They did the menu, heard the specials. Hope said, “I’m always going to order something different,” but ordered the onion soup. Jack ordered the cassoulet, saying, “I should have the fish.
“And a bottle of your Merlot,” he told the unsmiling proprietress, “which we will have right away.”
“We’ll share a salad,” Hope said. She saw Jack watch the proprietress walk off in the direction of the bar, in a remarkably short skirt for a woman of fifty. Hope saw the long, brown, athletic legs, bare even in January, with Jack’s eyes. Jack, a large man, with a heavy, dark face, turned to Hope. “So?”
“O.K., I guess. You?”
Jack said, “My agenda: if we were still making resolutions, what would yours be?”
Hope’s interest pricked right up. “I’m thinking. You go first.”
Jack said, “I’m going to watch what I eat. It’s not the weight; it’s the constantly thinking of eating. I don’t eat real meals unless Jeremy comes over.” Jeremy was Jack’s son.
Hope said, “I’m going to watch what I watch and then I’m going to turn the TV off. It’s ugly waking mornings with the thing flickering. It feels debauched.”
Jack said, “I’m not going to order books from Amazon till I’ve read the ones on my shelves.”
Hope said, “I’m going to hang up my clothes even when nobody is coming over. Nora is very severe with me.” Nora was Hope’s daughter.
The wine arrived. Jack did the label-checking, cork-sniffing, tasting, and nodding. The salad came. Hope served their two plates. Jack indicated Hope’s hair, which she had done in an upsweep. “Very fetching,” he commented.
“Thank you. Here’s an old new resolution: Going to learn French. What was the name of my teacher when we got back from Paris? I once counted eleven years of school French, but it was you who always had to do the talking.”
Jack said, “I want to learn how to pray.”
Hope looked across the table to see if he was being cute. Jack was concentrating on folding a whole lettuce leaf into his mouth.
Hope said, “I’ll never understand the principle of not cutting it into bite size.”
The onion soup came, the cassoulet came. Jack asked Hope if she would like to go back.
“Go back? Back to Paris!” Jack and Hope had lived together before marrying two other people. Jack subsequently divorced his wife, who had subsequently died. Hope was widowed.
“To Paris. To Aix,” Jack said.
“Something I’ve been meaning to ask you,” Hope said. “Were you and I ever together in an old, old garden? Did we walk under century-old trees? Did we lie down in the grass and look into tree crowns in France, or was that in England? Was it an old English garden or is this a garden in a book?”
“What’s to keep us?” Jack said.
There were a lot of reasons, of course, to keep them from going back. Two of the littlest were at this moment flattening their noses against the outside of the restaurant window. Ten-year-old Benjamin stuck his thumbs in his ears and wiggled his fingers at his grandfather. Hope made as if to catch her granddaughter’s hand through the glass. This made little Miranda laugh. And there was Hope’s daughter, Nora, with baby Julie in a stroller, and Jack’s son, Jeremy, standing out on the sidewalk.
“I’m just going to the bathroom,” Hope mouthed to her daughter.
“What?” Nora mouthed back, her face sharpened with irritation. The baby was crying.
“She knows I can’t hear her through the glass,” Nora said to Jeremy.
Jeremy said, “You stay with the kids. I’ll go in and get him. I’ll see what your mother wants.” Jeremy walked into the restaurant, passing Jack and Hope on his way to the corner where, an hour ago, he had folded up his father’s wheelchair. Hope stood and came around the table to kiss Jack and be kissed goodbye.
“On the double, Dad,” Jeremy said. “I need to get back to the office.”
“I’ll call you,” Jack said to Hope. “We’ll have lunch.”
Hope was mouthing through the window again and Nora said, “Julie, shut up, please! Mom, what?” The baby had started screeching.
Hope pointed in the direction of the ladies’ room. Nora signalled, You need me to go with you? Hope shook her head no. One of the reasons for the Café Provence was that its bathrooms were on the street floor, not in the basement, down a long stair.
Gathering her coat and bag, Hope opened the door to the ladies’ room and saw, in the mirror above the basins, that her hair was coming out of its pins. She removed all the pins and stood gazing at the crone with the gray, shoulder-length hair girlishly loosened. Hope saw what Diane Arbus might have seen and was appalled, and being appalled pricked her interest right up. “I’ve got an agenda: the Arbus factor of old age,” Hope looked forward to saying to Jack the next time it would be convenient for Jeremy and Nora to arrange lunch for them at the Café Provence. ♦
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