Page 21 of Exit Party

“What if we said, just for the sake of argument, that you were an art thief.”

“I’m not—”

I give him my warmest, most harmless smile. “Do you know what ‘for the sake of argument’ means?”

He settles back, arms crossed.

“The truth is,” I continue, “I’ve been appallingly bored.”

“Really?” But he’s being kind. My life is objectively boring, and he can probably perceive that even after only knowing me for an hour. My beloved wife has been dead for two years, and after the first year my grief distilled into a deep stillness that has, over the passage of months, solidified into a set of unchanging routines. I drift about in my beautiful apartment. I go to my favourite café and watch the passersby or chat with friends while I eat pastries. I go to the opera, not because I like opera—I don’t—but because several of my most interesting friends love the opera, and I love chatting with them in the splendour of the lobby. I sense danger in isolation, and when I’m there I feel closer to Eddie, who went whenever possible. I still pay for her seat, because I cannot bear the thought of a stranger sitting there, and when I’m mingling with friends in the lobby I like to imagine that she’s just gone to the ladies’ room, or stepped away to speak with someone, and that she might at any moment materialize from the crowd, smiling in one of her oversized suits. The shiny black oxfords she liked to wear to the opera are lined up neatly by my apartment door. Pilar dusts the shoes and says nothing.

In the mornings I go for walks in parks, very delicately, because some years ago I was caught in an explosion that shattered my left leg. I like sitting by carousels and watching children glide by on wooden horses, shouting out triumphant reports to their parents as they capture brass rings—“J’en ai cinq!”—and I like the pool where more serious children and their parents float small sailboats. I like observing the procession of dogs with their stylish owners. Hey, buddy, I say quietly, to the dogs who come closest, and this is the only scenario in which I use English in my day-to-day life. I like spaces in the world where there’s sound and movement, other people, because in those spaces I feel the irrational possibility that my wife might momentarily appear.

After the park I return to my apartment and read books, watch films, stare at paintings, and sometimes—but not very often now, because I’m out of wall space—buy other paintings. I’m known for my collection of Post-Collapse Formalist art, and to a lesser extent for my paintings from New York City in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

There’s a great deal to recommend this life, and it’s certainly a wildly better life than I would’ve imagined for myself, say, twenty years or so ago, when I was imprisoned in what was then the United States. But it is not, shall we say, exciting. Just in these last few months I’ve begun to wonder if a peaceful life is maybe ever-so-slightly overrated, though that thought pierces me with guilt. Sebastian is staring at me, and I realize I’ve been gazing up at the rain slipping down the skylight. My thoughts take longer now than they did before my wife died, or perhaps it’s just that it takes me longer to come back from them.

“You were saying,” he says gently.

“Right, yes. Here’s the question, my friend. If you were an art thief, which I’m not saying you are, what painting would you steal?”

He smiles. “Okay.” He’s looking around the room, playing along. “That one,” he says finally. He’s pointing at a small painting called Olivia on Yellow Sofa. And it’s exquisite, I’ll grant him that. It’s a head-and-shoulders portrait of a beautiful, pensive young woman. But I was watching him closely just now, and I saw the way he considered all of the paintings except one. The one he carefully didn’t look at hangs on the wall to his right. He means to steal Swan Dive.

“That’s an excellent choice,” I say. “Olivia on Yellow Sofa. A portrait of the artist Olivia Collins. Exact date unknown, but it would’ve been sometime around 1960.”

“Painted by whom?”

“That I do know. Lucas Alkaitis.” How strange it is to speak normally with this person, to carry on a conversation, when he wishes to steal the object I love most in the world. Swan Dive means more to me than the entire rest of the collection taken together.

“The colours are striking,” he murmurs, returning to his drink. “Do you think we . . . could we take a tour of your other paintings?”

“Of course,” I say, and rise carefully from my chair. Sebastian passes me my cane.

“Would you like to hear something extraordinary?” Sebastian offers an elbow, and we walk, very slowly, into the adjoining room, which is also a sort of parlour. My apartment was formerly four separate apartments, which I bought one at a time from my neighbours or their heirs. The first time I brought Eddie here, she wandered from room to room and made a joke about a labyrinth.

“I would.”

“We’ve actually met before.”

“Really? When?”

“When I was a boy,” he says, with a smile, “you knew my mother.”

“I’ve met too many people. I don’t mean to be rude.”

“Not at all. You knew my mother in Los Angeles,” he says. This room, too, is filled with paintings, but he doesn’t stop; he’s leading me through to the gallery that follows. This gallery is also a kitchen, and the air is heavy with the fragrance of Pilar’s signature chicken/lemon/artichoke soup. She’s at the stove, stirring a very large pot and listening to a podcast, a low murmur of voices.

The memory still isn’t coming to me. Who did I know in Los Angeles who had a child?

“I’m trying to remember a friend in Los Angeles with a child,” I say finally.

“We didn’t meet there,” he says. “We met in France.”

We’ve passed through the kitchen now, into the room on the other side. It’s a corridor lined with books. There’s a figure at the far end, in the shadows, but I know not to comment on this. It’s the ghost of my first husband, Felix. He comes here sometimes in the evenings. I sink into a pink velvet armchair.

“Is there a restroom I could use?” Sebastian asks.

“Of course. Just off the kitchen.”