Fifteen minutes after I heard her shower end, there was a knock on the guest room door. Anne had always been a fast dresser, much faster than me. To look at her, people assumed she spent hours preparing, pampering herself with different creams and potions in front of a vanity table, but she wasn’t like that at all. She was an expert dresser. Like a musician, she had different registers: power outfit, seduction, family gatherings, leisure. When I opened the door, I caught my breath. She’d gone with “Look what you risk losing, you fucking wanker”: navy Dries Van Noten cigarette kimono pants with a cream-and-rust-colored dragon slinking up the side, a pale pink double-paneled tank top made out of cashmere and silk with a vertiginous V-neck; black steel-toe and calf-hair booties that she’d gifted herself with after winning her first case. Over this, a thick felt coat the color of wet moss. Her eyes were lined with kohl, her hair was tousled, up.
“You look incredible,” I whispered.
She clutched her coat around her cleavage. “Should we go?”
In an effort to make the night feel different, I’d called us a cab. The car, sporting the logo of the only Parisian company that reliably showed up when called, was idling by the sidewalk when we locked the house. I gave him the address, the Pont de l’Alma, a stone bridge that connects the seventh arrondissement to the eighth. Anne looked at me knowingly before folding her hands in her lap.
“So?” I asked as the taxi edged us onto the Boulevard Raspail. “How’s it going with the case?”
She contemplated me before answering. “You look nice,” she said.
Shocked, I managed a thank-you.
“The case is going,” she continued, taking a lipstick out of her purse. “Jacques is holding us back a little, he’s very methodical. He doesn’t trust our energy, I think.”
I wanted to suggest that maybe he was just too old, but I held my tongue.
“The problem with a case like this is that your common sense keeps kicking in and saying it’s ridiculous—it’s ridiculous to not know not to drink, it’s ridiculous to not have some kind of role model around you, if not your family, at least the TV. I mean, it’s not like these women were living in a hut somewhere. Lille’s a major city. So we have to dig pretty deep to come up with a counterargument that isn’t rooted in, well, scorn.”
“When’s the trial?” I asked.
She sighed. “The Monday after next week.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah. So, do I get to know where we’re going, or is it a surprise?”
“You seem to have guessed the first place.”
I watched her face darken.
“Don’t worry,” I said as her gaze strained out the window. “We won’t be eating there.”
The Bateaux Mouches is a relatively old company that operates a fleet of tour boats around the Seine. They offer lunch cruises and dinner cruises with previously frozen, three-course dinners that are notoriously substandard, along with daytime and nighttime scenic trips. Whenever Anne and I take Camille for a walk along the river, at one point or another, the flat, white boats float by—the top level completely open, filled with happy tourists waving from their orange seats. At night, it’s thrilling to see them pass under the city’s most famous monuments, illuminating the stonework and the turrets with their dazzling web of lights, passing through Paris’s watery spleen like a massive flashlight.
Every time we pass one of these boats, Anne says the same thing: “Isn’t it funny that I’ve never been.” It makes sense, of course. The Bateaux Mouches are something you do as a tourist, much like the double-decker bus tours in London or New York. But I felt sure that deep inside her, she was dying to go. So that night we would.
When we arrived at the small port by the bridge, I rushed around to open the door for her before paying the cab. Then I offered my arm to assist her down the steep boat ramp that was decidedly not made for women in high heels.
“Top level or the bottom?”
It was the first week in November, and at 6 p.m., the evening air had a biting chill. But still, she answered, “Top.”
I gave the attendant the tickets I’d bought online and we went up the short staircase to the upper deck, where it became clear relatively quickly that all the other tourists had opted to stay warm in the glass-enclosed level below.
Once the boat churned into action, kicking up the dirty green water into modest waves, Anne sat down on a bench and took a pack of cigarettes out of her purse.
“What?” she said, with a defensive shrug when she saw me staring at her.
Anne and I had both been smokers when we met, but she gave it up when she was pregnant, and I, out of sympathy, did my damnedest to give it up, too. Later, when Camille was three or so, we started smoking again only at parties, pinching other people’s cigarettes because buying our own would signal that we were back to our bad ways. About two years ago, we gave it up for good. Which made the unopened pack of Davidoff’s on Anne’s lap even more surprising.
“I’ve been really stressed,” she said, taking one out. Gesturing to the space between us, she said, “This is stressful. You want?”
Fuck it, I thought, we might as well be on the same psychosomatic page.
And so we smoked as the boat chugged its way toward the monuments both historical and recent: the Palais de Chaillot, the tunnel where Princess Diana died, the Champs de Mars, the Eiffel Tower.
“Do you think, though,” I asked, pulling my scarf tighter around my neck, “that you’ll win?”
I watched her pull elegantly on the cigarette. “I don’t know. I felt sure we would. But now?”
“And who’s this Thomas fellow? Is he good?”
She narrowed her eyes at me.
“What?” I said. “I can’t help it.”
She exhaled a halo of gray smoke. “Try.”
And so I tried. We talked more about her case, both the sureties and the chances, before I told her about my ideas for WarWash: that I was going to ritually cleanse both my country and my own mistakes. In gas.
She ran her hand over the railing, stretched her fingers toward the water.
“So you’ll be washing what, like old letters? The British flag?”
I decided to take the sting of her comment without commenting on it myself. “Yeah, basically. Some things that allude to the future, a lot of things from the past.”
She started fiddling with her wedding ring. Dark tendrils of hair danced around her neck, shaken by the wind. I longed to touch her face.
“The thing about this project, though, is that Julien won’t take it,” I continued, stubbing the cigarette out under my shoe. “We had a fight about it, actually.” Anne raised her eyebrows, which encouraged me to go on.
“You know, he wants me to keep doing the same old, same old. But the oils—they were a fluke, really. An intermission.”
“So find someone who will, then,” she said. “Find another gallery.”
I stared at her, amazed. Where art thou, my pragmatist?
“The thing is, Richard,” she said, tossing her Davidoff into the Seine. “It’s his business. He has the right to choose what he does and doesn’t want to sell. And it would be good for you to have extra representation.”
“Oh no,” I said. “It would be incredible. But it’s not going to be easy, pitching something made with gas.”
“It’s the content that matters,” she said, shrugging. “People display noxious things—used tampons, dead animals—all the time. Most of the time, it’s laughable. You just have to make it good.”
“So you think it’s worth doing?” I held my breath.
She pulled her coat around her. “Of course.”
I wanted to ask her so many other questions. Do you really think so? Would you love me more? But instead, we both fell silent as we approached the majestic white-and-gold bridge that graced the entrance to the Invalides.
“Tell me,” she said quietly. “The Blue Bear. Did you really try and get it back?”
I nodded. “I kind of barged in. I begged.”
“But why?”
“Because I do care about that painting. When I painted it, the way I was when I painted it.” I looked down at my sneakers. “The way we were.”
Her attention strayed to the bridge, where a fleet of winged horses presided over the passing cars and pedestrians above us.
“You remember how that bathroom always smelled like french fries?” she asked.
I laughed. The people we’d been house-sitting for in Cape Cod that summer had two children, and whether it was a proclivity for fast food so entrenched that it had literally become part of the walls, or if it had been some cleaning product with a high percentage of canola oil, it was true, the bathroom had smelled like fries.
“I wonder what they’re up to,” I said, thinking of Charles and Donna. Back then, we’d been such good friends. “We should get in touch.”
Anne looked away from me, and I felt the numbness that comes from having said the wrong thing. On both sides of us, the flesh- and beige-colored buildings of Paris passed us by.
“I want you to tell me one thing,” she said finally, pulling her coat tighter around her throat. “You didn’t sell it to her? She really didn’t buy it? That’s not why you wanted it back?”
I felt pinpricks through my body. “I promise you, it wasn’t. It went to two men, a couple.”
She looked unconvinced. “You promise?”
“I swear.”
“But she’s in London?”
I swallowed. “Yes.”
“Was she when this started?”
I shook my head.
“She was in Paris.”
“Yes.”
She bit her lip and looked away from me. She reached for a tissue from her purse, but just sat with it, wringing it between her hands.
“In Paris,” she said. “How long?”
My heart was caged. “How long was she in Paris?”
“How long did it last?”
I looked away from her toward the water again, the slope of the embankments, the weathered houseboats lined up against the Seine.
“Richard?”
“Seven months.”
Her face lost color. I thought I might be sick.
“But it wasn’t—”
She held her hand up. She closed her eyes. “Don’t.”
An older couple mounted the staircase and nodded hello before moving to the front of the boat to take their seats. The man took a camera out of his knapsack. The woman fluffed her hair.
“What did I do to you?” Anne asked. “What did we do?”
The wind made my eyes smart. I was already close to tears. “It wasn’t your fault. It wasn’t anything you did—”
“Of course it wasn’t something I did. You did this. You.”
I looked down at the orange vinyl floor, cracked here and there and coated in grime. At the bow of the boat, the older woman changed positions, insisting that her husband take a photo of her in profile against the Seine.
“If you could have any idea how sorry I am to have hurt you.”
Anne closed her eyes. “Don’t. Don’t. There’s nothing you can say.” She brought the tissue she’d been clutching up to her face. “It fucking makes me sick, Richard. Seven months.” She put her hand against her stomach. She actually looked ill.
“I’ll get you something,” I said, rising because she, too, had taken to her feet.
“I need to be alone awhile,” she said, pushing me away. “I’m going downstairs.”
She walked quickly to the staircase, but I didn’t go after her. Seven months. It was too long.
I sat down, trembling from the falling temperature and regret. Probably, when we docked, Anne would ask to go home. And she would have every right to. I was a fool to think we could solve this on a fucking date. I was a fool to think I could solve any of the problems that I’d started. We were just digging deeper now, down through the silt loam, into the worms.
I had scheduled the next part of the itinerary for comic relief, but when we docked at the Maison de la Radio, a circular gray structure that looked like it was inspired by a Cold War diaphragm, I was mortified by my naïveté. If by some miracle, Anne hadn’t already hailed a taxi, the least that I could reward her with was a confession that we were going to one of the city’s top restaurants: something stupefyingly expensive and atmospheric, Le Tour d’Argent, or Jules Verne. Instead, I’d picked a twenty-four-hour steak house chain named Hippopotamus, a red, black, and gray temple of bad taste where the dishes were bottomless: you could eat as much steak and creamed spinach and roasted potatoes as you wanted.
When we’d first moved to Paris, when Inès’s greatest joy was babysitting her new grandchild, we’d arranged decadent weekly date nights, pushing ourselves to make our evening as riotous and splendid as possible so that the happy fuel would last us through the gummy take-away dinners and predawn risings that characterized our life as new parents.
We went dancing, drinking—we’ve always loved to dance. When we got bored with one club, we went to another, knowing that inevitably we’d end up at Le Pulp, a gritty lesbian-run establishment in the Grands Boulevards district around the opera house. Here, we’d slug ourselves silly with tepid beer and dance to indie pop music until we were famished and dehydrated, ready to eat.
The Hippo chain by the opera was just a short walk from the Pulp, and even though the quality of meat was far from exemplary and the place was full of bloated men in metallic blazers who had pilgrimaged there from the nearby strip clubs, we loved the contagious charm of the provincial waiters and the endless cuts of steak that would appear alongside a bowl of frites and sizzling vegetables as soon as we had ordered.
It was our little secret—our cheesy place. Now, with Camille older (and eating solid foods), Anne paid more attention to our diet. She was always reading labels, tracking down the provenance of our culinary choices. Our late-night trips to the Hippopotamus had become a ritual of the past.
But when I found her waiting for me at the bottom of the boat ramp, I decided not to lie. It was clear that she’d been crying, but she also had a look of pride back in her face. Her lips were freshly touched with lipstick, her posture was straight.
“So,” she said, her arms crossed. “What now?”
“If I said ‘Hippo Malin’. . . ?” My heart was beating wildly.
She shook her head, the faintest glimmer of a smile passing ephemerally across her lips.
“I’d say you’re an asshole,” she said, shifting her purse on her shoulder. “But yes.”
• • •
The Hippopotamus was packed—a good thing, as it allowed us a distraction while we sat at our table and waited for the menus to arrive. I felt completely anchorless. On one hand, the rhythms and habits of our last decade together were literally within reach, but on the other, there was this fucking iceberg between us and it was my fault that it was there, and both of us knew there was no way around the crash.
“So, are you thinking Hippo Malin?” I asked cheerfully once the menus arrived.
Under the heading For the love of meat, the Hippopotamus had a variety of prix fixe menu options, and our favorite, the preposterously named Clever Hippo, consisted of either an appetizer and an entrée or an entrée and a dessert for nineteen euros.
“I don’t know,” she said, turning a plastic-coated menu page. “I’m not very hungry.”
I looked at her, and longed for her, and wished that I could simply reach out and take her hand and make everything all right.
“Please, Anne,” I said softly. “Please order the Clever Hippo.”
She looked up, clearly astonished to see that my earnestness was genuine, but said nothing else u
ntil the waiter arrived.
“Welcome to Hippopotamus!” Our young attendant had lightly spiked hair and reeked of Drakkar Noir. “My name is Antoine. Can I get you two started with one of our signature cocktails?”
“I think we’re ready to order, actually,” said Anne.
“Wonderful. What can I get you?”
“I’ll have the Hippo Malin menu,” said Anne, keeping her eyes on the table. “With the tomato tartare and the Hippo steak.”
“Excellent choice. And you, monsieur?”
“I’ll have exactly the same. Rare?” I looked at Anne for confirmation. “Both rare.”
“Faultless! And are you aware of our new Beef Effects?”
“I’m sorry?” said Anne.
Antoine opened up her menu to a page near the back. “On our new list of Beef Effects are highly favorable options for guests of all persuasions. Have you just been to the cinema?”
“Uh, no,” I said.
He turned the page. “Well, you might appreciate the Beef Effect Gourmand. You can have unlimited sauces for your steak.”
“But isn’t that always the case?” asked Anne.
Antoine shut the menu. “And will you be drinking wine?”
“Please,” said Anne. “The Côtes du Rhône.”
“Very good!” he said, gathering our menus. “I’ll get your carpaccios right out.”
“A for effort,” I said, when he was gone.
“You get five euros off if you’ve just seen a movie,” she remarked, raising her eyebrows at the Beef Effect Cinema option. “Not bad.”
We sat in silence and drank from the carafe of water on the table, waiting rather conspicuously for our bottle of wine. When it arrived, we waited until Antoine had left again to pour ourselves much larger portions than he’d originally served.
We raised our glasses but did not clink them together. The service at Hippopotamus was excessively efficient. We didn’t have a lot of time.
“Can I ask you if they said anything?” I asked, tracing the outline of the French map on the paper tablecloth. “Your parents, when I left?”
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