Twenty-Three #2
But I look at the cake, and it’s infuriatingly pretty and neat, and I don’t care about it at all, didn’t even want it.
I could have told Elise about my birthday, or told my sisters yes when they offered not to go, or had the girls from work take me to dinner.
But I didn’t, so it’s my fault that I feel this way: forgotten and angry and sad all at once.
“Maybe one more helping each,” I say, and I reach toward the cake and scoop a chunk out with my fingers.
Clément watches with fear in his eyes. I smile and drop the chunk on his plate and his fear turns to wonder. There’s pink frosting under my nails, vanilla sponge stuck to my skin.
“Can I? Can I?” Nathalie begs.
“Go ahead,” I say, running my hand under the tap.
“I’ll still leave some for Daddy,” she says. She digs out a smaller piece and places it right in her mouth.
“No fair,” Clément says. “I want to try!”
They scoop and chew, frosting smearing on the stand and their fingers and mouths, until their stomachs hurt and they collapse, sugar drunk and happy as can be.
Later, I cry in the bathroom, sitting on the closed toilet lid, quiet so I won’t wake the children, until eventually I stop.
My eyes are red and puffy. Out in the kitchen, here’s the cake on its stand, dug into.
I stare at it for a while as I hold a cold washcloth over my face.
Stare longer and it becomes a painting. I know just how I’d make it.
Could I? A birthday gift to myself. Only a few hours.
Everything tidied up before morning. Such a small and reasonable plan. Simple if I let it be.
I toss the washcloth into the sink. Open the windows wide.
A canvas I stretched over the summer waits for me, tucked behind my dresser, just the right size.
My box of paints is in the back of the cabinet, a thin layer of dust on its top.
Inside: cadmium red, titanium white, yellows and blues …
More than enough. The sense that the night will last as long as I need it to.
I mix pink, sweep a strong line across the canvas, and my hand is steady and I’m seeing everything.
The children’s finger punctures, the smoothness of the unmauled frosting, the knife resting, menacing, on the table.
It’s violent and lovely and lurid and prim, one of my usual still lifes turned nightmarish.
I paint, and I allow each brushstroke to soothe me.
I’m not rushing, and yet it goes fast, as though I never fell out of practice.
Before long I’ve done all I can. The paint needs to dry before adding the crumbs and the string of white daisies that border the cake stand.
A second night of painting, then. Careful and private. What harm could it do?
Noise comes from outside. Raccoons, maybe. I listen closer, and the knob turns, and Felix is in the doorway—his slender frame, his smile, his hat crooked on his head as he hoists his suitcase over the threshold.
“You’re back early!” I say, rising, so happy and relieved not to be alone that tears rush back.
“Oh good, you’re still up. Happy birthday, darling,” he says. “Look at this painting. Look at this cake.”
“But how is this happening? How are you here?”
“You’ll never believe it. I flew. It was divine. I’ll tell you everything, but first, close your eyes.”
I hear an unzipping, a rustling, his feet across the floor.
I peek, can’t help it. He’s opening a paper bag, dark with grease, crossing to the kitchen. A plate comes down. He arranges something on it. I shut my eyes again as he turns. My cheeks hurt with smiling as he walks toward me. But then a silence.
“What happened here?” he asks, touching my eyelid. “You were crying?”
My eyes still closed, I shake my head. “It’s nothing,” I say, “some birthday blues,” and wave to banish the thought. I hold my upturned palms toward him, and the pause lasts a few seconds too long, and then he sets the plate in my hands.
I open my eyes. A small stack of beignets—a little deflated, their powdered sugar mostly disappeared. Beautiful, still. “Oh,” I breathe. “You were in New Orleans?”
“Another porter wanted my shift. I took the train from Chicago to New Orleans, and then flew back just now. They were hot this morning,” he says. “You’ll need to use your imagination.”
“Are they from Lorraine’s?”
“Where else?”
I set the plate on the coffee table, and we lower ourselves, side by side, on the sofa.
“Ready?” he asks.
We each take one. We bite in. Magnolias heavy and fragrant, rain breaking through the heat, a screen door clapping shut. “My God.”
“Home?” he asks, hopeful.
“Home,” I say, and he smiles.
Outside on the patio he tells me about flying. How the stewardesses served everyone champagne, how plush the seats were. On his first flight, from New Orleans to Denver, he sat in the main cabin. After he switched planes and left for Los Angeles, he sat downstairs in the lounge.
“I had a fascinating conversation with a Lucky Strike salesman,” he says. “Apparently these new cigarettes they’re making protect against cough.”
“I don’t think I believe him.”
“I don’t either. But he was very handsome.”
We laugh. The sound of our voices in the dark, the closeness of us together this way.
I thank him for coming home. I turn to catch his eye so that he’ll see how much I mean it, find that he’s watching me already.
He has something of his own to say, a question in his eyes.
“Odette. I don’t understand how you’re satisfied with this.
With me.” And a pain starts beneath my breastbone, sharp and real.
“Don’t get me wrong,” he rushes. “You’re my dearest friend.
But you’ve just turned twenty-seven. You’re still young.
That’s all I mean.” I nod, the pain easing.
“I know you had it rough. But isn’t there a chance, still, of romantic love?
Even a small chance? Or is it really only Cyril, forever? ”
How can he know me so well, and treat me so sweetly, and have me so wrong? But he’s only being kind. He has his discreet romances, and his long trips away, and his nights spent in bars and clubs, doing whatever he wants to. Only good of him, to take note of the differences between us.
I force a smile. “I have everything I need. I’m happy, really.”
I look at my water glass. My hand holding it, the thin gold band around my finger. This secret—it’s made a fortress of me. I’ve kept it for so long; how could I ever tell him now? I can’t meet his eye. After a time, he pats my knee. “It’s gotten late,” he says. “Sweet dreams.”
I stay outside as he prepares for bed. Clean up my painting supplies, set the still life aside to finish another night. And then I join him in our room, both of us breathing in the dark.