“Do you ever feel untethered?”
“No. I know who I am.” She smiles then. “At my age, it would be a problem if I didn’t. Look at this one,” she says, cradling the blossom of an ornate oncidium, with its frilly plum-colored petals. The lips a deep Bordeaux. Delicate and complex and unequivocally female. “So beautiful,” she says.
I can’t help thinking of Anouk.
She calls that night, a little after midnight. When both my parents and the kids are asleep, and I am in bed on my phone, scrolling through news about the presidential primaries.
“Are you awake?” Her voice is deep, syrupy. She sounds as if she’s been drinking. But it’s the middle of the day in Ise-Shima, where she, Frederick, and Sacha are spending part of their spring break. “Everyone is doing Japan, now,” she said, when I asked her about their plans earlier in the month.
“Barely,” I respond.
“Alone?”
“Sadly.”
“Missing me?”
At that I laugh. “Naturally.”
“Well, I don’t know what’s allowed in your parents’ home.”
“Missing you is definitely allowed.”
“But fingering you is not?”
“You should come visit sometime and find out.”
She laughs. “You would like that. I thought you said they were strict Jamaicans.”
“Oh, they are. But I can assure you they would have absolutely no clue, because you’re a girl. And because I am very happily married.”
“Of course you are,” she says, and I can feel her smiling.
The week before, only days following Julien’s incident at the mall, she came over for a quick visit after we lunched at the Ivy in Santa Monica. I wanted to show her some of the edits for the installation, but we ended up in the guest bedroom instead.
After, when she was cinching the waist of her black Alaïa midi dress and stepping into her kitten heels, I couldn’t help but laugh.
“What’s so funny?”
“My God, we are ladies who lunch.”
“Lunch, and some polite fingering.”
“Yes, precisely that.”
There was a sudden bang out in the hallway then, and we both froze. Certain we were caught. I rushed to arrange my hair and my blouse before opening the door to an empty hall. But there on the wall of glass abutting the courtyard was a distinct smattering of organic matter. Blood and feathers. And on the ground below, the broken body of a mourning dove.
“I had a long talk with Pascal today,” she says to me now.
“Your ex?”
“We’re trying to coordinate plans for the spring, him coming for Sacha’s graduation. And my God, he’s infuriating. He wants four tickets to this thing and we only get six. Can I remind you that he was completely unhelpful with the whole college-application process? Frederick hired a slew of consultants, but I was the one who did the trips to the East Coast. Why did I marry him again?”
“Because he was once young and beautiful and in love with you, I imagine.”
“Yes, but clearly not enough to not fuck it all up.”
I’m quiet then. She doesn’t talk about Pascal often. And I haven’t pried. Her ex was not the only one who’d taken something that might have once been beautiful and destroyed it.
