The Hotel Riviera(13)
Most of the rooms have balconies overlooking the leafy fig arbor and the terrace, with perfect views of the Mediterranean. If you want, you can lean from the windows and pick the ripe figs. When you bite into them, still hot from the sun, the sweet juices run down your chin.
In some rooms, the beds are all gilded ormolu and padded damask, which somehow turned out to look more country bordello than seaside villa, but which has a certain charm. Others are plain country iron, painted white and draped in gauze so that lying in bed with the soft slur of the sea in your ears, you could imagine you were in the tropics.
Everything else in the bedrooms is very simple. A table under the window; an amber-shaded lamp, a comfy chair, a soft rug for your feet. The soap in the small, Proven?al-tiled bathrooms is made from local olive oil and is scented deliciously with verbena; the bed linens smell of being dried in the sun and the wind, and the bunches of flowers on the nightstands smell like wild strawberries.
Occasionally, a nightingale pays us a visit, or a blackbird, which in my view has the prettier song. I like to hope it sends those guests already drifting off to sleep closer into each other’s arms, because there’s surely nothing as romantic as a nightingale’s song, heard while lying in your cool bed with the tall windows flung open to the sea breeze. “Hear that,” I sometimes imagine a delighted lover whispering, holding the long, cool length of his woman against his warm tanned body, as they love each other.
I’m back on the terrace now, the focus and general meeting place of the Hotel Riviera. Worn terra-cotta pavers, verdigrised iron railings under a burden of blossoms, old-fashioned globe light, and, overhead, a thick canopy of fig leaves.
Enchanting is the word that comes to mind as I look down over the tangle of colorful plants spilling onto the sandy path below. At the end of this path, there’s the clump of boulders and a flight of wooden steps leading down to the cove. Just above this is my own house, a miniature single-story version of the hotel, in the same faded-rose pink, with the same tall silvery shutters framing its windows, and a tiny porch tacked onto the front. The sea laps practically at my door and I sleep with my windows open to its soothing music.
I pick a sprig of jasmine and tuck it into my hair, as I take that sandy path, back to my little house, and Scramble, and my lonely dreams. Is there any wonder I love this place?
Chapter 13
The night had turned sultry, that sticky kind of heat that foretells a summer storm. I peeled off my clothes and headed into the shower. Five minutes later and many degrees cooler, I was in bed.
I lay there, eyes wide open, sheet thrown back, rigid as a soldier at attention, staring into the semidarkness at the vague shapes of the old blue-painted ceiling beams with the yellow spaces of plaster between them, Scramble rustled around on my pillow, clucking softly and occasionally touching my hair with her beak. I was glad of her company.
Sleep was impossible. I was too worried, too distracted, too lonely. I flung myself out of bed and sat by the open window, leaning on the wooden ledge. I felt the sun’s warmth still locked there and rested my head on my arms, listening to the distant rumble of thunder and the soft background sigh of the sea, thinking how fortunate I was to live in such a beautiful place. I reminded myself that I had Patrick to thank for that.
I suppose I’m what you might call a nester, partly because as a child I never really had a home. Due to Dad’s financial ups and downs, we were always on the move; one month I’d be a country cowgirl on a ranch, the next I was an urban schoolgirl striving to make instant best friends. We lived in so many different apartments I lost count. I yearned for a place to call my own.
My mother had simply picked up and left one day without taking six-year-old me with her. She’d dubbed my father, scathingly, Mr. Charm, and it was true, he was Mr. Charm, but oh, how I loved him. I’d hang on to his hand and on to his every word, gazing proudly up at my handsome daddy, who to his credit, and unlike my runaway mother, always showed up for PTA meetings, charming every mother there, beaming his “shy” smile while looking searchingly into their eyes. Looking for what? I wondered. It was a long time before I found out it was “would the answer be yes? Or no?”
After Mom left, somehow too, it was always me looking after Dad, instead of the other way around, making sure he got to appointments on time; that he’d booked the sitter; that there was milk for the breakfast cereal.
“You have to make a left turn here,” I’d remind him from the backseat of the car, because even at age six I realized he had zero sense of direction. “I have to be at school by eight,” I’d say, or “What shall we have for supper tonight, Daddy?” I knew if I didn’t remind him he’d forget all about it and it would be take-out pizza one more time. Even a little kid can get awfully sick of pizza.
Anyhow, Mr. Charm or not, I adored him, and of course, he was the standard by which I measured every other man. I found out too late he wasn’t the best yardstick to go by.
When I met Patrick I was at a vulnerable point in my life, but then somehow I always was. Vulnerable, that is. I’m sure a therapist would tell me it all stemmed from my childhood, it’s simple common sense; though of course common sense has never stopped me from falling for the wrong man.
I was just emerging from a two-year odyssey with a movie actor (odyssey was the only way to describe that long, hard haul) when I’d arrived at this conclusion. The “actor” was a wanna-be actor when I met him, then he started to climb the ladder: a small part in a small film; then another, larger part; soon he was escorting young actresses to premieres and parties and showing up in People magazine and the tabloids. Even blinded by love, I guessed where it was heading—absolutely nowhere—and called an end to it.