Overhead in a Balloon (10 page)

Monique soon overflowed two rooms and a third belonging to Robert. She shared her mother’s bathroom and Robert’s kitchen, striding through Walter’s apartment without asking if her perpetual trespassing suited him. In Robert’s kitchen she left supper dishes to soak until morning. Robert could not stand that, and he washed and dried them before going to bed. Soon after he had fallen asleep, his mother would come in and ask him what time it was.

“He was her favourite,” Monique told Walter. “Poor Robert. He’s paying for it now. It’s a bad idea to be a mother’s favourite. It costs too much later on.”

Entering without knocking, Monique let herself fall into one of Walter’s cretonne-covered armchairs. She crossed her legs and asked if anyone ever bought the stuff one saw in windows of art galleries. Walter hardly knew how to begin his reply. It would have encouraged him if Monique had worn clothes that rustled. Rustle in women’s dress, the settling of a skirt as a woman sat down, smoothing it with both hands, suggested feminine expectancy. Do explain, the taffeta hiss said. Tell about spies, interest rates, the Americans, Elizabeth Taylor. Is Hitler somewhere, still alive? But all that was the far past – his boyhood. He had grown adult in a world where clothes told one nothing. As soon as he thought of an answer, Monique shouted at him, “What? What did you say?” When she made a move, it was to knock something over. In Walter’s sitting room she upset a cut-glass decanter, breaking the stopper; another time it was a mahogany plant stand and a Chinese pot holding a rare kind of fern. He offered sponge cakes and watched in distress as she swept the crumbs onto the floor.

“You’ve got the best space in the house,” she said, looking around.

Soon after that remark, after giving himself time to think about it, Walter started locking all his doors.

M
onique and Robert began by discussing Walter’s apartment, and moved along to the edge of a quarrel.

“In any case,” said Robert, “you should be under your husband’s roof. That is the law. You should never have left him.”

“Nobody left. It’s been like this for years.” Monique did not mention that she had come here to help; he knew that. He did not say that he was grateful.

“The law is the law,” Robert said.

“Not anymore.”

“It was a law when you got married,” he said. “The husband is head of the family, he chooses the domicile, the wife is obliged to live under his roof, and he is obliged to receive her there. Under his roof.”

“That’s finished. If you still bothered to go to weddings, you’d know.”

“It was still binding when you married him. He should be offering you a roof.”

“He can’t,” said Monique, flinging out her arm and hitting Robert’s record-player, which resisted the shock. “It’s about to cave in from the weight of the mortgage.”

“Well,” said Robert, forgetting Gaston for a moment, “he has a lease and he pays his rent regularly. And I am still paying for mending
my
roof.” After a pause he said, “Aymeric says Gaston has a rich woman in Antibes.”

“I was said to have been a rich young one.”

“There is space for you here, always,” said Robert instantly. There would be even more, later on. When the time came,
they would knock all the flats into one and divide up the new space obtained.

“Look up ‘harp’ in your dream book,” she said. “I dreamed I was giving a concert.”

R
obert usually got the dream book out on Sundays. The others saved up their weeknight dreams. Aymeric continued to dream he had been slighted. It was a dream of contradiction, and meant that in real life he was deeply appreciated. Robert’s mother dreamed she was polishing furniture, which prophesied good luck with the opposite sex. Monique played tennis in a downpour: her affections would be returned. Robert went to answer the doorbell – the sign of a happy surprise. They began each new week reassured and smiling – all but Walter. He had been dreaming about moles and dormice again.

As the summer weather settled in, and with Monique there to care for their mother, Robert began spending weekends out of town. He took the Dijon train at the Gare de Lyon and got off at Tonnerre. Monique found cancelled railway tickets in wastepaper baskets. Walter had a sudden illumination: Robert must be attending weekend retreats in a monastery. That thin, quiet face belonged to a world of silence. Then, one day, Robert mentioned that there was a ballooning club in Tonnerre. Balloons were quieter than helicopters. Swaying in silence, between the clouds and the Burgundy Canal, he had been able to reach a decision. He did not say what about.

He accepted books from Walter to read in the train. They piled up at his bedside as he kept forgetting to give them back. Some he owned up to having lost. Walter could see
them overhead, St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, drifting and swaying. He had no wish to ascend in a balloon. He had seen enough balloons in engravings. Virtually anything portrayed as art turned his stomach. There was hardly anything he could look at without feeling sick. In any case, Robert did not invite him.

Sometimes they watched television together. Aymeric had an old black-and-white set with only two channels. Monique had a Japanese portable, but the screen was too small for her mother to enjoy. They all liked Walter’s set, which had a large screen and more buttons than there would ever be channels in France. One Saturday when Robert was not ballooning, he suddenly said he was getting married. It was just in the middle of “Dallas.” They were about a year behind Switzerland, and Monique had been asking Walter, whose occasional trips to Bern kept him up-to-date, to tell them how it would all turn out. Aymeric switched off the sound, upon which Robert’s mother went straight to sleep.

Robert said only that his first marriage had been so happy that he could hardly wait to start over. The others sat staring at him. Walter had a crazy idea, which he kept to himself: Would Robert get married overhead in a balloon? “I am happy,” Robert said, once or twice. Walter fixed his eyes on the bright, silent screen.

Monique prepared their mother’s meals and carried them from Robert’s kitchen on a tray. She had to make a wide detour around Walter’s locked apartment. Everything was stone cold by the time the old lady had been coaxed to sit down. Their mother had her own kitchen, but she filled the oven with whatever came to hand when she was tidying – towels, a shoebox full
of old Bic pens. Once, Monique found a bolster folded in two, looking like a bloated loaf. She disconnected the stove, so that her mother could not turn on the gas and start a fire.

Robert showed them a picture of his bride-to-be. She and Robert stood smiling, with arms linked, both wearing track suits. “Does she run as well as float?” said Aymeric. He turned the snapshot over and read a date and the initial “B.”

“Brigitte,” said Robert.

“Brigitte what?”

“I don’t want anyone driving to Tonnerre for long talks,” said Robert. He did say that she taught French grammar to semi-delinquents in a technical high school. She was trying to obtain a transfer to a Paris suburb. There could be no question of the Capital itself: one had to know someone, and there was a waiting list ten years long.

Monique’s arrival was followed closely by a new shock from the administrative authorities of Paris: a telephone number old people could call in the summertime, free of charge, in case their families were away and they felt lonely. Robert’s mother dialled the number on Aymeric’s phone. The woman at the other end – young, from the sound of her – seemed surprised to hear that Robert’s mother lived with a son, a daughter, and a nephew, all attentive; had the use of a large television set with plenty of buttons and dials; and still suffered from feelings of neglect and despair. She was afraid of dying alone in the dark. All night long, she tried to stay on her feet.

The young voice reminded her about old people who had absolutely no one, who lived at the top of six steep flights of stairs, who did not dare go down to buy a packet of macaroni for fear of the long climb back. Robert’s mother replied that the
lives of such people were at the next-to-final stage of hopelessness and terror. Her own meals were brought to her on a tray. She was not claiming more for her sentiments than blind panic.

Aymeric took the telephone out of her hand, said a few words into it, and hung up. His aunt gave him her sweet, steady smile before remarking, “Your poor mother, Aymeric, was nothing much to look at.”

W
alter, trying to find a place to go for his summer holiday where there would be no reminders of art, fell back on Switzerland and his mother and father. He scrubbed and vacuumed his rooms and put plastic dust sheets over the furniture. Just before calling for a taxi to take him to the airport, he asked Robert if he could have a word with him. He was more than usually nervous, and kept flexing his hands. Terrible things had been said at the gallery that day; Walter had threatened his employer with the police. Robert could not understand the story – something incoherent to do with the office safe. He removed a bundle of clothes fresh from the launderette (he did his own ironing) and invited Walter to sit down. Walter wanted to know if the imminent change in Robert’s life and Monique’s constant hints about the best space in the house meant that Walter’s apartment was coveted. “Coveted” was a heavy word, but Robert finally answered, “You’ve got your lease.”

“According to the law,” said Walter, more and more fussed, “you can throw me out if you can prove you need the space.” Robert sat quietly, and seemed to be waiting for something else. “I’ve got to be sure I have a home to come back to – a home I can keep for a long time. This time I really intend to give notice.
I don’t care about the pension. He’s making me an accomplice in crime. I’ll stay just until he can train a replacement for me. If he sees I am worried about something else as well, it will give him the upper hand. And then, I’m like you and Aymeric. I feel as if my own family had been living here forever.” Robert at this looked at him with a terrible politeness. Walter rushed on, mentioning a matter that other tenants, he thought, would have brought up first. Since moving in, he had painted the kitchen, paved the bathroom with imported tiles, and hung custom-made curtains on rods designed to fit the windows. All this, he said, constituted an embellishment of space.

“Your vacation will do you good,” said Robert.

Walter gave Robert his house keys and said he hoped Monique would feel free to use his apartment as a passage way while he was gone. Handing them over, he was reminded of another gesture – his hand, outstretched, opening to reveal the snuffbox.

T
heir mother had begun polishing furniture, as in some of her dreams. A table in Walter’s sitting room was like a pond. Everything else was dusty. The plastic sheets lay like crumpled parachutes in a corner. On Aymeric’s birthday, late in August, he and Robert and Monique sat at the polished table eating pastries out of a box. Robert picked out a few of the kind his mother liked and put them aside for her on a plate. They could hear her, in Walter’s bedroom, telling City Hall that they had disconnected her stove.

Perhaps because there was an empty chair, Robert suddenly said that Brigitte was immensely sociable and liked to entertain. She played first-class bridge. She had somehow managed
to obtain a transfer to Paris after all. They would be getting married in October.

“How did she do it?” Aymeric asked.

“She knows someone.”

They fell silent, admiring the empty chair.

“Who wants the last strawberry tart?” said Monique. When no one answered, she cut it in three.

“We will have to rearrange the space,” said Robert. He traced lines with his finger on the polished table and, with the palm of his hand, wiped something out.

Aymeric said, “Try to find out what she did with that snuff box. I wanted to give it to you as a wedding present.”

“I’ll look again in the oven,” Monique said.

“Ask her carefully,” said Aymeric. “Don’t frighten her. Sometimes she remembers.”

Robert went on tracing invisible lines.

W
alter came back in September to find his kitchen under occupation, full of rusted sieves and food mills and old graters. On the stove was a saucepan of strained soup for the old woman’s supper; a bowl of pureed apricots stood uncovered in the sink. He removed everything to the old woman’s kitchen.

I was brought up so soundly, he said to himself. He had respected his parents; now he admired them. At home, nothing had made him feel worried or tense, and he hadn’t minded his father’s habit of reading the newspaper aloud while Walter tried to watch television. When his father answered the telephone, his mother called, “What do they want?” from the kitchen. His father always repeated everything the caller said, so that his mother would not miss a word of the conversation.
There were no secrets, no mysteries. What Walter saw of his parents was probably all there was.

After cleaning his rooms and unpacking his suitcase, Walter called on Robert. He had meant to ask how they had spent their holidays, if in spite of the old lady they had managed to get away, but instead he found himself telling about a remarkable dream he’d had in Switzerland: A large badger had burst into the gallery and taken Walter’s employer hostage. Trout Face had said, “You’re not getting away with this. I’m not having anybody running around here with automatic weapons.” It was not a nightmare, said Walter. He had seen himself, aloof and nonchalant, enjoying the incident.

Robert said he would look it up. That night he made a neat stack of the books Walter had lent him – all that he could still find – and left it outside his locked front door. He wrote on the back of a page torn off a calendar, “Dream of badger taking man hostage means a change of residence, for which the dreamer should be prepared. R.” He rewrote this several times, changing a word here and there. In the morning, after starting the record and opening all the windows, he sat down and read his message again. He kept running his finger over the note, as he had traced new boundaries on Walter’s table, and seemed to be wondering if there was any point in trying to say the same thing some other way.