be drunker. He turned onto Roscoe and there was Julian’s building on his right. He might go back around the corner to the pay phone, call him. Say, I’m outside, are you still up? He was pretty sure he knew Julian’s number. Or he could just ring the buzzer. But then what would happen?
Well, he could think of a few things.
He knew he wouldn’t do it. He was only standing on the cliff edge to see what it felt like. He remembered in high school, sitting in assembly and becoming convinced that he might, at any second, stand up and scream. Not because he wanted to, just because it was the one thing he wasn’t supposed to do. But he hadn’t. And this was no different, was it? He was only entertaining a dangerous thought.
He kept walking.
He got a cheeseburger and walked back up Roscoe eating it. He went right past Julian’s door again, and he thought he was going to do it after all, and then he knew he wouldn’t.
2015
Fiona was jittery and she wanted to head back out, to comb the Marais, but it would be a terrible idea. She said to Richard, “Do not let me leave the apartment. I’ll mess things up.”
“We’re locking you in,” he said, “and we’ll force-feed you.”
Serge was cooking for the journalist who was coming to dinner, a woman from Libération. Fiona volunteered to chop something, and Serge set her up at the cutting board with a knife and six small onions. He said, “Women always like no-good men. Why is this?”
“Maybe there aren’t any good men,” Fiona said. And then she said, “I don’t mean that.”
Serge asked if she was surprised Kurt had been arrested. She supposed she was. She said, “I’m happy, actually. Is that odd? It’s—maybe it’s gratifying. That he got in trouble.” Not that she cared if Kurt was unhappy, but she wanted Claire to see it, how she’d hitched herself to the wrong adult.
Richard excused himself to nap, and Serge put on some Neil Diamond and poured Fiona a glass of red wine she hadn’t asked for.
Fiona prided herself on never tearing up over onions. A Marcus family ability, according to her father, and indeed Claire had proved impervious as well. Maybe the only thing the entire family had in common. Nora always claimed there were two distinct genetic strains in the family—the artistic one and the analytic one—and that you got one set of genes or the other. It was true that Fiona’s father, who had probably wanted to hand down his orthodontic practice one day, had absolutely no idea what to do with Nico, even before his sexuality came into play. Lloyd Marcus tried to turn his son into a chess player, tried to teach him to keep score at baseball games. All Nico wanted was to trace the comics out of the Sunday paper, draw spaceships and animals. It was their mother who’d tried, in her ineffectual way, to remind Lloyd that his Aunt Nora was an artist after all, and hadn’t there been a poet on the Cuban side of the family tree? But it fell to Nora to send Nico a camera for Christmas, a set of fine-tipped artist pens, a book of André Kertész photos. Nora would look at his work and critique it.
Fiona herself had no artistic skill—her strength was in the thousand logistical necessities of running the resale shop—but when Claire came along, when she started sketching realistic horses at age five, when she sat at nine to draw the downtown skyline from memory, Fiona understood she was that kind of Marcus. The problem was that Nora and Nico were gone, the alleged poet long forgotten. There was no one to send her to for a weekend drawing lesson. Fiona did her best, buying her charcoal pencils and gummy erasers, taking her to museums. But she couldn’t give her what Nico had gotten from Nora. If Richard had stayed in Chicago, maybe he’d have filled that role.
Serge said, “Richard is glad you’re here. He thinks you’re good luck for the show.”
Fiona scraped the chopped onions into the bowl by the stove. She said, “I think you’re the good luck, Serge. He seems happy.”
“Ha! Never happy. You ask him about his work, you’ll see. Never happy.”
“Maybe,” Fiona said, “but he seems content.”
She wasn’t sure Serge understood the difference, but he nodded. He was making a stack of plates now, a stack of silverware. He said, “You can grab five placemats?”