The Sun Room

This story contains themes of suicide & physical violence.

Claire wanted big.

— I don't want a castle.

She kept her eyes on the screen.

— Just a hall where the chairs don't shake.

— Nobody cares about the chairs.

— No. They say they don't care.

She wanted a big hall. Real tablecloths. Flowers not from the supermarket. No fluorescents. Fluorescents kill dresses. Matching chairs. Garlands over the tables. Glasses lined up.

She kept pictures on her phone.

At night, on the edge of the bed, she scrolled through them. The blue screen on her face. Clean lawns. Floral archways. Women laughing without looking like they counted.

She'd say: it's so beautiful.

She said it soft. Worse than if she'd shouted. She'd stripped the phrase of expectation.

And me, I'd promise faster. I'd say yes before she finished. Yes, we'll find a way. Yes, I'll handle it. The words came faster than the numbers.

She'd put the phone on the nightstand, screen down. She'd kill her lamp.

In the dark, she'd say:

— All right.

And me, in the dark, I'd go over the figures I'd done three times during the day, and that didn't add up any better at night. I didn't have the money. I did the numbers. Then I did them again. On an envelope. On the back of a receipt. In the account book. On the phone. In my head coming home from work.

The next day, I drove home.

The phone was hot in my pocket. I'd squeezed the case so hard the mark stayed in my palm. The estimates folded against my thigh had the thickness of a stack of debt.

The low road ran along the ditches before the village. It had rained in the afternoon. The asphalt kept a black smell, almost sweet. Mixed with crushed grass. With dirty water.

Dogs barked behind the fences. The trash cans had been put out too early. The houses lit up one by one. Cars went past too fast, kicked up water from the verge, disappeared toward the lit kitchens.

I drove past the manor the way I had since I was a kid.

Without seeing it. Like everybody. The head stayed straight coming up to the bend. The kids learned quick to do the same. Nobody said: don't look. We didn't need to anymore. The eyes of the village slid over the building like rain on stone.

I was eight the first time I asked.

— Uncle, what's that place.

My uncle was drinking. He put the glass down.

— Finish your plate.

I pulled over to the verge.

A narrow road. Two thin ditches. The low fields, grass flattened by wind. The village behind me taken back by its shutters.

And in front, at the entrance, the manor. Nobody in it. Never anybody in it.

Raw concrete. Nothing else.

The walls, the roof, the frames, the cornices. All poured in one gesture. No ornament. No patchwork. Of no era.

Four stories. Flat roof. The openings, the angles, the cornices brought the eye back to the same place. With a cold patience.

In the middle of the slab, jutting out, the glass house.

Solarium, on the plans. The sun room. Where the sick were supposed to be rolled out on their beds to take the light. A glass cage planted in the gray mass. The only part that still took the light instead of pushing it back. It didn't really shine. It held the day.

I stayed on the verge, looking. Cars went past behind me. The wet sound of tires on cold asphalt. I barely heard them. The village was to the left. Low roofs. The bell tower. The bakery. The Centre bar. Houses pressed against each other.

And there in front, this dirty glass house. The whole country turned around this cube. The roads, the dogs, the shutters, the old men at the counter.

The first owner came from the East.

He'd arrived after the war. With a wife you rarely saw. A kid you saw even less. Enough money to keep half the canton working for two seasons.

He'd had it built as a cure house. A private clinic for the lungs, for people from the East with money enough to take the air somewhere nobody knew them. That was what the permits said. The village called it the manor before the first pour was dry, and the word stayed.

White Russian for some. Polish for others. Romanian sometimes. A defector, Moretti said. A former dignitary, Lacombe said. A rich thief, said another. The East, the war, the Soviets, all that.

Nobody knew.

The family came in fits and starts. Three weeks one summer. Two months the winter after. A whole spring, one time. Then nothing for years. Then one day, a car appeared behind the trees. A light came on at the top floor. Smoke came out of a flue. The clinic never took a patient. Not one bed, not one day.

The grass grew up the drive. The gate rusted. The rain changed the color of the concrete.

The village saw the building more often than the people inside. With time, the owners dropped out of the story. We knew the gate better than their faces. We didn't say their name anymore. Or several names got said, all blurred. We said the manor, the way we'd have said the quarry, the bridge, the cemetery.

Only the mass was left. The concrete. The glass house.

The workers, them, were local.

The site boss was from the village. He paid on Saturday, never before. He wet his thumb. He counted the bills slow. If a man said an hour was missing, he started over from the top. He never added anything.

He'd taken on men from here. Among them, Bonardi, forty-two, wife and four kids, the youngest not yet walking. Lazzaro, thirty-five, drank little, read the paper out loud during the noon break. And little Venturi, nineteen, maybe twenty, sang off-key at midnight Mass without knowing it and laughed louder than the others.

Three men.

During the pouring of an inside pillar, the mixer let go. A valve. A chain. A hopper. Nobody told the same story twice. Only the position of the bodies didn't change. What we knew was the three of them were working underneath. People shouted. People ran. The concrete kept coming.

By the time they cut, by the time they dug, the concrete had finished.

Poured standing. With their hands. Their mouths full of cement.

Held upright in the mass.

The concrete dried. The widows got something. The priest spoke of misfortune and work. The boss sat the Bonardi widow on the nail crate. He counted the indemnity bills wetting his thumb. He held back the equivalent of the two sacks of cement spoiled by blood. After, the site stopped for five days. Then it started again.

Since then, some men avoided the north wall. They only said that side held the damp.

The owner died later.

Three stories went around.

In the first, the Party tracked him down because he'd stayed Christian. An old business of icons. Of baptisms.

In the second, his money was found outside. His Swiss accounts. His jewelry. His papers. Men had come to settle an old debt.

In the third, he'd lost too much money. He hung himself like any man who can't bear coming down.

The three versions lived together for years. The one who talked icons didn't contradict the one who talked Swiss accounts. The one who said suicide shrugged. You picked the version depending on the hour of the evening. Depending on the audience. Depending on how much wine had gone down at the Centre counter. At the start of the meal, it was the Party, the version for the young, for the women, for visitors, because that was the version with panache. By dessert, it was the Swiss accounts, the man's version, the one that reminded you money draws money and money from far away always ends up taken back. Very late, after the digestif, when there were three or four customers left leaning on the bar and the patron rinsing his glasses for the night, it was suicide.

The son inherited everything.

Sole heir. Tall. Skinny. Too well dressed for the streets around here.

They said sick in the nerves. They said arrogant. Unpredictable.

He came to the manor like his father. In fits and starts. A few days. Sometimes a few weeks. Then he'd leave. The gate took rust. Grass came up between the gravel.

When he was there, you knew.

A sports car stayed parked sideways at the gate. A window lit till morning. Music came down all night. An engine took the bend too fast past midnight.

He came into the grocery in shoes too thin for the mud. He bought French wine. He talked too loud. He laughed alone at the town hall notices. He could stare at a woman the whole time it took her to weigh her apples, and walk out without buying anything.

Madame Brunet, when he left, would close the door behind him and stay a moment with her hand on the latch.

Then a rumor about a girl.

A girl from the village.

She wasn't a story before somebody made her one. Nobody knew who she was. Her name stayed with one or two families. A neighbor. The shop owner. The midwife, maybe. For the others, she was the girl. The girl from the manor.

She'd been seen going up to the manor. After, she disappeared. Her mother said tired. Her father said nothing. After a month, the women had figured it out. Then the men.

Pregnant.

They said dishonored. They said she hadn't understood. They said she'd wanted to. They said a lot.

After, the abortion.

A car left before dawn. An address given low. A private clinic two departments away. Or a woman in a back kitchen, with an enamel basin and boiled towels. There again, the versions changed.

The pregnancy didn't hold. She did. Barely.

After that, the village shut its ties with the son. Nobody talked to him. Nobody greeted him. The men crossed the street. The women went quiet when his car passed. At the bar, his name was enough to dry up the talk.

The manor kept lighting up some evenings.

A window on the third. Two windows sometimes. The glass house, very late, a pale clarity that stayed above the trees.

Nobody went to check. There wasn't anybody up there. Maybe there never had been. Just concrete. Three dead in a slab. A girl wiped out of the village.

Then one night, the son came down from the manor with a gas can.

He crossed the low road the way everybody crossed it. Without hiding. Without hurrying.

It was dark. It was raining, or it had rained. I don't remember.

He got to the church. He set the can down. He poured the gasoline on the steps. On the wooden doors. On the south wall where the ivy had bit. He poured some on himself in the motion.

He struck a match. He threw it.

The church was damp from the week's rain. The doors had been treated since the last restoration. The gasoline pooled in badly spread puddles instead of soaking in. Part of it caught on the steps. Another smoldered without climbing. The south wall darkened without catching. The fire stayed low.

Him, he caught right away.

The gasoline on his clothes, on his hands, in his hair, lit up the second the match dropped. He burned standing on the parvis, without crying out. He burned in silence the time it took somebody to figure out what they were looking at and move.

The church fire went out by itself. The steps smoked and quieted. The south wall stopped blackening. The doors held.

He kept burning. By the time anybody noticed, he'd burned to ninety percent. The face, the arms, the torso, the legs, the back. Only the feet were spared, because he'd kept his shoes on, those shoes too thin for the mud he'd always worn in the village, and the leather had protected the skin underneath.

The firemen came. The ambulance came. He was taken to the hospital. He died there.

The church was restored within the week. The steps were redone. The doors replaced. The south wall resurfaced. The parish paid part. The town paid the rest. We've gone there on Sundays since, like before.

I got out of the car.

Thirty years driving past this block. Thirty years seeing it without touching it. The ditch smelled of dead leaves. My shoes slid in the greasy earth. The wall rose in front of me, taller than in the stories.

Up close, the concrete had nothing smooth. It was pitted. Veined. Open in places. Old runs descended below the sills. The frost had eaten the edges. Pale dust had settled in the hollows. Almost white already. A white of salt and bone.

I laid my palm flat against it.

A steady cold, without damp, deep as a cellar. Under my hand the wall was dry. Granular. Years of north rain, frost, thaw, moss, sun. No sealer. No primer.

I scraped with my nail. The skin of the concrete came off in fine powder, gray-white, stuck to my finger. I rubbed thumb against index. A faint sound. Almost nothing.

Underneath, it held. It would hold a long time yet.

I looked up.

Four stories. Big flat surfaces. The frames were eating time, but less than I'd thought. Exterior facades. Returns. Cornice undersides. Stairwell if you opened the inside. Big bare walls on the ground floor.

I rubbed the dust between my fingers. White underneath. I knew what to do.

In my head, the numbers fell into place.

So many square meters per facade. Four levels. The window returns. The terrace. The interior. A sealer. Two primers on the dead zones. Two coats of finish. Maybe a third on the high parts, for the wind.

No gloss. Matte. A matte white, thick, almost mineral, that would drink the light instead of throwing it back.

In the workshop, the six pots of matte white acrylic from the Ferri job were still there. Sealed. Never opened. Paid for and forgotten. The rest I could get from Sgarbi at wholesale, if it went through his brother. Wide rollers. Brushes for the corners. Poles. Tarps. Rust to neutralize under the sills. The glass house cleaned without breaking the joints. Two scaffolds. Maybe three. A week to prep. Two to paint right, if it didn't rain.

The walls taken back to the angles. The concrete drinking the sealer. The primer plugging the pores. The finish laid broad, coat after coat. The tables in the great hall. The white tablecloths. The white plates. The white flowers tight in white vases. The ribbons at the windows. The washed gravel at the entrance. The chairs redone with the spray gun. The glass house cleaned to let the light fall on the center of the hall.

A white day, planted in the village's old sickness.

Claire under the high light of the glass house, her pale dress in front of the still-fresh walls, the whole village forced to raise their eyes to her.

The village would come.

At first it'd pretend not to understand. Then it'd ask who authorized it, who rented it. The women would talk about the flowers. The men would say the concrete had taken well. The old men would dig for the old versions at the bottom of their glass and find one, repainted over the others. Nobody would say the family's name. Not once. That was how it had always been.

They'd eat under the walls where they'd placed their dead. They'd drink in front of the windows they'd stopped looking at. They'd smile at Claire.

My hand was still against the wall. The gray dust clinging to my finger. I pushed the door open. No vestibule. No entryway. A bare slab that started right away.

I had a few measurements to check. The placement of the chairs, the tables, the passage down the middle. The floor was a slab. Smooth in places, rough in others. To the left, the staircase took the floors in one gray pour. The wall in place of a banister. No balusters. The steps were slightly too high. By the third, the calves pulled. By the tenth, the breath changed. By the fifteenth the hand looked for a banister that wasn't there.

The building had never tried to please. It left a trace in the muscles. It worked the body. I thought about the guests. The heels. The long dresses. The old folks we'd have to help. I stopped thinking about it.

On the walls, paler rectangles marked the old frames. In the parlor, higher. In the study, at man-height. Aligned with the level. No nail stuck out. No wire hung. The screws had been pulled. Filled. Sanded. The family hadn't disappeared all at once. It had been taken down.

In the center, the solarium. The only room where the light came straight. Under the glass house, at the center of the solarium, the slab was lighter than anywhere. A wide circle. The concrete polished by years of light in one spot. The light fell from the glass, crossed the air, crossed the air, crossed the air, and touched the slab.

I lay down at the center of the slab. The sky dropped all at once. Like it had been waiting for me to lie down. It opened above me with its hard blue, its slow clouds, its panes where, in the corners, dead bugs nobody had ever seen. I thought about the voices that would rise here. The vows.

I thought about Claire walking under this sky, straight in her white dress, her bouquet pressed against her.

Claire would say yes.