“Okay.” She reached her hand across the table, readying herself for coherence. “Okay. You, Emily Cooper, Percy.”
“You can’t put me in a position to fuck myself.”
“Such ego! How do you know I’m not putting you in a position to kill yourself ? Fine: Percy, Emily, and me.”
She raised an eyebrow and made a shooing gesture.
“Kill Emily. That’s a given. Over the cliff she goes. The thing is, I already live with Percy, so there’s a common-law marriage vibe to our relationship. But then what? You don’t want to get fucked by default, do you?”
“I don’t want to get married by default either.”
Her lips were stained with wine. Her teeth looked huge against them.
“I wish we had some tequila.” She kicked off her shoes, one of them just missing the possible Cézanne.
“Wrong country.”
She flopped down in one of the chairs on the far side of their room, got back up, and flopped down in a different one. She tested her weight on the canvas straps of a luggage rack. He unbuttoned the cuffs on his shirt while she skipped to the liquor cabinet, a wooden chest with an inlaid star medallion.
“They must have tequila in France.” She crouched down and spun the bottles to face her. “Especially at a place like this. But I won’t eat the sea horse if I find it.”
The dirty soles of her feet seesawed back and forth, struggling for balance.
“Is that code for something?”
“The sea horse.” She hiccupped. “In the tequila.”
“The worm?”
“That’s what I said, the sea worm.”
Eventually, Kezia gave up the search. She opened one of the windows and leaned into the salty breeze. He crossed the room, trying to straighten out. He leaned with her, inhaling and stretching his arm back to put his hand around her waist. She looked at the hand as if it belonged to a third party.
“God,” she said, thumping on the sill to make her point. “God!”
“What?”
“Look where we are. How did we get here?”
“I want to say ‘by car.’”
“Okay, I’m gonna ask you a serious question. Do you think . . . do you think we’re all hanging on to a past that isn’t hanging on to us back? Not to be dramatic but, like, maybe all our friendships from college should have a big DNR bracelet on them. Do Not Resuscitate.”
“I know what DNR means. But I can’t answer that for you.”
Actually, he could. It was the same sense of remove she had tried to express last night. But why give shape to her shifting perceptions about him by talking about them? He was Dorian Gray and she was the painting: If she stopped remembering him the way he used to be, he feared that version of himself would cease to exist.
“Hmmm.” She looked up at the sky.
Sober Kezia might have attacked him for not having an answer. Drunk Kezia put such questions to bed shortly after she posed them.
“I wonder what sound sea horses make.” She smashed her chin against her palm.
“Kezia?” Nathaniel pressed his nose against hers.
“Oui?” She hiccupped.
He pressed her closer. Her breath smelled of sauces and wine. Her lips were relaxed. She opened her eyes. From this close, she looked like a sexy Cyclops. He pressed gently on the cartilage in her nose. Her mouth opened in a way that he found so irresistible, he thought he might fall on top of her.
“Hi,” he said, and kissed her, really kissed her.
She seemed surprised but then she kissed him back, tannic tongue and all, grabbing the back of his head.
They backed away from the window and sidestepped the maze of furniture that stood between them and the bed. She pulled away from his face and looked at his eyes, one eye and then the other, as if trying to separate a doctored photograph from the original. He brushed both straps of her dress off her shoulders but the dress stayed up.
“Huh.” He frowned.
She pulled down a hidden zipper at her side. It made a noise like a tiny engine starting. Then the underwear came off, twisting down her legs.
She seemed alternately proud of and embarrassed at being naked. She apologized for “the state of her feet” as she pushed him gently onto his back, seemingly determined that he take her in from specific angles. But he wanted all of the angles. He turned off one of the bedside lamps but purposely left one on. By now they were both out of clothing and Nathaniel could sense part of his brain split from him. It hadn’t gone very far—it was sitting on an overstuffed tuffet, watching this all happen.
She was soft, even the feet, and he moved up, kissing her neck before moving back down over her breasts until his head was at her pelvis.
“Oh,” she said, flinging her forearm over her face.
He didn’t want her overthinking this. He shifted her legs harder against his shoulders in an attempt to make her forget. Then he climbed up the length of her body, wiping his mouth against her shoulder. He pressed his face into her neck, glancing down to confirm that everything was aligned. She pulled him close.
They fit perfectly together. Better than Bean, somehow, though he couldn’t say how. Maybe it was psychological, the intoxicating blend of the familiar and the unknown. All that casual curiosity answered. Or maybe Kezia had a magical vagina that squeezed him in exactly the right way. She did feel hot inside, temperature-wise. And she got wet the second he touched her. Or maybe it was just the way they looked at each other—pleasantly dazed.
Afterward, she slung a leg over his and lay there with her hair stretched up over the pillow. Normally, in these moments, he felt the pressure to say something. Not a lie, exactly, but a nicety to mollify the resentments that would invariably accrue when he disappointed the woman next to him. But feeling no pressure, he just lived in the silence until a space opened up of its own accord. Into that space flooded unfamiliar emotions—emotions that behaved as if they had been standing for years and only now allowed to sit. He could feel his heart beat in his temples. The words came with such uncluttered force, he practically shouted them:
“I love everything about you.”
She kissed him and wrapped her arm around him. He was waiting for a response, brushing his fingers in circles on her shoulder, watching the moment when she could reasonably say something in return get farther away. He began preparing his defenses. Maybe it was better for her not to say it back. Maybe it wasn’t real and he just wanted to hear what it sounded like to be that passionate about something. Maybe this was like missing the last train to a destination you weren’t so sure you wanted to go to anyway.
She lifted her face toward his.
“Well, that’s definitely not true,” she whispered, her smile pushing against his chest.
FORTY-FOUR
Victor
From the outside, the Dieppe jail looked more like a car rental outpost. The letters police municipale were painted on the pavement and compact police cars were parked in a row. Inside, the waiting area was covered in pictures of retired policemen and service plaques. The room itself was bare except for a desk, a cactus (an odd choice for a jail plant), and an ATM, which Victor found comforting. What happened here demanded temporary capitalism, not permanent incarceration.
Two cops, a woman with a low ponytail and a man with a goatee, chatted by a water cooler while Victor and his left wrist were handcuffed to a bench. Stuck to the wall behind him was a poster of known Norman criminals, one of whom Victor was pretty sure was Face Veins. At least he had been kneed in the face by a professional.
It was about an hour between when the Ardurats locked him in their daughter’s bedroom and the arrival of the police. Another few minutes passed while Victor pleaded his harmlessness in choppy French and, somehow, even choppier English. Finally, two cops burst into the room, one holding a gun. Victor had his arms up and his head down, so he didn’t get a good look at the gun. He was escorted in the semidarkness down the marble stairs. Alexia and her mother were in another wing of
their house now, Mrs. Ardurat probably trying to curtail permanent psychological damage (fear of entering one’s own bedroom, say).
The cops shoved Victor into a car and yelled in French through a mesh barrier. Mr. Ardurat had to fill out a police report and so he got in his own vehicle and followed them out the driveway, through aisles of gnarled trees and bushes, their branches scraping against the window. Victor’s rental bike was somewhere in those woods. He twisted around in his pleather seat and watched the château recede. There was something up-and-down about the silhouette of the roof, as if it had been sketched by a cardiogram needle.
At first it seemed like they might question but not arrest him. His story was too outlandish to be menacing. But things took a turn for the worse when they asked Victor to provide a second source of identification, in addition to his passport. He had no other identification. The tracksuited thugs of Rouen had stolen his wallet. They were roaming free, the actually dangerous criminals, while Victor was sitting here.
There were three chambres in the back of the jail. Two of which were meant for one, maybe two people. They had flimsy plastic chairs and low urinals. The third was big enough to accommodate an entire gang of looters and rapists. All the rooms were empty but it was only 2:00 a.m., 8:00 p.m. in criminal hours. They put him in the biggest room. He saw Mr. Ardurat at the end of the hall being interrogated by a police officer, reenacting the evening’s events with his hands. His bald head was flush with anger—a better emotion than fear, for both their sakes.
Victor’s line of vision was interrupted by a stout female officer. She held a piece of paper through the bars. He took a step back. He didn’t know much—this was obvious—but he had seen enough movies to know not to sign anything. She shook the paper and winked at him. Winked. Just like the woman on the Métro and the girl at the bicycle shop. He leaned forward and saw that instead of an affidavit, she held a blank piece of paper.
“Le pianiste, ouais?”
“What?”
“J’ai adoré Minuit à Paris, Monsieur Brody.”
“No, no . . . I’m not—”
She shook the paper again. Like pigeons.
“Fuck it,” he said, taking her pen and signing Adrien Brody’s name. The male cop who had done the head-shoving back at the château whispered hotly at her and shooed her away, but not before she had the chance to blow Victor a kiss.
The cop pulled up a plastic chair, scraping it along the concrete floor. He had a disproportionately square head, like a human Pez dispenser. Victor’s face was healing and his eye was beginning to itch around the perimeter. The cop sat in the chair with his legs open, and dropped Victor’s duffel in between them. He did not want Victor’s autograph. Victor stood as the cop unzipped the duffel.
“C’est quoi, ça?” He held the nose-hair trimmer.
“It’s for nose hair.”
“Nose hair?”
“Follicules of le nez.” Victor tilted his head and made a scissors gesture.
The cop gave him a look of amused pity and leaned his clipboard against his knee.
“Do you want to contact the U.S. consulate?”
“Do I need to contact the U.S. consulate?”
“Has it been explained to you adequately that you may consult a French lawyer?”
“I mean . . . you’re explaining it to me now. Do I need a lawyer?”
Victor could not afford a lawyer in any currency.
“I do not know.” The cop clicked his pen and leaned on the clipboard. “I am not you. Tell me, why were you on the château property?”
“I had taken the tour earlier that day.”
“Did you pay for a ticket?”
So deep ran Victor’s criminality, he’d lost track of his crimes. Now was probably a bad time to mention the bicycle.
“Why did you not leave after they closed?”
“I was looking around and I must have fallen asleep in the garden shed.”
“Surely the shed was not open, not part of the official tour.”
“It wasn’t locked, there was just a little metal latch and I unhooked it.”
“And this looked like a good place to nap for you?”
“I haven’t been feeling well.”
The cop raised his eyebrows and leaned his head back on his Pezy neck. Then he checked off a box on his clipboard and scribbled something in the margins.
“Physically.” Victor wanted that note erased. “Mentally, I’m okay.”
“Why did you not stay in the shed until dawn?”
“My cell phone died, so I thought I could use the phone in the main house.”
“Monsieur Wexler, it is a crime in France to lie to a police officer.”
“Even if we’re not in court?”
“Where are you staying when you are not breaking into châteaus?”
“I was staying with a friend—”
“Not a very good one if you are forced to sleep in garden sheds.”
“He lives in Rouen.”
“And you came to Rouen by train? Do you have your ticket stub?”
“No, it’s in my wallet.”
“You told the arresting officers that you were mugged in Rouen. Your friend did not report this to the police there?”
“I seriously doubt it.”
“What is his information please?”
“I don’t have it. I just met him that night.”
“Where?”
“In a bar. I don’t know the name of the bar.”
“Is that how you got the bruises on your face?”
“Sorry?”
“Because of a . . . rough encounter? You and this man had the sex?”
“What? No. Do you think I’m a prostitute?” Victor felt a flicker of flattery.
“I do not think anything of you. What is the name of your airline?”
“United.” Victor gulped, and the cop scribbled. “Are you going to keep me over the weekend for questioning?”
“Au contraire.” The cop retracted his pen. “We want to confirm that you are leaving. You are very lucky. Monsieur Ardurat is not going to be pressing charges and we cannot compel him to testify even though you are guilty of breaking into government property.”
Victor couldn’t believe it. Mr. Ardurat would not press shahjiz. He began to thank the cop, as if he personally had done him this favor, but then it occurred to him—he was still behind bars.
“Get some rest, Monsieur Wexler, I have to finish your paperwork.”
“Okay, thanks,” Victor said, eyes on his duffel, still in the cop’s grip.
FORTY-FIVE
Kezia
She got up in slow motion and brought her phone with her to the bathroom, using it as a flashlight. It was late morning but the room’s heavy curtains had helped them sleep in. She had four missed calls from Sophie and two messages, both left in a barely concealed tone of panic. The first was about the website. It was loading to 75 percent (Other people are just beads on the thread . . . ) and freezing. But the next one contained an actual problem. All the samples for the upcoming season should have been in by now. But a pair of earrings had been lost in the mail and their replacements wouldn’t arrive until after the collection had been photographed. Should the earrings therefore be left out of the catalog entirely? Or was it worth delaying the press materials? Decisions, decisions. Sophie professed her desire “not to bother” Rachel with “such a teeny thingy” while she was in Japan.
Let Sophie solve her own problems like a grown-up. There would be another Sophie along shortly. New York was swarmed with Sophies. This week had been a nice break from them. Kezia was sick of being bombarded by them, tired of their childlike sexuality dictating how she should be. “You know what’s important?” the Sophies said. “Finding yourself! Whatever self you had when you were twelve? That’s who you are. That girl. You should have stuck. Any movement past twelve was a move in the wrong direction. True, this means you’ve completely wasted decades becoming an adult, but it’s not too late for you to
prioritize the polka dot, adopt a bunny, name him Miu Miu. If there is no ironic picnic spot near your home, one can be provided for you.”
She would never be a Sophie. She was a grown woman who got uneven hairs around her nipples, who did not want to give herself daily affirmations in the mirror, who wouldn’t dream of stepping on her bathroom scale without peeing first, who got tested for diseases, and engaged in genuinely nasty fights with the cable company. Was this so wrong?
She believed, in some indirect way, that last night could be blamed on the Sophies. It was their fault that for years she had let herself believe she was in love with a man who showed no interest in having a relationship. A childlike crush. They did this. They (with the help of several bottles of French wine) had made Nathaniel Healy her romantic ideal: a boyish emotionally unavailable man-child who lived across the country. They had infiltrated her mind. But where were they now that she and Nathaniel had slept together? Back in New York maybe. They were not here to tell her what came next. She would have to leave this bathroom without them.
She strummed her toes on the tile. She thought Nathaniel was teasing when he said he loved everything about her. Once she realized he was being sincere, she couldn’t say it back. She wanted to give the gift of him saying it to her younger self, the one who needed to hear it. She wanted to wrap up the words in a ribbon and leave it outside nineteen-year-old Kezia’s dorm room. The truth was, as recently as last week it would have been a pretty solid gift. But something deep down had grown bored of wanting him, tired of being more interested in his life than he was in hers. Only now did it occur to her that her maternity ward dream was not about heartbreak. It was her subconscious, waving goodbye.
“You fall in?” Nathaniel rapped gently on the door. “We gotta check out.”
“Right.” She pushed the “cold” faucet. “Be right out!”
She took a wrapped bar of soap from the shelf above the sink. In tiny print at the bottom: “Une propriété de Markson.”
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