that filled the foyer. “Feel free to look around,” he said, and she couldn’t figure out why she’d need or want such an invitation until she realized the house was filled with incredible art, that guests were sticking their necks into corners and back halls and even upstairs to glimpse Fernand and Corinne’s acquisitions. A Basquiat hung outside the bathroom; a Julian Schnabel plate portrait dominated the dining room.
People made an effort to speak English to her at first—Corinne, Serge, the German writer they introduced her to—but soon everything was a whirl of French, and she was left talking to Jake. They wound up in a sunroom at the back of the house, a room that filled and then emptied every few minutes as guests popped in to make sure they hadn’t missed any trays of food, buckets of champagne, seminal works of cubism.
He said, “I’ve been studying his work online. Richard’s. It’s weird how many photos I didn’t even know were his. Like, famous ones. That triptych thing, I’ve totally admired that before. No idea it was Campo. And I saw one of you, I think. Yeah?” Despite the drink in his hand, he seemed soberer now than he had on the Métro. She wanted him to disappear.
“Was I wearing a flowery dress?”
“No, you were next to a guy—you were curled up next to someone in a hospital bed.”
Fiona attempted to drain her champagne, although it hurt her nose when she swallowed. “You’re asking about private things,” she said. “It’s art, but I was there. Those were my friends.”
“I—hey, I actually didn’t ask anything. I don’t think I asked a question.”
“Fair enough.”
“What were you afraid I was going to ask?”
She thought. “You were going to ask me who that was, in the bed.”
“Hey, do you want to sit down?”
“No.” She looked at the group hovering in the sunroom door, but they were speaking French and hadn’t glanced her way.
“Can I—listen, I just have one question, and it’s not about that picture, it’s about the triptych.”
“Christ. What.”
“Sorry! Sorry. Let’s find food.”
She was stressed about things that had nothing to do with Jake Austen and his invasion, but he was a convenient punching bag. And so she stepped too close to him, spoke too loud. “That was Julian Ames. In the triptych. He was a beautiful person, an actor, and Richard took the first photo when everything was great, and he took the second when Julian was freaking out because he knew he was sick, and then he took the third when he weighed like a hundred pounds.”
“Hey, I’m sorry, I—”
“My brother died in this stupid hospital where my parents put him, this place where everyone was scared of him and no one knew what the hell they were doing, and Julian came up there every single day. He wasn’t the smartest guy, but he was loyal and he felt things more than other people. You, you numb out with alcohol, right? Some people actually feel things. And there was this nurse who’d come around with the menu, but she wouldn’t bring it into the room. Not that he could eat anything anyway.”
“That’s awful.”
“Shut up. So half the time it didn’t matter, because Nico was out of it. What we realized at the very end was he had lymphoma of the central nervous system, and these idiot doctors missed it and gave him steroids, which was the worst thing. But it reduced the brain swelling at first, so for a couple days he had these lucid windows. He’d reemerge for ten minutes, and then he’d be gone again. So he’s lucid one day and the nurse comes and stands there, and she’s got this smug little face, and she starts reading the menu from the doorway. Julian’s in there with me, and Nico’s alert, and the nurse goes, ‘Spaghetti with meatballs.’ So Julian stands at the foot of Nico’s bed and repeats it in this theater voice, like he’s playing a Shakespearean king, and then he does—it was somewhere between pantomime and an interpretive dance. This whole thing about spaghetti, twining it around his fork, slurping the noodles. And the nurse just has this look on her face, like, This is why you’re all sick, look at this faggy behavior. Julian goes right up and peers over her shoulder at the menu, and he announces the next thing, which is chicken salad, and he does a chicken dance. He does the whole menu like that while the nurse stands there.”