I stood up and hurried out of the house, up the hill to the village, as if I could elude these questions by moving quickly. At a loss for anything else to do, I bought myself a newspaper and walked down to Le Camping.
The terrace was crowded, and Yohann was busy with customers. I ordered a coffee at the bar and took it to an empty table, where I could see the trees, the river, and the castle beyond. I was still alone but surrounded, at least, by the hum of people. I was perusing my paper, feeling nostalgic for afternoons with friends and family, when I heard a chair scrape across from me and looked up. It was Julien, whom I had met on one of the Saturday evenings Grant, his friends, and I had spent at the campground. From that first encounter, I had learned that Julien was a stonemason, had lived in America for a year, attended architectural school and quit, and worked with his father restoring old houses. He made puns that worked only if you were bilingual, and he espoused ferocious political, literary, and architectural opinions. He was tall, wore small wire-framed glasses, and had thick sandy-blond hair and blue-gray eyes. From afar he looked a bit fierce, even warriorlike, but up close, he had a deep, infectious laugh and a smile like a delighted little boy. He reminded me of a Greek statue or an archangel missing his wings.
Now he was standing beside my table with his hand on the back of a chair. “Do you mind if I join you?”
“Not at all.”
Julien sat down, took off his glasses, and rubbed the bridge of his nose, which was speckled with white flecks of lime plaster. “What a day.” He picked up my newspaper and glanced at it. “Am I bothering you? Maybe you wanted to read.”
“No, no, I haven’t really talked to anyone all day. Nice to have some company.” I had wondered, since meeting him, what made him different from the other people I’d met in the village. “Were you born here?” I ventured.
He nodded. “Not far from here—about an hour away, in the high Ardèche. In a commune, actually. My parents are from Paris. Came here in the seventies—back-to-the-land types—you know, Jean Giono and all that.”
“Do they still live in the commune?”
“Nope—it didn’t really work out the way they wanted it to.” He seemed to be considering how much he wanted to tell me. “It’s a long story—it ended badly … direct action, violence, the SAC, that sort of thing …” He trailed off and waved his hand as if to push it all aside. “What about you?”
I told him about the house and my grandparents.
“Yes, but what about you?” he repeated.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, what are you going to do now you’re here? Do you have a job? Are you going to stay?” He had a firm, warm voice that was both humorous and rigorous, and he leaned forward as he asked these questions, fiddling with the spoon that had come with my coffee cup. Then he leaned back and smiled. “You’re a bit of a romantic, no?”
“I have a fellowship from my university. For a year. Then I don’t know.”
“So what are you doing for a year?” He relaxed into the plastic café chair and observed me. He was quite tall, and his legs were stretched along one side of the table. Despite his lounging posture, something about his gaze, or his manner of listening, made me feel as if he could detect the things I wasn’t saying, too. “Figuring out what happened to my grandparents and writing about it. They have an extraordinary story—I mean, it’s always important to know what happened to your family, don’t you think?” I trailed off, worried I sounded defensive.
“Sure,” agreed Julien. “But you can’t live in the past. Not always, at least.”
“You should see my living room. In fact, you should see my whole house.”
He laughed. “I’d like to.” He stretched. “I’ve been sitting here for twenty minutes, and I haven’t even ordered anything. Can I get you a drink?”
“I don’t know—first you call me a romantic, and then you tell me I’m living in the past, and now you want to buy me a drink?”
He waved at Yohann, who started over to our table. “I have nothing against being a romantic,” he declared.
When we’d finished our drinks, Julien gave me a ride back to La Roche, and I showed him around the house. When he saw the warped terrace door and the plastic over the windows, his brow furrowed. “What are you going to do about those?” he asked. “When the summer’s over, I mean.” He squatted down and ran a fingernail over the cement holding the terrace doorframe in place. “This has got to be redone,” he told me, brushing his hair away from his glasses. “You see how the water has been running down and rotting the wood? That’s why it’s warped.”
“I know—I mean, I know I’m going to have to replace the door. I actually have a door,” I added, brightening. “Youssef said he would help me install it when he had the time.”
I led Julien to the tower, where I had stowed the door Grant and I had bought the month before, at Youssef’s urging, from a big home construction warehouse. We’d tied it to the roof of Grant’s borrowed Renault Super 5 with a ball of twine and driven home with me hanging out the window, clinging to the door so the wind wouldn’t push between it and the car and blow us off the road, feeling like The Clampett Family Visits France.
Now Julien stared at the door dubiously. “Did you measure your doorframe?”
“I didn’t have a tape measure. And the door was on sale … Youssef said we should grab it.”
Julien didn’t say anything right away. Though I didn’t recognize it then, I would soon become familiar with the perplexed squint he got on his face when things weren’t logical. “Hang on,” he instructed, and disappeared through the front door, reappearing moments later with a tape measure, which he unrolled against the frame of the door I’d bought. “Two hundred and four by ninety centimeters. Standard.” He walked back out to the terrace and turned to the rotting doorframe. “Eighty-two centimeters. And eighty-three down here.” He hooked the tape measure onto the top of the door’s stone threshold and stood up again. “One hundred sixty-eight centimeters.” He slid the tape measure to the other end of the threshold. “And one hundred seventy point five over here, if you want to split hairs.” The tape measure slid back into its case with a clang whose finality passed the judgment Julien was too discreet to voice.
“But Youssef said—” Even as the words came out of my mouth, I laughed at the mental image of trying to get the door to fit. “I don’t know what he was thinking.”
Julien looked a little aggrieved. “Either Youssef was hallucinating, or he is a far better carpenter than I am.” He hooked the tape measure onto his pocket and sat down on the terrace wall. “You’re going to have to get a door made, I’m sorry to say. But I’ll hang it for you when you do.”
I couldn’t imagine when that would be or how I would find the money for it.