Two mornings later, though, something happened. When Esme woke up, it was not the man of her dreams who claimed her first thought. It was the pain au levain. She woke up tasting it, feeling its springy crumb bouncing around her mouth, its chewy crust battling her teeth. She took a deep breath through her nose to see if the smell could make its way from the bakery to her room and thought, with a tickle of her saliva glands, that it could.
She jumped out of bed, threw on an old pair of low-slung men’s cricket trousers and a white tank top, and bounded down the stairs. Charlie was conked out in his ground floor pit but she knew he would be pathetically grateful to find the fresh bread ready and waiting for him when he awoke. They had given up the croissants after the first morning and concentrated instead on just the sourdough bread, which they ate with fresh homemade plum preserve Gerard at the auberge had given them. For lunch, they bought a slab of Brie from the Venolat corner store, which sold everything from fishing lines to Dickensian classics, and smeared that on the pain, washing it down with a bottle of Bordeaux before planning the afternoon’s sightseeing or swanning about.
They fought over the crust. The crust made Esme’s taste buds tingle. It was chewy and hard and had a powerful, almost cheesy, flavor. It was in the crust that the sour nature of the dough left its calling card. The crumb was spongy and shiny and almost sweet to the taste but the crust positively sang with the sharp, tart notes of apple vinegar and yeast.
The thought of it spurred Esme on as she practically skipped to the boulangerie, her mouth watering in anticipation. She flew around the corner and in through the boulangerie door, her eyes going straight to the happy smiling faces in their ancient wooden racks.
She opened her mouth to speak, but the boulanger got there first.
“Aha,” he said in a voice so smooth just listening to it felt like being wrapped in warm satin. “The girl with the long red hair.”
Esme’s mouth stayed open, but nothing came out of it.
It was not the old, fat baker with whom she had been sharing staccato chitchat and jumbled talk of the weather for the past week. It was his younger, thinner shadow, the object of her moonlit vision here right in front of her doing all the right things in all the right places.
Up closer, in the light of day, he was even more beautiful than she had imagined, and she had been imagining a lot. Twenty-four hours a day, even. He was not tall, almost exactly her height in fact, and she was fairly sure his hips were not as wide as hers but he was wiry and strong, she could tell that, even though this time he was wearing a T-shirt.
His eyes were dark and shiny like pools of something mechanical and oily that fashionable shoes might slip on in a driveway. His skin was walnut brown and smooth on his arms, his neck, even his face, which looked as though it barely needed shaving.
“I’m Louis,” he said. “Louis Lapoine.”
Esme closed her mouth and gulped but couldn’t think what the next normal step might be so just stood there, breathing undaintily, her heart thumping in her chest.
Louis smiled as though this happened all the time and reached for a loaf of bread, pulling out a sheet of wrap and placing it inside.
“My uncle tells me you are the only English person this summer who has not asked for a baguette,” he said, putting the bread on the counter in front of him and patting it.
Esme looked at the bread, then back at him. The words she had imagined saying were piled up in her throat, gridlocked.
“You are lucky to find us if it is pain au levain that you like,” Louis said softly. “Nobody makes it much anymore.”
Esme licked her dry lips and tried hard to breathe. She had not washed her face or done anything with her hair, which felt positively electric.
“The recipe has been in my family for nearly two hundred years,” Louis continued, as though there were actually a two-way conversation going on. “It has not changed in all that time. That’s pretty good, hm?”
Esme, appalled at her own hopeless mawkishness, nodded woodenly, for far too long, thinking as she did that she did not have on any deodorant or lip gloss and that she was acting like a complete idiot when this was in fact the moment she had been waiting for. She licked her unglossed lips again, gulped and forced herself to say something.
“It’s beautiful,” she finally managed in a creepy awestruck sort of a whisper, looking at the bread on the counter and thinking as the words slid off her tongue how they were totally the wrong ones to use.
Louis said nothing, just looked at her, the corner of his mouth and one eye uniting in an expression that could have been amusement, could have been alarm. Esme couldn’t bear to humiliate herself any further and so jerkily forced her frozen body into a forward lurch, grabbed the bread from the counter, let the coins she had ready in her hand bounce and clatter out of her grasp, then willed her awkward limbs to turn her around and walk out of the shop.
“If you come back at midnight tonight,” Louis said coolly, astonishing her to a standstill at the doorway, “I will show you everything.”
She turned and looked at him again, aware that she was having to try very deliberately not to drool. He nodded his head questioningly. Slowly, she nodded back. Then he smiled and disappeared through the screen door (slap! slap!).
Esme stayed there staring for what seemed like forever. Her eyes remained focused on the spot where he had been, waiting for a sign that what she thought had happened had happened. And while no action replay ever came, Louis’s velvet words still bounced around in her head telling her it was true, that he had asked her to meet him at midnight and he was going to show her everything.
It was too delicious for words.
“He’s going to show you everything?” Charlie squawked when Esme jumped on his bed, woke him from his slumber and repeated every word of the conversation in the boulangerie, leaving out only the bit where she stayed tongue-tied and lumpish and deeply unsexy.
“You said, ‘It’s beautiful,’ and he said, ‘Come back and I will show you everything’? I wonder what sort of everything he means.” Charlie sat up and rubbed the sleep out of his eyes.
Esme shook her head and shrugged her shoulders, biting her lip and buzzing invisibly with excitement.
“I just can’t believe it,” she said with a shudder. “It’s like a dream, Charlie. You should see him. He is just so incredibly”—she searched for the right word—“horny.”
Charlie looked at her with renewed respect.
“Spoken like a real slut,” he said proudly. “Details, please, mistress. Details.”
“Well, if that pratty friend of yours with the cravat and the door-handle phobia was a three, Louis is a ten.”
“You give Gordon a three? I say.”
“I give any male with a pulse who does not vomit on me and has all his limbs a three. It’s the nice thing to do,” said Esme. “But probably Louis shouldn’t be measured on the same scale as someone like Gordon. He’s in a class of his own. Oh, he’s just gorgeous, Charlie. I can’t tell you! I’ve never felt like this about anyone before. It just feels so fantastically—aaarrgggh.” Words failed her and she flopped onto the bed, her smile stretching as far across her face as it could manage.
Charlie gave her a funny look. “Don’t get too carried away, old girl,” he said. “It’s just your hormones waking up after spending your whole entire life in hibernation, after all. You’ve only just met the bloke, for goodness’ sake. If you even call it meeting him.”
Esme snorted. “That’s rich coming from you. You don’t even bother meeting half the blokes you shag.”
Charlie didn’t laugh. “That’s because I only shag them. I don’t sit around for days mooning over them first and imagining myself walking up the aisle in a lovely white dress with a fur cape and a muff while my mother plays ‘Here Comes the Bride’ on a wheezing old organ.”
Esme was stunned. Her invisible buzzing died away to a small but angry internal reverberation. “Don’t you dare infect me with your bitter- and tw
istedness,” she admonished, hurt and unable to hide it. “And in case you had forgotten, I don’t have a mother so when it comes to wheezing old organs, you are the closest thing I possess.” She got up off the bed and made as if to leave, relieved nonetheless to see out the corner of her eye that Charlie looked repentant.
“I’m sorry,” he said reaching for her arm and grabbing it. “I don’t want to spread my vile Charlie-ness any further than I already have; it’s just that I don’t want you being hurt, Es, or disappointed. Your expectations, you have to admit, are rather on the high side. But I mean, what say, for argument’s sake, Louis just wants to show you how to bake bread?”
“I can’t think of anything I would rather see more,” Esme said and she meant it. Nearly.
“Okay,” said Charlie. “Okay. I believe you. I’m with you. Whatever you want me to do or say, I will do or say it.”
They looked at each other and the warmth crept back into their friendship. Esme picked the loaf up from the end of the bed.
“Do you really imagine yourself in a white fur cape and muff?” she asked her friend.
“In the spring,” Charlie answered without missing a beat.
By ten to midnight Esme’s certainty that everything about Louis was fantastically “aaarrgggh” had given way to the deep conviction that she had imagined the entire scenario and should probably, in the interests of bakers everywhere, go on a gluten-free tour of Siberia.
Charlie had gone out in search of more (or was it less?) wayward Dutch boys, leaving Esme at home with her hammering heart, her topsy-turvy thoughts and half a bottle of Chablis, which she had taken in quick gulps between eight and nine thirty, for medicinal purposes only.
At two minutes to midnight she bolted out of the apartment feeling ridiculously Cinderella-ish and not at all sure that it wasn’t the older, wider baker she was going to find whistling happily to himself behind the tantalizing bakery counter.
Rounding the corner, she saw the faint glow of the bakery inner workings reflecting off the side of the fountain. Her mouth started to dry up and her knees to tremble but she urged herself on, determined not to repeat her humiliating behavior of earlier in the day.
As she approached the yellow-and-white-striped awning, a black figure stepped out of the shadows, the red glow of a cigarette the only bit of it she could clearly make out. She stopped and the figure stepped into the moonlight. It was Louis.
Esme dumbfounded herself by laughing. The joyful sound, so light and happy, ricocheted around the little square, coming to rest neatly at Louis’s feet.
“I was hoping you would come,” he said in his glossy voice with its seductive lilt.
“I was hoping I hadn’t dreamed the whole thing up,” Esme answered, relief that she hadn’t loosening her tongue. She reddened, which she hoped Louis couldn’t see, and looked at his feet. He was wearing white canvas espadrilles and she could see the bones of his ankles. She suddenly felt sick with the hopelessness of never having kissed that part of him, of any man.
Louis threw his cigarette butt on the ground and crushed it with a mesmerizing twist of his hip.
“I have been trying to guess your name,” he said. “You did not tell me.”
“Esme,” said Esme. Louis looked surprised.
“Esme,” he repeated. “That’s French, no?”
Esme was not equipped to convincingly lie at this point. “No, it’s Scottish actually,” she said. “It was the name of a highland terrier that belonged to my mother’s next-door neighbor.” He did not need to know this, but she did not seem able to shut up. “It was run over,” she twittered. “The terrier. By the neighbor. Terribly sad, really.”
Louis looked at her curiously and laughed. “Come,” he said, “I will show you inside.”
He held out his hand and Esme, with almost indecent haste, reached for it. At the touch of his skin against her palm she could have sworn she felt a shock, and when he tightened his fingers around her hand she feared she was going to lose it completely. The feel of him, her first feel of him, just this tiny little bit of him, left her begging, drooling, praying for more.
Inside, the front of the bakery was in darkness and the dim light shone out through the screen door. Louis pushed it aside and led her through into a narrow hallway lit with wall-mounted lanterns and smelling fragrantly of loaves past and present.
At the end of the hallway they passed a closed doorway and just beyond it turned down a set of ancient golden stone steps trodden on so often over the years that smooth dips had been worn in the middle. The stairs hugged two walls, turning a corner halfway and delivering Esme and Louis into the heart of the bakery.
For a moment Esme just stood and soaked it all in: the smell, the feel, the taste, the promise of what was to come. She licked her glistening lips, her mouth watering.
The ceiling of the basement room was curved, as if built in a giant archway, and the bricks were burned from golden brown at the bottom to chocolate brown in the middle to pitch-black at the top. The smell was tantalizing, so thick she could almost feel it, and the air was heavy and hot. She was glad she had worn just a thin white camisole and a vintage waist petticoat with her own espadrilles. The three hours spent choosing the outfit seemed now not to have been such a scurrilous waste of time after all.
The heart of the bakery was smaller than Esme had imagined. Along one wall sat a big mechanical stainless steel mixing machine, next to it a long wooden bench empty apart from a dusting of flour and an old-fashioned set of scales. The opposite wall was filled with wooden racks, and at the end of the room through another small arch Esme could see the wood-stoked fire not unlike the wood-fired pizza ovens she had seen in Italian eateries at home.
“Someone has been baking bread down here for nearly six hundred years,” Louis said, his eyes following hers as she took everything in. “First it was the monks who lived in Venolat—it was once a monastery, did you know?—and for one hundred eighty-nine years it has been the Lapoine family.”
Esme traced a four-finger squiggle into the flour on the wooden bench, then inspected her floury fingertips. She wanted to know more about the bakery, the bread. But mostly she wanted to know more about him.
“You speak such good English,” she said.
“My best friend is English,” Louis said. “The family moved here when we were both thirteen—that is seven years ago now—and we do a trade. I teach French. I learn English. It is good to share, no?”
He eyed Esme’s top with a look she was sure was going to bring her out in blisters.
“It is good you wear white,” he said. “You will not go home dirty.”
Oh, but I want to go home dirty, Esme silently trilled. Very, very dirty. So dirty I will never be clean again.
Louis watched her watching him, then looked up at a dusty antiquated clock and clicked his tongue. “It is time for me to start,” he said. “If you sit on the stairs I can see you and tell you what I am doing. Okay?”
Louis took off his T-shirt, revealing the corrugation of his ribs on his brown, smooth chest and the silky black hair of his underarms. An army of goose bumps stood at attention from one end of Esme’s body to the other.
He turned his back on her and she counted the muscles and sinews shifting and changing as he reached up and opened a chute coming down from the ceiling. A rush of flour hurtled into the steel mixing bowl. He closed the chute, turned on a tap sticking out of the wall and filled a tin bucket with water, which he also tipped into the bowl.
He turned the machine on and its gently rhythmic chugging filled up part of the room.
“In here,” Louis said, somehow barely needing to raise his voice above the noise, “we keep our starter or our levain. You know what this is, no?”
Esme shook her head, her shiny, clean, twice-conditioned curls still bouncing way after her head had stopped moving. Louis turned to catch this and smiled.
“Sourdough, or pain au levain as you know we call it, does not use yeast the way a baguette do
es, the way other bread does. We make our own yeast, our own rising agent, the levain, from the bacteria in the air, in this air. We made it for the first time one hundred and eighty-nine years ago with the juice of three apples from my great-great-great-great-great-grandfather’s only tree.”
Louis laughed, a sound so sweet to Esme, despite the underlay of the mixer, that it seemed like singing.
“Great-great-great-great-great?” he said. “Do I get that right? Yes, I think so.” Esme watched his shoulder blades stick out and recede again as he dipped his hand into the swirling dough. “Anyway,” he continued, “we make the levain, or chef as some people call it, my uncle for one, way back then and every day we use it to make bread, then leave a bit behind for the next day, and the natural yeast in the chef becomes stronger and stronger and after all this time, you can see, well, you know, that it makes very good bread.”
Esme imagined running her fingers up his spine. “How did apple juice ever make bread in the first place?” she asked.
“The apple juice ferments, fermented with the natural yeast in the Venolat air,” Louis said, turning the mixer off, pulling out the dough hook and continuing to mix with his hands. “After a couple of weeks, maybe, the many-greats-grandfather added flour and water, and every day after that he added more flour and more water, and then the chef got a life of its own. Finally, it had enough strength so that when he added it to more flour and water, it provided the gas to make the bread rise.”
His earlobes looked edible. Esme was entranced. “How did he know when it was strong enough?”
“He just knew,” answered Louis. “Plus it would have been not a good color and maybe it didn’t smell so good. Sharp, like vinegar.”
His elbows were exquisite. “And it never got so stinky you had to throw it away and start again?”
Louis stood up and turned around to face her, a light film of sweat shimmering on his forehead, one black curl plastered down above his eye.
“No, no, no,” he said. “Stinky is not a bad thing. We would never throw the chef away. It is what makes Lapoine bread Lapoine bread. It is our special ingredient. The heart of the pain au levain. It makes us what we are.”