“Maybe there was nothing,” I said to Julien on the way back from Geneva. “Maybe they were never in love. Maybe they ended up together for no good reason at all and then stayed together because they felt bad about leaving each other.”
“What do you mean?”
“You know, maybe they just happened to be sort of dating, and then the war broke out, and they just happened to continue to be together, and then they were stuck.” I fidgeted in the passenger’s seat, feeling melancholy and out of sorts, ashamed I had ever blown their story into anything more than it was, ashamed to have romanticized anything about that horrible time. “I mean, why should they have a special reason to be together? Or apart? Why does anyone get together or break apart? Does anyone ever know?”
“I know why I’m with you.”
“Why?”
“What does your dad like to say? ‘Cause you look so cute when you get riled up,’ ” he said in English, putting on a silly American cowboy voice.
“Thank you, Rock Hudson.”
Julien took a hand off the wheel and stroked my hair. “Really, since when is this about reason? You think they had a reason? We’re talking about feelings here. Did you have a rational reason to take up with me?”
“Sure. Indoor plumbing.” I opened the window all the way and pushed my hand against the air. “I think war makes you crazy. I think that’s it. They’re just another casualty of a goddamn genocide.”
I put away all the letters, papers, and notes. It was early November, and my grant money was almost gone. In less than a month, I would no longer have any legal residency status in France, and I’d have to return to the United States. I decided to spend my last weeks in France enjoying my time with Julien.
So we shopped for groceries, fed the cats, read the paper, watched movies, argued, made up, listened to the news, caught colds and recovered from them, went for walks, ate dinner by ourselves, ate dinner with friends. As the weather got colder, we cooked soup, built fires in the fireplace, and added blankets to the bed. The cats crept inside at night. And despite my unfinished story and unanswered questions, I felt the same uncurling motion in my heart that I’d felt in the pool that summer. Through all of it, I kept thinking, I am happy.
Finally, one day, I received word that the terrace door, custom-made to Julien’s specifications, was ready. We borrowed a truck to pick it up, and I paid everything I had saved to make sure the house in La Roche could be shut securely around its emptiness.
That weekend it froze for the first time. It was so cold on the north side of La Roche that Julien was worried his mortar wouldn’t set. My grandmother would have said that the sun was shining through clenched teeth, a Romanian expression she loved. We drove the door down to La Roche and carried it to the house. When we opened the door and felt an exhalation of cool air from the dark interior, it was difficult to imagine I had been living there just a couple of months before.
In the living room, we rested the door against the wall while Julien pulled the broken door off its hinges and pried the rotting wood of the doorframe away from the house’s stone wall. He drove nails into the soft mortar on the inside of the now empty opening, and then we brought the door outside and leaned it against the blackberry cane already growing up again through the terrace tiles. He drove more nails into the new doorframe, then set the door and frame into the stone opening, using thick steel wire to twine together the nails on the doorframe and the nails in the wall’s opening, checking with his level after every twist to make sure he was setting it straight. I brought him buckets of water, and he mixed a wheelbarrow full of mortar, which he used to fill the space around the doorframe, throwing it off the back of his trowel with easy, precise motions. Then he smoothed it all out, and we stood back to admire his handiwork.
It was beautiful. Looking at the honey-colored wood and the clear glass panes set into the speckled stones, I saw for the first time what the house might be like if I did manage to rescue it. For a moment, I forgot the cold, the dust, and my grandparents’ bad blood and felt the same longing that had made me swear to myself all those years ago that I would make this place my home. And then, just as it had in June, the first time I’d sat by myself on the terrace wall, the enormous contrast between my fantasy and the house’s reality clamped down on me, and I wondered how I could ever have believed that getting doors and windows on the place would make it less of a ruin or teach me anything about my family history.
Julien turned away from the door and began assembling his tools. Wistfully, I admired his work for a moment longer and then went to help him.
“Thanks for doing this. I’m a bit of a busman’s holiday for you, aren’t I?”
“Here.” He handed me an empty bucket and his level. “We can take everything to my mom’s house and rinse it off in her garden.” He straightened up and winked. “Not a problem, by the way. It’s never a bad idea to make a pretty girl feel obligated to you.”
I took the tools from him. “Very chivalrous.”
“At your service, milady,” Julien said, packing his leftover mortar around a loose stone in the terrace wall.
I set the tools in the wheelbarrow, feeling like an arctic explorer who’d just discovered that the north pole was a figment of her imagination—that the house could be my home, that my grandparents’ relationship had ever contained so much as a spark of tenderness. From far off, Anna and Armand’s love had shone like a blaze of starlight. Closer study had revealed the glow of a single bedraggled candle and two people thrown together by a terrible set of circumstances, who, through some strange lapse of judgment, ended up marrying and purchasing a rotting house.
As I looked at the dark ruins, it occurred to me that I’d gotten the nature of my grandparents’ fairy tale all wrong, or rather had failed to recognize its true meaning and message. After all, there is no love in most fairy tales; they are better characterized as sad and cruel. All but one of Bluebeard’s wives are killed; Cinderella turns into a princess, but her stepsisters’ eyes are pecked out by pigeons; Little Red Riding Hood gets eaten by the wolf—and those are the nicer ones. I’d been exposed to too many Disney movies, I decided, feeling abashed. Real fairy tales are about calamity. Julien had been right, that day at Le Camping: I was a romantic, trying to pretty up affliction, to streamline and simplify the grotesque, to make a love story where there was none, out of a little silver dish and some painful twists of fate. I looked around me. La Roche certainly seemed like the perfect setting for a fairy tale, with its crazy wrecked castle perched on an elderly plug of hardened magma, its cicadas, and its lazy river running over ancient stones.
“You okay?” Julien interrupted my musings.
“I guess. I was thinking about fairy tales.”
“I told you that first day at Le Camping. You’re a romantic.”
“That’s what I was thinking about. It made me mad at the time.”