Words by Anabel Audoly CM ’28, Graphic by Ben Connolly PZ ’26

1

The dinner was to be at Anton Volkov’s apartment in the 6ᵉ  arrondissement. He had started spending his time watching rather long episodes of two young Americans remodeling homes. They were twins and he found this quite charming, although he hadn’t yet realized it was because he missed his children. Ivana and Gabriel were born in 1983. Beatriz Almeida, his wife, a French-Brazilian architect, had recently been diagnosed with endometrial cancer. The therapies she developed when she was 48 hadn’t worked, she supposed, but she remained committed to the series of serums she applied before slumber. 

He dwelled on her death as one dwells on a departure board –– knowing the train must leave but unable to envision it. 

When she wore her ivory silk gown, he would say something to the effect of “you look gorgeous, my darling, absolutely sublime” and she would smile that mischievous smile and whisper “thank you” and place a kiss on his left cheek. He made a tolerable fortune as a jewelry store owner that Beatriz designed the interior of. The shop was on Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, and displayed emeralds the way Anton’s grandfather had displayed them in Saint Petersburg.

Anton’s Russian accent had softened over the decades, but it emerged when he was tired or when he spoke to his brother on the phone. He still dreamed in Russian. Still counted money in Russian. Still said bozhe moy under his breath when something surprised him.

Yuri, Anton’s good friend, lived at the intersection of Rue Jacob and Rue Bonaparte, and tended to wander down the road to him most days with his Jack Russell Terrier, Jacques. Often, the manhole in the road was left uncovered, and all that remain hidden behind the window of smoke was a bark, or the silhouette of a woman in a large coat, or the news of a recent worker strike being tucked under an armpit. 

Jacques was a spiritual creature and his levels of energy were not suited to the life of the old man that raised him, but he made do. 

Yuri had come to Paris in 1985, when everything in Leningrad felt like it was collapsing inward. He brought with him three things: a samovar that didn’t work properly, a photograph of his sister who had died of pneumonia when they were children, and a copy of Eugene Onegin complete with his father’s marginalia.

By nature of the proximity Yuri and Anton’s apartments had to each other, they confabulated for most hours of the afternoon most days of the week. This, of course, couldn’t happen when Anton and Beatriz were at their home in Cambrils, and Anton noticed himself idling for far longer than he would have liked on Facebook marketplace, and taking far more naps, and far longer walks, to pass the time. Yuri, too, would miss his presence, and noticed his Jacques waiting by the door, ready for the walk over, and wonder if he should fill his time with a large baking project or go to his favorite museum, the Musée Rodin, where he liked to walk in the garden and observe the mingling birds. 

2

Today was October 21, and Anton woke at 9h00. The dinner was in two days. After he and Bea retired they began cooking together more frequently. They would forage mushrooms together –– Anton showing her which ones his grandmother had picked in the forests outside Novgorod. She’d sit next to him while he fished. He’d sit next to her as she played solitaire. 

Today, though, as they prepared vinaigrette together, he assumed the seated position at their dining table, and she stood at the counter cutting carrots. Svekla, he called the beets, always the Russian word first. When she stood for too long she would need to retire to the bedroom to rest. 

You should sit, Anton said, watching her sway slightly.

I’m fine, lyubimiy, she replied, using the endearment he’d taught her thirty years ago.

But he saw the way her hand gripped the counter, the way her breath came shorter. He stood and took the knife from her gently, the way you might take something fragile from a child.

3 

Marie-Colette Abadie was born 1989. She liked watercoloring on the banks of rivers, smelling leather purses, feeling the grass beneath her bare feet, and cracking the spines of magazines. 

When she moved into her apartment in the 6ᵉ arrondissement at 21 Rue Bonaparte, she did not care to learn about the lives of her neighbors. In fact, she did not learn Beatriz’s name until Beatriz asked her for help with carrying her groceries up. It was not a planned market visit, je vous le jure! They were taking care of Jacques for the week, as Yuri was vacationing with a male companion in Provence –– or possibly the Riviera, Beatriz couldn’t remember which.

Marie-Colette pet Jacques like she knew him, which she did. Yuri entered the book store she had inherited weekly with him. Marie-Colette noticed how thin Beatriz’s wrists were, how her rings turned loose on her fingers.

You’re Russian, Marie-Colette said, hearing Beatriz murmur something to the dog.

My husband is, I’ve absorbed some of it. Beatriz smiled. Like living with the weather. 

They became friendly in a particularly sweet way –– nodding on the stairs, occasionally sharing some cherries on the small balcony between their floors, never quite crossing into true intimacy but hovering at its edge.

4

Ivana Almeida-Volkova had written earlier in the week that she would arrive late, if she arrived at all. She had inherited her father’s dark eyes and her mother’s incapacity for patience. She was living in Berlin with a man named Kaspar Dietrich who designed complicated lighting systems for art galleries and wore square glasses with titanium frames that cost more than most people’s monthly rent. Kaspar was methodical in a way that Ivana found both attractive and occasionally maddening. He labeled everything in their shared apartment –– spices, electrical cords, the recycling bins –– with a label maker he’d received as a birthday gift from his mother. He was from Cologne, spoke four languages fluently, and had strong opinions about Brutalist architecture.

Ivana smoked but only in the mornings, which she considered a kind of discipline. When she called home, her voice carried a faint echo of German efficiency, but when she spoke to Anton, she slipped into Russian without thinking. She worked as a translator for the European Parliament, spent her weekends at flea markets in Kreuzberg, and had recently developed an interest in learning to make her own kombucha, which Kaspar supported with the same serious dedication he brought to everything else. He had built her a fermentation station in their kitchen with adjustable shelving and temperature controls.

Gabriel Almeida-Volkov was already in Paris, though rarely in one place. He worked between Lisbon and Dakar, photographing shipyards and urban corners where buildings seemed to grow out of one another. His work had once been described as “architectural sorrow.” He was thirty-nine now and still did not know whether he wanted children. He spent most nights in borrowed apartments, sending his lovers long voice messages of street sounds and scattered thoughts rather than actual words. They loved this.

Currently, Gabriel was seeing a woman named Aminata Diallo who worked for an NGO focused on coastal erosion in West Africa. She was Senegalese, from Saint-Louis, and had studied environmental science in Lyon before returning to Dakar. She was tall, with elegant hands and a direct way of speaking that reminded Gabriel of his mother. She wore her lips with a dark brown lipstick, and had a scar on her left shoulder from a childhood accident involving a fishing boat. She would trace it absently when she was thinking. They had met six months ago at a conference in Lisbon, where she’d been presenting on rising sea levels and he’d been photographing the presenters for the conference materials. She had looked directly into his camera and said, are you going to take the photo or are you waiting for me to pose? He took the photo then asked her to dinner.

Aminata was flying to Paris for the dinner party. This was significant. Gabriel did not usually introduce his lovers to his family, but Aminata had asked to meet them with such straightforward curiosity that he couldn’t think of a reason to refuse. She wanted to see where he came from, she said, to understand what made him so quiet. You photograph people like you’re documenting something that’s already disappeared, she’d told him once. Like you’re already nostalgic for the present moment. He didn’t know what to say then, so he kissed her hand instead.

What he hadn’t told her was that he’d once loved someone this way before. A bookseller who wore her hair in a long braid down her back. Whose grandfather had left her a shop that smelled of paper and lavender. He had loved her with the violent certainty of a man who doesn’t yet know that certainty is not the same as commitment. He’d left for Dakar without asking her to come, telling himself it was kindness –– that she had her life –– when really it was cowardice. Three years later, he still thought of her when he woke in unfamiliar rooms, when he watched women toy with their hair, when he passed bookshops in foreign cities.

5

Anton and Beatriz’s love story was not dramatic. When they met, she was thirty-seven and he was forty-one. She had just been hired to consult on the interior design of a new jewelry store on Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. He was the owner, recently divorced from a Russian woman who had returned to Saint Petersburg with their daughter from that marriage. He wore a navy coat with the collar turned up and ordered tea with lemon, no sugar, in a way that made the waiter nervous. His Russian manners confused the French. She found him handsome in an austere way. He had the most brilliant smile. 

Their first meeting was professional. She presented her ideas for the shop and he listened without interrupting, his hands folded on the table. When she finished, he said, Yes. Exactly this. Then he asked if she would have dinner with him.

She said no. She had a rule about mixing business with pleasure. He accepted this with a small nod and said, Then we will wait until the business is finished.

It took four months to design and build the interior of the shop. During that time, they spoke often about all sorts of curiosities. When the shop opened, he sent her a bouquet of white roses with a card that said only, Now?

They had dinner that night at a small restaurant near the Luxembourg Gardens. He did not appear nervous, she realized. She found this charming. He was smooth, practiced, but so earnest in a way that made her chest tighten.

Six months later he proposed with a ring he’d made himself –– white gold, with a small sapphire that had belonged to his grandmother. They were married six months after that in a small ceremony at the mairie of the 6ᵉ arrondissement. His mother came from Russia and cried through the entire ceremony. Beatriz’s mother came from São Paulo and kept whispering to Beatriz in Portuguese, This is wonderful, this is wonderful. Beatriz was so pleased then.

They learned each other slowly. He liked to read before bed, always non-fiction, always in Russian. She couldn’t sleep if there were dishes in the sink. He was afraid of dogs until he met Jacques. She cried during certain medication commercials but never during sad movies.

When the twins were born, Anton softened. He would hold them for hours, speaking to them in Russian, telling them stories about his grandmother, about his summers in Kazakhstan. Beatriz would watch him from the doorway and feel something she couldn’t name. Happiness, certainly, but maybe something closer to contentment, maybe. The sense that she had chosen correctly, that this man with his careful hands and his Russian sadness was exactly who she was meant to build a life with.

Now, decades later, they had learned the choreography of a long marriage: when to speak, when to be quiet, when to simply exist in the same room and let that be enough.

When she told him about the cancer, he had taken her hand and said nothing for a very long time. Then he said, in Russian, ya tebya ne otpushchu. I will not let you go. 

6

Three weeks before the dinner party, Beatriz had been walking home from a doctor’s appointment. The news had been clear enough: the endometrial cancer, first diagnosed eighteen months ago, had spread despite the treatments. Stage IV now. The oncologist had used words like “palliative” and “quality of life” and “perhaps two years, perhaps less.” She had nodded, and then left.

She went to the café on Rue Saint-Jacques, ordered a noisette, and sat by the window. She was thinking about nothing in particular — about the doctor’s office, about whether she needed to buy eggs, about the young lady outside with the red hair — when she heard someone say her name.

Beatriz?

She looked up. A man was standing beside her table. Tall, grey hair, wire-framed glasses. It took her a moment to place him. Mylo.

Mon Dieu, he said, smiling. It is you.

They stared at each other for a moment. He had aged, of course. They both had. But his face was still the same face, the same slightly crooked smile, the same way of tilting his head when he was pleased.

May I? He gestured to the chair across from her.

Please.

He sat. They looked at each other some more. It was awkward and strange and somehow also perfectly natural.

How long has it been? she asked. 

Thirty years? 

More, I think. She tried to calculate. The last time she’d seen him had been the mid seventies? He had been with someone then, a man, she remembered now. They had run into each other at a museum. It had been brief. Polite. She was standing next to her boyfriend at the time, Charles. 

You live in Paris still? he asked.

I never left. And you?

I came back two years ago. I was in New York for a long time. Then Berlin. Then I got tired of Germany and decided to come home. He smiled. Or what passes for home.

They talked for an hour. 

When she got up to leave, he said It’s good to see you, Beatriz.

It’s good to see you, too. And she meant it. It was strange, but she meant it.

He hesitated, then pulled out his phone. May I? Your number?

7

Two days later, she received a card in the mail. His handwriting, still the same. It was lovely to run into you. Perhaps we could have coffee again sometime? – M.

She showed the card to Anton that evening.

Anton read the M carefully. Mylo Weintraub? 

An old friend. From university. I ran into him at the café.

Anton was quiet for a moment. You were lovers.

It was not a question. Beatriz had told him everything when they were first married –– not as a confession, but as a fact, the way you might mention that you’d once lived in Lyon or that you were allergic to shellfish.

A very long time ago, she said.

And now he wants to have coffee.

I think he’s lonely. He’s been away from Paris for years.

Anton nodded slowly. He returned the card to her. Khorosho.

But that evening, she noticed him in his study, looking at nothing in particular, his jaw tight.

A week later, when she was planning the dinner party, she said, casually, I invited Mylo. Is that alright?

Anton was polishing a bracelet at his workbench. He did not look up. Of course. We need an even number anyway.

She knew him well enough to hear what he wasn’t saying. But she also knew that he would never forbid her anything. 

Ten people. Her and Anton. Ivana and Kaspar. Gabriel and Aminata. Marie-Colette from upstairs, invited for no particular reason except that Beatriz found her “undeniably pleasant to look at.” Yuri and his plus one. And Mylo. She didn’t know why she was inviting him but she sent the invitation anyway.

8

Beatriz went to Sciences Po when she was 18. She would go out most days on long walks through the city. In 1967, on a Wednesday in late May, at the Cité campus, she met Mylo Weintraub, a German Jew from Stuttgart. He was standing beneath a poplar, holding a cigarette in his left hand and a folded map of the city in the other, which she would later discover he could not read properly. He’d arrived two days earlier from Prague, with a valise full of pressed shirts and two volumes of Rilkes that he pretended to understand deeply.

She, meanwhile, was hurrying toward a lecture on political movements she didn’t particularly care about. Their conversation was unremarkable. He approached her and said he wasn’t lost and actually just wanted to be completely and utterly sure that he was going in the right direction, and could she help him? She said he was pretty evidently lost and he smiled a cheeky grin because his flirtation had worked. This charmed her. They shared a slightly embarrassed laugh. She, embarrassed because she realized far too late that he was attempting to jest with her, and he, because he wished he just asked her out. 

She came to find out that he was her age, but actually a few months younger. Ergo, he playfully called her Madame. He had an accent when he spoke French, but then again, so did she. Beatriz was ineluctably bewitched by his height and his beauty marks and tweed coat. If he weren’t an academic, she surmised he could still blend into the faculty perfectly. L’usurpateur. He had blond hair and brown eyes. He hated that she didn’t seem impressed by him. 

Two weeks later, they were meeting at odd hours, between his German literature class and her political philosophy seminar, and at 21h00, or 04h00 when they couldn’t sleep. They drank noisettes at a corner table on Rue Saint-Jacques. She wore cheap lipstick and left faint red rings on every cup. He memorized the shapes of her sentences; held her hand and thought about how small it looked in his. They got along agreeably. Both with some knowledge of esoterica. She thought he was quite wise, and he thought she was incredibly brilliant. They were just young. He collected scraps for her: lines of poems torn from journals, once a folded grocery list with pâte d’amande underlined twice. She kept them inside a ceramic dish in her bedroom, the same one she used to hold hairpins. She never told him.

They fell in love without deciding to. In the fall, they spent an entire night lying on the floor of his small rented room, reading out loud from books they only half-understood, then they would kiss. 

You know Nietzsche was in love with Lou Andreas-Salomé but she rejected his proposals for marriage, she said. 

Rée loved her too. 

Übermenschen. 

Très bien, madame. He’d smile.

At dawn, she told him she was in love with him. He said nothing for a long time, which she mistook for hesitation, but later he said it back whilst caressing her hair. The thing about first loves is that they rarely fold themselves into the rest of your life as neatly as you hope.

9

When she returned to Paris after a summer in Brazil, he had become absorbed in his work, in political debates, in ideas too big, too bizarre for them to confabulate about. She had met people who painted in the streets, who drank too much rosé, who kissed her hands like they were already in love with her.

They began to fight. Not viciously, but in the way people fight when they know something has shifted and neither wants to say it out loud. She was twenty. He was almost. They broke up in a small park near a church they never went inside. She gave him back the key to his room. He gave her back a book he’d never finished. She hated him for this. Never finishing a book. He kissed her forehead as though he were trying to remember it. 

Years passed like that. Slowly. 

When they saw each other again, it wasn’t planned. She was standing outside a museum to present a model of the building they were to make for an expansion project. He was exiting the same museum through a different door. It was raining in the thin, stubborn way that makes umbrellas seem useless.

He said her name softly. Beatriz. 

Mylo. You look terrible.

He laughed –– not because it was true (though it was), but because it was her.

Once, in 1983, he spent an afternoon at a flea market on the outskirts of Paris. He walked, touching things he wouldn’t buy. Later, he bought Beatriz a small tin lighter with a swallow engraved on it in case he ever saw her again. At this very moment, across the city, Beatriz held Gabriel and Ivana for the very first time. 

Now, decades later, Mylo has grown softer around the edges. He carries a leather satchel that smells of camphor. She wears shawls even when it isn’t cold.

10

The table was to be set for ten. The silverware had been polished by a woman from Marseille who had worked with them for decades and who now hummed to herself in the kitchen as she arranged silver fish knives in a row. There were three bottles of Chassagne-Montrachet cooling in the marble sink. Anton preferred Chablis, but he would never admit this aloud; Beatriz liked the Montrachet, and this was enough.

Anton had also requested a bottle of nastoika –– cherry vodka his cousin sent from Moscow every year –– to be served ice-cold in small glasses after the meal. For digestion, he always said, though everyone knew it was for nostalgia.

The menu had been planned for weeks. The courses would be served by the two footmen in white gloves that Beatriz had hired for the evening. This was extravagant, perhaps, but she wanted it to be perfect. 

11

Yuri and Jacques arrived first, at precisely 19h30. Yuri wore a dark suit that was slightly too large for him, as though he had recently lost weight, or as though the suit had been made for a version of himself that no longer existed. Jacques immediately found the warmest spot near the radiator.

You’re early, Beatriz said, kissing Yuri on both cheeks. And alone? I thought you were bringing someone.

Yuri smiled in that particular way he had when he was nervous. He ran to get something. He’ll be up in a moment.

When Beatriz looked past him down the hallway, she found, just behind Yuri, a tall figure approaching. A man with a brown wool coat folded over one arm, holding a small box of sweets wrapped in wax paper dampened by the rain. As he came into the light, she felt her breath catch.

Mylo? 

Yuri’s smile widened, though his eyes were careful, watching her reaction. You invited him, didn’t you? I had no idea you two knew each other until he mentioned your name last week. What a small world.

Something passed between Beatriz and Mylo. A recognition. A question. Mylo looked between them, understanding dawning. You’re the Beatriz that Yuri speaks of so fondly. I should have guessed. And you’re Yuri’s –– Beatriz began, then stopped. She laughed, a little breathless. This is quite a coincidence. Mylo winked at her, that same playful expression from decades ago. Good of you to come, she said. 

Anton appeared behind Beatriz with two glasses of vodka. He handed one to Yuri then glanced at the man beside him. Mylo met his gaze steadily. Ah, Anton said finally, polite, formal, you must be Beatriz’s old friend. Welcome. 

They shook hands. Ochen priyatno, Anton said. Very pleasant to meet you. The Russian was deliberate, a small claim of territory. The pleasure is mine, Mylo replied in French. There was a moment of silence. Then, Come in, come in. Let me take your coat. 

12

When Ivana and Kaspar arrived, Kaspar immediately began complimenting the lighting fixtures in the apartment, explaining to the crowd about the optimal color temperature for evening gatherings. Ivana kissed her father on both cheeks and whispered in Russian, Ty vyglyadish’ ustalym. You look tired. He squeezed her hand and said nothing. 

Gabriel and Aminata were next. Aminata wore a dress in deep indigo with gold embroidery at the collar. You must be Madame Almeida-Volkova, Aminata said, extending her hand. It is a pleasure to make your acquaintance. Gabriel has told me so much about you. 

Gabriel followed behind, carrying a bag that clinked with wine bottles. He looked nervous in a way Beatriz rarely saw in him. He kissed his mother, then his father, and introduced Aminata to everyone with a formality that betrayed how much he cared. 

Marie-Colette arrived last, bringing a bouquet of wildflowers she had picked herself. She wore a simple green dress and no jewelry except small gold hoops in her ears. She looked impossibly young standing in the ornate apartment and when Gabriel saw her his throat grew dry. 

13

The living room smelled of cedar and cumin and something roasting in the oven. Conversations formed and dissolved. Kaspar asked Marie-Colette about her book store. Marie-Colette wondered if she could excuse herself to smoke. Aminata spoke to Anton about the jewelry business and listened as he explained the provenance of various stones. Ivana stood by the window with Gabriel, speaking in a low voice about their mother’s health, about whether she was really as well as she pretended to be. Gabriel could only think about Marie-Colette.

Mylo stood slightly apart from the group, near the bookshelf, examining the spines. Yuri brought him a glass of wine. Their hands touched briefly when Yuri passed the glass. Anton, across the room, saw this. 

14

They filed into the dining room. Each place setting had been measured, the knives aligned, the napkins folded like narrow envelopes, the menu printed on thick ivory card stock. Beatriz had spent an hour that afternoon arranging the place cards.

She had seated herself at the head of the table, with Anton at the opposite end. Mylo was next to Beatriz, which Anton noticed immediately. His mouth formed a thin line. Mylo and Yuri were separated by the length of the table. The soup arrived, the violet petals floated in the cream like small boats. Everyone admired them. 

This is exquisite, Aminata said to the table. 

Beatriz has always had an eye for these things. Anton’s voice carried a note of pride that made Beatriz smile at him. He raised his glass slightly, a small gesture of acknowledgment. 

How long have you and Gabriel been together? Ivana asked Aminata.

Six months, Aminata said. Though it feels longer. We met at a conference in Lisbon.

Gabriel never tells us anything, Ivana said. We had to hear about you from Maman.

Gabriel looked mildly uncomfortable. I told you about her.

You said you were ‘seeing someone’. That’s not the same as telling us about her.

What would you like to know? Aminata said, amused.

Ivana leaned forward. The important things.

Aminata laughed. I’m from Saint-Louis, in Senegal. I work on climate adaptation. 

Gabriel looked at her with transparent affection.

The turbot arrived. Marie-Colette excused herself to smoke on the balcony and didn’t return for fifteen minutes. When she came back, her cheeks were flushed from the cold. Gabriel glanced at her and felt his heart palpitate. 

Mylo turned to Beatriz. How have you been? he asked quietly. She looked at him. He was watching her with that particular intensity that had charmed her all those years ago.

I’m well, she said.

Are you?

She didn’t answer. Instead, she lifted her wine glass and took a long sip.

I’m glad you invited me, Mylo said. It’s strange, being back in Paris. I’d forgotten what it felt like.

Would you not have come regardless of my invitation?

Hm.

She supposed it really was not a very dramatic situation, she would just have to tell Anton. Tell me, what does it feel like being back here?

Like coming back to a place you used to live, and all the furniture has been rearranged. Familiar but wrong.

Beatriz knew this exactly.

At the far end of the table, Anton was watching them. Yuri was saying something to him about the wine, but Anton wasn’t listening. He was watching the way Mylo leaned slightly toward Beatriz when he spoke. The way Beatriz’s face softened when she listened.

The guinea fowl arrived. The chestnut purée was smooth and rich. Ivana told a story about Kaspar labeling their spice rack in order of usage frequency. Everyone laughed. Kaspar protested mildly that it was efficient.

How did you two meet? Aminata asked Beatriz and Anton.

I designed his jewelry shop.

And I fell in love with her taste in velvet, Anton added.

That’s not romantic, Ivana said.

It’s very romantic, Anton said. She made my shop beautiful. Then she made my life beautiful.

There was a brief silence. He raised his glass. To my wife, he said. Who makes everything beautiful. 

They all drank.

Mylo watched this exchange. Something flickered across his face. Not jealousy, exactly, but a kind of recognition. He felt a strange relief knowing he and Beatriz both found love in different places. He reached into his jacket pocket and withdrew something small wrapped in tissue paper. He placed it quietly beside her plate.

She unwrapped it. A small tin lighter with a swallow engraved on it.

I found this years ago, Mylo said quietly. It made me think of you. I’ve been meaning to return it. 

Beatriz held the lighter, turning it over in her fingers. She understood that some loves persist even when they transform into something else entirely.

Thank you. It’s lovely.

Anton, at the far end of the table, saw the exchange but could not hear the words. He saw only Mylo’s gentle expression, the small object passing between them.

The salad arrived. The pomegranate seeds looked like small jewels. Gabriel asked Kaspar about a lighting installation he’d read about in Berlin. Kaspar began explaining inverse square law and lumens. Gabriel glanced at Marie-Colette every few seconds. He thought about what it would be like to smell her neck. 

Yuri, emboldened by wine, leaned across the table slightly. Mylo, he said. Tell them about your work.

I teach German literature, Mylo said. At the Sorbonne. I specialize in post-war poetry.

Paul Celan? Marie-Colette asked, suddenly interested. 

Among others, yes.

They talked about poetry for a while. Marie-Colette quoted something from memory. Mylo corrected her gently. She blushed but didn’t seem offended. 

She glanced at Gabriel. She had forgotten his face, the way his wrists looked, the way he held a fork. It had been three years since she’d last seen him. He had come in looking for a book on Portuguese architecture and stayed for two hours talking to her about Lisbon. They had loved each other intensely for eight months, and then he left silently. She had waited for him to call. He never did. And now here he was, staring at her across his parents’ dinner table. 

She stood abruptly. Excusez-moi, she murmured, and walked toward the restroom. Gabriel waited thirty seconds, and in a moment of folly, he followed. He found her in the hallway, leaning against the wall.

Gabi, she said. J’y crois pas. I can’t believe it.

Ça me tue de te voir, he said. His voice was rough. It kills me to see you.

She looked at him. Tu aurais pu appeler. You could have called.

Je sais. 

They stood there, close enough to touch but not touching.

Embrasse-moi, she finally said. Kiss me.

He looked at her for a long moment. Then he shook his head. I can’t, he said. It wouldn’t be fair. Not to you, not to Aminata, not to –– He gestured helplessly. I can’t.

She laughed, a bitter sound. Now you have integrity?

I’m sorry.

When they returned to the table, Aminata glanced at Gabriel and said nothing, but her smile tightened slightly, and she turned her attention to the rest of the table.

And at the same moment in time, Anton watched the way Yuri looked at Mylo. He had known Yuri for nearly forty years. They had walked together almost daily, had confided in each other through divorces and deaths and the small accumulated sorrows of growing old in a foreign city. And yet Yuri had never mentioned Mylo. Had never mentioned being in love. Had carried this entire part of his life in silence. Anton felt the sting of it. Not disapproval –– he didn’t care who Yuri loved. But the secrecy. Anton looked at Beatriz and mouthed Je t’aime. She mouthed it back. He reached for a small piece of chestnut purée with the edge of his fork. 

15

It was not the food itself, not exactly, but something caught somewhere in the wrong place, too far down and too suddenly. He straightened slightly. No one noticed. The candles flickered when the air moved.

He felt a tightness beginning in his chest. Just a pressure, as though someone had placed a heavy book against his sternum. Anton tried to cough, but it was a thin, small sound, the sound of someone clearing their throat at a concert so as not to disturb the performance.

He set the fork down carefully and pressed his hand flat against his chest. The pressure intensified, spreading across his ribs, radiating into his left shoulder. He thought perhaps it was indigestion. He had eaten too quickly. He tried to take a deep breath, but couldn’t. Yuri was saying something to Mylo about Jacques. Ivana was turning her spoon in a circle. Kaspar had his arm around the back of her chair. The chandelier made a low hum. Beatriz was laughing at something Aminata said. Gabriel and Marie-Colette had just returned to the table. 

The pressure became pain –– a deep, squeezing ache that made his jaw tighten. He gripped the edge of the table with his right hand, trying to steady himself, but his palm was slick with sweat.

He wanted to say something. Wanted to call Beatriz’s name. But the pain was taking all his concentration, and he found himself frozen in a strange politeness, not wanting to disturb the dinner, not wanting to make a scene. It would pass. These things passed.

He looked down the length of the table at Beatriz. She was gesturing with her wine glass, saying something that made Aminata lean forward. The candlelight caught the silver in her hair, made her skin glow. Beautiful. She was so beautiful.

The pain peaked. A crushing, suffocating pressure that made his entire body rigid for one long moment. Then, gradually, it began to ease. Not disappearing, but transforming into something else. A heaviness. A profound tiredness.

His last view was of the table. A good last view. 

His napkin slipped soundlessly from his lap to the floor.

Vsyo, he thought, or perhaps only felt. Everything. Or perhaps: enough.

Outside, the rain thickened. And for a long moment, the evening remained untouched, perfect, suspended in its own expensive, intricate stillness. ■