The Paris Apartment(9)

“I’m meant to be staying with my brother, Ben.”

“Ben,” she says, drawing out his name. She looks me up and down, taking in my jeans, my old sweater. “He’s your brother? Before him I thought all Englishmen were sunburnt, no elegance, bad teeth. I did not know they could be so . . . so beautiful, so charmant, so soigné.” Apparently there aren’t enough words in English for how wonderful my brother is. She continues shoveling clothes into the suitcase, a violence to her movements, scowling every so often at the door into the apartment building. “Is it so strange I got bored of being with a stupid fucking . . . loser alcoolique? That I wanted a little flirtation? And, d’accord, maybe I wanted to make Antoine jealous. Care about something other than himself. Is it such a surprise I started to look elsewhere?”

She tosses her hair over her shoulder in a shining curtain. It’s quite impressive, being able to do that while crouched down picking your lacy underwear out of a gravel path.

She looks toward the building and raises her voice, almost as though she wants her husband to hear. “He says I only care about him because of his money. Of course I only care about him because of his money. It was the only thing that made it—how do you say—worthwhile? But now . . .” she shrugs, “it’s not worth it.”

I pass her a silky, electric blue dress, a baby pink bucket hat with JACQUEMUS printed across the front. “Have you seen Ben recently?” I ask.

“Non,” she says, raising an eyebrow at me like I might be insinuating something. “Pour quoi? Why do you ask?”

“He was meant to be here last night, to let me in, but he wasn’t—and he hasn’t been answering my messages.”

Her eyes widen. And then, under her breath, she murmurs something. I make out: “Antoine . . . non. Ce n’est pas possible . . .”

“What did you say?”

“Oh—rien, nothing.” But I catch the glance she shoots toward the apartment building—fearful, suspicious, even—and wonder what it means.

Now she’s trying to clip shut her bulging suitcase—brown leather with some sort of logo printed all over it—but I see that her hands are trembling, making her fingers clumsy.

“Merde.” Finally it snaps closed.

“Hey,” I say. “Do you want to come inside? Call a cab?”

“No way,” she says, fiercely. “I’m never going back in there. I have an Uber coming . . .” As if on cue, her phone pings. She checks it and gives what sounds like a sigh of relief. “Merci. Putain, he’s here. I have to go.” Then she turns and looks up at the apartment building. “You know what? Fuck this evil place.” Then her expression softens and she blows a kiss toward the windows above us. “But at least one good thing happened to me here.”

She pulls up the handle of the little case then turns and begins stalking toward the gate.

I hurry after her. “What do you mean, evil?”

She glances at me and shakes her head, mimes zippering her lips. “I want my money, from the divorce.”

Then she’s out onto the street and climbing into the cab. As it pulls away, off into the night, I realize I never managed to ask whether what she had with my brother was ever more than a flirtation.



I turn back toward the courtyard and nearly jump out of my skin. Jesus Christ. There’s an old woman standing there, looking at me. She seems to glow with a cold white light, like something off Most Haunted. But after I’ve caught my breath, I realize it’s because she’s standing beneath the outdoor lamp. Where the hell did she appear from?

“Excuse-moi?” I say. “Madame?” I’m not even sure what I want to ask her. Who are you, maybe? What are you doing here?

She doesn’t answer. She simply shakes her head at me, very slowly. Then she’s retreating backward, toward that cabin in the corner of the courtyard. I watch as she disappears inside. As the shutters—which I see now must have been open—are quickly drawn closed.





Saturday

Nick





Second floor



I lean forward onto the handlebars of the Peloton bike, standing up in the saddle for the incline. There’s sweat running into my eyes, stinging. My lungs feel like they’re full of acid, not air, my heart hammering so hard it feels like I might be about to have a heart attack. I pedal harder. I want to push beyond anything I’ve done before. Tiny stars dance at the edges of my vision. The apartment around me seems to shift and blur. For a moment I think I’m going to pass out. Maybe I do—next thing I know I’m slumped forward over the handlebars and the mechanism is whirring down. I’m hit by a sudden rush of nausea. I force it down, take huge gulps of air.

I got into spinning in San Francisco. And bulletproof coffee, keto, Bikram—pretty much any other fad the rest of the tech world was into, in case it provided any extra edge, any additional source of inspiration. Normally I’d sit here and do a class, or listen to a Ted Talk. This morning wasn’t like that. I wanted to lose myself in pure exertion, push through to a place where thought was silenced. I woke just after five a.m., but I knew I wasn’t going to sleep, especially during that fight in the courtyard, the latest—and worst—of many. Getting on the bike seemed like the only thing that made sense.