Page 47 of Exit Party

“You’re not certain.” I had a feeling I often had when I talked with her, of vast mysteries opening up all around us.

“I’m not certain of anything. Look, I loved that painting. It kept me company in the evenings, when I was working and wished I could be at home with my children. It was nice to look up and see a beautiful thing. But . . .” She shrugged.

“But you’re a physicist,” I said, “and you’re saying that you can’t imagine how a painting could be a door.”

“Right,” she said. “On the other hand, I absolutely cannot explain how the accident happened, so clearly there are variables I don’t understand.”

3

Ari Soriano moved in a cloud of wild rumours. “Someone told me her first husband was an assassin,” Cole told me, late at night in the library when the two of us and Obie were cramming for some exam or another. I didn’t believe in studying until the night before exams. Cole had to study for weeks to make the bare minimum grades to stay at the school, and tonight he had dark circles under his eyes.

“Nah, they were both killers,” Obie said. “I heard she did like thirty years in an American prison.”

I liked looking her up online and trying to divine clues to her character in photographs. Ari Soriano was still beautiful, in a formidable way, but she had that haunted air that’s common among refugees, that look of having seen too much damage and of having lost too much too quickly. That whole generation was a little wrecked.

Her current spouse was a pianist. Eddie Kalisa no longer performed, except for the occasional fundraiser for the music school with which she was affiliated. She taught students at a Paris conservatory, mentored at-risk youth in some music-based program out in the suburbs, and always smiled for photographers. Cole had told me that she and Ari often went to the opera, so when I came back to Paris for spring break, when Nico asked what I wanted to do, I said the opera and we went together.

I might have asked for the opera even if I didn’t have an ulterior motive, or at least that’s what I told myself during the first act. I’d always liked doing things like that with Nico. She sat perfectly still, perfectly focused. She’d told me once that if she was stuck in this world, she could at least try to understand it, which was why she recorded conversations, made lists of things that to me seemed both everyday and random, and absorbed every experience she could. At fifteen I was only just beginning to realize that these activities were a counterweight to despair. She was busying herself in my timeline because she couldn’t get home to hers.

“Did you used to go to the opera, before?” I asked, during intermission. Before was our shorthand for the place she’d come from.

“Where I’m from,” she said, “opera hasn’t been a thing since my parents’ generation. I was surprised to find it here.”

“I mean, opera’s evolved, though,” I said, feeling obscurely protective of my home universe. The opera we’d been watching involved a DJ and breakdancers.

“I just never had much time for concerts,” she said. “I was always working, and then . . .” She stopped there, but I knew the and then meant her children, Samir and Marlowe, very young when she was separated from them. She couldn’t quite look at me. “Life gets in the way of doing things like this,” she said. “But I did occasionally go to the ballet with friends.”

I was looking past her, because I’d just spotted Ari Soriano and Eddie Kalisa. Eddie was a small woman in rumpled tweed. Ari was better-dressed, in an elegant dark suit, with a shock of white hair that ended just above her collar. Her silk scarf was a dash of red that perfectly matched her lipstick. She walked slowly and used a cane. Eddie stayed by Ari’s side, her hand on Ari’s back.

Nico looked where I was looking, and winced.

“Did you know they’d be here?”

“No,” I said. “I knew Eddie came to the opera sometimes, but not her wife.”

“I don’t believe you.” She didn’t sound angry though, because in my experience Nico was almost never angry. The worst thing she could imagine had already happened to her, and nothing that followed was worth getting all that upset about.

“I swear. My plan was to approach Ari through Eddie.”

“Well,” she said, “perhaps now you won’t have to.” But a few minutes later Ari had vanished into the crowd. I watched Eddie Kalisa carefully after that. She seemed to be alone now. I saw her on a mezzanine staircase. From our seats on the lower level, I craned my neck until she appeared on a side balcony. The chair next to hers was empty and remained so when the lights went down. Her wife had seemingly left at intermission.

“It’s data,” Nico said later, out on the street. We were walking together toward the metro, on a narrow street empty except for delivery robots, these sweet-looking animalistic characters who glowed softly on their wheels. “Now you know that Eddie and Ari go to the opera, but Eddie likes it more than she does.”

“Well,” I said, “Eddie’s the musician.”

“What are you doing, Sebastian? Why are you so fixated on this?”

“I’m a fixative person,” I said. “I get fixated very easily.”

“I know, but you’re avoiding the question,” she said.

“Before you, I was always by myself.” I didn’t like to talk about it.

“I know,” Nico said. “I’d never met someone so alone as you.”

“With my mother in the same apartment.” I was trying to keep my voice light, but I felt and sounded like I was choking.

“You know she wasn’t really there,” Nico said. I didn’t know what to say to this. What does it mean to be with someone, what does it mean to be there? I’d liked the way Eddie stayed so close to Ari as they moved through the lobby at the opera; it wasn’t just Eddie’s hand on her wife’s back, it was an overall impression of care. When I saw the two of them together, I felt that she loved her. Nico and I were almost at the metro now. “Listen,” Nico was saying, “your mother sold it. You have to accept that. The painting was hers to sell.”