Page 44 of Exit Party

“Oh, I don’t know,” Gloria said, retreating into vagueness. “Not necessarily.”

“Come on,” I said. “That’s an extreme sentence.”

“Not by American standards, my little Parisian,” she said, and for just a second I heard Nico in her voice. My little Parisian was the kind of thing Nico would say. I may have winced. On the list of things I hated most in those days—bananas, humidity, falling-down socks, the Paris dome, being embarrassed in front of people my own age—any point of overlap between Nico and Gloria was near the top. Nico had left France four days ago on one of her research trips, and I missed her already. “Anyway, why are you so interested in Ari Soriano?”

“She has my father’s painting,” I said. “That was the only thing I had of his in the world.”

“It was . . .” Gloria had started to say It was mine to sell, but we’d been having this argument since I was seven so she didn’t finish the sentence. I heard the low electric whirr of the academy bus before I saw it, rounding the corner between low buildings. The bus looked a little shabbier now than it had last year, red paint fading to pink.

“Are you happy there?” Gloria asked, watching the bus’s approach. “At the school?”

“Seriously,” I said, “what do you care?”

“Of course I care,” she said. “I’m your mother.”

“If you say so, Gloria. I was raised by reality TV until Nico showed up.”

“I don’t think that’s quite fair,” she said. I rolled my eyes, but I saw she was about to cry, so I said nothing further. The conduct of the president was unforgivable, one of my history professors had said a while back, in relation to some long-ago financial scandal, and the phrase had stayed with me because that was how I thought of my mother. I thought her conduct as a parent had been unforgivable, but on the other hand I didn’t actually want her weeping and causing a scene on a train platform. A guy from the year above me was moving down the platform, also headed for the bus. We exchanged stiff nods. My mother didn’t start crying in front of him and social disaster was averted.

But if I’d just answered the question instead of going on the attack, the answer was that I was happy at boarding school, for the most part. I was having a good time there. School had always been easy for me, and I’d been learning a lot about drugs and petty theft from the degenerate offspring of the international elite. I wasn’t bad-looking. My American ancestry lent an air of tragedy that was helpful with the girls, especially the girls who did well in history.

“I could visit you,” she said. “During the school year?”

“Bit late to take an interest, isn’t it?”

“Sebastian,” she said, with a pained expression, but there was nothing she could really say to this. I basked for a moment in victory as the bus glided to a stop.

“Gloria,” I said, “someone told me Ari Soriano’s been married three times. Who was her first husband?”

“I don’t know,” she said, and then “I really don’t, Sebastian,” in response to the look I gave her. “All of that drama was after I knew her.”

2

Ari Soriano’s current spouse was a woman, the pianist Eddie Kalisa. They were a glamorous couple, both well into their fifties by the time they married. They had an enormous apartment in the 7th, or so I’d been told. Their dinner parties were legendary. My friend Cole had attended one of them with his parents—his parents and Eddie were opera friends—and I grilled him on Ari, on the paintings, the layout of the apartment, the other guests, until he told me to shut up.

“She was intimidating,” he said, about Ari, but struggled to articulate what he meant by this. When I asked Nico if she’d ever been to a dinner party there, she laughed at me. “I’m probably the last person she’d invite to a dinner party,” she said. She’d visited Ari in the hospital a few times, she told me, after the explosion. They’d talked, and then argued. They’d nearly come to blows.

“But she still paid my tuition,” I said to Nico, who shrugged.

“I asked her to,” Nico said, “and she said yes. One thing I’ll say for her, she does what she says she’s going to do.”

“But why would she do that for a kid she doesn’t know?”

“Guilt, maybe? The source of her wealth isn’t exactly aboveboard, Sebastian. She was a criminal for most of her life.”

“Well, she did seem a bit volatile,” Cole said when I told him that. We were smoking on a park bench in the village by the school, with my other friend Obie and this girl Aurélie who was friends with Obie. Obie always had cigarettes. Obie’s curse in life was that he’d been born to Shakespearean actors and his legal name was Oberon. His father was a marginal figure who’d long since abandoned acting for petty crime, and his mother had died some years earlier during a heat wave in Spain.

“Volatile how?” I asked. It’s important to know your enemy.

“Like a panther at the zoo,” Cole said. “Volatile’s maybe not the right word. Like perfectly calm, but you felt like she’d kill you at the first opportunity.”

“Tightly wound,” Obie said. “That’s what you mean, not volatile. Like a coiled spring. My dad’s like that.”

“All springs are coiled,” Aurélie said, “or they wouldn’t be springs.”

“Not all springs,” Obie said.

“No, they’ve all got that spiralling thing,” Cole said, “you know, like—”