and honest to God it was the lawyer’s invoice coming through on a Friday that made us strangers by Monday,” she tittered into her champagne flute, teeth clinking against the glass. “We had no idea we would never speak again. We still had plans to go to the opera on Saturday. I went alone, but the divorce had nothing to do with that. Aristide and I were still the best of friends, like before, like we were supposed to remain. We hadn’t planned on changing our relationship with its legal status.”
She had, under no external persuasion, run her audience of long-time acquaintances through with the fable of her short marriage to its end, and all for their cheap laughs and tacky reactions. They might later cite her as their most audacious friend in conversations with their other, closer friends, but she would never exist to them outside of her stunts. She had amounted to nothing more than an anecdote in this lifetime and I wanted to pity her for it, but I knew she pitied herself more. It fell now on the rest of us to forgive her impulse to expose herself.
“You’re asking why we married at all if we were destined to leave each other, but why would we not?”
I remained, like everyone around me, sailor to siren in her alchemical tale of past mistakes into glamorous choices so as to absolve her involvement in them.
“Must you not commit to cabbage though it may wilt on the counter before you get to chopping it? Must you not commit to a course of study though life may pivot you to a different occupation?”
I had a job in the city. It was simple and so was the pay, so I wasn’t at risk of losing it. I was safe, like I had been my whole life. I was not given to bouts of caprice, having inherited my mother’s inhibitions. I would never throw my life away for a story. I had the imagination to come up with those.
Sasha liked my stories. When he read, he held his books or my typing paper flat with both hands, his pale wrists sticking out on either side. “Qu’est-ce qui va se passer?” he would ask me, his dark eyes scanning ahead to the blank bottom of the page. I never knew, so I would abandon every ending and come up with fragments of new fictions to not finish.
“…Everything I ever had to say to him just went away after that,” the newly knighted divorcée carried on. “I had to learn how to be myself by myself again.” She had a face that started with her lips and the teeth behind them, making her look on the perpetual verge of saying something. “Imagine the only person you ever want to talk to becoming the one person you can’t talk to at all!”
Sasha and I were going steady. Constanze, he would say my name to me like Adam naming his first animal. His Russian affectation lowered the o into an a, softening the second syllable into a song. He led the battalion of his face with his nose and buried a kiss in the back of my hair.
“Before I knew it, my sweet Aristide had rotted like my maxillary molar at fourteen. I’ve always had a sweet tooth.” She took another sip. “Aristide was bad for me and needed to be done away with, but I still find myself running my tongue over where I remember his.” Her lips didn’t entirely close around her front teeth, so they peeked out like a prying eye from the permanently parted keyhole of her mouth.
“Five more minutes,” I murmured to Sasha, sensing what was coming.
“I have work in the morning.” This was Sasha’s way of saying we should go. He was always trying to leave before it got too late, but the later hours were the better ones, the ones worth staying for, the ones that would get talked about. Sasha would always have work in the morning; we were too young to take leave of our lives to go to bed.
“La vie est si longue qu’elle doit se recroqueviller comme un chat avant de pouvoir s’endormir,” she sagely imparted on her coterie, following with something about Paris and all the unoriginal ways it had been done and overdone. The conversation had already left us for her handful of years in Marseille, where we lost Aristide among Algerian thieves.
“The South has everything you really need. The sea, the sun— but even if you’re after a left shoe or, say, a belt buckle, rest assured you’ll find what you’re looking for in the Noailles markets, as it was undoubtedly stolen off someone that very morning!” She giggled behind her palm, pleased with the knowledge her ungoverned lifestyle had earned her. Marseille was good fun. The city had made her feel alive and every bit of a woman. She liked the simple living and degree of vibrancy accredited only to cultures born of warmth.
On the last day of our vacances a few summers back, I had complained to Maman that I wasn’t ready to be myself again. I was restless. I had wanted to go up and down the coast and stop in all the little places just out of sight that we had never thought to see.
Maman believed it better to save some sites for later, to leave something to come back for, to let my future husband show me around.
“Why not see what I want to see while I’m here?”
“Don’t waste the novelty all on yourself,” Maman had advised me. “It’s better to see new things with other people. To share.”
As it stood, I could not imagine sharing the South with Sasha, who worked the miasmal jobs nobody from this country wanted to work. But, he put jam on my bread and we always had raspberries in the house— ever since I had brought up my favorite berry in passing.
“J’ai toujours rêvé en français, même avant de venir ici,” the demoiselle continued.
I had never come from somewhere else, so Sasha and my grandmother had more in common with the people around me than I did. I had never had a bad haircut. I had never had an ugly phase or a particularly beautiful one. I had never had an eye for the unconventional like Sasha, who wore two watches in the fashion of Fidel Castro: one for himself and one for his Moscow. My father had once stolen on a trip to Geneva a demitasse with its saucer in protest of Swiss prices. His righteousness still sat unused in my cupboard of souvenirs.
“‘Dis-moi que tu m’aimes,’ Yassine m’a dit, ‘et tu pourras me quitter.’”
It really was getting late. Sasha had work in the morning.
“… mais ça, c’est une histoire pour un autre soir.”