wealthy as their counterparts in other regions, but prematurely weathered by their skiing obsession.
“It’s so great to meet you,” they said, and Louise caught sight of Vincent and Jonathan’s rings in the round of handshakes. “Oh my goodness, Jonathan,” she said, “are congratulations in order?”
“Thank you,” he said, in such a convincing tone of bashful happiness that for a disorienting moment Vincent entertained the wild thought that they were somehow actually married.
“Well, cheers,” Marc said, and raised his glass. “Congratulations to the both of you. Wonderful news, just wonderful.”
“Can I ask…?” Louise said. “Big wedding, small…?”
“If we’d made any to-do about it at all,” Jonathan said, “you’d have been the first names on the guest list.”
“Would you believe,” Vincent said, “that we actually got married at city hall?”
“Good lord,” Marc said, and Louise said, “I like your style. Donna’s getting married—that’s our daughter—and my god, the logistics, the complications, all the drama, the headache of it, I’m tempted to suggest they follow your lead and elope.”
“There’s a certain efficiency to elopement,” Jonathan said. “Weddings are such elaborate affairs. We just didn’t want all the hoopla.”
“I had to convince him to take the day off work,” Vincent said. “He wanted to just go down there on his lunch break.” They were laughing, and Jonathan put his arm around her. She could tell he appreciated the improvisation.
“Was there a honeymoon?” Marc asked.
“I’m taking her to Nice next week, and then on to Dubai for the weekend,” Jonathan said.
“Ah, right,” Marc said, “I remember you telling me that you love it there. Vincent, have you been?”
“To Dubai? No, not yet. I can’t wait.” And so on and so forth. She didn’t want to be a liar but his expectations were clear. As a former bartender, she was accustomed to performing. The lies were troublingly easy. On the night when Jonathan had walked into the bar at the Hotel Caiette, someone had written terrible graffiti on the window, and she was standing there polishing glasses, counting the minutes till the end of her shift, wondering why she’d ever thought it was a good idea to come back here, trying to imagine the rest of her life and getting nowhere because of course she could leave and go work in another bar, and then another bar after that, and another, and another, but leaving Caiette wouldn’t change the underlying equation. The problems of Vincent’s life were the same from one year to the next: she knew she was a reasonably intelligent person, but there’s a difference between being intelligent and knowing what to do with your life, also a difference between knowing that a college degree might change your life and a willingness to actually commit to the terrifying weight of student loans, especially since she’d worked alongside enough bartenders with college degrees to know that a college degree might not change anything at all, etc. etc., and she was spiraling through that familiar territory, sick of her thoughts and sick of herself, when Jonathan walked into the bar. In the way he spoke to her, his obvious wealth and his obvious interest, she saw an opening into a vastly easier life, or at least a different life, a chance to live in a foreign country, a life of something other than bartending in a place other than here, and the opportunity was irresistible.
Lying about being married troubled her conscience, but not enough to make her want to flee. I’m paying a price for this life, she told herself, but the price is reasonable.
Variations
Jonathan never talked about Suzanne, his real wife, but the past wasn’t entirely off the table. Sometimes in a certain mood he liked to hear stories about Vincent’s life. She doled them out carefully: “When I was thirteen,” she told him once, lying in the bed on a Sunday morning, “I dyed my hair blue and got suspended from school for writing graffiti on a window.”
“Really. What did you write?”
“Would you believe I wrote a philosopher’s last words? I came across them in a book somewhere and loved them.”
“Precocious, but morbid,” he said. “I’m afraid to ask.”
“Sweep me up. It has a certain beauty, don’t you think?”
“Maybe if you’re a temperamental thirteen-year-old girl,” he said, so she threw a pillow at him. She didn’t tell him that her mother had died two weeks earlier, or that her brother had been lurking around and saw her do it, or that she had a brother. It is possible to leave so