When I reach the foyer she’s not there. I push through the glass-paned door and into the courtyard and trip over the cobblestones as I whisper a string of shits to myself—how could she have disappeared so quickly? And then I spot her by the big, gated door that leads to the street. Twining yellow and pink roses stretch around the door frame. She’s tugging on the handle like the tourist she probably is, and I almost laugh when she actually kicks the door with her prissy black pump. She mutters something under her breath as I approach.
“You have to press Porte,” I go. “See, right here.” I indicate the button on the stone wall to the left of the door. She moves toward it but I’m too quick. I step in front of the set of buttons—Lumière being the other option—and block them with my body. “It’s weird, the way doors work here,” I continue. “They’re all the same. High-tech security. Serious stuff.” I reach for my black leather tote and rummage for a cigarette. She’s standing there, arms crossed over her chest, looking a mixture of angry and frightened. She still hasn’t said anything. “Want one?” I extend the pack toward her. One of us has to make this less awkward, and it looks like it’s going to be me.
“I don’t smoke,” she says in an American accent. It confirms my suspicions—an American like me, but without the international experiences that have rendered my own accent difficult to place. “Can you please step aside so I can go?” Her jaw is tight and her eyes are cloaked in dark circles. Far away she looked exotic and devastated. Up close she just looks tired and snotty.
“No,” I mimic her. “I cannot.”
“What do you want?”
“I can only guess from the way you were staring in there that you didn’t know about me,” I say matter-of-factly.
“What are you talking about?” she says, but her eyes dart downward. She knows—she must, after my speech. I peer at her closely before I continue, giving her a minute to be upfront. I’m not sure what game she’s playing.
“You’re the other girl,” I say, when it becomes obvious she’s determined to be silent. “I always knew he was cheating,” I continue. “I just can’t believe you had the balls to show up here. Oh . . .” I finish, deliberately trailing off. I’m sure she can’t know how calculated my words are. She’s definitely the sheltered type. “Don’t tell me you were in love with him.”
“Charlie was my boyfriend,” she hisses, almost defensively. “Of course I loved him. I don’t even know who you are.” I didn’t think she could shock me; now my blood runs cold. I knew Charlie had a thing with another American girl when he was spending the summer at NYU the year before. I’d even suspected maybe there’d been one or two more incidents. But someone he was serious enough about to consider his girlfriend? Not possible. I’d have known.
“You’re delusional,” I tell her. I suck at my cigarette and wait for the smoke to calm me. It doesn’t. The girl’s face turns into two faces and then a blurry blob before my line of vision. These are angry tears. I always cry when I’m pissed off. “Charlie and I dated for three years.”
“We were together for a year,” she tells me in an uncertain voice. “We just had our anniversary.”
“You say that like he’s still alive.” I’m testing her, trying to gauge if she has the same suspicions I do.
“That’s ridiculous,” she snaps back, her eyes narrowing. “Of course he’s dead.”
I’m taken aback by her vehemence. There’s a silence. There’s the sound of her breathing hard, of me expelling more smoke. I breathe it in. I breathe it out. I hope when it leaves my lungs it’ll take my pain with it.
“When?” I want to know. I have to know.
“When what?” She’s stopped sniffling and is mopping her mess of a face with a tissue.
“When did you celebrate?” Charlie went water-skiing with some friends the second weekend of July. He’d canceled on a concert with me and I’d tried not to be angry. But it was an important concert, Vampire Weekend. Neither of us even liked them anymore, but it still meant something to me.
“July twelfth,” she says. “We met up in Milwaukee.”
I slump against the wall.
The first concert Charlie and I went to together was Vampire Weekend. That night, we had sex for the first time in a little room behind the sound pit. We could be as loud as we wanted because the music drowned us out; and the cacophony actually wound up forming a weird kind of silent bubble between us. It was the same sensation as when something’s so cold it’s hot—your body no longer knows how to sort out the sensations. Actually, that’s how I always felt around Charlie.
Charlie’s friend Derek hooked him up with the room, back near where the bands get ready. Derek’s dad owns a record label, and it wouldn’t be the first time he’d hook us up. The room was tiny but Charlie decorated it with posters of all my favorite bands: the New Pornographers, Vampire Weekend, M83. There was a row of chocolate-frosted cupcakes lined up on a table in the shape of L+C. There was a bed in the corner with a huge fluffy blue blanket and a bottle of champagne resting on the table next to it.
“It’s your eighteenth,” he told me softly. “I thought you deserved something special.”