“Oh.”
“It’s my ex. I guess—you know, the other night, I mentioned my friend Andrew in front of Kurt. Kurt’s so smart, and he notices more than I think. He misunderstood, though, and he thought you were sick. He doesn’t mind. He knows Andrew and everything, and—”
“He told your ex I have AIDS.”
“I explained that you didn’t. Basically I told the truth, I said you’d been exposed to the virus. But Bruce freaked out, and he’s saying he can’t believe you’re staying with us, eating food with us. It’s ridiculous, but this is what he’s like.”
“It wouldn’t help for me to talk to him, would it?”
“The thing is, we haven’t always agreed on custody details, and he thinks he could use this somehow in court.” She bit her top lip with her bottom teeth.
He felt suddenly exhausted. “Got it. Honestly, he probably could. If he got the right judge.” Yale looked down at his sweatpants, his bare feet. He said, “If I stayed one more night, do you think that would be okay?” He felt terrible asking. He’d compromised Cecily’s career, and now he was upsetting her family. This woman barely had it together, and Yale was stomping across her life.
“Of course! But then—”
“I’ll clear out in the morning.”
“I’m sorry, Yale. And Kurt feels terrible. He knows he messed up. What’s funny is Kurt didn’t even mind, he just thinks it’s interesting. He’s been hearing about it on the news.”
“He didn’t mess up. Can you let him know that?”
“This was the last thing you needed.”
Yale said, honestly, “It means more that you would take me in than that someone wouldn’t want me here.”
“Kurt’s worried about you. I told him you aren’t sick, but he’s worried everyone’s going to be mean to you.”
“Well, I might get sick.”
She nodded, serious. “I feel so strongly that you’re going to be okay.”
“Are you okay?” he said. “Your job?”
She hesitated. “As long as those paintings are real, I’m probably fine.” Her face was pinched, and he wasn’t convinced she was giving him the whole story. “Even if they’re not, it’s just a job, Yale. This has reminded me of that, you know? There are more serious things.”
In the morning, Yale was dressed and shaved and out the door with his stuff before Kurt and Cecily’s alarms went off.
2015
She didn’t have Arnaud’s permission to do this, but what the hell did she care about Arnaud? Arnaud wanted to stretch things out. Arnaud was getting paid.
Plus when Jake showed up at Richard’s flat late the next afternoon, she wanted to hustle him out of there. If he was there to bother Richard, he needed to leave, and if he was there to bother her, he could do it elsewhere. So before Serge could invite him to sit down, get him a drink, Fiona grabbed his arm and said, “I need your help with something,” and dragged him outside.
“I know where he lives now,” she said. “The guy, the one who roped her into the cult. We’re going back there.”
“We?”
“You’re bigger than me. You’re not as big as him, I should warn you. But he’s not an athlete or anything.”
“Oh. Great.”
But he followed, got in the cab.
She said, “So you’re really not an alcoholic?”
“I don’t know. I’ve taken some of those online tests. Here’s what it is: In America, I’m considered a heavy drinker. In France, I’m completely normal.”
She laughed, felt her pocket to make sure she hadn’t left her phone at Richard’s. “If I dropped you into the eighties, into my group of friends, you’d be a monk.”
“Lots of parties?”
“We all had drinking problems. Every single one of us, except some of the ones with drug problems.”
“And you survived!” he said. “You’re still here!”
God, she hated him right then.
She said, “Listen, when we get there, don’t talk. You’ll be scarier if you’re silent.”
“Sure,” he said. “I’m the muscle.”
She brushed his hand away before it even made contact with her knee.
* * *
—
Fiona hoped, as they knocked, as her stomach did painful gymnastics, that the wife would answer. That she’d invite them in, and Kurt would return from work to find them all on the couch, drinking tea. But it was Kurt who answered, stared blankly. He looked more at Jake than at Fiona until, finally, he turned to her and his eyes went wide, his hand went to his ponytail.
“Ohhhhh,” he said. “Hey. I— Oh, wow. Hey. Fiona.”
Fiona said, “We’re coming in,” and she ducked under his arm and into an apartment that—with grocery bags on the counter and an open laptop on the couch—looked significantly fuller and warmer than it had yesterday.
Fiona had spent an inordinate amount of her adult life engaged in two different ongoing fantasies. One, especially lately, was the exercise in which she’d walk through Chicago and try to bring it back as it was in 1984, 1985. She’d start by picturing brown cars on the street. Brown cars parked nose-to-tail, mufflers falling off. Instead of the Gap, the Woolworth’s with the lunch counter. Wax Trax! Records, where the oral surgeon was now. And if she could see all that, then she could see her boys on the sidewalks in bomber jackets, calling after each other, running to cross before the light changed. She could see Nico in the distance, walking toward her.
The other fantasy was the one where Nico walked beside her everywhere, wondering what the hell things were. He was Rip Van Winkle, and it was her job to explain the modern world. She’d done it at O’Hare on her way here. Focused as she was on Claire, on getting to Paris, she’d suddenly had Nico beside her on the moving walkway as it rolled past a sign advertising “a firewall for your cloud.” How could she even begin to explain why a cloud needed a wall of fire? And once he was in her head, he was following her all around the terminal—ordering food with her off the iPad at the pizza counter, jumping at the autoflush toilet, reading the scroll at the bottom of CNN and asking what Bitcoins were. He asked why everyone was staring at calculators. “You’re living in the future,” he whispered. “Feef, this is the future.” And when she saw something he’d fully understand—a baby crying for a dropped pacifier, a McDonald’s, a whole wall (was it still possible?) of pay phones—she felt the world had been set right.