Castle of Water: A Novel(23)
And in an instant, just like that, their buoyant mood went as flat as the remains of the rescue raft. It was a view full of splendor, but devoid of hope. No misty islands were waiting on the ocean’s edge. No distant cliffs caught surf across the waves. Just a tight perimeter of turquoise, and beyond that, a nauseating amount of deep oceanic blue. Nothing but an infinity of open sea in every direction one could turn, interrupted only by a tide of dark thunderheads gathering in the west. Barry’s confidence wilted; whatever general goodwill had been restored in Sophie shrank alongside it. She treated the entire universe to several moments of disparaging silence, clutching her own shoulders in a jacket of despair. Then, still without a word, she slid sideways over the edge and began to make her way back down.
“Where are you going?” Barry asked.
“Swimming,” she answered with a cold indifference he found deeply unsettling.
“Are you sure?” He remembered her terror when he had first pulled her from the raft, away from the sea.
“Oui.”
“Want me to come with you?”
“Non.”
The words were peremptory and served with a sting. He let her go.
Ten minutes later she reappeared in miniature below, walking across the beach, stripping off her meager clothing, and shaking out her hair. Barry watched her slip naked into the low waves, then turn on her back in an attitude of total repose and absolute surrender. At the end of his own emotional rope, he lay down on the rocks high above her and did the same. The two of them, though an island apart, stared up at the sky together for quite some time. Sophie waited to see if a shark would drag her under and put an end to her misery. One did not, although a school of diminutive fish did tickle her toes. Barry lay as close to the heavens as possible and waited to find out if lightning can strike twice. It can, but on that evening it did not oblige—the thunderheads dissipated without so much as a rumble, and the sun slipped down beneath a burnished copper sea, and then that day was over, too.
Crap, thought Barry as it suddenly occurred to him: He had only two extra pairs of contacts left.
PART TWO
18
The American art students catch a cab from the cemetery and have their breakfast at a café on boulevard Voltaire. Their ears are still ringing from their night at the discotheque, and their eyes are red rimmed from the cigarette smoke. They do their best to keep alive the excitement of it all, and for a while they succeed. Oh, my God, like, I can’t believe you gave that guy in the turtleneck your number, one snickers. Whoever said the number I gave him was mine, another replies. Forget the club, interjects the third—I want to talk about what happened at that grave. I mean, like, do you think anyone’s ever going to believe us?
By the time the dishes are cleared and the coffees finished, however, what lingers of their elation has begun to wear thin. They yawn, they rub their eyes. They ask for l’addition, and the spell is broken. The giddiness of their drunks has finally worn off, and they’re ready to go back to their dorm rooms in the Latin Quarter. All except the girl with the bangs and the blue jeans, whose name is Mona. She decides to hang back, bidding her friends farewell as they step outside into the bright light and church bells. Are you sure you don’t want to come back with us? they ask. It’s totally cool if you want to crash on our couch. She says thank you but that she should probably go back to her own place. Unlike them, she’s on financial aid and has to rent a cheaper chambre de bonne in the tenth, on a derelict street called Chateau d’Eau.
She watches them get into another taxi and purr away. Then she turns her head into the sun and closes her eyes, alone at last, smiling bittersweetly. She loves this city, at times more than she can bear, but it also makes her unbearably sad. It doesn’t seem to affect her other American friends in that way at all, though. They claim to “get the French” (which is a lie, nobody gets the French, not even the French) and to feel at home in Paris (also a dubious claim, no one except the homesick is truly at home there). But she has the distinct sense that their impressions are far different from hers. For them, the semester abroad from art school seems to be a pseudobohemian spring break of sorts. A brief rest stop on their path to graduation and then high-paying jobs at graphic design firms—a path she swore she never would take but now feels increasingly resigned to as well. They try to show off their shoddy French in cafés, while Mona, whose French is actually quite good, is timid about using it. They mention ancient streets casually, hinting at an unearned intimacy, while Mona, who knows them all too well, is hesitant to even evoke their names. Having just turned twenty-one, she is very young, and the city is very old, and she is excited and terrified to be part of it, to measure herself against it. So much history, so many lives … she shudders just thinking about it but smiles all the same. Her parents were right—it is definitely not like Pittsburgh.
Mona should be tired, but she isn’t. Being on her own has left her inexplicably energized. Inspired by the sighting at the cemetery—after all, how often in life does something like that happen?—she decides to go over to the Pompidou and complete the story. A bit of closure, perhaps. She is the only one in the group who has not seen his exhibition, but then again, she is the only one in the group who has not done a great many things.
She cuts through the quarter on rue Oberkampf, gets off it as quickly as she can—it’s still in shambles from the previous night—and crisscrosses through alleyways, until the bold architecture of the museum rises from all the wrought iron and slate. A cathedral, she thinks, to all things promising and new. It’s early enough that a line has yet to form, so she breezes right in, flashing her student ID for a well-deserved discount. A series of multilingual signs ushers her to the exhibition, which she approaches anxiously, filled with wonder. Her pace slows, her pulse quickens; this is it, what everyone’s been talking about.