19 STAIRS DON’T GO UPDOWN
19
S TAIRS D ON ’ T G O U P OR D OWN
How do you endure the unendurable?
That night, they went to bed early. In the coldness of their beds, they asked themselves the same question. He thought about Barbara’s husband’s infidelity and the tragic death of her parents. Ever since she’d told him, he hadn’t been able to get it out of his head. A plane takes off, flying toward a dream, and while waiting for them to call and say, “We’ve just arrived!” the police ring the doorbell instead to give you the news that there’s been an accident and there are no survivors. From everything to nothing in half a second. Without the chance to say goodbye. Without the chance to finish a conversation. Not a word of grace. Period. The two of them, but alone. A bloodcurdling end that no one deserves and that is painful to even imagine. Who went first? Did they realize their fates?
Two absences that all of a sudden hit you—mother and father—and weigh heavily on you. How do you suffer a blow like that?
The only way you can, of course.
Wearing a man’s pajama set, Barbara thought about the murder of Roger’s father with her head on her pillow and her eyes closed. A cruel punishment. The spiral of game, obsession, addiction, an unstoppable whirlpool—Pep Narbona’s debts grew until he ended up like waste in an irrigation canal, his head underwater. How do you move forward?
The only possible way.
Living.
Living. People look down on gerunds. Barbara had argued about it once with the copyeditors at her company, but she maintained that when gerunds were used by themselves, employed in an isolated manner, they don’t indicate present or past. And all you can do after a disaster is that: live. In the margins of time, accompanied by memories, wrapped in sorrow. Once the mourning period is over, if it ever passes, you get used to moving forward and taking the only path left for you as an opportunity. The clouds are like carriages that carry you, not a punishment forcing you to drag your feet.
Between all of it, Barbara was too agitated to fall asleep. The story of her marriage kept her awake. She had worked herself up all over again, like it had happened only four days prior. She got out of bed, pulled on her sheepskin socks over her pajama pants, and walked to Roger’s room. She listened closely to hear if he was snoring. Like always, the door was closed, day or night. She knocked on it with her knuckles.
“Can I come in?”
“Hey ...”
“Are you sleeping?”
“No.” He cleared his throat. “Not anymore. Come in.”
She entered and stood at the foot of his bed. Roger turned on the light on the nightstand—the insipid forty-watt light bulb—and sat up.
“Is something wrong? Are you feeling okay?”
“Yes, yes, but ... Sorry if you were sleeping.”
“I wasn’t, Barbara, don’t worry. It was a joke. How can I expect to sleep today? I was thinking about everything you told me.”
“I need to talk, if it’s okay. A little bit longer still.” She tried to button her pajama collar. There was neither a button nor a buttonhole. “You’ve heard my version.”
“Sit down.”
“I want you to tell me what you think. Please.”
“Sit down.”
She sat on the edge of the bed, as if she didn’t dare go farther. Roger propped up his pillow so she could sit more comfortably. He covered himself above the waist with the comforter.
“Me? How I see it?”
“Didn’t you just say you were thinking it over?”
“Nothing specific, honestly.”
“I’m interested.”
“Well ...” Roger was stuck between a rock and a hard place. “It’s hard to say. I don’t know Maurice. My mother always used to say something: ‘Judge not, that you be not judged.’ She says it, but it was originally said by some saint ... When it comes to infidelity, I guess everyone knows their own.” He hesitated, not knowing what he was trying to say. “Actually, this is what it must have been like forever.”
Male avoidance. The more real a conversation is, the more lost Roger became. She noticed it immediately.
“Look at me,” she said, interrupting him. “I don’t want compassion. Who do you think I am?”
Roger covered his nose and snorted under the blanket.
“Well, what stings to me,” Roger tried again, “is Mireille’s high treason, Betrayal with a capital B . For your best friend to do that to you. Fucked over, in the biggest way.”
“I appreciate your honesty.” She breathed in deeply. “I’ve spent plenty of months without knowing who to talk to about it.”
“Has she tried ...”
“To contact me?” She leaned over and put her head against the mattress. She sat up again. “By all means possible ... Calls I’ve hung up on? A few. Two letters I’ve ripped up without reading. One day, she even stood at the bus stop in front of my door waiting for me to leave the house. She told me she wanted to explain herself. That she had the right to it. She asked that I please listen. I walked fast, her on my tail like a pest, begging me to give her five minutes. In the end, after ignoring her, I stopped suddenly, and I told her to get out of my face and to leave me alone forever, or I’d make sure to tell Robert, her husband, everything I’d discovered regarding her and Maurice.”
“Did you do it?”
“I was tempted to on more than one occasion.”
“Do you think her husband was in the know, or was he clueless?”
“Maybe he was suspicious. For my part, I don’t think he knew anything.” She smiled for the first time that whole night. “Directly.”
They didn’t talk about Maurice anymore. Or about Robert. Barbara didn’t know if the couple was still together after her subtle revenge. She was done with them. She had gotten out burned enough. They talked about Mireille. Mireille and all the anxieties it had stirred up that the person who knew everything about her, who’d shared so many things with her as a girl, was the one to betray her while looking Barbara in the eyes and then laugh with her like there was nothing wrong, like she wasn’t fucking Barbara’s husband. She’d stopped expecting much from men. But Mireille, who’d traveled across half of Europe with her via Interrail the first time their parents let them travel alone, Mireille who’d smoked her first joint with her, whom she’d shared her most intimate secrets with at every age, who’d secretly accompanied her to the gynecologist when Barbara had contracted a vaginal infection from somewhere, who’d even consoled her when her parents died. Poor édith and Clément had known Mireille very well. And loved her. Years ago, she’d slept over at her house plenty of times. If her parents had ever discovered that Mireille, her best friend, who’d gone with her to try on wedding dresses, turned out to be her husband’s mistress ... She couldn’t count the number of times she’d processed the whole scenario from beginning to end like it was an old silent film, and she’d come to the conclusion that Mireille and Maurice had been involved even before the wedding. In fact, if she ever found herself face-to-face with Mireille again, she’d ask her a single question. Only one. The call. The long call Maurice had made from Valldemossa during their honeymoon in Mallorca. “Was it to you?”
Barbara was sure of the answer. It was precisely that intuition that caused her so much suspicion. If you can’t trust the person you believe in the most, then what do you do? And since experiencing his father’s death, Roger agreed with how painful the retroactive discovery can be. Because if it’s difficult to find out your father is a compulsive gambler and has debts he can’t pay, it’s even worse to find out he’s been beaten to death, and to look back and replay the last few years of his life, when the man had pretended to be one thing and turned out to be something else completely. And he added that you can’t trust the world anymore when your best friend and husband are the ones who’ve really fucked you over. It’s hard to lose the two people closest to you; it’s even harder to realize you no longer have a safe place. Everything comes crashing down. So long to a friend, her husband could go to hell, and that’s when all the doubts come flooding. Roger said he understood that feeling of defenselessness. Barbara discussed a subject never mentioned in the newspapers, of being able to trust people again after an experience like that. And she said that, in the end, stairs don’t go up or down on their own; everything depends on us. And she told him about Simone Sicilia, how she’d been abused by her uncle, how she’d revealed it all in a book of revenge before killing herself. He asked if the book had been edited by Giresse & Trésor, and Barbara responded that it had, and he asked that she please share it with him because he wanted to read it.
“Roger. Can I ask you for one thing?”
He was silent.
“I don’t want to sleep alone tonight.”
He stayed quiet. He had to process if he’d understood her. Her eyes, eager for companionship in a way he’d never seen them, answered him. Roger pulled aside the comforter like a father letting his child in when they have a nightmare. As flustered as he was, he managed to say only one thing:
“On one condition. Don’t bring the sheep into bed.”
She laughed nervously, took off her sheepskin socks, let them fall discreetly to the floor, and surrendered to the comfort of warm sheets in no time.
She was the first one to wake up. The ray of vertical light streaming through the crack in the door was enough for her to guess the time. In fact, she hadn’t been able to sleep through most of the night. It wasn’t her bed, it wasn’t her pillow, and she still didn’t know how she’d even dared ask him to share a bed with her. Sometimes, when she turned, she’d open an eye and stare at Roger sleeping only inches from her. Little by little, the shaft of light outlined his silhouette, sketching his features. He hadn’t shaved for a couple of days. The beard growing in was dark with prickly hair and matched his thick eyebrows. The joyful skin of his early thirties didn’t contain a trace of wrinkles, nor did the area around his eyes. His breathing, calm, emitted the tranquility of a nonsmoker. She was in no rush for him to wake up. She liked looking at him and thinking that, without the confinement of the snowstorm, she would never have gotten to know so well this guy who’d shown up to her house only a few weeks ago with the entitlement of a karaoke bar owner. The 32nd of March had let them fill their days with conversations and moments that, under normal conditions, wouldn’t have fit on the calendar.
Roger opened an eye.
“Good morning,” Barbara said first.
“Good morning,” he responded, clenching his eyes shut. In the nebulousness of his first waking moments, he had to think. What was Barbara doing in his bed? “Everything okay?”
“Mm-hmm,” she replied.
After that guttural affirmation, she thought Roger would go back to sleep. She didn’t want to bother him. She observed him for some five minutes, which passed as slowly as a turtle. When her heart had had enough, Roger woke up on his own, serene, like he’d been listening to rain. Barbara, leaning her head on her hand, her arm propped up by a pillow, waited with words on the tip of her tongue. She’d had time to think about it.
“It’s been a year since I made love.”
The sentence came out how she wanted it to. Blunt. Informative. Without sounding like a complaint or a desperate cry. She said it, counting her words, and let her tone do the rest.
“I don’t do favors, Barbara.” Then, dropping the bad joke, which had left her cold as stone, Roger wriggled over and kissed her on the lips. “I do it only when I want to. And I would love to do it right now with you.”
The second kiss was longer. By the third, they were holding each other’s faces, looking at each other closely with surprise, and letting their eyes laugh. And by the happiness of unexpected things that accelerate the booming of the heart, they didn’t rush things under the sheets. Every piece of clothing they removed was a respectful game. All clothes off. Until, body against body, they wrapped their legs around each other and felt a new warmth. Then they hugged each other. Chest against chest, Barbara and Roger sealed a shared happiness. They needed to feel protected in each other’s arms, and they made it last. Slowly, they let touch guide them down the path of desire.
By the time they melted into each other, it was noon. Once they were finished, they stayed in bed, stretched out, looking up at the ceiling and caressing each other with the door open. Surrendering to a situation that was unthinkable only a week before, they gave in to sweet dreams and short phrases. She had put on the pajama shirt without buttoning it up. She berated him for teasing with “I don’t do favors,” which he could have kept to himself in that moment. He ribbed her right back. He teased her about saying “It’s been a year since I’ve made love,” which had sounded like a cry for help. They joked in whispers, as they acknowledged that on the day they’d met, Barbara had thought he was stuck-up, and Roger admitted he hadn’t understood how his brother could live in an apartment with such an uptight woman.
“You know what I’d love right now?”
“We don’t have it,” she responded, no intention of moving.
“A glass of milk with Banania.”
“Really? You like that banana mush?”
“Isn’t it like a chocolate milkshake?”
“Why do you think it’s called Banania, smarty-pants? Oh, of course, you’re the king of apples, and you can’t pick out a banana.”
“Listen—”
“In any case, I don’t think we have any in the house.”
“Are you sure?” He carefully ran his finger over her nipple.
“Oh, Roger, what’s gotten into you ...”
“Shhh.” He put the same finger over her lips. Barbara pretended to bite him.
“Where are you going?”
Roger climbed over her and jumped up from the bed. He slid on his underwear from the night before and his pajama shirt, and he stretched out on the floor next to the bed.
She asked, “Can I know what you’re up to?”
He was already face down on the ground with half his body beneath the bedspring. He stretched his hand to touch the box with his fingers. Using both hands, he dragged it out.
“I found a treasure ... Close your eyes. Are you ready?”
“Oh ...”
“Close them. I don’t know, maybe you already knew what was under here.”
“Under the bed? No idea.”
He put the tin Banania box on top of the bed. “You can open your eyes.”
Barbara opened them, not knowing what she’d find. “Banania!” She laughed. “Is that your brother’s?”
“I don’t think so. You’ve never seen this box before?”
“Never.”
“You don’t recognize it?”
“No.” She touched it and shook it. “I thought it’d be heavier.”
“Open it.”
She took off the lid with the caution required by surprises. Immediately, she let escape an “oh.” And another. It was in front of her, and she could hardly believe what she was seeing.
“It’s Mamie’s picture!”
“It’s your grandmother, right?”
“The same one we saw at the exhibit.”
“Yes or no?”
“What a coincidence. The same bicycle, the same pose. And of course, it’s this one ... How can it be? What is all this?”
Barbara realized that, under the picture, there were several black-and-white photograph clippings. All of them seemed to have come from the same magazine. Who were all these people?
“Your grandmother never told you about it?”
“Never. I’d remember.”
“And what about your mother?”
“Not at all. But my parents never lived here.” Suddenly, she furrowed her brow. “Wait, what were you doing going through things that don’t belong to you?”
“I thought,” he replied cheekily, “it was my brother’s box.”
“Of course. And—” All of a sudden, she came to a realization. “Now I get why you were interested in me seeing the exhibition of ... What was the name of the controversial photographer?”
“That’s the least important part.”
“You’d already seen that picture. You’d seen it here first ...”
He raised an eyebrow playfully and defiantly. “You think I’d do something like that, Barbara?”
“You’re a trickster.” She pinched his thigh. “Did you see it here first, or not?”
“I can’t answer without the presence of my lawyer. My lawyer is my brother, and right now, he’s at a trial that, by the way, seems to have gone well for him.”
“What else do you know about these clippings, about this story?” she said, disoriented by the picture she was holding of her grandmother. “Have you researched it?”
“These are all pictures from the war. Basically the years of Nazi occupation in Paris, so ...”
“Starting from the summer of 1940. When Mamie wasn’t a grandmother, or mother. When she was ... what? Fifteen or sixteen years old. Seventeen, maybe.”
How do you endure the unendurable?
Behind those magazine clippings were the most sinister years of the war.
Margaux in black and white. Jovial, despite it all. Elegant and pretty on top of the bike. Lit up by someone she knew. That museum picture, so well-defined, hid a story.
The story of Mamie Margaux and the love of her life.
Only she knew it.