Chapter 10 #2
“I live next door and can get changed any time,” he said. “You know this, non?” He didn’t even look at her, but Marlow went crimson at the thought of him in a towel. Lali saw it.
“Shall we see what needs to be done?” he asked, leaving the front hall.
Lali leaned into Marlow. “Perhaps you have good gossip after all.”
Cracks in the masonry needed stonework and mortaring. Shutters needed repair and repainting. Luc would then move inside to replaster the walls and ceilings. Lali and Marlow would repaint. Rémy had turned on the electricity so that Fedir the engineer could check for wiring issues.
Luc left and reappeared in work clothes and boots. He propped a ladder against the house, climbed it with ease, and pulled a screwdriver out of his pocket to remove the shutters.
“Shouldn’t we talk about what this is going to cost?” asked Marlow, holding onto the bottom of the ladder for safety.
“I’ll think about it.”
“You can’t give me an estimate?”
“Not really.”
“We shouldn’t start unless I know how much I’m paying.”
“Whatever you may think, I would not overcharge for this work. I want to revive Mirabelle. Like it or not, you’re part of that. It won’t cost the arm and the hand, don’t worry.”
“Thank you,” she said, a bit sheepish. It won’t cost the arm and the hand. She liked it. Come to think of it, she was sort of starting to like him, in a weird way.
She watched him work on the shutter screws—not easy, since they were rusted and worn.
His triceps flexed as he worked. She’d been an arms gal since university when she dated a drummer who’d done the music on one of her short films. He’d been a bit of an oddball (Noah used to say, never date drummers or goalies—they’re on another planet), but this guy had had delicious guns for sure, and several arm tricks up his sleeve, like supporting her whole body weight when they did it standing, or even horizontal, which added a plank to the game—a physical feat. It had been a massive turn-on.
Luc’s arms were lean. Defined. Biceps like tennis balls under his skin. She shoved that thought into the back of her mind and held onto the ladder tight—if not for his balance, then for hers.
Over the next few weeks, things started to come together at Maison Perdue. Sabine and Aubin spent their time in the tiny courtyard, scraping and sanding the shutters, covering the courtyard with old paint flakes.
Lali brought out bags of junk from every room—old newspapers, the contents of drawers, broken tchotchkes, wallpaper that was peeling off the walls, lotion in the bathroom cabinet from the sixties. Multiple runs down to the Nenier parking lot dumpster bins had been required.
Fedir dealt with electrical and plumbing things and watched over Yakiv.
Sabine found a few curiosities and lined them up along the shed’s windowsill.
A rusted Eiffel tower keychain. An ancient school exercise book half-filled with alphabet practice.
A parcel of furled, faded maps of Paris, Lyon, Marseille, and Annecy.
A hand-painted porcelain rabbit figurine that she and Aubin dubbed the patron saint of Maison Perdue.
Scraping the shutters was sweaty work, but she liked being outdoors after a seeming century in classrooms. “What’s it like around here?” she asked Aubin.
“Boring,” said Aubin. “There is no lycée—I think you call this the high school—in Nenier, so you take a bus, and when you get home at night, the social life disappears. Unless you have a car and can go to where the party is.”
“Which is what you do.”
“Maybe,” he said, smiling. “But it’s the same people over and over.”
It didn’t sound so boring to Sabine. “What are you doing in the fall?”
He shrugged. “My mother wants me to go to the Sorbonne in Paris for business and to continue to learn about the maison de champagne with my uncle until I am ready to take it over.”
“And you don’t?”
He shrugged again. “I think it is easy for her to say, go here, do this, take care of the family business, when all she does is lie on the beach in Nice, or see shows in the West End, or go on endless cruises in the Mediterranean.”
“I see your point. And by the way, that ‘I don’t care’ shrug doesn’t work with me anymore.”
“Too bad. It is the move I prefer.”
“You must be pretty smart to get into the Sorbonne.”
“No, I was told what my future would be. I wasn’t interested, so I refused to try.”
“Then how did you pass high school?”
“My mother knows the director of my school. And she was a large donor.”
“Ah. And you got into the Sorbonne the same way?”
“No, my mother discovered her influence didn’t stretch that far.”
“So how did you get in?”
“I said my mother wanted me to go to the Sorbonne. I did not say I got in. I, how do you say, flamed up because I did not do well?”
She laughed. “You mean flamed out?”
“Yes. So here we are. The genius and the flame-out. Yes? We say that?”
“Not exactly,” she said, laughing harder.
“How would you say it, then? I ask to improve my English.”
“The Genius and the Loser, but that’s awful and untrue.”
“I love it. As if a reality show.”
“But it doesn’t sound like you wanted to go to the Sorbonne anyway. What do you want to do?” This was rich coming from Sabine, who had no idea about anything.
“It doesn’t matter what I want. What’s the point of even talking about it?”
“They say we’re on this planet for four thousand weeks,” she said. “You’re not going to waste them shrugging your way through life, are you?”
“I am caught.”
“Really? A guy who’s going to inherit a vineyard, who likes to party, and who drives his new car wherever he wants to? I dunno … Sounds like an easy ride to me.”
Aubin turned back to scraping the shutters. The paint flaked off and fluttered down.
She slumped a bit. “That was awful of me. I’m sorry.”
“No, I should be interested in my own future. Feel grateful. Be happy.”
“That’s a lot of shoulds, which I get, because I’m the same. So just for the sake of argument, what would you want to do, if you had the choice?”
Aubin eyed her. She tried not to flinch under his gaze.
“Make music,” he said. “I make EDM. Electronic dance music.”
She raised her eyebrows, surprised.
“People aren’t necessarily who you think they are.”
“True,” she said. “So what are you going to do about it?”
“I thought I only had to answer one question!”
Now she shrugged. A move that made him grin.
“I could take music, I guess,” he said. “I’d have to improve my marks. Then I’d have to find a university that would take me and my bad history. It would be a lot of work. But then you know all about that.”
“It’s a good time, I’ll tell you,” she said, reaching for sarcasm. “A total cakewalk.”
“What is this, a walk with cake?”
“It means something is super easy. Which it wasn’t. I was making a joke. I guess if you have to explain a joke, it maybe wasn’t so funny.”
“But it does need explaining. Because walking with a cake is not easy. So it makes no sense.”
She had to laugh at that. He was right.
“So what is there to do in Toronto?”
“Changing the subject, very clever. Lots, but I’m not the one to ask, remember? Nerd who studied all day and night. Besides, we’re talking about you.”
“You get one more question this week,” he said, “and I do, too. Then we will talk about fixing your terrible social life when you go back to Canada. Because someone told me we only live four thousand weeks.”
“Fine. Go for it.”
“Do you have regrets?”
“Not breaking the rules, I guess.”
“Ha! Too bad I can’t go to university with that skill alone. I would be top of the class.”
“You could teach me a thing or two, then,” said Sabine.
“But I would never do that. Because once you have broken one rule, it just becomes easy to break them all … which isn’t as good as it sounds. Eventually you end up not knowing what is important. And one thing I already like about you is, you know what is important.”
“You give me too much credit.”
“I don’t think so. I think you are a very, very good person who is good for the world.”
He shot her a sincere look she hadn’t seen on his face since that moment right before they kissed in the Parc des Roches. She had an impulse to kiss him again, right then and there, but turned back to scraping instead.
Marlow bought new mattresses, linens and pillows, and she and Sabine moved into Maison Perdue.
Thereafter, she divided her time between working on the house with Luc in the mornings and driving the moped to Guillaume’s in the afternoon to work for the festival.
She had lunch from noon to one, then started working right through until eight at night.
Oscar rolled in at the beginning of his day, whenever that was, and dialed her up on video call—he liked having her available online from the moment she sat down, even if they weren’t meeting; his theory was that if she were there in the open-concept Renegade office in Toronto, she would be available to him, so why not have her available to him from France, too?
Guillaume thought this was ridiculous and found little ways to try to counter the effect of Oscar’s challenging personality, like sneaking Marlow a café au lait just out of Oscar’s eyeline in the laptop camera, or a slice of whatever dessert Madame Klein had made.
By the time she finished her festival work and brought her dishes back to the kitchen, Guillaume was usually in phone meetings with North America, so she started leaving him little notes to say thank you, on the kitchen counter, or just outside his office.
It also allowed her to practice her French.
Merci pour le gateau délicieux.
C’était un café merveilleux—c’est très gentil.
Sometimes when she raced in the next day from her work on Maison Perdue, she found replies from him.
De rien—which meant “of nothing,” as in, “it cost me nothing to do you this kindness.” So gallant. Or …
Avec grand plaisir. Meaning, it was his great pleasure. Also pretty damn gallant, which made her feel almost wooed. It was a charming and old-timey way to communicate and felt like a bit of courtship. But they didn’t often connect face-to-face.