She woke and they got up, and went down to breakfast, and Michel felt a most curious sensation: It was as if he were walking in Martian g. His body was light, floating ever so slightly, feet just padding the floor. Walking on air! He laughed to feel such a cliché come true, right there in his own body, in this very moment. And he suddenly knew he would remember this moment for the rest of his life, no matter what happened, no matter if he lived a thousand years. Make this your last thought when you die, he told himself, and you’ll be happy even then, to know that you once had such a moment. The balance will be even and more than even.
After breakfast they abandoned the conference entirely. Michel drove her around and showed her his Provence. He showed her Nîmes and Orange and Montpellier and Villefranche-sur-Mer, his old beach, where they swam again. And he showed her the Pont du Gard, where the Romans had made their most beautiful creation. “Nadia would like this.” And he took her up to Les Baux, the hilltop village overlooking the Camargue and the Med, the peaks honeycombed with the ancient chambers of the hermitage, poor monks up there above the world and all its Saracens. And later that afternoon they sat in a sidewalk café in Avignon, down from the Pope’s palace, under plane trees, and Michel sipped cassis and watched her relax into her metal chair like a cat. “This is nice,” she said. “I like this.” And again he felt himself floating in Martian g, and she laughed to see the idiot grin plastered across his face.
But the next day the conference was scheduled to end. And that night, in bed, after they had finished making love and were lying stretched against each other, sweaty and warm, he said impulsively, “Will you stay longer?”
“Ah no,” she said. “No—I have to get back.”
She got up abruptly to go to the bathroom. When she came back she saw the look on his face, and said immediately, “But I’ll come back! I’ll come back and visit.”
“Yes?”
“Of course. What, did you think I wouldn’t? What do you take me for? Did you think I was not here too?”
“No.”
“Did you think I do this all the time?”
“No.”
“I should hope not.”
She returned to bed, pulled back to look at him. “I’m not the kind of person to pull back when the stakes get high.”
“Me neither.”
“Except in Antarctica, right? We could have been up there a century ago, had our own world to live in together.” She jabbed him with a finger. “Right?”
“Ahh—”
“But you said no.” Now the knives were showing. Nothing ever went away, not really. “You could have said yes and we would have been there a century ago, in 2026. We could have been a couple there, maybe. Eventually we might have gotten together. We could have been together for sixty or seventy years, who knows!”
“Oh come on,” he said.
“We could have! I liked you, you liked me. It was a bit like this, even in Antarctica, admit it. But you said no. You lost your nerve.”
He shook his head. “It wouldn’t have been like this.”
“You don’t know! Anything could happen, you said so yourself on that panel the other day. You admitted it then, in front of everyone.”
He felt himself getting heavy. Sinking down into the bed.
“Yes,” he said. “Anything could have happened.”
He had to admit it to her, admit it just to her, lying next to her naked in bed.
“It’s true. And I said no. I was afraid. I’m sorry.”
She nodded, severe as any hawk.
He rolled on his back and stared at the ceiling, unable to meet her gaze. A hotel ceiling. He was getting heavier by the moment. He had to exert himself, to swim back to the surface. “But,” he said. He sighed. He looked at her. “Now it’s now. And—here we are, right?”
“Please,” she said. “You sound like John when he first landed there.”
She and John Boone had been a celebrity couple for a few years, several decades ago; she had mentioned him briefly the day before. A shallow man, she had said. All he wants is to have fun.
“But it’s true what he said,” Michel said. “Here we are.”
“Yes yes. And I’ll come back too. I told you that. But I have business to attend to.”
“But you’ll come back?” he asked, clasping her arm. “Even though—even though I . . .”
“Yes yes,” she said. She stopped, and looked like she was thinking something over. Then: “You admitted it. That’s what I wanted to hear. That’s where we are now. So I’ll come back.”
She kissed him; then rolled onto him. “When I can.”
The next morning she left. Michel drove her to the airport, kissed her good-bye. Back at his car, looking at its shabby interior, he groaned; he wasn’t sure she really would return.
But she had said she would. And here they were, on Earth, in the year 2126. What might have been was no more than a dream, forgotten on waking. They could only go on from the here and now. So he had to stop worrying about the past, and think about what he could do now. If Maya was going to return, it would not be to comfort a guilt-stricken unhappy old man, that was certain. Maya looked forward. She was ready to go on making her life, no matter what had happened in the past. That was one of the qualities that made him love her; she was alive to the present, living in it. And she would want a partner to be the same. So he would have to live up to that; he would have to construct a life here, now, in Provence, that was worthy of Maya’s love, that would make her want to come back, again and again, perhaps to stay, at least to visit. Perhaps to invite him back with her to Russia. Perhaps to make a life together.
It was a project.
The question, then, was where to settle, where to make a home? He was a Provençal, therefore he would settle in Provence. But he had moved around so much over the years that no one place represented home above all the others. But now he wanted one. Now when Maya returned (if she did; on the phone it sounded like she had a lot to keep her there in Russia), he wanted to be able to show her a Michel centered in the moment, happy. At home, and by being at home, justifying after the fact his decision to say no to Mars, to opt instead for the Mediterranean, that cradle of civilization still rocking, the coast’s sun-washed rocky headlands still glowing in the light. Seduce the Russian beauty with the warmth of Provence.
A sign appeared, in the form of a family event; Michel’s great-uncle died, and left to Michel and his nephew Francis a house on the coast, east of Marseilles. Michel thought of Maya’s love for the sea and went to see his nephew. Francis was deeply involved in Arlesian affairs, and was agreeable to selling his share of the house to Michel, trusting that he would remain welcome there, which he certainly would be—Michel’s late brother’s son was among the most cherished people in Michel’s life, a rock of good humor and good sense. And now, bless him, perfectly amenable. He seemed to know what Michel intended.
So the place was Michel’s. An unadorned old vacation house on the beach, at the back of a little inlet between Pointe du Déffend and Bandol. A very modest place, in keeping with his great-uncle’s character, and with Michel’s project; it looked very much like a place Maya would like, beautifully located under plane trees, on a low beach no more than three or four meters higher than the sea, behind a little creek-crossed beach wedged between two small rocky headlands. A line of cypress trees ran up the crease in the hills.