Castle of Water: A Novel(48)
The day overall is pleasant enough, but walking down the street, Mona notices the rain clouds. Nothing too severe, just a small charcoal cluster poised above the city. But she feels the moisture in the air, and soon she sees the scatter of drops begin to freckle the cement. She doubts it will last long—spring rains seldom do in Paris—but she also has no wish to get soaked in the meantime. And she has no money left to buy a few minutes in a café. So instead, she cuts her walk short and hurries straight into the Rambuteau Métro stop, where, if she’s not mistaken, she can take the eleven to République. She taps her Navigo pass just as a train is pulling in and nearly gets her purse caught in the closing doors. But she jerks it free and takes the first seat, settling back and rubbing her temples. She is on the verge of closing her eyes when she catches sight of the advertisement—a travel poster for vacations to French Polynesia. La vie est toujours plus facile sur une ?le, says the poster, below a picture of a man and a woman strolling down a beach. Life is always easier on an island.
Mona stares at the poster with a sad, ironic smile and wonders if he would share that sentiment. Somehow she doubts it. After all, how did he do it? How did they do it? What does it take to not only survive such a thing, but then live the rest of your life with that thing inside you?
That’s if the stories were true, of course—the answer to which she, like everyone else, could only pretend to know.
The train commences its electric glide toward home, and Mona at last can close her eyes … at least, until the conductor rattles off H?tel de Ville and Chatelet, and she realizes she is going in the wrong direction.
Shit. She gets off at the last stop and stands alone in a sea of people, suddenly feeling exceptionally lost. She sighs and with an underhand toss pitches the empty Orangina bottle into the garbage. She misses. A custodian picks it up before she has the chance, setting it gently into the bin. She thanks him with an apologetic smile—he responds with a weary nod. Still a tourist after all.
33
If the first year Barry and Sophie spent together on the island could be called a study in torture, then the second might be deemed an exercise in patience. No, things were not quite as bad as they’d been during those first dark months. There was at least some food to eat, they had at least something resembling an actual home, and if nothing else, at the very least they had each other. But even with the realization of their mutual affection, maintaining health, both physical and mental, proved to be a constant challenge.
For the latter, they did have their memories. Nights were spent in quiet conversation, reminiscing about their past lives and wondering how their loved ones were getting along back home. The most seemingly insignificant thing could take on a fresh sense of abundance on the blank slate of an unknown island. Sophie once spent two full hours describing the drive from Toulouse to Gavarnie with her parents in the little beige Peugeot, the narrow bridges hung taut as a kite string and the reams of high rock pocketed with snow. Barry used the better part of a night to tell her about the first time his father had taken him rabbit hunting in Illinois, how the whip-poor-wills had circled in a wild frenzy and he had been too frightened to pull the trigger on the .410 shotgun. A whole evening was devoted to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater house, including the cool smell of concrete and the black outline of elm leaves in the bottom of the plunge pool, and the MoMA—just the fifth floor, mind you—demanded from midnight until dawn to fully render its oil-based splendors, with Rousseau’s The Sleeping Gypsy and Munch’s The Storm both saved for another night entire. Side by side in the palm-thatched hut, Barry and Sophie would hold each other, and they would talk about the world as they remembered it, and those two things were what pulled them back from the brink. And on those especially harrowing nights when all else failed (their second Christmas Eve together was a good example), there was always the shortwave, as even something as simple as “Silent Night” on the BBC could quiet the sobs and keep a panic attack at bay. Barry kept his ears peeled for the murmur of ship transmissions undercutting the signals, but after several months, he resigned himself to the fact that they might not come again and gradually ceased thinking about them altogether. It was better for his sanity anyway, not to torture himself with such thoughts.
As for the physical aspects of their health, Barry and Sophie did what they could. The occasional nibble of vitamin-rich seaweed didn’t leave them in the finest fettle, but coupled with the constant bananas, it did ward off any serious deficiencies. A pair of notched ‘ohe bamboo “toothbrushes” carved by Sophie provided at least a modicum of dental hygiene, and the solar still with just a pinch of sea salt provided Barry with a passable saline solution for his contact lenses. Even the facial wound from the octopus had more or less healed, although the brand of its beak would be there forever. Barry studied the thick white scar in the survival kit signal mirror and joked that he was only a peg leg and a parrot away from being a qualified pirate. Sophie, with a laugh, had to agree.
Without a doubt, however, the greatest advancement made in their general well-being came courtesy of the Askoy III, the outrigger canoe that Sophie had designed and that they had built together. It proved, in the end, to be an absolute lifesaver.
Were one to ask, Barry would have readily admitted that he had never been especially successful as a bond salesman at Lehman Brothers. Or even very competent, for that matter. Embarrassingly old to have not made director, he had simply never possessed the gilded élan so common to his cohort when it came to schmoozing with clients or sealing big deals. In matters of negotiation, he had been timid and guileless. And as far as making huge sums of money, he was more or less indifferent to that as well. After all, the oil paints and secondhand art books that filled his apartment were relatively cheap, and admission to the Met was donation only. Looking back on it, he was amazed that he’d lasted as long as he had. He and his boss had briefly been on the football team together at Princeton, not to mention in the same eating club, and Barry suspected that was the only reason he’d kept him around. Perhaps if the fateful Gauguin exhibition that shunted his course had come a decade sooner, things would have been different. But alas, that was not the case, and he had spent twelve lackluster years pitching financial products at a New York investment bank.