Castle of Water: A Novel(18)
As such, five fruitless days after Marco’s Cessna took a nosedive into the ocean, the search was called off, sending a small armada of ships and reconnaissance planes back empty-handed to the French naval base in Tahiti. A reluctant call was placed from the U.S. consular agent in French Polynesia to Barry’s parents in Cleveland, who had been waiting anxiously by the phone since the Tahitian airline had first informed them that their son was missing. Sophie’s parents, in their village outside Toulouse, received a similar phone call from the Départements et Territoires d’Outre-Mer. Although the languages were different, the content was identical—there was always room for hope, but it was very unlikely that their respective child was still with the living. In both countries, phones were dropped, sweaters were sobbed upon, and bouts of delirious grief bilingually ensued.
In the media, the story received little coverage, given the small size of the plane and its limited number of passengers. Both The New York Times and Le Monde made mention of it in passing, however, with single-column articles buried inconsequentially toward the back. INVESTMENT BANKER PRESUMED DEAD IN FRENCH POLYNESIA, read the headline of the former; LUNE DE MIEL MORTELLE POUR DEUX ARCHITECTES PARISIENS, proclaimed the bold print of the latter.
Neither was completely correct. As a bond salesman at Lehman Brothers, Barry was an investment banker in only the loosest sense of the term, and a recently retired one at that. As for Sophie, the honeymoon had proven fatal for only one Parisian architect, certainly not two. And for both survivors, their banishment from the world was consequential indeed.
15
“What are we going to do?”
Sophie spoke first, and for the first time since he’d met her, she sounded less angry than afraid.
Barry rubbed his face in an exasperated fashion, feeling the unfamiliar stubble of an incipient beard. He was tempted to say, I don’t have a goddamn clue, but somehow knew he could not. This may have been the time for despair, but it was not the place for uncertainty.
“We’ll wait. Even if they’ve called off the search, someone could still come by. Boats could pass, or a plane could fly overhead. We have the flare gun, and we can spell out SOS in rocks on the sand.”
“What about food?”
Barry poked at the fire with a bone-white piece of driftwood, pushing the pot with the blackened remains of the eggs away from the coals. “Well, hopefully your next Denver omelet will turn out better than this one.”
“Je suis sérieuse.”
Barry set down the stick of driftwood, considered it for a moment. “There are clams. I saw some fish over by the little cove. There are at least a few coconuts. And bananas. Christ, there’s a ton of bananas.”
Sophie nearly retched at the thought—étienne had always been partial to the fruit; she’d made him bananes flambées every year for his birthday, and she’d carved them onto his muesli each morning before work. The notion of actually subsisting upon them made her nauseous with grief. But of course she would never say that to the American.
“I don’t want to spend my life eating nothing but f*cking bananas” was all that she told him.
“You’ll probably have a pretty short life, then” was all he said in reply.
And he regretted it as soon as it was out of his mouth. But Barry felt entitled to administer a cold dose of reality, given the inordinately painful pinch of it she had dosed him with back in the hammock. After an uncomfortable silence lasting nearly a minute, he wisely changed the subject.
“What made you decide to go to the Marquesas, anyway? They’re a little out of the way, aren’t they?”
Sophie did her best Gallic puff. “Jacques Brel.”
“The singer?”
Sophie nodded, flicking some kind of small beetle off her arm before settling back in the sand. “We originally planned to spend the entire trip in Tahiti, but I read that Jacques Brel had lived on the Marquesas, and that he was buried there. It was a short flight, we were only going to stay a few nights. It was all my idea, so I suppose in a way this is entirely my fault.”
Sophie began to choke up. Barry froze, uncertain what to do. He felt an obligation to extend a hand for comfort or offer some form of condolence but was almost certain that she would slap both away. But after a long, shaky breath, she regained her composure.
“What about you?” she asked, reassuming her mildly annoyed tone.
Barry pushed a jet of ironic air through his nostrils to complement Sophie’s earlier pfff and managed a weak smile. “Paul Gauguin. He’s always been my favorite artist. He’s buried on the Marquesas, too—right next to Jacques Brel, I believe.”
“You flew all the way from New York to some island in the middle of the Pacific just to see the grave of Paul Gauguin?”
He had to admit, when described as such, it did sound improbable, if not flat-out ridiculous. Of course, there was more to it than that, but he didn’t feel like going into it at that moment.
“Yeah, something like that.”
“Rather romantic for an American, non? I thought you people just worked all the time, watched TV in your big houses, and ate terrible food.”
“That’s the whole reason I left. And speaking of terrible food, we should probably eat the eggs, even if they’re burnt. It is protein.”
Sophie grimaced in disgust. “Dégueulasse. You can eat them.”