They had been through some of Aymeric’s troubles and were sliding, Walter hoped, along to his own. These were, in order, that for nine years his employer had been exploiting him; that he had a foot caught in the steel teeth of his native Calvinism and was hoping to ease it free without resorting to a knife; that the awfully nice Dominican who had been lending books to him had brusquely advised him to try psychoanalysis. Finally, the apartment building he lived in had just been sold to a chain of health clubs, and everybody had to get out. It seemed a great deal to set loose on a new friend, so Walter mentioned only that he had a long underground ride to work every day, with two changes.
Aymeric replied that from the Notre-Dame-des-Champs station there was no change. That was how he had come, lugging his portfolio to show Walter’s employer. “I was too soft with him, probably,” Aymeric resumed. His relatives had already turned out to be his favorite topic. “The men in my family are too tolerant. Our wives leave us for brutes.”
Leaning forward the better to hear Aymeric, who had dropped to a mutter, Walter noticed that his hair was dyed, pale locks on a ruddy forehead. His voice ran like clockwork, drawling to a stop and then, wound up tight, picking up again, like a refreshed countertenor. His voice was like the signature that required a magnifying glass; what he had to say was clear, but a kind of secret.
Walter said he was astonished at the number of men willing to admit, with no false pride, that their wives had left them.
“Oh, well, they do that nowadays,” said Aymeric. “They wait for the children to.” To? He must have meant “to grow up, to leave home.”
“Are there children?” He imagined Aymeric lingering outside the fence of a schoolyard, trying to catch a glimpse of his estranged children, ducking behind a parked car when a teacher looked his way.
“Grandchildren.”
Walter continued to feel sympathy. His employer, back in the days when he had been training Walter to be a gallery instrument as silent and reliable as the lock on the office safe, had repeatedly warned him that wives were death to the art trade. Degas had remained a bachelor. Did Walter know why? Because Degas did not want to have a wife looking at his work at the end of the day and remarking, “That’s pretty.”
They had finally got the conversation rolling evenly. Aymeric, wound up and in good breath, revealed that he and his cousin Robert and Robert’s aged mother occupied a house his family had lived in forever. Actually, it was on one floor of an apartment building, but nearly the whole story — three sides of the court. For a long time, it had been a place the women of the family could come back to when their husbands died or began showing the indifference that amounts to desertion. Now that Paris had changed so much, it was often the men who returned. (Walter noticed that Aymeric said “Paris” instead of “life,” or “manners,” or “people.”) Probably laziness of habit had made him say they had lived forever between the Luxembourg Gardens and the Boulevard Raspail. Raspail was less than a century old, and could scarcely count as a timeless landmark. Still, when Aymeric looked down at the damp cobblestones in the court, out of his kitchen window, he could not help feeling behind him the line of ancestors who had looked out, too, wondering, like Aymeric, if it really would be a mortal sin to jump.
Robert, his cousin, owned much of the space. It was space one carved up, doled out anew, remodeled; it was space on which one was taxed. Sixty square meters had just been sold to keep the city of Paris from grabbing twice that amount for back taxes. Another piece had gone to pay their share in mending the roof. Over the years, as so many single, forsaken adults had tried to construct something nestlike, cushioning, clusters of small living quarters had evolved, almost naturally, like clusters of coral. All the apartments connected; one could walk from end to end of the floor without having to step out to a landing. They never locked their doors. Members of the same family do not steal from one another, and they have nothing to hide. Aymeric said this almost sternly. Robert’s wife had died, he added, just as Walter opened his mouth to ask. Death was the same thing as desertion.
Walter did not know what to answer to all this, especially to the part about locks. A good, stout bolt seemed to him a sensible and not an unfriendly precaution. “And lead us not into temptation,” he was minded to quote, but it was too soon to begin that ambiguous sort of exchange.
At that moment Walter’s employer appeared across the boulevard, at the curb, trying to flag a taxi by waving his briefcase. None stopped, and he moved away, perhaps to a bus stop. Walter wondered where he was going, then remembered that he didn’t care.
“I hate him,” he told Aymeric. “I hate him. I dream he is in danger. A patrol car drives up and the execution squad takes him away. I dream he is drinking coffee after dinner and far off in the night you can hear the patrol car, coming to get him.”
Aymeric wondered what bound Walter to that particular dealer. There were other employers in Paris, just as dedicated to art.
“I hate art, too,” said Walter. “Oh, I don’t mean that I hate what you do. That, at least, has some meaning — it lets people see how they imagine they live.”
Aymeric’s tongue rested on his lower lip as he considered this. Walter explained that he had to spend another eleven years working for Trout Face if he was to get the full benefit of a twenty-year pension fund. In eleven years, he would be forty-six. He hoped there was still enjoyment to be had at that age.
“When you are drawing retirement pay, I’ll be working for a living,” Aymeric said. He let his strong, elderly hands rest on the table — evidence, of a kind.
“At first, when I thought I could pull my funds out at any time, I used to give notice,” Walter went on. “When I stopped giving notice, he turned mean. I dreamed last night that there was a bomb under the floor of the gallery. He nearly blew himself up digging it out. He was saved. He is always saved. He escapes, or the thing doesn’t explode, or the chief of the execution squad changes his mind.”
“Robert has a book about dreams,” said Aymeric. “He can look it up. I want him to meet you.”
About four weeks after this, Walter moved into two rooms, kitchen, and bathroom standing empty between Robert’s quarters and his mother’s. It was Robert who looked after the practical side of the household and to whom Walter paid a surprisingly hefty rent; but he was on a direct Métro line, and within reach of friendship, and, for the first time since he had left Bern to work in Paris, he felt close to France.
That spring Robert’s mother had grown old. She could not always remember where she was, or the age of her two children. At night she roamed about, turning on lights, opening bedroom doors. (Walter, who felt no responsibility toward her, kept his locked.) She picked up curios and trinkets and left them anywhere. Once a month Robert and Aymeric traded back paperweights and snuffboxes.
One night she entered her son’s bedroom at two in the morning, pulled open a drawer, and began throwing his shirts on the floor. She was packing to send him on a summer holiday. Halfway through (her son pretended to be asleep), she turned her mind to Aymeric. Aymeric woke up a few minutes later to find his aunt in bed beside him, with her finger in her mouth. He got up and spent the rest of the night in an armchair.
“Why don’t you knock her out with pills?” Walter asked him.
“We can’t do that. It might kill her.”
What’s the difference, said Walter’s face. “Then shut her up in her own bedroom.”