Summer Tenants

The farmhouse outside Gordes had been divided, like so many things in France, along lines of inheritance that satisfied no one. The Martins owned the east wing — four bedrooms, a kitchen with a view of the Luberon, and a swimming pool whose filter had not worked properly since Chirac was president. The Desrosiers owned the west wing, which was smaller but caught the evening light and had a terrace shaded by a plane tree that was older than the Republic. Every August, both families descended upon their respective halves and pretended that a shared courtyard and a common well constituted a boundary sufficient to contain their mutual incomprehension.

Claire Martin arrived first, as she always did, unloading the Volvo with the efficiency of a woman who had been organizing other people's comfort for so long that she had forgotten what her own looked like. Her husband Philippe followed with the children and the dog and the particular expression of a man who considers vacation a verb that someone else conjugates. They opened the shutters and swept the floors and discovered, as they did every year, that the house had spent the winter composing new grievances — a leak in the upstairs bathroom, mice in the pantry, a crack in the kitchen wall that had grown with the patient ambition of something alive.

The Desrosiers arrived three hours later in a rented BMW that was too large for thelane and too clean for the countryside. Mathilde Desrosiers emerged in linen and sunglasses with the composed elegance of a woman whose relationship with rural France was primarily aesthetic. Her husband Jerome carried a case of wine from a producer whose name Claire did not recognize, which was itself a statement — in Provence, the wine you bring announces not what you drink but who you think you are. The children assessed each other across the courtyard with the wary diplomacy of nations sharing a border, and the summer began its slow, inevitable work of erosion.