3 THERE’S NO TURNING BACK
3
T HERE ’ S N O T URNING B ACK
Roger’s room, which had been Marcel’s room and must have been Barbara’s room when she lived with Mamie Margaux before that, overlooked a rather old interior courtyard. The window leaned out over laundry rooms, clotheslines, and a rank odor that sometimes wafted up from the apartments below. The views, necessarily domestic, were charmless enough to justify those frosted-glass windows that hardly let in enough light for a prison cell, and were instead useful only to tell whether it was night or day outside. The built-in wardrobe next to the door was full of Marcel’s suit jackets. Roger slid them over a little, careful not to wrinkle them, to make room for his two pairs of pants. They were the only two he’d brought with him. Two pairs of warm pants: one corduroy and the jeans he was currently wearing. Whatever didn’t fit into Marcel’s wardrobe he’d keep under the bed for the time being. He would open the suitcase, lay it flat, store it between the two legs of the bed, then drag it out whenever he needed something. The bed was big enough but a strange size nonetheless, as though it were made for one-and-a-half people. It wasn’t a twin, but it wasn’t quite a full-size bed, either. In his thirty-three years of life—some of it spent circling the globe more than enough times—he’d never slept on a mattress with those dimensions. He collapsed on top of it, testing it out. It was a little soft for his taste, but at least it didn’t squeak or have an impression left by past inhabitants. He planned on making the most of that little corner of the world while his older brother was out of the city. He found a full-length mirror behind the door. He looked at himself, tucked his plaid shirt into his jeans, and walked out of the room, now with an idea.
“Should we get lunch? You pick the place and I’ll pay.”
“It’s not a good time for me, honestly.”
“Come on, to make up for my entrance. I didn’t mean to create so much chaos. You got scared, and ...”
“Some other day.” Barbara had hardly looked up from the screen of the twenty-four-inch Mac desktop she kept on the desk in the living room.
“Something quick.”
“I’ve got a lot of work today.” She was blunt.
“On a Saturday?”
Barbara didn’t feel like explaining. She realized that Marcel had at least been discreet enough not to tell his brother what she did for work. And, from what she could tell, he must also not have told Roger that, at forty-one years old, Barbara had sought refuge at her grandmother’s house in Paris to escape her husband and her miserable experiences with him.
“When love is a mistake, it’s better to run.”
Her grandmother had given her that advice over the phone, and once she finally faced the reality of her situation, Barbara packed her bags and left Arles so that she could be done for good with Maurice. After all, she could do her job selling international rights for Giresse he closed the door and began to load his backpack. He packed his Canon and, just in case, picked two lenses to help resize the world. He grabbed the wide-angle and the macro lens, because there was always a drop of water dripping from a handrail somewhere with just the right lack of urgency. He’d never forgive himself if he didn’t have the right lens to capture that moment of urban poetry. Then he checked to make sure he had the keys to the apartment in one of the twenty pockets of his parka. He didn’t understand why his brother carried them on that key ring. A miniature oboe did nothing for him, and music didn’t mean much to Marcel either. In fact, no one in the Narbona-Bazin family cared about instruments or songs. They were all tone-deaf. And none of them knew how to dance. “Everyone here has two left feet,” his mother would say, in a rather French expression. They once heard their father humming a couple of the traditional Easter caramelles he’d learned as a child as he filled boxes with apples. Their mother, Fabienne, always said that she’d studied piano until she was twelve, but when the Bazin family moved from Besancon to Fontclara, they took only the most essential items: clothes, the great-grandparents’ trunk, the photo albums, and the good cutlery. Once they shuffled everything around carefully, there was just enough room left in the truck to fit that little period of mourning you need before a rebirth. And those crucial memories we hold on to when moving to new places. The rest, including the piano and the metronome, they left at home in France, in case they ever returned.
The rules. Roger wanted to know them before he left for his first walk around the neighborhood. Barbara recited all five of them like a chant she knew from memory—as though she’d grown tired of repeating them to her tenants.
Whoever cooks, cleans.
Whoever spreads out, picks up.
Don’t touch the heater.
The half bathroom is for men.
And at night, make as little sound as possible.
“That’s the life of a monk.”
“That’s how things are.”
“I’m not arguing. I’m just saying.”
Barbara ran her finger over her bushy eyebrows.
“Oh, and no smoking. Like I told you, if you don’t like it ...”
“Yeah, yeah, Paris, hotels, rats. What about the shower?” Roger asked, puzzled. “There’s no shower in the small bathroom.”
“Sorry.” Barbara got up from the office chair. “You can take up to one shower a day. Your brother was in the habit of taking one at night. He’d go for a run, come back sweaty as all hell, and go straight into the shower. I like to wake up and shower before I start working, so the bathroom was never a problem.”
“I can’t stand running. In fact I can’t even do it. One of my legs is longer than the other. It’s a birth defect.”
Barbara looked him over, from his hips down to his feet.
“And does that hold you back ... a lot?”
“Either way, I’m used to showering every day. And I’d like to continue. Or is that unpopular in France?”
She stared at him and wondered how Roger and Marcel could have fallen from the same family tree. They were brothers but looked nothing alike.
“The hot water tank is the issue. We don’t get any more than it gives. The building’s utilities must date back to before the war.”
“The Napoleonic one, I’m guessing.”
One brother discreet, the other impertinent.
“I don’t think they’ve changed anything in the building since my grandmother was born here. People tolerate it for the sake of peace.”
Roger looked around. The apartment had personality—especially the living room with the grand windows. On a slight incline, like an observatory, the windows made the room feel different, picturesque, Parisian. The light of midday entered in rays, and between the February cold and the heat inside, the glass began misting at the edges of the wooden frames. The enormous cactus stood like the totem of the home. Roger plodded and strolled around the room, like a cat scrutinizing its surroundings without even knowing what it’s looking for.
“What about the television?”
“My grandmother took it.”
“There’s no TV? Seriously?”
“She asked for permission from the retirement home to have a TV in her room. Who knows how many requests she had to make. But, in the end, she got it; if Mamie Margaux wants something, she gets it.”
“Granny’s frail, huh?”
The question surprised Barbara. It was never a question of whether Mamie Margaux was frail. She hadn’t even thought about it in those terms. Mamie Margaux was in good health for an eighty-three-year-old. Her mind was clear, her pain in check, and she had a strong bite with dignified wrinkles. Above it all, she had the will to live. For her own sake and for all the life Damien hadn’t been able to experience. And for the chunk of life stolen from édith, her poor daughter. Because, even with all she’d been through, Mamie Margaux had no plans to surrender.
Once, a few days before leaving for the retirement home, she’d grabbed her granddaughter’s hand at dinner and caressed it like she had when Barbara was little. Mamie Margaux told her that she hadn’t yet heard the siren’s last call. She knew that when the question arrived, the cursed question, the question posed in all uppercase—“WHAT AM I STILL DOING HERE ON EARTH?”—it would mean her first steps into the dirt. And once that moment arrived, the steps would become short, quick, and headed one way: toward death, with no hope for turning back.
Barbara and Mamie Margaux toasted with a glass of wine. Though the grandmother’s eyes were losing their green, her granddaughter’s still sparkled with the lush richness of forty—even more so when they tried to choke back emotions.
“To not asking yourself the fatal question, then ...”
“And may it stay that way for a long time,” said the grandmother, filling her gold-rimmed glass.
Spring had weighed heavily upon Mamie Margaux as she’d planned to leave her apartment—the one she’d lived in her whole life—since it had become a burden for her to climb the stairs. There was no other reason. She’d simply discovered what she’d long seen coming: that getting old was hard. When she turned seventy, the fifth-floor walkup became a big problem. The thought of returning home made her look forward to leaving the house less and less ... When she turned eighty, that many stairs was torture. Once she realized she was leaving the house only when necessary—when whole weeks started to pass without her feeling the air of the street—she thought it was time to search for somewhere more comfortable. After so many years on the move, many spent carrying boxes up and down staircases as a retail worker, she’d finally let someone cook for her, care for her, pay attention to her when she wanted it, and leave her in peace when she wished to walk through the gardens of the Viviani Retirement Home. When she officially moved, she missed her red sofa, her collection of ducks, and the company of her beloved Barbara for the past three years. But when sadness reared its head, she’d think about that worn-out Himalaya of a staircase, each floor a base camp unto itself, and she’d let go of the nostalgia in no time.
“I’m leaving. Do you think it’ll rain?”
Barbara approached the windows and studied the clouds while she tied her hair in a high bun.
“I don’t think so. But it’s Paris. You know ... rats, hotels, and rain.”
Roger zipped up his parka and slung the backpack over his shoulders.
“Can I say something?” He lightly lifted his pant leg up as far as his rigid jeans would let him. “Truth is, one of my legs isn’t shorter than the other. I just can’t stand jogging.”
“A liar on top of it all.”
“It was a joke, woman. Are jokes also against the house rules?”
“You know what? I don’t like it either. At all. Running? It’s not for me.”
“It’s a sport for people who weren’t picked for any teams.”