“Not everyone gets that. And, like, I was probably sick in the summer, I just can’t remember. Maybe I was sick in the spring.”
Charlie had been under the weather in December. So maybe the whole thing was true; maybe it had been a one-time lapse. Or maybe the Julian thing had started that night, and kept going. Yale’s head spun.
He said, “It’s like the world’s worst logic puzzle.”
“I’m sorry, Yale.”
“Stop it. You’re not allowed to feel sorry for me.”
“I think I am.”
Yale poured himself more scotch. He still hadn’t eaten dinner, but he wasn’t about to ask Terrence for food. Roscoe jumped up on the couch beside him and fell promptly asleep.
Terrence said, “You can stay here tonight if you want, but believe me, you don’t want to stay longer. I’m gonna wake you up with my morning sickness.” He rubbed his concave belly and said, “This baby must be a girl. She’s such a drama queen.”
Yale said, “Until about one o’clock, this was the best day of my life.” And although Terrence might well have been hinting that he was ready for bed, he couldn’t stop himself from talking. He told Terrence about Nora’s artwork, or at least the bare details. Modigliani, etcetera. It felt now like a tremendously hollow victory. He’d lost his lover and possibly his health, his life, but he’d brought some old drawings from Wisconsin to Illinois. Pieces of paper.
He said, “The whole time we were up there, I kept thinking, This is too good to be true. There’s something I’m missing. I’m being tricked. Maybe it was my subconscious. You know? I knew inside something was off, something wasn’t right. Red flags. Only I got it all mixed up.”
Terrence was quiet and then he said, “This is a weird question, but are those Nico’s shoes?”
He’d forgotten. “Oh, God. Yes. I’m sorry. Do you mind?”
“No, it’s fine. I mean, maybe you could leave them by the door, actually. I just don’t want germs tracked in.”
Yale slipped them off, put them on the welcome mat, and then he washed his hands, even though he’d already done it after changing Roscoe’s litter. He said, “Tomorrow before I leave I’ll run errands for you, okay?”
“Yeah.”
Yale lay on the couch that night, listening as Terrence tossed in his sheets, as he whimpered through his night sweats. Yale closed his eyes and watched himself, the night of the memorial, from high up in Richard’s house near the skylight. He watched himself talk to Fiona, talk to Julian, sip his Cuba libre.
Again and again he watched himself take in the beginning of the slide show, then turn and put his foot on the first step. He watched himself climb the stairs.
2015
Fiona woke up late, not with a hangover but with a raw throat that was already spreading its ache into her chest and sinus. Her hand flashed with pain every time her heart beat.
Serge took her to his doctor in a cab, no appointment required (no insurance either), and the doctor swabbed her with iodine and bandaged her up sleekly and gave her pain pills and a prescription for an antibiotic. The bill was twenty-three euros, which Serge insisted on paying.
“You take the day off,” he said. “Promise, okay? You feel like going out, maybe you come to Richard’s studio and he give you a tour. He can show you the videos on his computer, so you see before the show!”
But Fiona couldn’t do that, not yet. Watching this footage was a great thing to do tomorrow, but not today. Never today. She could take a few hours off, though, as defeating as the notion was. She could wait for Arnaud to call, see how sleepy these pills were going to make her. If Claire wasn’t even in Paris, it made more sense to search online for “Kurt Pearce + arrest + Paris” (fruitless) and “how to move to France American citizen” (semi-informative) and “Hosanna Collective Paris” (also fruitless) than to wander the streets.
When Serge took off for the studio, she told him she was too tired. It was chilly out, but she opened the balcony doors, dragged a chair over, and listened to the sounds of the film crew. If she angled herself right, she could see the crowd, the lighting fixtures, the crane. She’d need to learn the movie’s name before she left town, so she could see this thing when it came out.
But she had no idea how long she’d be staying, or what her next step even was.
She held on her lap the book of Paris history she’d bought. She was too distracted to read, but the photos were lovely, evocative: women with fur stoles, men crossing a flood by stepping across café chairs, a nightclub entrance made to look like a monster’s gaping mouth.
She remembered what Nora had said once: “For us, Paris wasn’t even Paris. It was all a projection. It was whatever we needed it to be.”
This conversation had happened at the wedding where she’d told Nora to get in touch with Yale, where she’d written down Yale Tishman, Northwestern, Brigg on a cocktail napkin. It was her cousin Melanie’s wedding, north of Milwaukee, and Melanie had specifically invited Nico and Fiona but not their parents. She didn’t include Terrence—it would’ve been a step too far, maybe, for 1985 Wisconsin—but her loyalty was to her own generation. Fiona and her brother had walked in together, like dates.
Nico had lost weight, but Fiona thought nothing of it. He danced with Fiona, and he danced with the bride, and with their terrible cousin Debra, and he sat and entertained Nora. In his car on the way home, he rolled up the side of his shirt to show her a stripe of vicious red bumps, ones that made Fiona’s eyes water. “It’s shingles,” he said.
And when she freaked out, he said, “It itches like hell, but it’s the same thing as chicken pox. Anyone who ever had chicken pox can get it. The virus lives under your skin forever.”
He hadn’t been to his own doctor, she learned later, just to the ER, where they’d given him calamine lotion and a leaflet.
A month later, he and Terrence were shopping, and Terrence asked how much cash he had, and Nico spent a long minute staring at the ten dollar bill in one hand, the five dollar bill in the other hand, unable to add them together. And six weeks after that, he was gone.
She looked at the pigeon that had landed on the balcony rail. She was not ready to look at Richard’s videos, but maybe she could work her way there by looking through Richard’s photo albums. She closed the balcony, poured a glass of milk, took a few deep breaths.
There were probably twenty albums on the shelf, a fact Fiona hadn’t absorbed that first day. Rows of black leather, brown leather, colored canvas. Boxes full of slides, as well, but she wouldn’t mess with those.
When she pulled a thick red album off the shelf, though, a paper slipped out and landed on the floor. Fiona attempted to clutch the album closed before anything else fell, but she dropped the whole thing, and now there were papers everywhere. Cream-colored sheets folded in half, small cards, a lavender page with a grainy photo of a man. They were funeral bulletins and prayer cards. She got on her knees and started stacking them up. This wasn’t a photo album at all, she saw when she opened it to an old clipping from Out Loud Chicago, an obituary of someone who’d danced with the Alvin Ailey Theater.