been eating once on the top floor of the Edgewater Hotel in Madison, a place with windows looking out over Lake Mendota. Bobbing docks and angry gulls. When Damian got up for the restroom, a white-haired man approached the table and in a thick, slobbery accent said, “You are the mistress, no?” Fiona had the presence of mind not to engage, not even to deny this; she just signaled the waiter, who came right over, and the man left. But she’d laughed about it with Damian for weeks. When she answered the phone he’d say, “You are the mistress, no?” She wasn’t. Damian had never been married, never even planned to get married until suddenly, that next fall, Fiona found herself pregnant. It was the start of her fourth year at Wisconsin, and she was twenty-seven.
She said to Arnaud, “Can you just call the landlady?”
“I tell you what, I’ll call in ten minutes. But we’ll hear before then.”
She appreciated his confidence as much as she resented it.
The couple at the other table, she realized, had switched to English. Odd, because they didn’t speak it well.
“I pay for the flat,” the man was saying. “I pay, and this is how you do!” He glanced at Fiona and she pretended to read the front of Arnaud’s newspaper, just inches from her face. She imagined the man assumed they were French—Le Monde probably helped—and thought English would be the safer language for communicating his anger.
The woman said, “What I’m supposed to spend my day? I should sit there?” She looked frustrated, but defiant too. Was she a kept woman? Something worse?
“Yes,” he said, “you sit, you read a book, I don’t care. You watch a film.” He had wild, thick eyebrows. He was furious.
Arnaud had gone still, moved his paper to the side to get a better look.
Fiona wanted to write the woman a note (“Leave him now!”) but there was no way to get it to her without the man noticing. Had someone seen Claire and Kurt like this in Boulder and done nothing? Had anyone seen Claire and the other Hosanna women walking together on a rare trip to town, arms covered, faces down? Did anyone ask if they were alright? If they needed a ride to the airport and three hundred dollars?
The woman was crying, and Fiona managed to make eye contact with Arnaud, who gave a small shrug. The man picked up his own half-empty glass and poured his remaining water into the woman’s. He checked that the waiter had his back turned, and then he wiped the glass with his napkin and shoved it into the woman’s purse.
The woman whispered in French, a protest, and he whispered back. Was this how they furnished her apartment, one pilfered dish at a time? The woman stood, miserable, and picked up her purse. They left quickly.
“Wow,” Fiona said. Her whiskey was gone.
Arnaud folded the paper, shook his head. “Some women are very stupid.”
“Excuse me?”
“What, you think she’s a genius?”
“You don’t know what it’s like to be with someone manipulative.” Though really, she didn’t know either. Damian had been older, sure, and he often turned professorial, lecturing and pontificating, but he never manipulated her.
Damian had supported her finishing school that year after the baby was born, and when Fiona had class she’d drop Claire off with a bottle at his office, where she was the little princess of the sociology department. She’d come back two hours later to find the room full of grad students cooing over Claire, holding a rattle for her. Damian was never anything but solicitous; the marriage’s failure was her fault, entirely. She’d offered once that if any new girlfriend called her up, she’d testify to his character, explain how she was the one with commitment issues. How her heart was too battered for anything like real love. When he got together with Karen, Fiona had repeated the offer. “It’s okay,” he said. “She knows.”
Arnaud said, “I see this all the time. What do you think I investigate? Half of it involves, okay, not-so-genius women in trouble with a man. I turn down jobs every week from guys like that who want women followed.”
Fiona told herself not to yell at Arnaud, whose assistance she didn’t want to lose. She said, “I’ve known men in that situation too. Men manipulated by women. Or by other men.”
Arnaud looked at his phone. “She texted.”
“Oh,” she said. “Okay. Okay.” And suddenly she was all nerves again. She tipped the chair back getting