Photograph by Amy Hart
The argument began with an invitation. “Come to the market with me today.”
“What for?” Jim was driving and didn’t look at her.
“For company,” Alice said. “We hardly see each other.”
“We see each other all the time. We’re seeing each other now.”
Alice put a hand on his shoulder and smiled when he glanced at her. “Come with me. It’ll be fun.”
“My friends. They’ll be expecting me.”
“Acquaintances,” Alice corrected. “You spend three, four days a week shooting the breeze with them.”
“Don’t be a nag.”
“Then treat me like I’m your wife. Like you want to be with me.”
“Oh, please. Don’t start that again.”
They passed near the Terrain des Peintres, the small park where Cezanne used to set up his easel. How Alice envied his vision, his sense of purpose, while in this country she had no direction at all.
“I want you with me. Can’t that be enough?”
“We’ll see each other afterward.”
She smothered her retort and sat in smoldering silence the rest of the way. Jim found a space in Parking Pasteur, a block from Aix-en-Provence’s pedestrian labyrinth. Alice retrieved her shopping caddy from the trunk, and they walked together past tourist shops and the cathedral. At the café, she waved to Jim’s friends and called out, “À plus tard,” the limit of her French. Jim settled into a chair.
In Place Richelme, shaded by a row of leafy plane trees and brightened by limestone block pavement, Alice meandered through the food stands hoping to run into Mark. Like her, he shopped on Wednesdays, when the marché was smaller and less crowded. Wheeling her caddy behind her, she stopped at a fruit and vegetable stand where the vendor spoke decent English. She carefully nestled strawberries, salad greens, and vegetables into her sack. After adding tomatoes at another stall, she found Mark at the fromagerie, thoughtfully chewing a sample of cheese.
“Hi, Professor.”
He looked up. “Hey, Alice.” He held out his hand. “Tell me what you think.”
Alice raised his fingers to her mouth, and he put the bit of cheese on her tongue. “Mild,” she said. “Creamy, but not overly. Nice flavor.”
“From Basque sheep.” He turned to the cheese monger. “Deux cents grams, s’il vous plaît.”
Alice pointed at the cheese wheel and said in English, “The same for me, please.”
They moved on, his companionship a salve for her husband’s rebuff. She enjoyed this bustling square, wrapped by harmonious Renaissance buildings of yellow stone and rows of windows. A few cafés with outdoor tables under colorful awnings hugged the perimeter.
Caddies rattling, they strolled among the shaded stands and chatted: Alice’s life in New Jersey, Mark’s in Indiana. His Midwest accent was a refreshing respite from the nasal babble that constantly assailed her. They laughed about French politics and talked about tennis, travel, and an exhibit Mark had seen at the local Musée Granet. She couldn’t ignore the physical attraction, either. He was tall and fit, with a rugged, handsome face more befitting a woodsman than a scholar.
They stood before a boulangerie display. “What’s wrong?” Mark asked.
He had a way of picking up on emotions she believed she was effectively hiding. The opposite of obtuse Jim. Alice paid for a loaf of whole wheat bread and slipped the bag into her caddy.
“It’s nothing.”
“Not nothing,” he said. “If you want to talk about it. . . .”
She shook her head emphatically. “It’s not important.”
They finished their rounds. “Coffee?” he asked.
“Jim will be waiting for me.” The essence of her response hadn’t changed whenever he asked: for coffee, lunch, a movie, something else. But this time she blurted out, “We can get together this evening if you’re free.” Jim planned to go to a lecture, some arcane aspect of Aix-en-Provence’s history that wouldn’t interest her even if she understood French.
His face sparkled. “Sure. Great. Dinner at my place?”
Alice found Jim where she’d left him in Place de l’Hôtel de Ville, the square abutting the ancient city hall and Renaissance bell tower. Absorbed in conversation, he paid no attention to the caddy clack-clacking on the pavement and failed to notice her. A metaphor of what had become of their relationship. Of the five companions who’d been there when she left him, four remained ensconced under a flotilla of wide green umbrellas. Gregoire, already tipsy from his morning beer, stood and kissed her on the cheeks.
“Alice.” He said it in the French way, Al-eece, the accent on the second syllable. “I’m so sorry you did not sit with us today.”
“Someone had to get the groceries.” A dig at Jim that elicited no reaction. Besides, Gregoire was just being polite. Other than her husband, he was the only one of the group who could hold a conversation in English. If she were ever to join them, the fluid exchange would dry up.
Jim drove again, cheerfully assuming she wanted to hear about the group’s mundane chat, making no inquiry about her shopping expedition. Their rental was several miles out of town on the grounds of a winery, Domaine Cadieux, surrounded by extensive vineyards. It had been romantic at first, with the huge sky, vines in neat rows stretching away to forested hills, the winery with rows of oak barrels in the cold basement, and their small stone guest house. Now all Alice saw was the monotony of unbroken green leaves under an unforgiving sun.
In place of her flower garden back home that flourished only with her care, bright red poppies bloomed in wild profusion on both sides of the long gravel driveway. Even the earth here found her unnecessary.
Jim took a call as she put away her purchases. Phone to his ear, he left the kitchen. He returned, announcing that he needed to work in the Aix office the rest of the day. “I might as well eat in town. Otherwise I just have to rush back for the lecture.”
“I’m having dinner with a friend tonight,” she told him. “A fellow I sometimes run into at the market. We played doubles against him at the club.” She pictured Mark’s elegant serve and muscled arms.
Jim tilted his head upward, eyes unfocused, as he did when searching for a thought.
“Mark,” she said. “His name’s Mark.”
Jim nodded. “He had a cute girlfriend. Close match, but they won.”
Jim misremembered Mark’s tennis partner as his girlfriend. Alice didn’t correct him.
After he left, she opened her computer to study French. She’d given up a challenging, high paying job with Langston Foods for the boring and impossible task of memorizing irregular verbs. For a month, she’d gone to the city center every weekday for a French immersion course, the worst student in the class. Now she plugged away online in solitary frustration for two hours before calling it quits and making lunch. With the outside temperature in the upper eighties, she ate in the dining room. The hot afternoon lay ahead of her, long and empty.
Mark rented a place a few blocks from the Puyricard village center, a short drive from the winery. She presented him with a bottle of Domaine Cadieux’s reserve red. With furnishings selected by the owner, the interior of his one bedroom cottage could pass for an IKEA display, nothing suggesting Mark’s presence other than in the office, with his computer on the desk and papers and books piled everywhere.
Alice couldn’t take her eyes off Mark’s sure, quick hands as he sautéed vegetables for ratatouille and slid the pan of duck confit from the oven. They ate on his patio, the house shading them from the descending sun.
“Tell me about your book,” Alice said.
An associate professor of English, Mark was on sabbatical studying the influence of nineteenth century French novelists on American literature.
“I spent two weeks in this totally bleak chateau in the Loire Valley researching Balzac’s impact on Henry James. Everything was gray. The room where they keep Balzac’s letters felt like a tomb.” He wrapped a hand around his throat and made gagging noises.
Alice cringed instead of laughing. It was how she felt with Jim. Airless. “What did you find out?”
“Believe me, the details are boring.”
“No, I want to know.” It was safer to keep him at arm’s length with impersonal conversation.
He began telling her. “You’re right,” she said. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“What’s wrong?”
She hadn’t known she was revealing herself again. “Nothing.”
He reached across the table. She let him take her hand, which he held loosely. No meaningful squeeze or unnecessary words. Nothing more than a simple act of caring, and tears cascaded down her face. Mark rounded the table, and she rose to her feet. He held both her hands, his touch comforting. He didn’t presume greater physical closeness or try to kiss her. Which was a relief. Falling into the arms of another man wasn’t on the menu. He avoided the mistake of telling her that everything would be alright, only let her cry until she’d cried herself out.
He took his seat again. “I’m listening,” he said. “Whatever you want to tell me.”
She’d hadn’t meant to invite him into her personal sphere, but she had to release the pressure. Tell somebody. “It’s Jim. We used to have this amazing relationship. Right from the start. I was dating him for a few months when my mother died. She had leukemia. It was horrible. I was a total wreck. Jim was so nurturing, there for me completely. Then I came down with a bad case of Covid. He was there again, never complaining.” She gave a wistful smile. “He would play-kiss me through our masks.” She recalled weekend hikes, expeditions into Manhattan, friends they made as a couple, the excitement of buying their home. “I fell in love with him and stayed that way.”
She left out their deep intimacy, the frequent love-making, the physical passion sustained for years. She skipped ahead to what Jim called the opportunity of a lifetime with his employer, IBM, and his pigheaded determination to move to France regardless of what it meant to her.
“He kept at me, guilt-tripping me over and over. I finally told him okay if he promised to come home after a year. Now we’ve been here, what? Three months? I’m miserable and he doesn’t even notice. He loves his work. He loves Provence. Now that he has French friends, he leaves me stranded at home two, three evenings a week. And when he’s home, he works.”
“So he’s having the time of his life and you’re unhappy.”
“Coming here was the biggest mistake of my life. I’m terrible at learning the language. I go and hang out at Book in Bar to find expats to talk to, then I feel ridiculous for being so desperate.”
“Don’t go blaming yourself. It just makes it worse.”
“No one held a gun to my head.”
Mark’s eyes caught hers and held them. Her heart involuntarily thumped when his gaze dropped down for a glance at the swell of her breasts.
“Do you have any wine?” she asked.
He popped the cork at the table. She filled her glass and then another. “I feel better with you than I have in weeks.” Something she never would have admitted without the wine. The alcohol had its intended effect, dissolving her resolve to have a chaste encounter. She walked around the table and tugged on Mark’s arm. “Get up. I need you to hold me.”
Mark stood and faced her. “You’re sure?”
“I was sure when I agreed to come here. Only I didn’t let myself know it.”
Mark stepped into her embrace. She pressed her body against his, and he responded. Her lips against his, she was ready to let herself go fully. She would luxuriate in the evening’s private pleasures and endure the inescapable recriminations against herself later.
The Sainte-Baume massif rose out of the plain, a long ridge stretching into the color-melding distance. Jim drove, while Alice pictured the irregular mounds of limestone scattered throughout the landscape as masculine masses that had bullied their way up through soft feminine earth. From the parking lot, she viewed their objectives above: Mary Magdalene’s sanctuary, where the sloping forest met an imposing vertical cliff, and, higher yet, the chapel on the summit. They’d gotten an early start and arrived before eight, but cars kicked up dust ahead of them, with throngs of pilgrims and weekend hikers sure to follow.
AllTrails directed them across the flats on the Chemin des Roys. They began the ascent to the holy cave prepared for cloudless heat: shorts, fanny packs with water bottles, wide-brimmed hats, and sunblock. The path cut diagonally up the incline where oak and Scotch pine filtered the intensifying sun.
After her lapse the other night, an error not to be repeated, Alice decided to put her bitterness behind her. Jim had been attentive, solicitous even, since their spat. They’d played tennis and spent a nice evening together. They talked on the trail. Jim suggested a restaurant they might try, they decided on their next hike, and she asked for his take on French businessmen.
The Jim she remembered and loved seemed to be back.
Just over two miles in, they reached the buildings in front of the cave. The low-relief plain stretched out below—farmland, forest, and roads set against the escarpment. In the magnificence, Alice’s soul opened. She held Jim to her and initiated a kiss.
Jim pecked her impatiently. “Come on. Let’s go inside.”
He mounted the steps to the shrine’s entrance, a wooden double door set in a stone facade flush with the cliff. Inside, he left her without a word to explore on his own.
He hadn’t come back to her after all, didn’t recognize her need for togetherness. He couldn’t have hurt her more if he’d done it out of spite.
A section of the cave had been converted to a church, religious statues placed here and there. She sat in one of the pews near an unadorned altar and cried.
Alice imagined Mary Magdalene living here for thirty years, as legend claimed and the faithful believed. For all the Dominican friars had done, the cavern remained cold, wet, and inhospitable. Year after year into old age, Mary would have had to trek down to the valley every day to farm. And who would guard her cattle or sheep at night? Alice doubted she was so repentant that she would have chosen such a life. Nonetheless, pilgrims had been visiting the Christian shrine, one of the holiest in Europe, for fifteen hundred years.
She recalled the legend, accepted as history by so many. After the death of Jesus, the Romans forced Mary, who’d been proselytizing in Jerusalem, into a boat without rudder or mast and pushed her onto the vast Mediterranean Sea. She drifted without knowing her direction through unknown waters, with no knowledge of where providence would put her ashore.
Worshippers trudged in, crossed themselves, and knelt. Praying, as Mary supposedly did after her fortuitous landing, for absolution. Alice toyed with joining them.
No, she would live with what she’d done, would not beg for forgiveness.
Alice waited at the exit until Jim joined her. Outside, the heat hit her. The high sun had leached the vivid early morning hues from the lowlands. They backtracked to a fork in the trail and skirted under the massive wall until it ended in broken rock, where a trail led up to the top.
Her tee shirt dark with large wet spots, her head sweaty under her hat, Alice lagged behind to walk alone and finally stood with Jim at the crest next to the stone chapel. Broken limestone fragments crunched underfoot on the wide Sainte-Baume ridge. In place of exhilaration, she felt as remote from her husband as distant Mt. Ventoux, hazy in the north, or the expanse of Mediterranean blue to the far south. The heartrending gulf separating them was widening.
Alice shopped at the outdoor market Tuesday, a day early to avoid running into Mark. The crowd around her did nothing to mitigate her loneliness. She regretted ruining their friendship, her only one in Provence, by climbing into his bed. Distressed in her isolation, she could barely recall what she needed to buy.
The next day, she poked her head into Jim’s home office to say hello. He was talking in English, speakerphone on. She recognized the voice of his boss at IBM in the States. He didn’t emerge for another hour, and then he gushed with barely contained excitement.
“Listen to this. They like what I’m doing here so much the department’s making the Aix bureau permanent. They offered me the job. It’s incredible.”
“Jim!” She saw his puzzled reaction. “You promised this was temporary. To stay for a year and then go home.”
“They’re giving me a big raise. The French IT staff will be under me. You won’t ever have to work.”
Alice struggled to keep her temper in check. “It’s going to be hard enough to finish out the year. There’s no way I’m staying here the rest of my life.”
Jim looked at the antique wall clock. “I’ve got to go. Think it over. It’s an amazing opportunity. I’m sure we can work it out.”
He took off for meetings in Marseilles with the CEO and IT staff of a shipping company. His latest contract, the kind he’d been bringing to IBM.
In Alice’s agitation, nothing of the Rosetta Stone French got through. She gave up and summoned an Uber. The driver left her off at Aix’s magnificent Fontaine de la Rotonde, its water spilling down multiple tiers, marble human figures at its crown and sculpted lions around a circular pool at its base. With the vague hope she would find someone to talk to at Book in Bar, she strolled along the Cours Mirabeau and turned onto a narrow street with a solitary car creeping along.
Inside, bookshelves and tables displayed popular titles in English. A few people drank coffee and conversed at small round tables placed here and there. She picked up a novel to read the back cover. Her glance met that of a man who, like her, held a book in both hands. Her automatic smile acted as a beacon drawing him towards her. She threw the book down and fled.
Deposited by an Uber in Puyricard village, Alice entered Patisserie Victoire and eyed the array of desserts. She chose a tarte framboise, planning to grab a coffee at the brasserie across the street and sit in the church courtyard.
She wanted something else. The real reason she’d come.
She returned to the pastry store, and a few minutes later she stood in front of Mark’s cottage. He’d proven to be an astute listener before she’d fashioned him into her illicit lover. Fair or not, she would ask him to resume the former role and forfeit the latter.
The door opened at her knock. “What a nice surprise. Come in.”
Making a show of cheerfulness, Alice displayed the tarts. “I was in Puyricard.” He gave a quizzical look. She never just happened to be in Puyricard.
Wearing shorts and an unbuttoned short sleeve shirt in the overheated cottage, Mark made drip coffee, more to her liking than French espresso. “When I didn’t see you this morning, I thought you were avoiding me,” he said.
“I was. I like you, but I’m not looking for a repeat of the other night.”
“We were both pretty drunk. I hope you don’t think I . . .”
“Took advantage of me? If I recall, I pretty much instigated it.”
They sat outside on the ground, shaded and leaning against a broad oak, desserts on paper plates, coffee in ceramic mugs.
“Did you tell your husband?”
“I don’t plan to. Ever.” There was an extended silence as they ate and drank.
“There’s something on your mind. What is it?” Mark asked.
She told him of the bombshell Jim had dropped. “He never used to be so insensitive. It’s like he’s on this path. He’s so wrapped up in it, he shuts out anything he doesn’t want to see. I’ve been a mess since he told me.”
Mark sipped his coffee and shook his head without saying anything.
“Our marriage is sick, and I don’t know what to do to make it better. Jim and I used to dreamscape together. Now it’s like he tosses me aside like a toy he’s outgrown.”
“Keep going. I’m listening.”
Lost at sea, Alice revisited their problems without seeing a solution. She desired above all to be loved, and here was Mark, caring, responsive, not expecting anything in return. She felt closer to him than to her husband.
“Let’s not talk about Jim anymore,” she said.
She kissed him and he pulled away, hands on her shoulders. She drew him to her again. In the next kiss, she felt the pent-up ardor he’d been careful not to show. Lying down in the protective shade of leafy branches, she suddenly wanted him beyond reason, wanted to join together until the feel of him etched itself permanently into the memory of her body.
Her marriage failed to satisfy Alice’s gnawing hunger for connection. Jim was unwilling to turn down the job offer but put off accepting it. She was unwilling to commit to staying but put off the inevitable confrontation. They reserved their weekends for hiking the calanques, swimming at Cassis, and exploring the towns and trails of the Luberon.
She had never envisioned taking on a lover, but as long as her husband continued providing such meager scraps, Alice’s survival demanded finding nourishment elsewhere. She regularly bicycled to Mark’s home, where she gladly devoured him whole.
They lay in Mark’s bed, a fan blowing air over their sweaty bodies. “I’m falling hard for you,” he said. “You must know that.”
“You mean a lot to me. But I can’t afford to fall in love with you. I’m still with Jim.”
“I feel like a shit for torpedoing your marriage.”
“It’s been a leaky ship ever since we got to France. If it goes under, it won’t be because of you.”
Two weeks later, when their affair had been going on for a month, Mark announced he had to go to Paris to consult original documents of Emil Zola. “Can you come with me?” They were in bed. He propped himself up on an elbow and gazed at her. “I wish you could stay with me forever.”
Alice took in his look—earnest, loving, expectant—before answering. “I’ve thought about it. It scares me.”
She wanted more of him than she allowed herself, inserting a day or two between her visits to temper their evolving intimacy. His Paris invitation meant spending rootless days alone in a big city while he worked, poring over manuscripts in some library, a facsimile of her situation with Jim.
“It’s better if you go without me,” she said, and he let it drop.
Alice prayed for good weather. She and Jim would be staying for two nights in Belvédère, a village perched on a high slope in Mercantour National Park. A getaway to hike and, hopefully, bond, in the heart of the Alps.
Jim interrupted Alice in the midst of packing. “I just talked to my boss. There’s a crisis in Montpellier. I’ve got to go. We’ll have to do the mountains another time.”
“No,” Alice objected.
“I don’t have a choice.”
“We planned this trip two weeks ago. It’s our time together.”
“It isn’t like I want to go. It’s an emergency.”
Alice pointed to the phone in his hand. “Call your boss back and tell him to find someone else. They’ve got managers all over France. He has no right to take the weekend away from us. You have no right.”
“Don’t be unreasonable. I’m the one he asked.” He put the phone in his pocket.
Alice raised her voice. “When am I ever going to come first for you?”
“What?”
Alice rose to her feet, arm and hand gesticulations giving emphasis to her accusations. “You’ve been chipping away at our marriage ever since we moved here. More and more time for work and your buddies. Less and less time for us. For me.”
“We have lots of time.”
“How blind can you be? Now you think it’s fine to destroy our weekend. And you have the nerve to think we can stay here for the rest of our lives?”
“You’ll never have to work. You’ll have time to have children.”
“I told you over and over I don’t like living in France. All you do is pat me on the back. ‘There, there. You’ll adjust.’ I told you I was having difficulty learning French. You said I wasn’t trying hard enough.” Alice felt her face flushing, the tension in her jaw and shoulders. “When I cried because I felt so alone, you had the audacity to tell me to call my friends in New Jersey and I’d be alright.”
“But this—”
She didn’t let him finish. “How could you think I’d want to make this place my permanent home? I came because you pushed and pushed and promised you’d be with me. You’ve gotten so far away, I can’t reach you anymore.”
Her litany of charges spewed out, his repeated snubs and painful abandonments, until she bared her teeth and screamed. “You unfeeling, selfish bastard.”
“Alice?” He sounded incredulous, as if it couldn’t be her expressing such viciousness. “I didn’t know you felt like that.”
She shrieked her answer at a volume and in language she rarely used, “Because you weren’t listening. Because you had what you wanted and that’s all that fucking mattered to you.”
He looked up towards the ceiling, the way he would when he had a problem to solve. “There’s lots of things that matter to me.”
The weak protest enraged her further. “Not me. I don’t matter to you. You fuck around with your friends. You fuck around with work. Well, I’ve been fucking someone, too.”
It was out. In her fury she wanted to inflict pain, make him suffer the way his treatment made her suffer. Alice was panting, her chest heaving and eyes glaring. Jim backed away from her ferocity and sank into the lumpy sofa.
“You’re having sex with someone?”
He looked crushed, but she refused to be the repentant sinner. “You’ve been a lousy husband ever since we got here. I begged for affection over and over. You gave me nothing.”
“Who is it?”
“It doesn’t matter. It’s over.”
It was true. She’d realized while Mark was away that he wasn’t the answer, and she hadn’t slept with him since his return from Paris.
“How could you? How long did it go on?”
“A few weeks.”
“I never thought I’d be dealing with your infidelity. I can’t believe it.” Jim looked up at the ceiling. Alice said nothing and he continued. “How can I trust you again?”
“Were you listening to anything I said? All you have to do is act like you love me, let me know you want me. Take a look at yourself for once. How you’ve been acting ever since we got here.”
The metronome of minutes ticked away on the noisy wall clock. Alice mused over the contents of the living room: the faded patch on the Oriental rug where the sun struck day after day, the rustic wood floor, the threadbare sofa that back home she would have donated to Goodwill.
A half-hour passed before Jim spoke. “I have everything I want here. I didn’t want to believe it wasn’t good for you, too. Even when you told me. That’s no excuse for what you did.”
“Then there’s no excuse for either of us. But at least now you’re listening.” Out the window extended the green ocean of vineyard, distant Mt. Sainte-Victoire poking its crusty head over the hills. “I never should have agreed to come. I don’t belong here. I can’t stay any longer.” Alice took a deep breath of relief at her own declaration. She was done with France. Softening, she took Jim’s hands in hers. “I’m going to make arrangements to go home. Please come with me.”
“I have what I’ve always wanted here. But I love you. Okay, we hurt each other. Whatever’s happened recently, I want us. Together.”
“You can stay here or you can be with me. It’s not in the cards to have both. You have to make a choice.”
Alice stepped out the back door into the dry afternoon heat, intense even with a breeze. In seemingly endless rows of vines, grapes swelled with the advancing season, taking on the purple of ripening. She popped a plump one into her mouth. It was so sour she quickly spit it out. She continued on, as though sailing through the broad leaves of a trellised sea, at the helm at last. The house dwindled in size, smaller, smaller, until by her reckoning she had given him enough time to decide. She began retracing her steps.
Barry Fields is a retired psychologist who lives with his wife and dog in the mountains of North Carolina. Twenty of his recent short stories have been included in literary magazines such as Sundial: A Magazine of Literary Historical Fiction, Unlikely Stories, Ginosko Literary Journal, After Dinner Conversation, Storm Dragon Publishing, The Pennsylvania Literary Review, Unlikely Stories, Tulip Tree Review, and The Opiate. “The Miracle Earth of Chimayó” was the runner-up of the 2025 James Hurst Short Fiction Prize, sponsored by North Carolina State University. Numerous nonfiction articles of his have appeared in a variety of publications.