Page 51 of Exit Party

“Are you happy working at the grocery store?” Nico asked. It was a spring evening in her apartment, where we met for dinner twice a week.

“It’s fine,” I said. “I could imagine staying there for a while.” We sat side by side, so that we could both look at the mural. She’d had it painted two or three years ago, but it retained a sheen of novelty for me. It was beautiful. I liked to imagine myself standing in that garden, looking up at the lights of towers. I liked to imagine that my mother was Nico.

“What do you want to do with your life?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I know that sounds like an evasion. I’m just not sure. I don’t think I’m the most ambitious person.”

“Sometimes it’s clarifying to pose the question in reverse. What don’t you want your life to be, Sebastian?”

“I don’t want to be violent,” I said, after a moment. I was thinking of a bully at school, a terrifying boy who’d pushed me down a staircase and given me a mild concussion when I was fourteen. “I don’t want to be mean. I know that sounds childish.”

“It doesn’t,” she said. “A word of advice, Sebastian, if you don’t want to be mean?”

“What is it?”

“The guys who run the neighbourhood,” she said. “You see them around.”

“Sure.”

“Don’t get into debt with them,” she said. “I don’t just mean money, I mean don’t put yourself in a position where they do you a favour of any kind.”

“Because then I’ll have to work for them?”

“They’ll own you,” she said.

Did they own Nico? I didn’t want to ask.

It’s important to have a mission. After Eddie Kalisa died, I decided I would wait a beat, so for two long, careful years I put my mission on hold. I would steal the painting from Ari Soriano, but not yet. A man has to have a code, a character said in some reality TV episode I watched as a child, and I knew that idea was outdated but it was something I thought about. I wanted to steal my father’s painting, but I didn’t want to steal from a woman reeling from the loss of her wife. I wanted to give her time to recover and then steal it, instead of joining a parade of bad luck. I didn’t want to be mean.

Waiting was difficult. Can you be the still point of the turning world? Can you remain still, purposefully still, when all of your instincts bend toward action? For two years I worked in the grocery store, commuted on the metro between home and work, said my careful good mornings and good evenings to the quiet men who moved through the neighbourhood, slept with Marie-Ève and went on dates with other girls on occasion, went to Nico’s apartment for dinner when she was in town, and ignored Gloria. Twenty-five months after Eddie Kalisa’s death, I began staking out Ari Soriano’s apartment.

She was a surprisingly busy person, at least on the surface. I’d known old people in Paris who’d settled into their apartments and almost never left, but Ari wasn’t like that. She was up early, walking very slowly down the block toward the park—her housekeeper followed at a discreet distance—and once at the park she would sit and watch people go by. She seemed to like dogs. She went to lunches with friends, she sat in a café not far from her apartment, she went to concerts and to the opera. On a spring morning, on one of my days off from the grocery store, I dressed carefully and approached her at the café.

“Excuse me,” I said, in English, “are you Ari Soriano?”

She looked at me appraisingly. She was impeccably dressed, as always, and she carried what I’d come to recognize as her opera cane: it was black, very elegant, with an ivory handle.

“You’re an American,” she said.

“My parents were American. I was born in Paris.”

“Please,” she said. “Sit.”

I sat across from her. “I’m sorry to bother you,” I said, “but I’m studying art history, and, well, I’ve been working on a master’s dissertation that involves some of your art collection.”

7

On the appointed afternoon I entered her building and took the elevator to the fifth floor, which was as high as the elevator went, but she lived on the sixth. I did two laps of a silent carpeted square at the top of the stairwell before I realized that the closet-sized door furthest from the grand apartment entrances wasn’t a closet at all. It opened into a cavernous space, an oddly unfinished back stairwell, with extremely sketchy electrical wiring flowing down the walls and bare lightbulbs suspended overhead. I climbed a long flight of wooden stairs to a plain white corridor. There were three doors here, but now my instructions made sense, and I followed the corridor to the end.

The housekeeper answered the door. She was younger than Ari by at least a decade. Pilar.

“You must be Sebastian,” she said. “Please, come in.” She turned, and I followed her into a labyrinthine apartment lined with art and bookcases.

Ari was reading at a dining room table. She maintained an air of formality, even sitting at a table with a book in her own home. It seemed to me that she was someone who never fully relaxed. She looked up, and for just a heartbeat before she smiled, her expression was that of a hawk evaluating its prey. She was wearing full makeup. I glanced around the room in what I hoped was a casual fashion, and there it was: Swan Dive, my window into the sea from childhood, the last trace of my father in the world, crammed in amidst all the other works on an overcrowded wall like it meant nothing to her. Childhood memories of lying on the couch after school, imagining being somewhere—anywhere—other than in the oppressively silent apartment where my mother worked hour upon hour behind a closed door, imagining swimming, diving, weightlessness, escape. Sometimes I imagined my father was the diver.

“Good afternoon,” she said.

“Hi. Hi. Good afternoon.” I was more nervous than I’d hoped. I shook her hand and exchanged pleasantries and then launched into a prepared monologue about Post-Collapse Formalism, which I’d researched precisely because it had nothing to do with the painting I was about to steal.