Castle of Water: A Novel(35)
“No, I’m serious. What do you want for your birthday?”
“Pfff. I don’t know. What did you get for your thirtieth birthday?”
Barry struggled to remember. It had been more than five years. He seemed to recall his parents giving him a novelty birthday card that chimed out a tune when you opened it, and his ex-girlfriend Ashley treating him to some rather unenthusiastic fellatio. But he wasn’t sure. He did remember a few of his co-workers took him out to Smith & Wollensky for dinner.
“I went out for steak,” he finally replied.
“Oh, God. Steak frites. That would be wonderful. My father used to grill the meat in our fireplace. My mother always fried the potatoes in duck fat. It was the best.”
“I don’t know, I’m somewhat partial to my dad’s country-fried steak myself. He made it with cream gravy and mashed potatoes, with some corn bread and green beans with bacon on the side.”
“You put lardons in your haricots verts?”
“Damn right.”
“Normally, I’d say that’s dégueulasse, but right now, I think I would eat a whole plateful.”
“And then for dessert, banana pudding!”
“No! No more bananas!” Sophie squealed rather comically, and they both had a good chuckle at their staple’s expense. Their laughter died down, and the waves resumed.
“But seriously, if you could have anything, what would you want?”
“Anything?”
“Yep.”
The one thing she truly wanted she knew she could not have or say—étienne pulled from the sea, a crash to never happen, a blissful return to their little architecture studio on rue des Vinaigriers. But anything else?
“If I could have anything…” And she paused briefly, to do perfection justice. “I think I would like one more night in Lisbon. I’d like to take a warm bath with a real bar of soap, put on a dress and a pair of nice earrings, and I’d like to go to a little café in the Alfama for a big plate of octopus salad with a glass of vinho verde. And after dinner, I’d like to go on a walk down by the water and look at the stars.”
“That’s all?”
“Oui. C’est tout.”
“And how do you say ‘happy birthday’ in French?”
“Joyeux anniversaire. That, or bon anniversaire.”
“Banana-versaire?”
She giggled, as was her habit by that point, at his horribly mangled French. “Close enough, Captain America.”
“I’ll have to practice saying it before the big day.” He leaned over and gave her a peck on the forehead. “Good night, Sophie.”
“Bonne nuit, Barry.”
He closed his eyes and pretended to sleep, but in the silence and darkness, his mind was racing. And those double r’s—God, her accent was cute when she said his name.
25
The earrings were by far the easiest variable to solve in Sophie’s perfect birthday equation, and making them proved a convenient distraction from the fact that they were running out of food. Barry had made a habit of keeping the prettier of their clamshells and using them for the odd bowl-like task—there was one whose nacreous swirls Sophie had always been especially fond of. A few careful whacks with a volcanic rock and he had himself two similarly sized mother-of-pearl fragments. Throw a pair of fishhooks with the barbs ground off into the mix (he found two from the remaining assortment that were too small for use in the cove), attached via a little fishing line, and Barry had a pair of earrings on his hands that were actually quite passable. Tiffany’s probably wasn’t going to get their skirts ruffled over the competition, but they were nice, and he was proud of them. He nervously hoped that Sophie would like them, too.
Nor did the soap portion of her wish provide too much challenge, although there was some trial and error involved, and he could work on the project only while Sophie was on the other side of the island, swimming or searching in vain for bananas. One of Barry’s most vivid childhood memories may have been seining for catfish with his grandfather on moonlit nights in Macoupin County, Illinois. But the other contender was the image of his grandmother and aunt making homemade soap in the farmhouse kitchen. The process consisted of two basic parts, one of rendering fat from a slaughtered hog and another of extracting lye from fresh ashes. For the latter step, both women would don, in addition to their calico housedresses, handkerchiefs tied about their faces bandit style as a means of fending off the fumes. For the handkerchief, Barry resorted to his trusty—and by this point quite tattered—Charles Tyrwhitt dress shirt. As for the lye and the hog fat, however, well, Barry had to get creative. Had he been marooned on the island during the days of Tu-nui-ea-i-te-atua-i-Tarahoi Vairaatoa Taina Pomare, he would have found no shortage of soap-worthy swine. Given the dearth of pigs some three centuries later, he had to locate another source of grease. And after much brain racking, he did just that, in the form of the humble coconut. Using again his weather-beaten shirt, he was able to mash and strain from what little coconut meat he could find a thick coconut milk. That, when rendered in one of their stainless-steel cups over the fire and left to settle, produced a layer of nearly pure coconut oil. Once the oil was scooped out, it was a relatively simple process of boiling some water and ashes in the second cup to produce lye. It took Barry a few tries to get the concentration just right, but when he felt confident that the iridescent substance swirling in the cup was alkaline enough, he added it to the coconut oil, cooked it together, and lo and behold!—when left to cool, a fresh cake of coconut soap. He smiled to himself, certain that his grandmother, who had never held a coconut in her life, would have been proud.