The Life to Come

by Michelle De Kretser

  Céleste was Barr’s eleventh Facebook friend and the only one who wasn’t a teenage boy. ‘I reckon a girlfriend would sort him out,’ Dominic had said. Céleste looked at Barr’s most recent post: a photograph of a featureless ocean, captioned ‘Kiting at Woodies’. Scrolling down, Céleste saw that all his posts were on similar lines—he hadn’t been on Facebook long. She googled ‘kiting’ and then had to look up ‘kiteboarding’ on Wikipedia. His parents hadn’t mentioned Barr’s interest in it, but she assumed they would be pleased that he wasn’t spending all his time watching revolutions on TV. ‘Yeah, it’s good,’ said Dominic without enthusiasm when Céleste Skyped with him. His voice brightened: ‘It’s really good he’s reached out to you.’

  Wendy appeared and said, ‘Can you please ask Barr to consider wearing his rashie on cold mornings? Since you seem to have gained his trust.’ Her carved smile conveyed injury, scepticism and complete indifference to Céleste’s underhand ways.

  Céleste sent Barr a brief, breezy message, without reference to rashies, which he quite rightly ignored. She now felt obliged to Like all his posts. Céleste had joined Facebook in order to access Sabine’s page—she never posted anything herself. Once a week or so, she checked out Sabine’s friends. The tall English girl was among them: she was called Zoe Rosser. Why had she been smiling that day as she emerged from Sabine’s shop? Her face was gentle and stupid. Céleste wouldn’t stoop to question Sabine, but noticed that Zoe Liked every photo that Sabine posted. Zoe’s own page was protected—what did she have to hide?

  Every few days, Céleste would receive a text: ‘Dinner chez moi?’ The meals were simple: sometimes Pippa prepared an omelette or grilled chicken breasts, but usually there was only bread, two or three cheeses, and a sturdy, Ottolenghi-ish salad of vegetables and bizarre grains. ‘I just keep adding to it,’ said Pippa. ‘Basically, we’ve been eating the same salad for weeks.’

  Pippa’s bed was piled with papers and folders cleared from the table. The shaggy piles increased as the weeks went past. The bedclothes looked lumpy—Céleste guessed that the quilt had been drawn over rumpled sheets. In Pippa’s studio, she saw the reflection of her own room as work progressed: nesty and smeared. Once, when Pippa was in the bathroom, Céleste flipped through a folder marked ‘First Draft’. Then she went and looked out at the street. Across the way, a pigeon was shuffling along a sill in front of a window hung with two panels of taut lace. A sense of wasted effort rose in Céleste and quickly spread in all directions, encompassing everything that lay behind her and all she would ever do. The desolation felt physical, as if she were filling up with black ink.

  It was understood that these evenings would end early, but on weekends Pippa often opened a second bottle. She had discovered a white Loire wine called Quincy, and now it was all that she and Céleste drank. Pippa talked about whatever she was reading: currently she was making her way through Alice Munro. Céleste would advise her on local material for the Paris section of her novel, saying things like, ‘You must realise that there are three Seventeenth Arrondissements: bourgeois, working class and cool.’

  Pippa would jump up to identify streets or districts on the map of Paris pinned to the wall. She enthused about a cafe in the Marais where newspapers hung over wooden holders—exactly the kind of calculated nostalgia to which a tourist would succumb. Wishing to save Pippa from charm, Céleste urged her to track down the places where the metro ran above ground. ‘The metro should be subterranean, so when it doesn’t conform to its nature, an atmosphere of violation is created. The streets below the line are always depressing. The shops sell ugly, useless things that aren’t always cheap. The only flowers you find are those magenta orchids wrapped in clear plastic. Orchids used to be expensive, exotic. Now they’re banal—supermarket flowers.’ This last observation was a borrowing from Sabine that Céleste imagined would be useful to a novelist. ‘Those neighbourhoods are very Parisian,’ she concluded. ‘Chinese takeaway places, discount furniture outlets. You should send your characters there.’

  She had tried, initially, to interest Pippa in the suburbs. Pippa looked doubtful. ‘What’s there?’ she asked.

  ‘Showrooms, social housing, pizza joints.’

  ‘Why would Australians want to read about that? It sounds like the boring bits of Sydney.’

  Cycling to dinner with Pippa one evening, Céleste noticed for the first time that every building in her street was fronted with sandstone blocks, with an acanthus carved into the lintel above each panelled door. Those enormous doors looked as if they hadn’t been opened in a century. Céleste made a mental note to draw them to Pippa’s attention. She was also going to say, ‘Have you realised that in Paris cats sleep indoors?’ Then, on a spike of meanness, she decided, Why should I help her so much? Let her discover things for herself.

  When Céleste told Sabine about Barr, Sabine said, ‘You are his sexy French aunt. Sure he want you for his friend.’

  ‘He’s doing it to annoy his mother.’

  Sabine checked her phone before gathering up her clothes. She was thirty-five, sixteen years younger than Céleste. When her bra and camisole were on, she pinched the flesh above her hips. ‘How will I be on the beach—my God!’ Céleste recognised this as a reminder that the summer holidays were drawing near. Sabine’s faux silk underwear, and the bright hair streaming over her pearly shoulders, gave her an extravagant, luxurious look. It was easy to picture her dripping and gleaming on a beach.

  When she was alone, Céleste took Sabine’s delphiniums out of the sink and put them in a vase. Blue and arrested, they splayed against her dingy wall. Sabine’s eyes, reborn as petals, would gaze out at Céleste from odd places for the rest of the week. The hour after Sabine left was a slow fall into a bottomless shaft. Céleste looked under her bolster—it was Sabine’s habit to leave a card there. The latest showed a teddy bear holding a shiny red balloon. Inside, Sabine had written, ‘Un gros bisou.’ With love. Her writing was Frenchly upright, the letter ‘r’ like a backless chair. Céleste put the card with the rest in a shoebox. Her treasure, her evidence of love, was an archive of kitsch. She wondered what the practically obese assistant made of it, Sabine setting out every Tuesday for her English lesson with an expensive bouquet.

  Céleste lifted her T-shirt and inspected herself. There was a slight swell across her stomach. Her periods had ceased a month after her last birthday, and now her stomach was no longer flat. Her smooth face could pass for forty, but her left knee turned dodgy if she ran. One evening over dinner, Pippa had asked if Céleste regretted not having children. ‘To be honest, I don’t really want to,’ said Pippa, ‘but Matt’s pretty keen.’ Céleste had seen Matt on Facebook—hair going, jawline gone—and concluded that Pippa’s big teeth could dispose of him in a single crunch. Pippa was saying that it was difficult for female artists to combine children and a career. ‘But later on, what if I wish I’d just gone ahead?’

  Céleste told her, ‘Listen, the only immortality you can be sure of is your nose on your child’s face.’ Why had she said that? She didn’t wish that she had just gone ahead and had a child, but with the cessation of her periods, a self who had tagged along like a cloudy dream figure disappeared. On Tuesday evenings, with the smell of Sabine still in her sheets, the future shrank to the single point of solitary, penny-pinching old age. She saw herself plainly, one of those skinny old women with a round belly: a spider. In supermarkets, the spider brought her change close up to her eyes, turning over small coins. Eventually, a stranger sitting behind a desk would call a number in Perth. Dominic put down the phone in the middle of the night and turned to Wendy. ‘Céleste’s carked it,’ he announced.

  What are they doing in heaven today? asked Mavis Staples from the apartment across the street. On the boulevard, a siren wailed. La police, pleine de malice. Céleste poured herself a glass of wine. She sliced open the end of a baguette, filled it with squares of dark Swiss chocolate and, chewing, settled down to work. She was on the third draft of her translati
on. One evening, lying curled in one of Pippa’s black vinyl chairs, Céleste had found herself talking about the way she worked. ‘The first draft is literal—very rough. I end up chucking out most of it, but it has a sort of glimmer of ideas. The second draft is detailed. Lots of dictionary work. For the third draft, I don’t look at the original text.’

  She went on in this vein. Pippa refilled her glass. She waved the bottle at Céleste, asking, ‘So how many drafts do you do?’

  ‘Four or five.’

  ‘Those writers are so lucky to have you,’ said Pippa. ‘My editor told me she edited my last book in three and a half days. It was seventy thousand words. I thought it was a confession—that she was asking me to forgive her. Later, I realised it was a boast.’

  She began to tell Céleste about a party thrown by an Austrian painter who had a studio in the Cité. The painter introduced Pippa to a French journalist, who had sought her opinion of what he insisted on calling Anglo-Saxon literature. ‘The thing is, I hadn’t heard of any of the writers he said were “of the first importance”. One of them’s this Scottish person called Mungo Daniel Daws. There’s also a genius American called Mary Bolla. It’s nothing to her to wrench metaphysical significance from the flows of the plastic world.’

  Céleste put out her hand and grasped Pippa’s wrist. They sat on, linked but separate, with their fruity white wine. Paris reeled about outside, its railway stations and clouds. Cars stood trembling at lights. Pippa launched into a disjointed complaint about her father. Her bones lay under Céleste’s fingers. Céleste was thinking, What won’t we say to each other? At the end of the street, the Seine rustled on its way.

  Céleste came down with a summer virus. Pippa brought her soup made from chicken and leeks. Céleste rarely bothered to cook. She opened tins, ate yoghurt and fruit. One of her sayings was, ‘All you really need is a big bowl of bananas on the table.’ Here, too, the past was at work. Yvette, burning chops while reading The Feminine Mystique, would remark that domestic labour was female enslavement. She read Marx and de Beauvoir to her nine-year-old daughter; from Capital, Céleste kept a lifelong mistrust of guilds. Her lack of interest in food was a disappointment to Pippa, who had hoped for insights into French home cooking as well as tips on restaurants where tourists didn’t go. French coffee, too, was a letdown—all the visiting Australians complained about it. The only drinkable brew, worth crossing Paris for, was found at a cafe in the Fourteenth run by a couple from Adelaide; they even served decaf almond lattes. Pippa’s predecessor in the studio had left the address. So much energy directed at coffee! What was on Céleste’s mind as she shivered in bed was a sentence. In her translation, it contained both ‘possibility’ and ‘fixity’, and she couldn’t see a way around either—unless ‘fixedness’ would do? The familiar impression that a solution lay just beyond her reach returned to torment.

  Sabine had stayed away that week; she had a horror of infection, and there were the children to take into account. But she texted daily and sent a big bunch of silky peonies in shades of pink. Pippa remarked on their magnificence and refreshed their water while the soup warmed. She asked Céleste the French for ‘free range’. The chicken in the soup was a poulet de Bresse; the man at the market stall had assured Pippa that this meant it was raised in the open, but she suspected he was laughing at her. She made a comic story of it, repeating the stallholder’s assurances of ‘’Appy chicken! ’Appy chicken!’ He had mimed injecting the bird, shaking his head and saying, ‘No pshtt,’ which Pippa understood to mean that it was free of growth hormones.

  Céleste, propped weakly against pillows, watched Pippa adjust the angle of an open window. She replaced the glass beside Céleste’s bed with a clean one, and placed a bag of rubbish beside the door to carry down to the bins. She started examining the books on Céleste’s shelves, pulling out those that caught her eye—that kind of intrusion was typical of Pippa. She would walk into Céleste’s flat, go straight into the kitchen and lift the lids off pans. Once she had put out her hand and plucked without permission at Céleste’s beads. Céleste deduced a large, bold family in cramped rooms where nothing was private. There would be a clutch of sisters in limp T-shirts, lapped by tides of children, who never got around to signing up at the gym.

  Small domestic sounds came from the kitchen: the fridge sighed shut, the container of washing-up liquid squeaked. Raising her voice, Céleste began to tell Pippa about an elderly Greek she had known, who cooled his brow with a lump of Parian marble when he fell ill. The story trailed off—she had remembered that the Greek was a character in the first novel she translated.

  Pippa went away, and Céleste’s agitation returned. The peonies flared as the light withdrew. Their pink aching had entered Céleste’s bones. Possibility/fixity: they were the feverish poles of the axis around which her brain twirled.

  Céleste recovered. She googled ‘Pippa Passes’, the blog that Pippa updated at longish intervals, and discovered a new post. It was accompanied by two photos. The first showed soup, tiny discs of carrot and golden sequins of oil, simmering in a pan. ‘I made this soup for a friend who had the flu,’ wrote Pippa. It was a warm day, but a tree of ice was shooting along Céleste’s veins. She realised, astonished, My blood has run cold. ‘As my friends know’, went on Pippa, ‘I’m a fan of ethical meat.’ With self-deprecating wit, she described her exchange with the man who had sold her the chicken that might or might not have been free range. A second photo showed hens on a grassy slope. Eleven Australians had already applauded this post. One commented: ‘The French—lol!! Go you good thing. So kind to make soup for a sick friend.’

  Sitting up in bed after Pippa had gone away, drinking careful, delicious spoonfuls of chicken and leek soup, Céleste had cried. When she tried to wipe her eyes, tears ran down her wrists. It had been a day set apart from the rest like an illuminated letter on a white page. Now something precious that had belonged to Céleste belonged to the world—to everyone and no one. She stared at the photo of the chickens: Why not show them at the moment when their bodies parted from their heads? If Pippa were there, Céleste would have told her, If you’re going to eat meat, better not make a song and dance about your ethics. Another thing she wanted to say was, You should have deleted the first sentence in each paragraph of your novel and looked closely at the last. Also, banish the word ‘beautiful’—it’s dangerous for you.

  Céleste went onto Amazon and bought George Meshaw’s latest book.

  Dominic’s email said that Barr was no longer going to school. He had turned sixteen, and for the past month had refused to leave his room. At first, Wendy had switched off the modem and told Barr that she wouldn’t turn it on again until he talked to her. Barr slid a piece of paper under his door. It said: ‘YOU ARE PEOPLE OF THE PAST.’ ‘Now we just leave food outside his door,’ wrote Dominic. ‘We don’t want to push too hard. Barr’s room is on the first floor, and he’s at that age when boys self-harm.’

  Céleste said, ‘Do you remember that summer in Perth when the road outside our house cracked and you could see the sand underneath?’

  Invisible Yvette pointed invisibly to the poster on her daughter’s wall: ‘Sous les pavés, la plage!’

  Pippa called for Céleste one afternoon; they had arranged to see a film. A Sydney newspaper had commissioned Pippa to write a feature on eating out in Paris, and she was fresh from lunch at a new restaurant in the Tenth. She read aloud from her notebook by the cloudy light on the stairs: ‘L’Atelier: loft-like white space, brushed steel tables, contemporary artworks. Always something fusion on menu: grilled fish with pesto of Thai herbs, scallops with shiitake mushrooms and wild garlic sauce (bright green). Homemade ginger ice cream served with avocado and passionfruit. Dishes here are curated—’

  ‘Dishes are what?’

  ‘Obviously these are just notes.’

  Céleste kept going downstairs, past the tight little landings, each with its spyholes and doors.

  In the entrance hall, Madame Kateb was coming
out of her lodge. Its frosted windows gave on to the hall. A light shone within whatever the weather or the time.

  ‘Bonjour, madame,’ said Céleste.

  Pippa said, ‘Bonjour. Comment vas-tu?’

  As usual, the concierge gave the impression that she was listening with her eyes. She held out a package to Céleste. ‘The courier buzzed but no one answered. I was just going to take it up to you.’

  ‘I must have been in the shower,’ said Céleste. She looked at the package—a book from her editor in New York. She asked if Madame Kateb would mind holding on to it until she returned home.

  In the street, Pippa said, ‘That poor woman lives in a cave.’

  ‘You should say vous to strangers. Tu is insulting.’

  ‘Oh no—I keep forgetting,’ wailed Pippa. ‘I can’t believe I went and offended her!’

  Panic had turned her face into a scrunched dishcloth. Céleste realised that Pippa would always need to demonstrate her solidarity with the oppressed—Indigenous people or battery hens, it scarcely mattered. Now she had added to the humiliations of a working-class cave dweller, and the photograph of herself captioned ‘A Good Person’ had been ripped in half. ‘Madame Kateb knows you’re a foreigner,’ said Céleste, taking pity. ‘It’s OK.’

  ‘I should have it tattooed on my forehead: Forgive me, I’m Australian.’ But Pippa had recovered. She exclaimed at the tarts in the window of a pâtisserie: the care with which the slices of fruit had been placed!

  ‘Strawberries sold by the kilo,’ said Céleste, remembering. That had delighted her beyond reason when she first came back to Paris. In Pippa’s company, the ghost of that Céleste often appeared. She had smiled at dark men lounging in doorways on trashy boulevards. If she greeted them, they followed her in the street or moved up on her park bench until they were almost touching her. Céleste had arrived with the vague idea of tracking down Karim, or someone who had known him or her father. But the factory that employed them had long since ceased production; a huge new outlet that sold discount sporting equipment had opened on the site. Every North African woman Céleste saw in the street was doubled by a gold-toothed crone—patterned with henna, redistributing garlic in puffs. This caricatural apparition was Karim’s mother, risen from her Saharan village to enquire into the fate of her son. At the time, it was usual to see armed policemen at the entrances to the metro checking the papers of anyone who looked foreign, and this brought the past up close. Very soon, however, Céleste learned to walk through the city like a Parisian, glancing to neither left nor right.