Jake tapped his phone, and the two men relaxed. “How’d it go?” Jake said. “They, ah, they filled me in, I hope you don’t mind. Is everything okay?”
“Christ,” she said. “I don’t know.” Well, there went her little fantasy of looking like a normal person on a normal trip. Poof.
Fiona hadn’t had dinner yet, but she wanted to go straight to bed. She should call Damian, though, and not forget to ask after Karen with something like concern. She ought to call Cecily and tell her that yes, Kurt was definitely in Paris, even if Cecily wouldn’t want to hear it. Or maybe it could wait. Was it even Fiona’s responsibility to tell her? She’d always had a bad sense of who fell under her jurisdiction and who didn’t. Cecily had known why she was coming here, wished her the best. Fiona hadn’t told her, though, about the little girl in the video. Why do that, when nothing was certain?
She said, “I think I’m done for the day.”
“This is perfect,” Serge said, “because you can come to the party! I convinced Jake to join already.”
“Party?”
“At Corinne’s, remember? We take the Métro to Vincennes at seven, okay? We get you home early, don’t worry!”
“Oh. I—”
“Lots of important artists there. And you need to meet Corinne’s husband. You need to see his beard.”
“His beard?”
Serge laughed. “Trust me. Just trust.”
* * *
—
Fiona called Damian from her room, and he wanted every detail repeated three times. It sounded less hopeless in the retelling, more like progress.
“This is great!” he said. “This is huge!”
She pretended, for his benefit, that she believed him.
Karen’s radiation started on Monday; otherwise he’d hop on a plane, he hoped she knew that. “I haven’t been to Paris since that conference in ’94,” he said.
“And you left me home with a baby. I never forgave you.” But she knew he could hear her smiling. “I don’t know what to do with myself,” she said. She told him about the party.
“Go!” he said. “You get to hang out with artists in Paris! Go and have a good time.”
“It’s not exactly hanging out with artists,” she said. “We’re not sketching at the café.”
He said, “Listen, try to retrace your great-aunt’s steps while you’re there. Didn’t you always want to? What about her boyfriend, the dead one?”
“Ranko Novak?”
“Try to track him down.”
“What, his grave?”
“I don’t know. Sure.”
“You’re sweet, Damian.”
“Go to the party.” And then, “Ciao,” which was something she used to find charming, back when he was her professor and she didn’t know better.
Well, getting ready for a party was an excuse not to call Cecily. And she really didn’t have it in her to call Cecily yet.
* * *
—
Fiona wished Jake weren’t with them, weren’t holding the Métro bar with two fingers and looking down at her. Richard and Serge sat behind her speaking rapid French, so Fiona had no one to talk to but Jake, and no way to talk to him but quasi-flirtatiously. The one dress she’d brought, a pale blue wrap, was low cut—and although she had a light coat, the buttons were broken and it hung open. Jake was staring straight down her cleavage.
When they disembarked in Vincennes and walked through the dark, quiet streets, past shops and restaurants and then beautiful, narrow houses, Jake got close to her ear and said, “So is this the Evanston of Paris?” and she couldn’t help laughing. She stopped herself, though, so he wouldn’t think he’d earned it.
He smelled of gin, and she wondered if he’d been drinking at Richard’s or before.
She checked her phone, although she’d just checked it two minutes ago and the ringer was on. And there was no reason Arnaud would be calling yet. But she couldn’t help refreshing her email, clicking on her empty voice mail.
It struck her that she could get rid of Jake by fucking him. It would be fun, she’d get it out of her system, and then he’d do the inevitable and graciously disappear. If he lingered, if he showed up tomorrow, she could always pretend she was in love, ask when they could see each other back in Chicago. “You know,” she could say if the situation got desperate, “there’s a chance I’m still fertile.”
Would he even be able to perform, drunk as she assumed he was? He held each syllable a bit too long (“Check out that mooooon”), held her gaze too long, moved his feet too slowly. Not enough for Richard or Serge to notice, apparently, but enough to irritate Fiona. Why was he allowed to go through life drunk? Why was he allowed his boomerang wallet?
* * *
—
And then she was stuck with him at the damn party. Both of them hung by Richard and Serge in the entryway at first, where Corinne (in a yellow tunic dress and a necklace of enormous wooden beads) greeted them warmly, made sure they had drinks, beckoned her husband from the next room. Fernand Leclercq’s beard was, as Serge had promised, prodigious: chest-length, as snowy and curled as the beard on a Claymation Santa. Importance radiated off him, a buzz that filled the foyer. “Feel free to look around,” he said, and she couldn’t figure out why she’d need or want such an invitation until she realized the house was filled with incredible art, that guests were sticking their necks into corners and back halls and even upstairs to glimpse Fernand and Corinne’s acquisitions. A Basquiat hung outside the bathroom; a Julian Schnabel plate portrait dominated the dining room.
People made an effort to speak English to her at first—Corinne, Serge, the German writer they introduced her to—but soon everything was a whirl of French, and she was left talking to Jake. They wound up in a sunroom at the back of the house, a room that filled and then emptied every few minutes as guests popped in to make sure they hadn’t missed any trays of food, buckets of champagne, seminal works of cubism.
He said, “I’ve been studying his work online. Richard’s. It’s weird how many photos I didn’t even know were his. Like, famous ones. That triptych thing, I’ve totally admired that before. No idea it was Campo. And I saw one of you, I think. Yeah?” Despite the drink in his hand, he seemed soberer now than he had on the Métro. She wanted him to disappear.
“Was I wearing a flowery dress?”
“No, you were next to a guy—you were curled up next to someone in a hospital bed.”