Free Invitation to Provence by Elizabeth Adler Page A

my family, and I want to see my friends again.
     
    “Do not disappoint me, Juliette,” she finished in her old commanding style, making Juliette laugh. And she signed it firmly, “Love, Rafaella.”
    Juliette sank onto a yellow damask sofa, arranging her flowery caftan around her ample body, gold bracelets clanking, Pomeranians clambering up, tiny paws plucking at her for attention. “Oh, sit down, you sillies,” she said, giving them an affectionate shove, and they settled with disgruntled expressions next to her.
    “Well, I never thought I would hear from you again, Rafaella,” she said out loud, “and now here you are, all of a sudden rejoining the land of the living!”
    She leaned back against the cushions, eyes closed, smiling as she remembered the good times they’d had together. They had been friends since they were girls, and in fact if it were not for Rafaella insisting on taking her to lunch at La Coupole in Paris, Juliette would never have met the man she eventually married.
    It was long ago, when they were both young and glamorous and brimming with life and laughter. Rafaella had come up to Paris for a few days to stay with Juliette at her apartment in an old courtyard building in Saint-Germain.
    Juliette’s place was constantly abustle with friends dropping in, messengers delivering bouquets, admirers stopping by. Invitations to cocktail parties, costume balls, and other grand events were stuffed casually into the edges of the huge seventeenth-century mirror above the black-marble mantelpiece, and Juliette’s first husband was stuffed into a tinyboudoir just around the corner, where his mistress lived. Juliette’s two young children were always dashing in and out, chased by nannies, stealing chocolate bonbons from beribboned boxes and dropping them on the striped silk sofas, where they left ominous little brown stains at which Juliette just laughed, and an earlier batch of Pomeranians rampaged everywhere, snapping at heels and yapping constantly.
    Rafaella had never understood Juliette’s miraculous ability to laugh at anything: a stain on a sofa, a bad haircut, an ugly dress. Juliette also had no taste and inevitably chose the wrong color or a fabric too clinging for her large figure. Unfashionable as she might appear though, she cut a swath through Paris, leaving a felled legion of broken hearts behind. Until she met Major Rufus Thomas and, like Rafaella with the Lover, gave him her heart.
    Rafaella was with her that lunchtime in La Coupole. It was in March, too many years ago to count, with the sun struggling out of the clouds and a gusty wind whipping at their skirts. They ran shivering through the large glass revolving doors, laughing and smoothing their ruffled hair, hugging chubby little fox jackets around their throats, settling at the bar and ordering glasses of champagne. Rufus was two seats away, smart in his khaki British major’s uniform, his brown leather belt gleaming like his eyes.
    “Like polished
marrons,”
Juliette whispered loudly, the way her whispers always were, and his eyes were in fact the color of chestnuts. They were also shiny with hope and longing. Rafaella was looking beautiful, her dark curls all wind-tossed and her blue eyes sparkling with fun, and at first Juliette thought the army officer was interested in her. He kept glancing at the two of them as they speared their oysters,throwing back their heads and letting them slide down their throats with little moans of pleasure.
    He was British though, and shy, so he said nothing. “I obviously have to take the initiative in this case,” Juliette whispered. Then, giving him that big smile of hers, she said, “Welcome to Paris.”
    Rufus moved over the two seats, introduced himself, and said, “Now I feel right at home.”
    By this time Juliette had eyes only for Major Rufus Thomas, so Rafaella swallowed her twelfth oyster, drained her glass, and went shopping on her own. In fact, Juliette remembered that was the