Today I finish earlier than usual, but I’m still a bachelor. Mélanie doesn’t get back until Thursday.
I just talked to her on the phone: the hotel isn’t as nice as she thought it would be, the spa is closed, and her team is useless.
Okay.
(She’s a medical rep, and the lab that employs her regularly organizes remotivation seminars to help them overcome the major trauma of generic medications.)
“Are you going to do the shopping?”
Of course. Of course I’m going to do the shopping. I’ve been stuck doing the shopping for two years, I’m not going to pick tonight to revolutionize our life as a couple.
“And don’t forget the loyalty card. The last time, you lost us at least sixty points. I figured it out.”
Mélanie is an informed consumer. Sixty points is a lot.
“No, no, I won’t forget. Well, I’ll let you go, because I have to go get little Woof-Woof out.”
“Sorry?”
“My little vacuum cleaner.”
“Oh . . . ”
When she says “Oh . . . ” like that, I wonder what she’s really thinking. Is she distressed? Does she talk about me to her colleagues? Does she say to them, “My partner sells Woof-Woofs in various colors”?
I doubt it. She thought she’d met the next Philippe Starck but she’s ended up with Overstock.com, I’m afraid. Plus I’m pretty sure she thinks I spend my days playing around with gadgets. If she only knew. It’s easier to peddle anticoagulants than it is a Frigidaire that breaks your balls every time you go into the kitchen. Well, whatever. I’m finishing earlier, but I’m not going to rush off to do the shopping at Franprix because I saw that there’s a Sidney Lumet festival showing at the Grand Action, and they’re playing Running on Empty at nine o’clock tonight.
Thank you, life.
I saw that movie with my cousin (probably even in the same theater) when I was fifteen, around the same age as River Phoenix when he played Danny Pope, and it affected me so much that I got run over by a bus as I was leaving the theater. It’s true. Four broken toes out of ten.
Let’s just say that the prospect of seeing it again made my heart beat faster, because—and this is a secret Mélanie doesn’t know—I’ve been building up loyalty points in my own way, too.
I decide to run by the house to change and eat something before finding a bike share.
(Bikes are nice when you come out after seeing a great movie; the headlight is like a projector, and the most beautiful scenes light your way in the night.)
When I get to my landing, a half-eaten sandwich in one hand and my uninteresting mail in the other, I suddenly find myself nose-to-nose with a huge piece of furniture. A sort of armoire in blue Formica. It’s sitting at a diagonal, blocking my way, and since I’m not armless I put my stuff down to shove it over a meter or so. As I’m doing this I hear a sharp little voice:
“Mommy! Mommy! There’s a man who’s stuck!”
Then a voice of medium pitch:
“Do you hear that, Isaac? Did you hear what your daughter just said? Do something with that thing!”
And finally the deep voice of Papa Bear:
“WOMEN! BLOODY WOMEN! YOU WANT ME TO DIE, IS THAT IT? YOU WANT ME TO BE CRUSHED UNDER THE WEIGHT OF THAT ATROCIOUS THING SO YOU CAN GET MY INHERITANCE? NEVER! NEVER, DO YOU HEAR ME? I’LL NEVER LEAVE YOU GRANDPAPA’S TREASURES!” (Then, in a softer voice for my benefit: “Sorry, neighbor, sorry! Can you get through?”)
I look up and see, above the curve of the fourth-floor railing, a ruddy face framed by a bushy beard and, between the bars, two little Goldilocks looking at me gravely.
“No problem,” I say.
He gives me a wave and I move away, turning my key as delicately as possible so I can overhear the rest of the scene.
“Come on, girls. You’ll catch cold.”
But Mama Bear is having none of it:
“What about Hans?”
“Hans is an ass. We had a difference of opinion right away and he dumped me with this piece of crap on the second floor. There you go, if you want to know everything! There’s the truth for you! HANS-IS-AN-ASS! (pronouncing each syllable distinctly, and loud enough for the whole building to hear). Come on, girls, come in now, or I’ll shut you up in this piece of garbage your mother paid two hundred euros to a bandit for. Vintage, vintage . . . I couldn’t care less about vintage. Hurry up, little chickens! Your lord and master is hungry!”
“Oh ho, let’s be very clear on that score, my friend: as long as my pretty buffet is in the stairwell, you’re not getting any dinner.”
“VERY WELL, LITTLE MADAM! VERY WELL! IN THAT CASE, I’M GOING TO EAT YOUR CHILDREN!”
The man roars like an ogre and a bunch of shrill little shrieks echo off the walls of the stairwell.
I turn around in wonderment, dazzled by the glitters of a magic sparkler.
Their door slams and, go figure, I no longer have any desire to go home.
I’ll go out for a kebab.
* * *
I head back down the stairs, musing.
I’ve passed her once or twice in the mornings, taking her daughters to school. She’s always disheveled, always in a rush, and always polite. Mélanie grumbles because she parks her stroller just anywhere in the lobby, a stroller full of toys, pails, sand, and crumbs. When there are cases of bottled water or milk at the bottom of the stairs I carry them up and put them down on the first steps leading up from our landing, so it’s as if they’ve made a little more than half the journey all by themselves.
Mélanie rolls her eyes: a deliveryman and a demonstrator. It’s too much.
One day, when the mother from the fourth floor thanked me too fervently for these modest little bits of help, I made her feel better by telling her that, in recompense, I’d helped myself to a forgotten Chamonix cookie or two from the bottom of the stroller. I heard her laugh from a few floors away, and the next day there was a whole package of them on my doorstep.
I didn’t tell Mélanie.
This is the first time I’ve seen the father’s face, but I think I can hear his footsteps sometimes, late at night.
I know he has a subscription to La Gazette Drouot, because I see it sticking out of their mailbox, and I also know he drives a Mercedes station wagon, because it has the same newspapers folded up on the dashboard.
One morning I saw him take a parking ticket off his windshield and use it to pick up a pile of dog crap before tossing the whole bundle in the gutter.
That’s all I know about them. We haven’t lived in the building very long, though.
Grandpapa’s treasures. I smiled comfortably.
It was charming, their little scene. They’d shouted at each other like street-theater actors, really. Like something out of an operetta. His voice, booming out rather than yelling: Bloody women! Vintage! Vintage! (pronounced “vaintage”) Very well, little madam!—his part of the libretto was still ringing in my ears.
I smiled as I made my way back down the stairs.
I smiled in the darkness because the timer chose that minute to shut off the lights, and because I was happy, there in the dark, replaying that little gift from heaven in my mind: a tiny taste of Parisian life, in the style of Offenbach.
I hadn’t even put an eyelash out the front door when an icy gust brought me back to the here and now.
God, I’m slow on the uptake. I turned on my heel and hightailed it back up the stairs.