1 #4
“Yes. He stole a painting.”
Gloria sighs. “Did you go to the police?”
“People like me don’t go to the police.”
She nods and doesn’t quite meet my eyes.
“But I have to imagine he already knew that,” I say, “or he wouldn’t have stolen it so brazenly. He wanted me to know who he was.”
“I was about to have dinner,” Gloria says. “Please, won’t you join me?”
“Thank you,” I say, because engaging with her seems like the best way to get my painting back, and I sit at her little round table.
“Dinner seems like the least I can do, considering.” She disappears into the kitchen, and I’m alone in the strange apartment.
I’ve been in apartments with murals before, but there’s something oddly, determinedly immersive about this one.
The person who painted it—or the person who commissioned it—wanted to be in a specific place, it seems to me, and tried very hard to re-create that place here in this room.
Gloria returns with two grilled cheese sandwiches.
“Why did your sister commission a mural in your apartment?”
“Well, she was here for a while,” Gloria says, “and it’s a place she misses. Her garden, I mean, not my apartment.”
“Does Sebastian come here sometimes?” I ask, when it becomes apparent that she isn’t going to say anything more. Her gaze keeps shifting toward the bedroom door, in a way that makes me wonder if he’s here now.
“Sometimes,” she says placidly, “but not tonight. Sometimes he stays with my sister.”
“Wait,” I say, “are we talking about Nico?”
“Yes.” She absolutely cannot meet my eyes. “My sister Nico.”
I put my sandwich down, and stare at her. “I understand why you lie about Nico,” I say, when she finally looks at me. “Anyone would, under the circumstances. But I wish you wouldn’t lie to me, Gloria. I was at that party.”
Gloria looks at me for another moment, unreadable, and then returns to placidly eating her grilled cheese.
She’s lapsed into distance. I think I remember this from the time when we lived together; the way you could be sitting across from her and she’d somehow recede without leaving the table, until you were alone with a kind of Gloria placeholder.
“You’d like Nico,” she says finally. “You and she have some things in common. She lived in Ohio too, you know.”
“Yes, I know,” I say. “I met her there.”
“What? You met her?”
“I came across her by chance in Ohio, and told her you were in Paris. I’m the reason she’s here.”
Gloria’s eyes widen. She was always a discreet person, I remember that about her, and it’s interesting to realize that Nico shares that quality. There was a time in my life, back in Ohio, when how alike or unalike Nico and Gloria were was something I spent a lot of time thinking about.
“I didn’t know any of that,” she says, after a moment. “Have you seen her since?”
“I got hurt a few years ago, in an explosion. She came to visit me in the hospital afterward.”
“That was kind of her.”
“I thought so too, but unfortunately we got into a screaming argument.”
“In your hospital room?” Gloria sounds incredulous.
“I have some regrets,” I say.
“I can’t believe you got into a screaming fight from your hospital bed,” she says.
“Well.” I shrug. I can’t believe she used to believe in tarot cards, but I manage—just barely—not to say this aloud. Instead, after a moment of consideration, I go for her throat: “Why do you pretend that Nico’s your sister?”
“She is my sister.”
“We both know Nico’s not your sister, and we both know your degenerate son is in this apartment with my stolen painting.”
Gloria has gone very still.
“Look,” I say, “I’m not saying you owe me anything, Gloria. Maybe we owe each other nothing at all. But I wish you wouldn’t be such a liar.”
“I think you should leave,” Gloria says quietly.
She rises, walks to the door, and holds it open, face like a closed fist, and after that I have no choice but to gather my rain jacket and cane and walk out with as much dignity as I can find in that moment—she’s the one harbouring a thief, I tell myself, I’ve no reason to be embarrassed here—and I’m back out in the dream-blue corridor, the elevator, the rain.
I wait for a while in the shadows of a doorway across the street, a rectangle of darkness.
Under the Paris dome the weather is never terrible, but tonight I’ve worn the wrong jacket for a scheduled rainfall, and I’m cold.
I expect to see Sebastian at any moment—there are so few constants in my life, but this is one of them, this unpleasant awareness of pending events—and he emerges within a half-hour, with a suspiciously Swan Dive–shaped bundle under his arm.
He looks both ways, then sets off to the south.
I follow as rapidly as I can, breathing hard, trying to strike a balance between not losing him and not falling—one misjudged footfall on a rain-slick night street and I’ll break my already shattered and pinned-together leg—but the street curves just ahead and he disappears.
There’s a light coming from around the curve, from high above, a dim blue glow that I don’t quite understand.
I approach the corner very cautiously—don’t fall, don’t fall—and on the other side of a dark building, I see the massive shadow of a castle keep, the Chateau de Vincennes, and beyond that, lights and movement in the sky.
It’s a moment before I understand what I’m looking at: this section of the Paris dome has been undergoing maintenance and upgrades for some weeks.
The construction project is directly above the forest.
I can’t see Sebastian—or anyone, actually, the street by the chateau is all but deserted tonight—but I’m certain that this is the direction he walked, and so I follow as quickly as possible.
Alongside the chateau, past the goats grazing peacefully behind fences and a guard in a raincoat who’s there to prevent people from stealing the goats, to the thoroughfare that’s been empty of cars since the dome was constructed.
Before me, across the deserted road, there’s an empty square, beyond which the forest is a mass of darkness.
A billboard-sized sign warns of danger from the construction project overhead, access forbidden, etc.
, but there’s no one around to enforce this rule.
What I should do, if I’m being rational, is summon a taxi and go home.
But I have a sense of fulfilling an appointment.
I need to go into the forest, because I’m meant to be somewhere up ahead, at a specific time, in a specific place.
There’s something I need to see, or perhaps someone I need to meet.
In any event I’m crossing the empty expressway, making my way over the gravel square that lies between me and the woods.
Walking is an excruciatingly slow meditation, placing the cane deliberately before each step.
It’s almost impossible to think of anything else.
I hear someone growling and realize that it’s me.
When I was a child in Brooklyn I loved to run through the streets after a rainstorm, and the speed and momentum are so close to the surface that the memory makes my muscles twitch.
After approximately a half-century I’m on the other side of the square, just on the edge of the woods.
Before me, the avenue extends into the darkness of the park.
There are lamps at intervals, sentry-like, but their pools of light serve only to deepen the shadows.
I see no one, but I’m certain that I’m not alone, and the disquieting next thought is that anyone out here will, like me, be a person who pays little attention to boundaries.
In another life I had a boyfriend in Brooklyn who had an enormous dog, and when we went out walking at night people crossed the street to avoid us.
I haven’t thought of that animal in years, but I wish now it were with me.
I resume walking, my bad leg throbbing, and there’s a shift: the forest is abruptly cast in a silvery light.
It’s like being onstage. The construction workers above me have switched on a new, intensely brilliant work light that casts a faint glow down to the ground, like starlight.
I stand for a moment looking up at the workers, tiny dark figures suspended on their safety wires, sounds of music and machinery coming from above.
What if I chose, just once, not to look into the future?
I always thought of it as an involuntary tic, but on the other hand I never really tried to control it.
Perhaps the hazy knowledge of coming events might be dialed back somehow, like turning down the volume on a radio.
What good does it do? There were protests all over Paris when the dome was announced, and again when construction began.
Some protesters resorted to violence to try to stop the dome.
One group tried to blow up a construction site and instead blew up my left leg and my second husband.
But the future arrives regardless. I walk forward again, into the dark, until finally I hear voices and music in the distance.
There are settlements here and there in the forest, I know that, little clusters of tarps and tents under the trees, and I know they’re hypothetically dangerous but I don’t really care.
I’m coming up on a village of sorts, a settlement constructed on the grounds of a former equestrian centre, a blaze of light in the forest. I smell meat cooking on a grill.
Here, finally, is Sebastian. He’s standing some distance away, waiting for food from a roadside stand where an old woman is ladling something over rice.
He’s clearly nervous, bouncing on the balls of his feet, the painting under his arm.
Out here in the dim light, he looks younger than I thought he was.
But my attention is drawn to another man, approaching rapidly.
This man’s attention is directed at me, and I realize my mistake: I am carrying an expensive handbag. I cannot run.
“Sebastian,” I call out.