from A Weekend in the Luberon

by Dixon Long

My wife, Susan, had an odd relationship with her brother, David. Though we saw him infrequently, he never seemed far from her thoughts. She would wonder aloud what he might think about her work, her friends, or the dress she wore, though she rarely asked me what I thought about these things. Her parents had divorced when the children were young, and I imagined that she and David had responded in a way unknown to me, an only child. I felt the tension between them, but I couldn’t imagine what had caused it and I assumed it would be resolved in time.

Now in his late forties, David was an eligible bachelor with a reputation as a rake. Susan and I lived beyond the periphery of his world, so reports of his lifestyle came to us second or third hand. Occasionally, there was confirmation—a photograph in one of New York’s tattletale papers showing David in a tuxedo, an attractive blonde in a barely decent dress clinging to his arm. There would be a self-satisfied smile on his face, a simulacrum of pleasure on hers.

I found David rather pompous, though I may have harbored some resentment because of his role in Susan’s financial affairs. However, I knew nothing about managing money, and only wanted to be sure that it was in competent hands. They communicated rarely; if papers needed to be signed, they were delivered and returned by messenger. Their father, Stanley Burton, had been the polestar in his daughter’s firmament, and when he was gone she and David seemed to have nothing more in common than their genetic endowment, a generous inheritance, and feelings of mutual repugnance.

At any rate, much of the time we were far away from all of that. We had a house in the south of France, where we went as often as possible and stayed as long as possible. About a month after arriving one autumn, I sensed that Susan was up to something. She was more intense than usual, and others were feeling it as well: René, the gardener, took a terrible tongue lashing one morning, and his wife, Marie, couldn’t seem to get anything right in the kitchen. I was slow to pick up on Susan’s mood, having been immersed in a lengthy monograph on a French foreign minister of the 1930s. Very little had been published on his role in France’s relations with Germany between the wars, and I was finding some new revelations in official correspondence and documents.

Then, one day, Susan and I took a long walk after lunch, climbing a little way into the Luberon, the mountain that lay behind the house like a long loaf of French bread. I was reminded of our early visits to the region, when we would take some fruit, cheese, and a bottle of wine, find a place to eat lunch in the shade of a grove of oaks or a cemetery wall, and then make love as the sun slid toward the horizon. Those were good days. I was still thin as a reed. With my silken, sandy hair and sad eyes of no identifiable color, people tended to overlook or ignore me. Some in our circle of acquaintances wondered why a woman as handsome, strong-willed, and prospectively wealthy as Susan would take an interest in me. The fact is that her respect for my intelligence, plus a sudden downpour in New York that soaked us to the skin and ended in a passionate interlude in my apartment, brought us together.

“I’ve been looking for a chance to tell you,” she began, “but you’re always buried in some manuscript or other. It’s about the weekend—I’ve invited some people down. It won’t interfere with your work, Freddy. Besides, you know them all.”

“Oh?” I said, lifting an eyebrow and glancing at her. “Who are they?”

“The Van Dams are in Paris. They’re coming down Friday afternoon on the TGV.”

“That shouldn’t be a problem,” I said. “Anyone else?”

“Werner.” She paused. “And Inga. We haven’t seen them for ages. I know what you’re thinking, Freddy. But they took us on some wonderful runs the last time we were in Arosa. I don’t think it’s asking too much for you to be civil to them. And it’s only for a couple of days.”

“My dear,” I replied with more generosity than I felt, “of course.”

Dixon Long lives in San Anselmo. These are the first pages of a novella-in-progress. Following a career as a professor of politics and dean at Case Western Reserve University, he co-authored Markets of Paris (Balade Books, San Anselmo) and Markets of Provence: A Culinary Tour of Southern France (HarperCollins). His novel, Brothers, was published by Creative Arts Books, Berkeley. E-mail: fordix33 at comcast dot net