Jake turned on his phone’s flashlight and, grimacing, held it above Fiona’s palm.
“I tell you what,” Fernand said. “I have a friend there. You write the name down before you leave tonight, I’ll ask him.”
“That’s so kind!”
“Well, you nearly severed your fingers at our house. This is so you won’t sue!”
* * *
—
Fiona held a glass of ice water in her gauzed hand because it felt good, even if the condensation made the gauze wet. She’d found Richard in the dining room, holding court over platters of smoked fish.
She could barely follow the conversation, and only thanks to Richard’s occasional translation. (“Marie is his wife.” “This was the Gehry retrospective last year.” “She’s talking about her daughter’s work.”) Fiona wanted codeine. She wanted to find a pharmacy. And then what? Maybe walk around the Marais till morning.
Richard said to her, “Paul here was asking how fame changed me. I’m explaining that I’ve only been famous a quarter of my life! Such a short time!” And then he spoke French again to this Paul, who had a giraffe neck and tiny teeth. Back to Fiona: “I was saying that my very first patron was a collector named Esmé Sharp, do you remember her? And she just emailed last week asking for a first look at some stuff before Art Basel this spring. Nothing changes! I’m still making work for the same audience.”
Jake had disappeared but now he was back, lingering outside the circle. He had rolled up his sleeves; his arms were all muscle and vein. At his left elbow, the bottom of a tattoo.
The name was a distant bell to Fiona. Esmé Sharp. Someone circling Richard when his career took off, someone she might have met when she was driving back to Chicago from Madison on weekends, pregnant or with a newborn Claire. Or maybe she’d met her after they moved back to the city in ’93, Damian teaching at U of C and Fiona going out of her mind, bored to death in the place she’d once found endlessly vibrant. The early nineties were a haze; Claire had been born in the summer of ’92, and Fiona was in the throes of what anyone today would easily spot as extended postpartum depression, on top of the PTSD she’d carried with her from the ’80s. She’d lied to her doctor that everything was splendid, and he hadn’t pushed further. She tried taking graduate classes at DePaul, but couldn’t bring herself to complete a single paper. She watched morning television, interviews with celebrities whose names she didn’t know. She sat on benches while Claire circled playgrounds and dug her fat fingers into cold sandboxes and got herself stuck on top of slides. It wasn’t till Claire started preschool and Fiona began working for the resale shop—around the time Richard left for Paris—that everything came clear. It was as if someone had handed her new glasses around 1995, turned up the color, unmuted the city. Just in time for Fiona to realize how unhappy she was with Damian, his little lectures, his teeth-licking. She began fucking a man she met at yoga, for the love of God, and even as it slowly eroded her marriage, it helped her wake up. But by then Richard was gone. Esmé must have been from that lost time, a boat in a foggy harbor.
“Et qu’est-ce que vous faites, dans la vie?” a woman asked Fiona.
She said, “Je—j’ai une boutique. En Chicago.” God, she wanted to leave. Richard rescued her, talking quickly; she assumed he was disabusing the crowd of the notion that Fiona sold fancy shoes. She heard “le SIDA,” which she’d always found a prettier acronym than AIDS. Well, everything about AIDS had been better all along in France, in London, even in Canada. Less shame, more education, more funding, more research. Fewer people screaming about hell as you died.
She sidled up to Jake and whispered. “Help me find more gauze,” she said.
“You want me to ask the hosts?”
“No. Just come with me.”
If she could ride around on a scooter like a teenager, she could act like one in other ways too.
He followed her into the front hall, empty but for the coat tree.
She said, “You don’t happen to have any good pain meds on you?”
“I wish.”
“Do you have a cigarette?”
“No, but I could use one.”
“Do you have a condom?”
“A what?”
“Listen.” She checked her phone; nothing. She dug her coat out from under the others. “You’re drunk, right?”
“Not really.” He followed her out the door; the streets were empty.
“Do you think you’re sober enough to find the Métro again?” She turned left, although she wasn’t sure that was the way.
“I said I’m not drunk. I was a little stoned when we got here, but it wore off.”
“You’re a shoddy alcoholic. Not even drunk.”
She walked fast and he worked to keep up.
“Who said I was an alcoholic?”
“Some guy on a plane.”
They stopped at an intersection and waited for the crossing light, although the streets were empty.
“You’re what,” she said, “thirty?”
“Thirty-five. Why?”
“I don’t want to sleep with an infant. Thirty-five should work.”
It was clear from his face that he couldn’t tell if she was joking, and also clear that he wanted her not to be.
She’d had the wrong amount of wine for self-analysis. One more glass and she might be sitting on the sidewalk, spilling her life’s secrets, wondering aloud why she tended to weaponize sex. One less glass and she’d still be next to Richard, nodding along to a French conversation. As things stood, she’d had just enough to be aware of how narrowly she’d missed both these possibilities, and also just enough not to care. She was drunk enough to want a man on top of her, but not so drunk that she’d fall asleep as soon as she was horizontal. Once they’d crossed the street, she put her hand on Jake’s ass, slid her fingers into his back pocket.
He swung toward her and gave her a look, some combination of vulnerable and predatory, and then he cupped the base of her skull, pulled her mouth onto his and her tongue toward his and her pelvis toward his. They walked another block and he did it again, and then another block, and he did it again.
He smelled like smoked meat, which was not something she minded. They made their way to a pharmacy for condoms and ibuprofen and then back to Richard’s house, and in her crisp guest bed, they had sex. Fiona remembered only once, riding on top of him, that she was most likely someone’s grandmother now. Mostly she felt no self-consciousness at all; Jake was so beautiful, the skin of his upper arms taut and goose-bumped, that it was easy to be lost. She ran her left hand through his chest hair, as thick as his beard, and kept her gauze-wrapped right hand tight on the bed frame. It would hurt worse in the morning, but she didn’t care. Jake finished with a long, helpless caveman grunt, and then he lay next to her and slipped his fingers between her thighs, which she didn’t think would work, until it did.