Mars Is a Water Planet

by Marie Chapman

Part 1 appears
in this issue.

conclusion

On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays Marie-Pierre rose early to arrive at the community pool before the public school teams. On Tuesdays and Thursdays she stayed in bed dreaming of swimming. On her stomach, she counted. She then rolled over and reached her arm under the mattress, struggled a few seconds, removed a paperback book. Another fell to the floor.

She opened The Martian Chronicles to the middle and began to read as she shoved a few pillows under her head with an arm and pushed the sheet off with a foot. The alien world created by the American writer astounded her, principally for the great difference between it and the red planet imagined by her husband. Here was a man who understood Mars.

She had bought the book and others at the local FNAC bookstore, carrying them into the apartment as if they were contraband, sealing them between mattress and box spring and then tossing all night in her sleep. Jean-Marc became annoyed with her twitching and kicking and transported himself more and more often to the living room couch.

“Good Lord, Marie-Pierre, do I need to retreat to the living room again? If this continues we’ll need to buy a longer sofa.”

“My lower back has started to ache. The pain is sometimes sharp, sometimes soft as a cat’s belly... I see you rolling your eyes at that.”

“Nonsense, it’s dark. You see nothing.”

“You used to laugh at what you called my imaginary worlds.”

“I didn’t know they would rear their heads at every moment.”

“You believed that having children would change that; only the Marie-Pierre you wanted would remain once the rest was filtered out through my legs.”

“Well, that didn’t happen now, did it? Look, I am truly sorry about your back. It’s probably from too much swimming. Please see Dr. Perrimond about it. But in the meantime I cannot function, I cannot work on Mars, if I don’t sleep when I need to.” He rose slowly.

“The work on Mars,” she called to him, “it’s been almost fifteen years. Does that project never end?”

“What do you mean ‘end’?” he responded from the WC.

“I’m not sure.”

“Finding water is a process. It’s not something that has a beginning and an end. It started centuries ago, no one knows when.”

“I know,” murmured Marie-Pierre, “they thought there were canals.” She closed her eyes and saw the aurora borealis of which she had read displayed on the screen inside her eyelids. “I’ve begun to dream about Mars,” she whispered, “I feel it in my back, running up to my neck. Is that possible?”

“What?” Jean-Marc called, as the water spiraled in the toilet. He emerged and headed to the living room, blanket and pillow in hand.

“I feel it,” she said, but he was out of earshot.

She looked out at the empty desert and the very bright stars coming out now on the black sky, and far away there was a sound of wind rising and canal waters stirring cold in the long canals. She shut her eyes, trembling. (Bradbury)

* * *

On the way to swimming, at just after the crack of dawn, her cell phone rang. Without thinking, Marie-Pierre answered it. She knew as she did that it would be her mother.

“Bonjour, ma fille. I’ve finally got you. You must be out all day everyday now. And Concepcion? Have you denied her the right to answer the phone? She is Portuguese, but she has rights!”

A pause for breath. “I even called Anne, so worried I was. And she said you shouldn’t worry me. Anne, with all her own worries! All those children, all those errands to remember, and then Bernard is always out of town on business. What a life! Oh, but they’re fine, don’t get me wrong: they are perfect. Yes, that’s the word: perfect.”

Marie-Pierre sat at the bus stop. She had been through her nails. Broken every one and gathered the chips in a pile on her lap. She moved the pile to the bench, wondering if she should brush it to the cement below.

She interrupted, “Maman, may I tell you something?” She spoke firmly, sure that her mother would react to the manliness of the insistence.

“Yes, chérie. You go right ahead. I have all morning.”

“I had a nightmare last night. I was inside a block of ice, which ended up being an ice cube. Not a large one, a regular one in a glass. A glass of Pastis, actually, that Jean-Marc had poured. I could see through the cube, to the dull yellow of the liquid, as if the glass was an immense yellowish pool. It wasn’t a good yellow, but that sickly whitish-yellow, the result of an unstable mixture.”

“Marie-Pierre?”

“Yes?”

“I need to go now. Anne’s going to call about wallpaper for the dining room. The sales begin today. If you need to tell me more, I will be here after lunch. Probably. Or you could tell Jean-Marc about it? He understands these kinds of things, such a smart man.”

Marie-Pierre pushed off the bits of nail. Jean-Marc brought the glass to his lips. His wife’s reflection was in the ice cube, her mouth frozen as if in a cry, her orange-brown lipstick smeared. He looked down and smiled at her.

* * *

On the evening he called to tell her about the water, Marie-Pierre drank undiluted vodka after the Vermouth until she could no longer stand. She would have wept herself to sleep had she not been so staggeringly looped. She lay down, closed her lids, but had no time to see a thing before she was asleep.

In the gray morning she awoke in stages, as if from an anesthetic. She gazed at the clock and phoned Concepcion to tell her not to come. As she set the receiver down by the bed she saw two drops of water running down her hand. Liquid streamed from her eyes and nose. She made loud, rhythmic, yelping sounds. She pulled at her hair and at the soiled white blouse that she had failed to remove the previous evening. She lay back so her nose would dry out and she pulled several tissues from under her pillow.

She lay in bed all day, weeping intermittently. She had forgotten the books under her mattress. It was Tuesday. On Friday morning she awoke alone in the apartment for the fourth time that week. Jean-Marc was not on the couch. It was early and surprisingly clear outside, a blue sky, green trees, and red and black cars moving to the left and right.

Without thinking, she pulled on a turtleneck and jeans, grabbed her bag with goggles and towel, and headed for the door. She did forty laps and then took the suburban line into Paris and had coffee and a pain aux raisins at a place she knew in the art gallery district, on the Left Bank, just across from the Louvre by way of the pedestrian Pont des Arts.

She then headed for the Louvre, the old palace that Marie-Pierre once believed was the only necessary museum in the world — her observatory — but into which she had not set foot for what had turned into years. She walked as if a somnambulist to the Denon Salon, straight to the middle of the high-ceilinged room, edging out Japanese tourists and Italian schoolchildren.

She stood frozen before the naked and mangled bodies hanging on and off the raft, the latter churned up and down by surging green and black waves. She followed the group up to the black man waving a light-colored scarf at a barely visible speck of ship in the background. She rolled in the waves and felt hungry, thirsty, paranoid, ready to push a raving companion off the raft, ready to bring the flesh of another human being to her mouth.

She rocked back and forth until the Italians and Japanese stared at her instead of at the raft. She was soon alone before it, seated on the bench in the middle of the room, weeping and whispering to herself all that she could remember of the ill-fated voyage to Senegal and how Géricault had created his masterpiece.

Bodies, horses, the insane, the father and son. After a time she went to the restroom, where she vomited up her breakfast. She sat on a chair before the sink and would have gathered her thoughts were she not empty.

And yet Marie-Pierre was beginning to move forward, slowly at first, in a trickle, and then, suddenly, at a quickening pace, almost in spite of herself. The direction she took formed and reformed, as a changeling. It led by dangling before her a wonderfully silvery translucent sphere. The sphere reflected the world around her as she left the Louvre and crossed back over the Pont des Arts. It reflected the world of Paris: the Louvre, the green river, the bridge of wooden planks, the cafés across the way, the intimate streets leading off from the Quai: spokes leading to galleries and more cafés, in an endless time, the time of Paris.

She gazed towards the Rue Napoléon, toward the École des Beaux-Arts, where young artists decried anything that wasn’t produced since the last student exhibition. And at last she focused on the people, the dozens and hundreds of them; whether active or stalled momentarily, they appeared to be moving forward.

From the bridge she saw the past and her mother, young and laughing, as her father took a photograph of the girls in matching yellow outfits, sitting along the Seine wall. She had watched her mother, wondering at the truth of her laughter, wanting to imitate it, to absorb it within her.

Her sister had brushed up against her the split second before the photo was taken, so that in the image one could not tell which small arm belonged to which girl. Her father stayed solidly still, knowing he should not move when holding a camera, the black box that would reveal the mystery of girlhood.

She saw them, she saw herself and Anne, on the wall. The time that had passed meant nothing; their selves were there on the wall and always would be, as Pompeian shadows burned into rock. She laughed now, and remembered that yellow day as if it were yesterday or today, not because it burst as an image before her eyes, but because she could feel the texture of the dresses, smell her mother’s perfume and make-up, touch her sister’s chubby fingers, hear the family laughter.

She squinted with the sun in her eyes and for the camera. The yellow melded into other sunny days, becoming this day. She was amazed at her heightened senses. She felt the surfaces of the clothing worn by people hurrying over the bridge, smelled their lives intermingled with the humid air rising from the river, the sounds of laughter, surprise, even boredom, reached her from all sides, she tasted the drops of vapor and the occasional spray from a passing bateau-mouche.

Marie-Pierre glanced up again at the sphere posed in the rays of the sun and she squinted again; she had forgotten her sunglasses. She could almost touch it now if she reached up.

Instead, she continued walking and bit by bit absorbed the scene around her. What was outside and observed began to enter her consciousness and her body, so that all the people, all of Paris around her, all her memories, turned within her. And yellow, the color that Van Gogh had termed the spiritual color, saturated the scene.

And then, suddenly, the sphere was gone. She was a child remembering an image from a movie theater: a lady in a white gown becoming herself a sphere, a bubble, and moving away from the girl, moving toward the sky, and disappearing, as the girl was aimed towards home.

She had crossed the bridge and looked to see how she might now cross the street. To the right, she saw a small child in a sailor outfit sitting on the parapet of the Quai, now glancing at Marie-Pierre and curling her lips, raising her hand, and waving. A greeting? A goodbye? The same gesture for both.

Marie-Pierre began her walk across the busy intersection. She no longer ached at the thought of the lost children, for they were all here, around her, moving along with the city and the earth and its colors.

* * *

Marie-Pierre returned home late that evening, overloaded with packages filled with summer shirts, magazines, brochures, tulips and daffodils, grapefruit, wrapping paper and ribbons, a child’s set of wooden blocks, soaps perfumed with linden blossoms.

The apartment was in disorder; Concepcion had not been there to dust or to remove the half empty glasses that had formed rings on the glass table tops. Marie-Pierre did not notice. She knew at once that Jean-Marc was home, not because of the used dishware in the kitchen sink or the jacket thrown over the couch, where she set the packages, but because of his familiar scent. She followed this to the bedroom, where he lay in the semi-dark, the drapes open, his eyes as well. She sat at the foot of the mattress and placed her hands on his lower legs.

“Hello, chérie,” he barely whispered. “Oh, how my legs ache. I’ve been on them night after night. The work is done for now. No water, in fact. And we’ll need to wait fifteen years for another pass at it.” She massaged his slender limbs. He had been weeping. He turned to the windows and to the overcast night that had replaced the clear day.

“Don’t worry, my love, the search is a long one.” She said this firmly, with conviction. “Time can dangle its temptations before you for so long that you believe you will never approach them, but time can also ease the past into the present. It must be the same for the future.”

He looked at her. “Where have you been?” The question was a plea.

“To the Louvre, the bridge, the galleries. I begin Monday three days a week at Mignard’s. They’re mounting an exhibit of Barbizon sketches. And I was swimming. And shopping. I should have phoned.”

“No, chérie, it was best for me to wait. The wait and uncertainty, they made me ache for something other than that.” He nodded towards the window and the sky and then turned back to her. “You look so lovely.”

His arms around her were solid. She lay over him, covered him, stretched out very long, buoyed by his body.

* * *

In the morning they ate a late breakfast. The news on the radio was trivial. A survey showed that the greatest fear of Americans was water.

“Idiots,” they mouthed, in synch.