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  Then I walked across the street to the convenience store for a Dr Pepper. Once the cashier had rung me up, I realized that I’d forgotten my wallet. He gave me a look, as though he’d missed some sign that I was a crack addict. Then he decided that it doesn’t make much difference if you give a crack addict a Dr Pepper every now and again. Begrudgingly, he let me have it.

  I went outside to the parking lot and the world felt motionless under my feet. I looked back at my apartment building, where people were coming and going like nothing had ever happened to them. I was doing the same thing and had been, I realized, for a long time. I guess you could say that’s how I got over.

  T. C. BOYLE

  The Apartment

  FROM McSweeney’s

  Who was to know? She might have outlived most of her contemporaries, but she was so slight and small, almost a dwarf, really, her eyesight compromised and her hearing fading, and if she lived a year or two more, it would have been by the grace of God alone. Yes, she was lively enough, even at ninety, wobbling down the street on her bicycle like some atrophied schoolgirl and twice a week donning her épée mask and fencing with her shadow in the salon of her second-floor apartment, overlooking rue Gambetta on the one side and rue Saint-Estève on the other, but his own mother had been lively too, and she’d gone to bed on the night of her seventy-second birthday and never opened her eyes again. No, no: the odds were in his favor. Definitely. Definitely in his favor.

  He turned forty-seven the year he first approached her, 1965, which meant that at that point he’d been married to Marie-Thérèse for some twenty years, years that had been happy enough for the most part—​and more than that, usual. He liked the usual. The usual kept you on an even keel and offered up few surprises. And this was the important thing here, the thing he always liked to stress when the subject came up: he was not a gambling man. Before he’d made any of the major decisions in his life—​asking for his wife’s hand all those years ago, applying for the course of study that would lead to his law degree, making an offer on the apartment they’d lived in since their marriage—​he’d studied all the angles with a cold, computational eye. The fact was, he had few vices beyond a fondness for sweets and a tendency to indulge his daughters, Sophie and Élise, sixteen and fourteen, respectively, that year (or maybe they were seventeen and fifteen—​he never could quite keep that straight; as he liked to say, “If you’re very, very fortunate, your children will be twelve months older each year”). He didn’t smoke or drink, habits he’d given up three years earlier after a strenuous talk with his doctor. And he wasn’t covetous, or not particularly. Other men might drive sleek sports cars, lease yachts, and keep mistresses, but none of that interested him.

  The only problem—​the sole problem in his life at that point—​was the apartment. It was just too small to contain his blossoming daughters and the eternally thumping music radiating from their bedroom day and night, simplistic music, moronic, even—​the Beatles, the Animals, the Kinks, the very names indicative of their juvenility—​and if he wanted a bigger apartment, grander, more spacious, quieter, who could blame him? An apartment that was a five-minute walk from his office, an apartment that was a cathedral of early-morning light? An apartment surrounded by shops, cafés, and first-class restaurants? It was, as they say, a no-brainer.

  He put together a proposal and sent Madame C. a note wondering if he might see her, at her convenience, about a matter of mutual interest. Whether she would respond or not, he couldn’t say, but it wasn’t as if he were some interloper—​he knew her as an acquaintance and neighbor, as did just about everyone else in Arles, and he must have stopped with her in the street half a dozen times in the past year to discuss the weather, the machinations of de Gaulle and Pompidou, and the absurdity of sending a rocket into space when life here, on terra firma, was so clearly in need of immediate attention. A week went by before he heard back from her. He’d come home from work that day to an empty apartment—​Marie-Thérèse was out shopping and the girls were at rehearsal for a school play, but the radio in their room was all too present, and regurgitating rock and roll at full volume (“We gotta get out of this place,” the singer insisted, in English, over and over) until he angrily snapped it off—​and he was just settling down in his armchair with the newspaper when he noticed her letter on the sideboard.

  “Cher monsieur,” she wrote in the firm, decisive hand she’d learned as a schoolgirl in the previous century, “I must confess to being intrigued. Shall we meet here at my residence at 4 P.M. Thursday?”

  * * *

  In addition to the contract he’d drawn up in advance—​he was an optimist, always an optimist—​he brought with him a bouquet of spring flowers and a box of chocolate truffles, which he presented somberly to her when she met him at the door. “How kind of you,” she murmured, taking the flowers in one all-but-translucent hand and the box of chocolates in the other and ushering him through the entrance hall and into the salon, and whether by calculation or not she left him standing there in that grand room with its high ceilings, Persian carpets, and dense mahogany furniture while she went into the kitchen to put the flowers in a vase.

  There was a Bösendorfer piano in one corner, with a great spreading palm—​or was it a cycad?—​in a ceramic pot beside it, and that, as much as anything, swept him away. To think of sinking into the sofa after work and listening to Bach or Mozart or Debussy instead of the Animals or whoever they were. And so what if no one in the family knew how to play or had ever evidenced even the slightest degree of musical talent—​they could take lessons. He himself could take lessons, and why not? He wasn’t dead yet. And before long the girls would be away at university and then married, with homes of their own, and it would be just Marie-Thérèse and him—​and maybe a cat. He could see himself seated on the piano bench, the cat asleep in his lap and Debussy’s Images flowing from his fingertips like a new kind of language.

  “Well, don’t these look pretty?” the old lady sang out, edging into the room to arrange the vase on the coffee table, which he now saw was set for two, with a blue-and-rose Sèvres teapot, matching cups and saucers, cloth napkins bound in silver rings, and a platter of macarons.

  He sat in the armchair across from her as she poured out two cups of tea, watching for any signs of palsy or Parkinson’s—​but no, she was steady enough—​and then they were both busy with their spoons, the sugar and the cream, until she broke the silence. “You have a proposition for me, is that it?” she asked. “And”—​here a sly look came into the flickering remnants of her eyes—​“I’ll bet you five francs I know what it is. I’m clairvoyant, monsieur, didn’t you know that?”

  He couldn’t think of anything to say to this, so he just smiled.

  “You want to make me an offer on the apartment, en viager—​isn’t that right?”

  If he was surprised, he tried not to show it. He’d been prepared to condescend to her, as with any elderly person—​politely, of course, generously, looking out for her best interests as well as his own—​but she’d caught him up short. “Well, yes,” he said. “That’s it exactly. A reverse annuity.”

  He set down his cup. The apartment was absolutely silent, as if no one else lived in the building, and what about a maid—​didn’t she have a maid? “The fact is, Marie-Thérèse and I—​my wife, that is—​have been thinking of moving for some time now.” He let out a little laugh. “Especially with my daughters growing into young women and the apartment getting smaller by the day, if you know what I mean, and while there are plenty of places on the market, there’s really hardly anything like this—​and it’s so close to my office . . .”

  “And since my grandson passed on, you figure the old woman has no one to leave the place to, and even if she doesn’t need the money, why wouldn’t she take it anyway? It’s better than getting nothing and leaving the place for the government to appropriate, isn’t that right?”

  “Yes,” he said, “that was my thinking.”
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  As far as he knew—​and he’d put in his research on the subject—​she had no heirs. She’d been a bride once, and a mother too, and she’d lived within these four walls and paced these creaking floorboards for an astonishing sixty-nine years, ever since she’d returned from her honeymoon, in 1896, and moved in here with her husband, a man of means, who had owned the department store on the ground floor and had given her a life of ease. Anything she wanted was at her fingertips. She hosted musical parties, vacationed in the Alps, skied, bicycled, hunted and fished, lived through the German occupation and the resumption of the republic without noticing all that much difference in her daily affairs, but of course no one gets through life unscathed. Her only child, a daughter, had died of pneumonia in 1934, after which she and her husband had assumed guardianship of their grandson, until first her husband died unexpectedly (after eating a dish of fresh-picked cherries that had been dusted with copper sulfate and inadequately rinsed), and then her grandson, whom she’d seen through medical school and who had continued to live with her as her sole companion and emotional support. He was only thirty-six when he was killed in an auto accident on a deserted road, not two years ago. It was Marie-Thérèse who’d seen the notice in the paper; otherwise he might have missed it altogether. They sent a condolence card, though neither of them attended the funeral, which, given the deceased’s condition, would have been a closed-casket affair in any case. Still, that was the beginning of it, the first glimmer of the idea, and whether he was being insensitive or not (“ghoulish” was the way Marie-Thérèse put it), he couldn’t say. Or no, he could say: he was just being practical.

  “What are you offering?” the old woman asked, focusing narrowly on him now as if to be certain he was still there.

  “Fair market value, of course. I want the best for you—​and for me and my family too. Here,” he said, handing her a sheet of paper on which he’d drawn up figures for comparable apartments in the neighborhood. “I was thinking perhaps twenty-two hundred francs a month?”

  She barely glanced at the paper. “Twenty-five,” she said.

  It took him a moment, doing a quick mental calculation, to realize that even if she lived ten more years he’d be getting the place for half of what it was worth, and that didn’t factor in appreciation either. “Agreed,” he said.

  “And you won’t interfere?”

  “No.”

  “What if I decide to paint the walls pink?” She laughed, a sudden strangled laugh that tailed off into a fit of coughing. She was a smoker, that much he knew (and had taken into account on the debit side of the ledger). Yes, she could ride a bicycle at ninety, an amazing feat, but she’d also been blackening her lungs for seventy years or more. He watched her dab at her eyes with a tissue, then grin to show her teeth—​yes, she still had them. Unless they were dentures.

  “And the ceiling chartreuse?” she went on, extending the joke. “And, and—​move the bathtub into the salon, right there where you’re perched in my armchair looking so pleased with yourself?”

  He shook his head. “You’ll live here as you always have, no strings attached.”

  She sat back in her chair, a tight smile compressing her lips. “You’re really throwing the dice, aren’t you?”

  He shrugged. “Twenty-five hundred a month,” he repeated. “It’s a fair offer.”

  “You’re betting I’ll die—​and sooner rather than later.”

  “Not at all. I wish you nothing but health and prosperity. Besides, I’m not a betting man.”

  “You know what I’m doing?” she asked, hunching forward so he could see the balding patch on the crown of her head and the slim tracery of bones exposed at the collar of her dress, where, apparently, she’d been unable to reach back and fasten the zipper.

  “No, what?” he said, grinning, patronizing her, though his stomach sank because he was sure she was going to say she was backing out of the deal, that she’d had a better offer, that she’d been toying with him all along.

  “I’m throwing the dice too.”

  * * *

  After he left that day, she felt as if she’d been lifted up into the clouds. She cleared away the tea things in a burst of energy, then marched around the apartment, going from room to room and back again, twice, three times, four, pumping her arms for the sake of her circulation and letting her eyes roam over the precious familiar things that meant more to her than anything else in the world, and not just the framed photos and paintings, but the ceramic snowman Frédéric had made in grammar school and the mounted butterflies her husband had collected when they first married. She’d been blessed, suddenly and unexpectedly blessed, and if she could have kicked up her heels, she would have—​she wasn’t going to a nursing home like so many other women she’d known, all of them lost now to death or the straitjacket of old age. No, she was staying right here. For the duration. In celebration, she unwrapped the box of chocolates, poured herself a glass of wine, and sat smoking by the window, looking out on the street and the parade of pedestrians that was the best show on earth, better than any television, better than La Comédie humaine—​no, it was La Comédie humaine. And there were no pages to turn and no commercials either.

  She watched a woman in a ridiculous hat go into the shop across the street and immediately come back out again as if she’d forgotten something, then press her face to the glass and wave till the shopgirl appeared in the window and reached for an equally ridiculous hat on the mannequin there, and here came a boy on a motor scooter with a girl clinging to him from behind and the sudden shadow of a black Renault sliced in front of them till the goat’s bleat of the boy’s horn rose up in protest and the car swerved at the last minute. Almost an accident, and wouldn’t that have been terrible? Another boy dead, like her Frédéric, and a girl too. It was everywhere, death, wasn’t it? You didn’t have to go out and look for it—​it was right there, always, lurking just below the surface. And that was part of the comédie too.

  But enough morbidity—​this was a celebration, wasn’t it? Twenty-five hundred francs! Truly, this man had come to her like an angel from heaven—​and what’s more he’d never even hesitated when she countered his offer. Like everyone else, he assumed she was better off than she was, that money meant nothing to her and she could take or leave any offer no matter how extravagant, but in fact, if you excluded the value of the apartment, she had practically nothing, her savings having dissipated in paying for Frédéric’s education and his clothes and his car and his medical degree—​Frédéric, lost to her now and forever. She got by, barely, by paring her expenses and the reduced needs that come with having lived so long. It wasn’t as if she needed theater tickets anymore. Or concert tickets either. She never went anywhere, except to church on Sundays, and that didn’t cost anything more than what she put in the collection box, which was between her and God.

  After Frédéric’s death she’d reduced the maid’s schedule to two days a week rather than the six she’d have preferred, but that was going to change now. And if she wanted a prime cut of meat at the butcher’s or l’écrevisse or even le homard at the fishmonger’s, she would just go ahead and order it and never mind what it cost. Bless the man, she thought, bless him. Best of all, even beyond the money, was the wager itself. If she’d been lost after Frédéric had been taken from her, now she was found. Now—​suddenly, wonderfully—​purpose had come back into her life. Gazing out the window at the bustle of the street below, bringing the cigarette to her lips just often enough to keep it glowing, she was as happy as she’d been in weeks, months, even, and all at once she was thinking about the time she and her husband had gone to Monte Carlo, the one time in all their life together. She remembered sitting there at the roulette table in a black velvet evening gown, Fernand glowing beside her in his tuxedo, the croupier spinning the wheel, and the bright, shining silver ball dropping into the slot for her number—​twenty-two black; she would never forget it—​and in the next moment using his little rake to push all tho
se gay, glittering chips in her direction.

  * * *

  He went to visit her at the end of the first month after the contract went into effect, feeling generous and expansive, wondering how she was getting on. He’d heard a rumor that she’d been ill, having caught the cold that was going around town that spring, which, of course, would have been all the more severe in someone of her age with her compromised immune system, not to mention smoker’s cough. A steady rain had been falling all day, and it was a bit of a juggling act for him to balance his umbrella and the paper-wrapped parcels he was bringing her: a bottle of Armagnac, another box of chocolates (two pounds, assorted), and a carton of the Gauloises he’d seen her smoking on his last visit. This time a girl met him at the door—​a woman, that is, of fifty or so, with sucked-in cheeks, badly dyed hair, and listless eyes. There was a moment of hesitation until he realized that this must be the maid he’d wondered about and then a further moment during which he reflected on the fact that he was, in a sense, paying her wages. “Is madame in?” he inquired.

  She didn’t ask his name or business, but simply nodded and held out her arms for the gifts, which he handed over as if they were a bribe, and then led him into the salon, which as far as he could see remained unchanged, no pink walls or chartreuse ceiling, and no bathtub either. He stood there awhile, reveling in the details—​the room was perfect, really, just as it was, though Marie-Thérèse, who’d yet to see the place from the inside, would want to do at least some redecorating, because she was a woman, and women were never satisfied till they’d put their own stamp on things—​and then there was a noise behind him and he turned round to see the maid pushing the old woman down the hall in a wheelchair. A wheelchair! He couldn’t suppress a rush of joy, though he composed his features in a suitably concerned expression and said, “Madame, how good to see you again,” and he was about to go on, about to say, You’re looking well, but that was hardly appropriate under the circumstances.