Was it possible that this was the stone in Claire’s shoe? That it wasn’t about Fiona’s affair, the divorce, at all? Her hand was throbbing, taking all the ache that should have been in her head, her gut.
“She grew up knowing she’d ruined your life,” Kurt said. “What do you think that does to a person?”
Fiona stood, too, and Jake took a step into the room, like he was getting ready to dive between them. “First of all, I never said that to her. It was something Damian told her, in the middle of the divorce, to poison her against me. Second, yes, that was one of the worst days of my life, although lord knows I’ve had lots of them, but it had nothing to do with Claire. This isn’t some huge secret. It was a terrible day, a shitshow. That doesn’t mean I didn’t want her, and it didn’t change the way I raised her.”
“Hey. I’m not saying—I remember that day too. I was—”
“You don’t think that’s more than a little fucked up, that you remember the day your girlfriend was born?”
“She’s not my girlfriend.” He held his hands up, an unattackable Buddha. “I’m trying to help you out here. You want to make things right with her, this is the swamp you have to wade through, okay? Claire is—she’s not a happy person. I don’t think she’d ever have been happy, no matter what you did. It’s like bad astrology or something. She’s just a fundamentally angry human. You weren’t a bad mother.”
But why did it hurt so much, if it wasn’t true?
“Listen, I need to ask you to get out of here before my wife gets home. She’s not a fan of the Claire drama.”
“Does she know Claire?” Fiona said.
Kurt opened his mouth but then stopped. He’d caught her trick.
She said, “Can you at least pass a message on?”
He shook his head slowly. She had fully expected him to say yes. “I’m barely in her good graces. I bring this to her, and maybe she takes it out on me. If she finds out I talked to you, let you in . . .”
Jake said, “What about an email address?” Fiona didn’t mind him talking; it was time to team up.
Kurt went to the door, opened it for them, though Fiona didn’t move. “Here’s what I can give you: Everyone’s okay, everyone’s safe. You want to leave me your number? I can promise I’d call you if anything bad ever happened.”
“You’ll tell me if she dies? How thoughtful.”
“That’s not what I—”
“Look, what about the little girl? Is she yours?”
Kurt put an enormous hand not on Fiona’s shoulder but on Jake’s, and steered him effortlessly through the doorway. Like guiding a toy boat. Fiona quickly fished a pen and her old boarding pass from her purse, wrote her number down.
She said, before she walked out the door, “You’re a father. Think about what this feels like. Use your imagination. I know you used to have one.”
* * *
—
Out on the street, Jake wrapped Fiona in a hug, pressed his beard and lips to her forehead. He said, “I can tell you’re a good mom.”
Fiona worried he would ask where she was going, ask if he could tag along, but she told him she needed to be alone—she was well practiced at shaking men—and she got in a cab and asked the driver to take her to Montparnasse. She didn’t want to go back to Richard’s, she knew that much, even though her hand felt like it was touching a live wire and she’d forgotten to bring the painkillers. “Promise me you’ll practice self-care,” her shrink had said to her before she left, and she didn’t imagine Elena had meant fucking vagrant former pilots. She could have a nice dinner; that was one thing she could do.
She wound up at La Rotonde, the place Aunt Nora used to talk about, the place, if Fiona remembered right, where Ranko Novak lost his mind. Or was it Modigliani? In any case, she sat inside where it was warm, and she ordered soupe à l’oignon gratinée and wished she weren’t surrounded by so many English-speakers. There were no scruffy, drunk artists, no absinthe-drinking models, no great expat poets.
Well, how would she know? Maybe that table in the corner was full of them.
She’d asked Nora once if she’d ever met Hemingway, and Nora had said, “If I did, he didn’t make an impression.”
But she imagined that in the intervening decades, the avant-garde had changed its meet-up spot.
If this was really where Ranko Novak had lost it, it seemed an odd place. Everything was warm and red and magical, and the soup was so good.
Well, if you were going to be miserable, you could be miserable anywhere. She’d known that for years: the way one person could starve to death at the banquet, the way you could sob through the funniest movie.
The waiter asked if she would like dessert. She ordered another soup instead, exactly the same as the first.
1986
After the gallery closed, Yale brushed his teeth in the bathroom. He shaved again so he’d look okay in the morning, and he changed his shirt. He left his things under his desk.
Evanston was not a town where places stayed open all night, and he thought he’d have a better chance in the city, so he went back down on the El. His plan was to stay pretty south on Clark, where Charlie wasn’t as likely to be. He started down at Inner Circle, which was dead, and then he headed up toward Cheeks to see if the cute bald bartender was working. He was a block away when he saw, in front of him on the sidewalk, the back of Bill Lindsey, his loping gait. Yale froze and figured he’d backtrack, but then Bill looked over his shoulder and stopped and called to Yale, gave a giant wave that Yale couldn’t pretend not to have seen.
When Yale caught up, Bill said, “You live near here, yes? It’s not an area I know too well.”
“Bit north of here.”
“Well, this is serendipity! I have something in my car that I forgot to bring to the office today. You’re going to be thrilled.”
And so Yale found himself following Bill to his Buick, the same car they’d all ridden triumphantly back from Wisconsin in. Bill was parked right outside Cheeks. He didn’t seem embarrassed at all, except that he was talking faster than usual.
“Look!” Bill said, and thrust an enormous book at him. Yale rested it on the car’s hood.
Pascin: Catalogue raisonné: Peintures, aquarelles, pastels, dessins. The second volume. Bill said, “Page sixty. Tell me what you see.”
“Oh.” A woman in a chair, blonde waves parted far to one side, a nightgown falling off her shoulders, pooling in her lap. The pose was exactly the same as in Nora’s supposed Pascin study. The face was the same. The only difference was that here she wore clothes. Yale said, “That’s great news.” He felt like laughing. That his luck should be so good only at work.