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She looks up from her papers, all sleepy-eyed and, maddeningly, unsurprised.
“You said I could get another watch, which means you knew Willem had my watch,” I continue.
I expect her to deny it, to shoot me down. Instead, she gives me a dismissive little shrug. “Why would you do that? Give him such an expensive watch after one day? It is a little desperate, no?”
“As desperate as lying to me?”
She shrugs again, lazily taps on her computer. “I did not lie. You asked if I knew where to find him. I do not.”
“But you didn’t tell me everything, either. You saw him, after . . . after he, he left me.”
She does this thing, neither a nod nor a shake of the head, somewhere in between. A perfect expression of ambiguity. A diamond-encrusted stonewall.
And at just that moment, another one of Nathaniel’s French lessons comes back to me: “T’es toujours aussi salope?” I ask her.
One eyebrow goes up, but her cigarette goes into the ashtray. “You speak French now?” she asks, in French.
“Un petit peu.” A little bit.
She shuffles the paperwork, stubs out the smoldering cigarette. “Il faut mieux être salope que lâche,” she says.
>“What did you say your name was?”
“Allyson,” I hear myself say as if from a distance away.
“Van,” he says, introducing himself while fingering an old pocket watch on a chain.
I’m staring at the table, remembering the intense sharpness of it against my back, the ease with which Willem hoisted me onto it. The table is, as it was then, meticulously clean, the neat pile of papers, the half-finished pieces in the corner, the mesh cup of charcoals, and pens. Wait, what? I grab for the pens.
“That’s my pen!”
“I’m sorry?” Van asks.
I reach over to grab the pen out of the cup. The Rollerball, inscribed BREATHE EASY WITH PULMOCLEAR. “This is my pen! From my dad’s practice.”
Van is looking at me, perplexed. But he doesn’t understand. The pen was in my bag. I never took it out. It just went missing. I had it on the barge. I wrote double happiness with it. And then the next day, when I was on the phone with Ms. Foley, it was gone.
“Last summer, my friend Willem and I, well, we came here hoping someone might put us up for the night. He said that squats will do that.” I pause. Van nods slightly. “But no one was here. Except a window was open. So we slept here, in your studio, and when I woke up the next morning, my friend, Willem, he was gone.”
I wait for Van to get upset about our trespassing, but he is looking at me, still trying to understand why I’m gripping the Pulmoclear pen in my hand like it’s a sword. “This pen was in my purse and then it was gone and now it’s here, and I’m wondering, maybe there was a note or something. . . .”
Van’s face remains blank, and I’m about to apologize, for trespassing before, and now again, but then I see something, like the faint glimmers of light before a sunrise, as some sort of recognition illuminates his face. He taps his index finger to the bridge of his nose.
“I did find something; I thought it was a shopping list.”
“A shopping list?”
“It said something about, about . . . I don’t recall, perhaps chocolate and bread?”
“Chocolate and bread?” Those were Willem’s staple foods. My heart starts to pound.
“I don’t remember. I thought it came in from the garbage. I had been away for holiday, and when I came back, everything was disarrayed. I disposed of it. I’m so sorry.” He looks stricken.
We snuck into his studio, made a mess of it, and he looks guilty.
“No, don’t be sorry. This is so helpful. Would there have been any reason for a shopping list to be in here? I mean, might you have written it?”
“No. And if I did, it would not have contained bread and chocolate.”
