“Can I ask what happened to him? To Julian?”
“What the fuck do you think happened?”
“Fiona, you’re—”
“He was an actor with no family and no health insurance, and he could’ve gotten some decent support at least if he’d stayed in Chicago, if he’d stuck around till the drugs came out, but instead he took off and died alone and I don’t even know where.”
“You’re bleeding.”
“What?”
“Your hand.”
She looked down. The empty champagne flute, which she’d been holding tightly, was cracked. A droplet of blood ran down her right wrist and another ran down the outside of the glass. When she peeled her hand back, the whole glass fell apart, shattering onto the floor.
The room went gray at the edges, and voices closed in. Corinne was there, holding a towel under her hand, guiding her to a wallpapered little bathroom with golden faucets, sitting her on the closed toilet.
Now Corinne’s husband was kneeling in front of Fiona with a pair of tweezers, slowly picking out the shards embedded all over her palm.
“I’m so embarrassed,” she said when everything was back in focus, when Corinne had left to clean up the mess.
“This is not allowed.” His voice was phlegmy and deep. There was something regal about the top of his bent head, his gel-combed white hair. Fernand, she reminded herself. Fernand the important critic. Nothing here was recognizable as her own life. This man, this room, this blood.
He massaged the meat of her palm gently, peered at her hand through his glasses.
“Thank you,” she said. “Have you done this before?”
“I’m just finding the bits of light.”
Fiona imagined her palm littered with a thousand slivers of reflective glass, ones she could carry with her forever. Her whole body ought to be like that. Her skin ought to cut the people who touched it.
She wanted to say nice things to him, but didn’t want to sit here endlessly repeating her thanks. “Do you paint, too? Besides the critic stuff? Your hands are so steady.”
“I studied painting.” He looked up and smiled, and she felt she could stay in the bathroom forever, being taken care of. “Terrible idea. Critics shouldn’t know how to paint.”
Jake appeared in the doorway. She didn’t have the energy to send him away.
Fernand daubed more antiseptic on her skin with a flat circle of cotton. He said, “I attended the Académie des Beaux-Arts. Very, ah, old-fashioned.”
Fiona perked up. “Are you still there? Do you teach?”
“No.” He laughed. “Not for me.”
“I just—” she stopped while he dug into the base of her middle finger with the tweezer point “—my family’s always been trying to track down this one artist who was there. He was my great-aunt’s boyfriend, and he died young.”
“What year?”
“Oh, way before your time! I didn’t mean you’d know him, I just—I don’t even know why I’m asking. I’m a little woozy. He won the Prix de Rome, but then he died right after World War I.”
“Ha, yes, that’s before my time!”
“His name was Ranko Novak. We were just always curious.”
“You’re trying to find what, records? A picture?” He turned to where Jake still hovered. “Do you have a light on your phone?”
Jake turned on his phone’s flashlight and, grimacing, held it above Fiona’s palm.
“I tell you what,” Fernand said. “I have a friend there. You write the name down before you leave tonight, I’ll ask him.”
“That’s so kind!”
“Well, you nearly severed your fingers at our house. This is so you won’t sue!”
* * *
—
Fiona held a glass of ice water in her gauzed hand because it felt good, even if the condensation made the gauze wet. She’d found Richard in the dining room, holding court over platters of smoked fish.
She could barely follow the conversation, and only thanks to Richard’s occasional translation. (“Marie is his wife.” “This was the Gehry retrospective last year.” “She’s talking about her daughter’s work.”) Fiona wanted codeine. She wanted to find a pharmacy. And then what? Maybe walk around the Marais till morning.
Richard said to her, “Paul here was asking how fame changed me. I’m explaining that I’ve only been famous a quarter of my life! Such a short time!” And then he spoke French again to this Paul, who had a giraffe neck and tiny teeth. Back to Fiona: “I was saying that my very first patron was a collector named Esmé Sharp, do you remember her? And she just emailed last week asking for a first look at some stuff before Art Basel this spring. Nothing changes! I’m still making work for the same audience.”
Jake had disappeared but now he was back, lingering outside the circle. He had rolled up his sleeves; his arms were all muscle and vein. At his left elbow, the bottom of a tattoo.
The name was a distant bell to Fiona. Esmé Sharp. Someone circling Richard when his career took off, someone she might have met when she was driving back to Chicago from Madison on weekends, pregnant or with a newborn Claire. Or maybe she’d met her after they moved back to the city in ’93, Damian teaching at U of C and Fiona going out of her mind, bored to death in the place she’d once found endlessly vibrant. The early nineties were a haze; Claire had been born in the summer of ’92, and Fiona was in the throes of what anyone today would easily spot as extended postpartum depression, on top of the PTSD she’d carried with her from the ’80s. She’d lied to her doctor that everything was splendid, and he hadn’t pushed further. She tried taking graduate classes at DePaul, but couldn’t bring herself to complete a single paper. She watched morning television, interviews with celebrities whose names she didn’t know. She sat on benches while Claire circled playgrounds and dug her fat fingers into cold sandboxes and got herself stuck on top of slides. It wasn’t till Claire started preschool and Fiona began working for the resale shop—around the time Richard left for Paris—that everything came clear. It was as if someone had handed her new glasses around 1995, turned up the color, unmuted the city. Just in time for Fiona to realize how unhappy she was with Damian, his little lectures, his teeth-licking. She began fucking a man she met at yoga, for the love of God, and even as it slowly eroded her marriage, it helped her wake up. But by then Richard was gone. Esmé must have been from that lost time, a boat in a foggy harbor.
“Et qu’est-ce que vous faites, dans la vie?” a woman asked Fiona.
She said, “Je—j’ai une boutique. En Chicago.” God, she wanted to leave. Richard rescued her, talking quickly; she assumed he was disabusing the crowd of the notion that Fiona sold fancy shoes. She heard “le SIDA,” which she’d always found a prettier acronym than AIDS. Well, everything about AIDS had been better all along in France, in London, even in Canada. Less shame, more education, more funding, more research. Fewer people screaming about hell as you died.
She sidled up to Jake and whispered. “Help me find more gauze,” she said.
“You want me to ask the hosts?”
“No. Just come with me.”
If she could ride around on a scooter like a teenager, she could act like one in other ways too.
He followed her into the front hall, empty but for the coat tree.
She said, “You don’t happen to have any good pain meds on you?”
“I wish.”
“Do you have a cigarette?”
“No, but I could use one.”
“Do you have a condom?”
“A what?”
“Listen.” She checked her phone; nothing. She dug her coat out from under the others. “You’re drunk, right?”
“Not really.” He followed her out the door; the streets were empty.
“Do you think you’re sober enough to find the Métro again?” She turned left,
although she wasn’t sure that was the way.
“I said I’m not drunk. I was a little stoned when we got here, but it wore off.”
“You’re a shoddy alcoholic. Not even drunk.”
She walked fast and he worked to keep up.
“Who said I was an alcoholic?”
“Some guy on a plane.”
They stopped at an intersection and waited for the crossing light, although the streets were empty.
“You’re what,” she said, “thirty?”
“Thirty-five. Why?”
“I don’t want to sleep with an infant. Thirty-five should work.”
It was clear from his face that he couldn’t tell if she was joking, and also clear that he wanted her not to be.
She’d had the wrong amount of wine for self-analysis. One more glass and she might be sitting on the sidewalk, spilling her life’s secrets, wondering aloud why she tended to weaponize sex. One less glass and she’d still be next to Richard, nodding along to a French conversation. As things stood, she’d had just enough to be aware of how narrowly she’d missed both these possibilities, and also just enough not to care. She was drunk enough to want a man on top of her, but not so drunk that she’d fall asleep as soon as she was horizontal. Once they’d crossed the street, she put her hand on Jake’s ass, slid her fingers into his back pocket.
He swung toward her and gave her a look, some combination of vulnerable and predatory, and then he cupped the base of her skull, pulled her mouth onto his and her tongue toward his and her pelvis toward his. They walked another block and he did it again, and then another block, and he did it again.
He smelled like smoked meat, which was not something she minded. They made their way to a pharmacy for condoms and ibuprofen and then back to Richard’s house, and in her crisp guest bed, they had sex. Fiona remembered only once, riding on top of him, that she was most likely someone’s grandmother now. Mostly she felt no self-consciousness at all; Jake was so beautiful, the skin of his upper arms taut and goose-bumped, that it was easy to be lost. She ran her left hand through his chest hair, as thick as his beard, and kept her gauze-wrapped right hand tight on the bed frame. It would hurt worse in the morning, but she didn’t care. Jake finished with a long, helpless caveman grunt, and then he lay next to her and slipped his fingers between her thighs, which she didn’t think would work, until it did.
She imagined Jake would go to sleep afterward, but instead he propped himself up on one elbow and told her about his first college girlfriend, a woman who tied him to the bed and left him there an hour, which was something he thought about all the time, and he hated her for it, but it was also the reason he still wasn’t over her. Pillow talk, good God. Fiona wanted to kick him out, but it was only ten o’clock, and she couldn’t imagine Richard and Serge returning for a couple more hours. She’d need him gone before then; not that Richard would judge her, but he wouldn’t pass up the opportunity to tease her, either. And she was fifty-one, and she didn’t quite believe Jake was thirty-five, and she couldn’t bear for the age difference to be a topic of prurient interest.
Jake said, “Tell me about your first.”
“What,” she said, “are we bonding?”
He laughed, not hurt. “This is one of the best parts. It’s like, there’s foreplay, and there’s afterplay.”
She rolled toward him. What the hell. “I lost my virginity to my cousin’s science teacher. I’d already graduated high school, just barely. Different school.”
“Damn.”
“I don’t know, all my friends were much older. They were my brother’s friends, and then they were mine. It was hard to get excited about someone with acne.”
“Did you ever sleep with your brother’s friends?”
The laugh that escaped her was embarrassingly gooselike. The idea of her younger self with Charlie Keene or Asher Glass! She’d been madly in love with Yale, but that was different. Without expectation, without hope, a crush could remain pure and platonic. It was never lustful, never selfish. She was always just looking for excuses to touch him, talk to him, lean her head against his arm.
“Not so much?” he said.
“Not so much.”
“So what I don’t understand about that triptych, about the guy in the triptych, is that—”
“My God, shut up. Come here.” She tried to kiss him, just to stop him from saying another word, but he pulled back. “Didn’t I already cut my hand over this? You’re being kind of . . . vampiric.”
“Sorry,” he said. “Sorry. I’m being a journalist. But also, like, isn’t it something you should talk about? To process it?”
“I’ve been processing for thirty years,” she said. “I’ve been processing since you were watching Saturday morning cartoons in your pajamas. I have a shrink for this stuff. I don’t need a journalist.”
“But you don’t have sex with your shrink. I mean, do you? Because seriously, when you talk after sex, it’s different. I think it’s why Freud had everyone lie down.”
“Did Freud sleep with his patients?”
“I think so.”
She rolled her eyes. “Okay. Fine. Julian died—God, I don’t even know how long ago. You know, depending how close you were to someone . . . There were some people who drew you in, leaned on you, and you spent more time with them in those last months than you ever had before. And there were people where if you were outside their closest circle, they shut you out. Not in an unkind way, it’s just they didn’t need you. You’d have been an interruption, you know? And I wasn’t in Julian’s tightest circle. And anyway, in the end, he shut everyone out.”
Jake looked like he didn’t follow. “Okay,” he said.
“There was this competitive grieving thing that could happen. People would crowd into the hospital and stand around for days, sort of posturing. That sounds terrible, but it’s true. Not that they had bad intentions, just . . . you always want to believe you’re important in someone’s life. And sometimes, in the end, it turns out you aren’t.”
Jake ran his tongue down her ear and then along her clavicle. “One more time,” he said.
She didn’t like the way he looked at her, staring deep like he was trying to get their pupil dilation synced up. The point had never been for him to get more attached, especially not with everything else going on.
There were sounds out in the apartment.
“Shit,” she said. “If it’s just Richard he’ll go to bed soon. You can sneak out then, okay?”
“Alright,” he said, and closed his eyes. “I’m not an alcoholic. That was a joke.”
“How is that funny?”
“I don’t know. I was drunk.”
Fiona must have fallen asleep, because she was on a bus in Chicago with Richard, looking for Corinne’s house. Her hand was on fire.
When she rolled over in the middle of the night, Jake, thank God, was gone.
1986
Bill had decreed that everyone had the afternoon off. Yale lugged his bag on the El, and then to Briar and up the two flights. He’d been away long enough to induce that wonderful coming-home-after-a-long-trip feeling, the way you’re hit with the smells of your own building, the dimensions of your own hallway, which have somehow readjusted themselves so the place feels dreamlike, off by a few vertiginous inches in every direction. He was hungry, late for lunch. He thought he might make a grilled cheese, and he wondered if there was tomato soup in the pantry.
When he opened the door, Charlie’s mother stood there in a gray dress, her feet bare. He’d thought she was coming next week. Yale dropped his bag and said “Teresa!” and went to hug her. As he did, he heard the bedroom door shut. He assumed Charlie was coming out to see him, closing the door to hide the unmade bed from his mother. But Charlie didn’t appear. He’d gone in, not out.
And when he pulled back from Teresa, she had the strangest face
. She smiled, but only with her mouth, and she said, “Yale, we need— Shall we go for a walk?”
He felt as if the room might tip sideways, or already had.
“What happened?” Charlie was having a breakdown. Julian had died. The paper had folded. Reagan had—
Teresa put her hands on his arms. He still had his coat on, his dressy coat. “Yale, we ought to take a walk.”
“Why would I want to do that? Teresa, what the hell?”
Her eyes were filling, and he saw now that she’d already been crying, that her face was a mess. Her hair was a mess.
He put his hands into his coat pockets. Fiona’s necklace was there, transferred from his pants, and the wings stabbed his palm. It was a cameo with birds on each side, birds holding up the frame of the cameo. Sharp metal wings. Something was very wrong.
Teresa drew a breath and very quietly said, “Yale, I’m going to walk you to the clinic and we’re going to get you tested.”
Yale started to say, I can’t believe he’s doing this again, I can’t believe you’re listening to him, I can’t believe he thinks I’d do that to him, and we just got tested this spring.
But he sat on the floor and put his head between his knees.
She was trying to tell him something different, something about Charlie, and Yale couldn’t work out the pieces. But yes, oh God, he understood. Needles shot through his arms and legs and abdomen, pinned him to the moment. A dead bug on a foam square.
He could hear Charlie in the bedroom, walking. Moving things. Yale squeezed his ears with his knees. Teresa had crouched in front of him. She put her hand on his shoe. Nico’s shoe.
She said, “Yale, can you hear me?”
Yale was shocked to find that he wasn’t crying, even though Teresa was. Why was he not crying? He whispered: “Teresa, what did he do?”
“I don’t know.” She shook her head. “He won’t tell me. Listen, Yale, even if he has this—these—antibodies, that just means he’s been exposed. It doesn’t mean he has the virus.”
“That’s not true. He knows damn well that’s not true. Did he tell you that?” His compulsion to whisper might have come from practice—not discussing someone’s disease when the guy was within earshot. Or maybe he wanted to deny Charlie his reaction. He could have screamed, couldn’t he? He could have broken down the bedroom door and held him, or punched him, instead of sitting here thinking about his own body, his own health, his own heart.
The Great Believers Page 21