love. Not that he was already kissing another woman at the same time that he was kissing me.

In the tall gold-framed mirror over the bureau in the hall the reflection of my pale, tear-stained face looked like a pale moon surrounded by quivering dark blond waves. My long hair with the center parting was as tousled as if after a wild night of love, except that there hadn't been any passionate embraces and whispered promises. “You've got hair like a fairy princess,” Claude had said. “You're my Titania.”

I laughed bitterly, went right up to the mirror, and examined myself with the ruthless gaze of the desperate. The state I was in with the dark shadows under my eyes made me look more like the madwoman of Chaillot, I thought. Above me to the right the photo of Claude and me that I liked so much was stuck in the frame. It had been taken on a balmy summer evening as we strolled over the Pont des Arts. A chubby African who'd spread his bags out for sale on the bridge had taken it for us. I still remember that he had unbelievably big hands—between his fingers my little camera looked like a doll's toy—and that it took ages until he finally pressed the button.

We were both laughing in the photo, our heads snuggling close together against the deep blue sky that tenderly embraced the silhouette of Paris.

Do photos lie or do they tell the truth? Pain makes you philosophical.

I took the photo down, put it on the dark wood, and leaned on the bureau with both hands.
“Que ça dure!”
the dark-skinned man from Africa had called after us in his deep voice with the rolling Rs.
“Que ça dure!”
Hope it lasts!

I noticed that my eyes were filling with tears again. They ran down my cheeks and splashed like heavy raindrops on Claude and me and the whole Paris-for-lovers crap, until everything became misty and indistinct.

I opened the drawer and shoved the photo in among the scarves and gloves. “So there,” I said. And then once more, “So there!”

Then I pushed the drawer shut, and thought about how easy it was to disappear from someone else's life. Claude had only needed a couple of hours. And it looked as if the men's striped pajama top, which had been left—probably unintentionally—under my pillow, was the only bit of him that remained.

Happiness and unhappiness are very often close to each other. To put it another way, you could also say that happiness sometimes follows very strange and devious routes.

If Claude hadn't left me then, I would probably have gone to meet Bernadette on that gloomy November morning. I would not have wandered the streets of Paris, the loneliest person in the world; I would not have stood at twilight on the Pont Louis-Philippe for such a long time staring self-pityingly into the water, nor would I have fled from that concerned young policeman into the little bookshop on the Île Saint-Louis, and I certainly would not have found the book that was to turn my life into such a wonderful adventure. But let's tell things in the right order.

*   *   *

It was at least quite considerate of Claude to leave me on a Sunday, because Le Temps des Cerises is always closed on Mondays. It's my free day, and I always use it to do something nice. I go to an exhibition. I spend hours in Bon Marché, my favorite big store. Or I see Bernadette.

Bernadette is my best friend. We got to know each other on a train journey when her little daughter Marie tottered up to me and cheerfully emptied a mug of cocoa over my cream knitted dress. The stains have never completely gone, but by the end of that entertaining journey from Avignon to Paris, including our not very successful attempts to clean the dress with water and paper towels in a swaying train toilet, we were already firm friends.

Bernadette is everything that I'm not. She is determined, unflappably good-tempered, very clever. She accepts things that happen with remarkable calm and tries to make the best of them. She's the one who sorts out in a couple of sentences things I sometimes think are frightfully complicated, making them quite simple.

“Good grief, Aurélie,” she says on such occasions, and looks at me with amusement in her dark blue eyes. “What a
fuss
you make about things! It's all really quite
simple
…”

Bernadette lives on the Île Saint-Louis and is a teacher at the École Primaire, but she could just as well be an advisor for people with complicated thought processes.

When I look into her beautiful, open face, I often think that she is one of the few women who look really good wearing their hair in a simple chignon. And when she wears her shoulder-length blond hair down, men follow her with their eyes.

She has a loud infectious laugh. And she always says what she thinks.

That was also the reason why I didn't want to meet her that Monday morning. From the very beginning, Bernadette could not stand Claude.

“He's a freak,” she said, after I had introduced Claude to her over a glass of wine. “I know people like that. Egocentric—and never looks you in the eye properly.”

“He looks into
my
eyes,” I answered, and laughed.

“You'll never be happy with a man like that,” she persisted.

I found that a bit over-hasty at the time, but now, as I spooned the coffee into the
cafetière
and poured in the boiling water, I had to admit that Bernadette had been right.

I sent her a text and canceled our lunch together with a few cryptic phrases. Then I drank my coffee, put on my coat, scarf, and gloves, and went out into the cold Parisian morning.

Sometimes you go out in order to get somewhere. And sometimes you just go out to walk and walk and go farther and farther until the clouds clear, despair calms down, or you have thought a thought through to the very end.

I wasn't going anywhere that morning; my head was strangely empty and my heart was so heavy that I could feel its weight and I involuntarily pressed my hand to the rough fabric of my coat. There were still not many people around and the heels of my boots clattered forlornly on the old cobbles as I walked toward the stone gateway that links the Rue de L'Ancienne Comédie with the Boulevard Saint-Germain. I had been so happy when I found my apartment on that street four years ago. I love this lively little district whose winding streets and alleys with their vegetable, oyster, and flower booths, cafés, and shops reach down to the bank of the Seine. I live on the third floor in an old house with worn stone steps and no elevator, and when I look out of the window I can look across at the Procope, the famous restaurant that has been there for centuries and is said to have been the first coffeehouse in Paris. Writers and philosophers used to meet there: Voltaire, Rousseau, Balzac, Hugo, and Anatole France. Great names, whose spiritual presence gives most of the guests who sit and eat there on red leather banquettes under massive chandeliers a pleasant frisson.

“Aren't you lucky!” Bernadette had said when I showed her my new home and we were eating a really delicious
coq au vin
in the Procope that evening to celebrate the occasion. “When you just think of all the people who've eaten here—and you live only a couple of steps away … great!”

She looked around enthusiastically, while I speared a piece of wine-marinated chicken on my fork, contemplated it blissfully, and wondered for a moment if I was a Philistine.

To be honest, I have to admit that the thought that you could have eaten the first ice cream made in Paris in the Procope delighted me far more than the idea of bearded men putting their brilliant thoughts down on paper—but my friend would probably not have understood that.

Bernadette's apartment is full of books. They sit around in tall bookshelves that stretch over the door frames, they lie around on dining tables, desks, coffee tables, and bedside tables, and even in the bathroom I discovered to my amazement a few books lying on a small table next to the toilet.

“I simply couldn't imagine a life without books,” Bernadette had said once—and I had nodded a bit ashamedly.

In principle, I also read. But most of the time something gets in the way. And if I have the choice, I'd sooner take a long walk or bake an apricot tart: then it's the delicious smell of that combination of flour, butter, vanilla, eggs, fruit, and cream wafting through the air that gives my imagination wings and makes me dream.

This is probably because of the metal plaque, framed with a wooden spoon and two roses, that still hangs in the kitchen of Le Temps des Cerises.

When I was learning to read in primary school and letters began to fit together into a big, meaningful whole, I would stand under it in my dark blue school uniform and decipher the words that were written on it:

The purpose of a cookery book is one and unmistakable: to increase the happiness of mankind.