Fiona attempted to drain her champagne, although it hurt her nose when she swallowed. “You’re asking about private things,” she said. “It’s art, but I was there. Those were my friends.”
“I—hey, I actually didn’t ask anything. I don’t think I asked a question.”
“Fair enough.”
“What were you afraid I was going to ask?”
She thought. “You were going to ask me who that was, in the bed.”
“Hey, do you want to sit down?”
“No.” She looked at the group hovering in the sunroom door, but they were speaking French and hadn’t glanced her way.
“Can I—listen, I just have one question, and it’s not about that picture, it’s about the triptych.”
“Christ. What.”
“Sorry! Sorry. Let’s find food.”
She was stressed about things that had nothing to do with Jake Austen and his invasion, but he was a convenient punching bag. And so she stepped too close to him, spoke too loud. “That was Julian Ames. In the triptych. He was a beautiful person, an actor, and Richard took the first photo when everything was great, and he took the second when Julian was freaking out because he knew he was sick, and then he took the third when he weighed like a hundred pounds.”
“Hey, I’m sorry, I—”
“My brother died in this stupid hospital where my parents put him, this place where everyone was scared of him and no one knew what the hell they were doing, and Julian came up there every single day. He wasn’t the smartest guy, but he was loyal and he felt things more than other people. You, you numb out with alcohol, right? Some people actually feel things. And there was this nurse who’d come around with the menu, but she wouldn’t bring it into the room. Not that he could eat anything anyway.”
“That’s awful.”
“Shut up. So half the time it didn’t matter, because Nico was out of it. What we realized at the very end was he had lymphoma of the central nervous system, and these idiot doctors missed it and gave him steroids, which was the worst thing. But it reduced the brain swelling at first, so for a couple days he had these lucid windows. He’d reemerge for ten minutes, and then he’d be gone again. So he’s lucid one day and the nurse comes and stands there, and she’s got this smug little face, and she starts reading the menu from the doorway. Julian’s in there with me, and Nico’s alert, and the nurse goes, ‘Spaghetti with meatballs.’ So Julian stands at the foot of Nico’s bed and repeats it in this theater voice, like he’s playing a Shakespearean king, and then he does—it was somewhere between pantomime and an interpretive dance. This whole thing about spaghetti, twining it around his fork, slurping the noodles. And the nurse just has this look on her face, like, This is why you’re all sick, look at this faggy behavior. Julian goes right up and peers over her shoulder at the menu, and he announces the next thing, which is chicken salad, and he does a chicken dance. He does the whole menu like that while the nurse stands there.”
“That’s awesome.”
“No. It was sad and awful. It was the last time my brother was awake.”
“Can I ask what happened to him? To Julian?”
“What the fuck do you think happened?”
“Fiona, you’re—”
“He was an actor with no family and no health insurance, and he could’ve gotten some decent support at least if he’d stayed in Chicago, if he’d stuck around till the drugs came out, but instead he took off and died alone and I don’t even know where.”
“You’re bleeding.”
“What?”
“Your hand.”
She looked down. The empty champagne flute, which she’d been holding tightly, was cracked. A droplet of blood ran down her right wrist and another ran down the outside of the glass. When she peeled her hand back, the whole glass fell apart, shattering onto the floor.
The room went gray at the edges, and voices closed in. Corinne was there, holding a towel under her hand, guiding her to a wallpapered little bathroom with golden faucets, sitting her on the closed toilet.
Now Corinne’s husband was kneeling in front of Fiona with a pair of tweezers, slowly picking out the shards embedded all over her palm.
“I’m so embarrassed,” she said when everything was back in focus, when Corinne had left to clean up the mess.
“This is not allowed.” His voice was phlegmy and deep. There was something regal about the top of his bent head, his gel-combed white hair. Fernand, she reminded herself. Fernand the important critic. Nothing here was recognizable as her own life. This man, this room, this blood.
He massaged the meat of her palm gently, peered at her hand through his glasses.
“Thank you,” she said. “Have you done this before?”
“I’m just finding the bits of light.”
Fiona imagined her palm littered with a thousand slivers of reflective glass, ones she could carry with her forever. Her whole body ought to be like that. Her skin ought to cut the people who touched it.
She wanted to say nice things to him, but didn’t want to sit here endlessly repeating her thanks. “Do you paint, too? Besides the critic stuff? Your hands are so steady.”
“I studied painting.” He looked up and smiled, and she felt she could stay in the bathroom forever, being taken care of. “Terrible idea. Critics shouldn’t know how to paint.”
Jake appeared in the doorway. She didn’t have the energy to send him away.
Fernand daubed more antiseptic on her skin with a flat circle of cotton. He said, “I attended the Académie des Beaux-Arts. Very, ah, old-fashioned.”
Fiona perked up. “Are you still there? Do you teach?”
“No.” He laughed. “Not for me.”
“I just—” she stopped while he dug into the base of her middle finger with the tweezer point “—my family’s always been trying to track down this one artist who was there. He was my great-aunt’s boyfriend, and he died young.”
“What year?”
“Oh, way before your time! I didn’t mean you’d know him, I just—I don’t even know why I’m asking. I’m a little woozy. He won the Prix de Rome, but then he died right after World War I.”
“Ha, yes, that’s before my time!”
“His name was Ranko Novak. We were just always curious.”
“You’re trying to find what, records? A picture?” He turned to where Jake still hovered. “Do you have a light on your phone?”