Castle of Water: A Novel(54)
“Pfff. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Hey, it’s not me, it’s him.”
“Well, he sounds like a connard.”
“You’re right. He is.”
Sophie smiled, leaned across the hull, and kissed Barry softly on the scar on his cheek.
“Je t’aime.”
Barry blushed a deep red beneath the burnished mahogany of his face, smiled shyly in return, and resumed his work untangling the net with his sea-gnarled hands. “I love you, too.”
With a cheerful snatch of Charles Aznavour’s “Emmenez-moi,” Sophie dipped a leg over the side and prepared for another dive. But Barry, suddenly as alert as a bird dog, stopped her. “Weather’s turning. We should probably head in.”
Not long before, Sophie would have debated the point. After all, the sky was still a hale shade of robin’s egg, and the sun was still brightly shining. But she’d seen how Barry’s days on the water had heightened his instincts and how his nights on the island had honed his senses. So she pulled her leg in and picked up a paddle, while he undid the riggings on their tarpaulin sail. And sure enough, within minutes, as the two of them stroked their way steadily in from the reef, the turquoise waves turned steely beneath the incoming clouds, and a sudden wind sent a duo of terns reeling above them. In the rising tide of gray, a single clap of thunder tolled, a solitary harbinger of the coming rains. It rolled across the water with a resonance that brought a shiver of goose bumps across the rowers’ brown backs, and they did not breathe easy until they were pulling the canoe across the sand, once again safe at home.
36
The third time it happened was four months after that, in the pleasant shade of the coconut grove. It had taken considerable campaigning, but Sophie had at last convinced Barry to relocate their home from the sunbaked beachhead to the cool and breezy glade. Naturally, she had taken charge of the design, and with little more than a frame of ‘ohe bamboo, a tarpaulin, and palm thatch, she had conceived of what might be called a midcentury modern bungalow. Barry’s half-remembered Boy Scout lashings helped to keep the thing together, but the final structure, complete with porch, stone oven, and translucent blue skylight, was entirely her creation. She’d even made a wind chime using various lengths of bamboo, and at night, when the winds inevitably came, the darkness was filled with its marimba-like song.
They were still redecorating their new house when Barry asked Sophie the question; she was in the midst of positioning one of his clamshell paintings above the doorway and didn’t quite hear him over the radio—severe storms in the region had been predicted by the weather service in Tahiti, and the shortwave was tuned to the news station in Papeete.
“Quoi?”
Barry lowered the volume on the radio and said it again. “I wanted to know if you’d stay in New York. At the little apartment in the East Village. You know, after you and the American moved in together.”
“Forever?”
“I guess. Or would you want to go somewhere else?”
Sophie tilted her head to check the levelness of her hang, then righted her posture and gave it some thought. “Well, this girl you met in Paris would certainly miss France, even though she loves New York. And at some point, sure, you would both definitely go back to live there.”
“Where would they live?”
“You have to ask? Chateau d’Eau, of course.”
“In a water tower?”
“No, idiot, Chateau d’Eau. The same poor little street where you fell in love, and where you made your first painting of her. You’d rent the exact same apartment above the courtyard, and you’d set up the extra room as your studio to work in while she found a job at an architecture firm in Paris.”
“A good one?”
“The best, of course. Every fashionable boutique would beg her to design their store, and all of the best hotels would demand her services, although she would much prefer to do special community projects and small homes for people she liked. And you’d be doing well, too. Your paintings would start to get some attention. Your first public show would be at a gallery in Bastille. You’d do big canvases, huge abstract landscapes in black and white, like the ones you do up in your little cave, but unlike anything they had ever seen. People would start talking, and gradually, they would start asking about purchasing them for their collections. You would begin getting letters and phone calls from art galleries, and then museums. Little ones at first, then big ones, but the money and the notoriety wouldn’t mean that much to you. The satisfaction of painting and doing what you loved in life would be enough.”
“Sounds a little unlikely, doesn’t it?”
“Well, you asked, and I’m telling you. And you would have a pretty good life together, you and this woman. You would both love the old bistros and cafés in the tenth arrondissement, with all the drunks and the artists and the writers and the bobos, and with the teenagers asking for cigarettes from the tables on the terrasse, and the old men at the counter counting their coins for a pastis. You would also have picnics on the Canal Saint-Martin, with bread and cheese from the market at Chez Julhès, and watch le pont tournant open and close when the boats went by.”
“I thought you said I was too romantic. This sounds like a very idealized version of Paris, if you ask me.”