After the move to France, Marius started wearing all black—black jeans, black t-shirt, black socks, black hat—so that it seemed to me that he’d materialized from the shade of our micocoulier, the majestic tree that loomed over the La Commanderie, its branches forming a leafy, fragrant umbrella from the sun. I loved the micocoulier. In the summer, it dropped a minefield of berries and, walking barefoot, I would pop purple juice over the hot flagstones. In the fall, it dropped a ton of dry, yellow leaves and Adam and Emma would rake them into a pile and hide, bringing our dog, a pug called Fly Me to the Moon (Fly for short), and our three cats Napolean, Josephine, and Chou-chou along for the ride.
Some nights we spent hours under the tree, sitting around the long wooden table with friends, eating, talking, drinking wine, arguing about whatever was in the news. The people we invited for dinner were never from Aubais, and rarely from the midi. 
They were all foreigners like us: French couples who had moved south from Paris for the weather; ex-pats from Australia or England or Belgium; Americans on holiday for a few weeks. Several times a month we formed a collective of happy outcasts gathered around a country feast, our wine glasses sweating in the heat, plates of tomatoes and olives before us, the star-filled sky expanding overhead. The micocolier’s branches spread at just the right angle to hang a plastic chandelier, and so we rigged one up, leaving a watery glow to fall gently from above, twinkling over the linen napkins, making patterns on the Provencal tablecloth. The food and wine and conversation acted as a fixing agent and some nights it felt like time had stopped. On those nights, we lived in an eternal present. The cooling air, with its smell of wet chalk and rosemary, would never blow through to morning.
But alone in our courtyard, time barreled ahead. Shaded from the afternoon sun, Marius and I would sit together, drinking glasses of Perrier with ice and lime. Bottled at the source in Vergeze, just ten minutes from us, Perrier was the local water, and we drank it by the caseload. Every once in awhile, Marius would wander into the house, where he would sit down at the Yamaha baby grand and play a piece of something that had been going through his head. The piano was my gift to him, the most expensive gift I had ever bought for anyone, and I was rewarded daily by short interludes of music. Marius played for a minute or two before returning to the chessboard. The music had cleared his mind. He was ready to make his next move.
Once he began, everything else faded away. He noticed nothing in the courtyard, not Fly as he terrorized the cats, not me pulling up a chair to sit by his side. In the dreamspace of the match, only the chess pieces existed, only the strategy. He could go on for hours, setting up openings and endings, mapping the middle game, sipping coffee as he planned his victories. He played speed chess on his phone when he needed to relax and live chess matches on the Internet on his laptop, locking himself away in his office for hours at a time only to emerge red-eyed, hungry, jumpy with adrenaline. I didn’t play chess, or any other game that involved abstract victories.
The satisfaction of winning a match couldn’t justify the hours I’d invested. When I played, I was always thinking of the things I wasn’t doing for the kids or for work or for the house. This is the way I was raised, the practical Midwesterner who couldn’t help but to feel guilty spending an entire day playing a game when there was work to do. This way of thinking sucked all the fun out of it; I knew this, and so I left my husband to his match.
Glancing at the chessboard, I saw a rook and a knight and queen. I saw the bishop and I saw the pawns. The cast was there, each character in position. I watched my husband pick up the Black King and roll it between his fingers. He tipped the piece in his hand, considering his options, and then, with a decisive gesture, he pinned the White Queen. A look of surprise passed over his features, as if the move startled him, as if he hadn’t predicted the elegance of the gesture. The White Queen is trapped between the Black King and a small but very significant pawn. Something in my mind recoiled as I watched him play, as if the move was meant to explain something, as if it was a warning: Beware, one day the drawbridge may lift.
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To reach Dani, email DaniTrueRomantic@gmail.com.
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Rumpus original logo and art by Max Winter.