“Dad. That’s great. Since when?”
“Since never. I said it’s not impossible.”
“Tell me about the lady.”
“Somebody I met at bridge. A nice lady.”
“I’m glad, Dad. I’m really glad.”
“So what’s wrong with you? Your old man can meet a lady and you can’t bring home a boyfriend?”
“I’ll bring home a boyfriend, Dad. I promise.”
“Yeah?”
“I don’t know. It’s very complicated. There’s a man I like. I don’t know.”
“What’s not to know?”
“Like I said, it’s complicated.”
Her father put his wineglass down on the table. He pushed his chair back and stood up.
“He’s married,” he said, his voice low.
“I didn’t say that.”
“Love isn’t complicated. Married men are complicated.”
“Forget I said anything.”
“Your mother would be very upset with you.”
“Don’t bring her into this.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“Dad. Sit down.”
Her father walked into the other room. Josie was furious with herself for saying something-there was no reason to talk about Simon. She got up and followed her father into the living room.
He was standing by the front door as if considering his escape. He gazed through the window; his face was dark and brooding.
“This is the day your mother was diagnosed,” he said quietly, as if he weren’t even talking to her. “Eight years ago.”
“Oh,” Josie said weakly. She stood back, scared that if she went to him, he’d throw open the door and disappear.
“I went with her to the doctor’s appointment. We thought it was nothing-some swelling in her ankles, a little discomfort, nothing important. But you know how much she hated the doctor.”
His hands hung limply at his sides. He looked helpless, lost, as if what happened eight years ago happened over and over again.
“She went in to the appointment and I stayed in the waiting room with all the ladies. Then the nurse came into the room and said, ‘The doctor will meet with you now.’ I knew everything I needed to know right then. I didn’t need him to say a word.”
“How was Mom?” Josie asked.
“Quiet. Scared. We sat in front of the doc’s desk in his fancy office and listened to him talk about surgery and chemo and new kinds of treatment. But right then I knew: I had lost her. I lost my world. I lost my life.”
There were tears running down his face. Josie swiped at her own face with the back of her hand.
“I’m sorry I was so far away,” she said.
“Oh, you did what you needed to do. What all kids do. We never blamed you for that.”
“Come have dinner with me, Dad.”
“Eight years go by. And there’s still all these feelings I have. Like I can’t gather them up and put them away in a box.”
Josie walked over to her father. He turned toward her and let her hold him.
After a moment he stepped away. “No married men,” he said.
“Who said anything about a married man?” she told him.
Nico and Josie take the elevator down from the top of the Eiffel Tower.
“Let’s walk along the Seine,” Nico says.
“This is the first day I have spent back in the world,” Josie tells him as they head toward the river. First they walk along the wide boulevard at the side of the road; below them, to their left, is the Seine and across it, the Grand Palais. Farther up is the Louvre. Then a stairwell takes them to a lower path, one that brushes the river and protects them from the street traffic and the mad crush of pedestrians.
“You have been hiding?”
“Hiding?” Josie says, considering the word. “No, there’s no place to hide. I try the bed, with the covers pulled high, but even then, it finds me and knocks me out.”
“Sadness?”
“I wish it were sadness. That seems kinder than what I feel now. It’s a gut punch now. It’s a wallop of grief.”
“When your mother died…?” Nico lets the question trail off. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m asking too many questions.”
“You are,” Josie says. But she slides her hand around his arm and walks at his side with their arms linked together.
They’re quiet for a while. The clouds have darkened the sky and they hear thunder far off in the distance.
“When my mother died,” Josie says, “I remember thinking I was no longer a child. It all ended at once. I had just graduated from college, I was thousands of miles from home, and then she was gone. I floated for a while-it’s so different. This grief has me crawling on the earth; that time I was cut loose and I couldn’t ground myself. I had a lot of sex. Isn’t that odd? I slept with every boy I knew-old friends, new friends, passing acquaintances. I guess I was trying to feel something. Now I feel too much.”
“What happened?”
Josie looks at him, puzzled. “Oh, not much. I spent a year or two like that. And then I missed my father. All at once. I applied for every teaching job within a hundred miles of home. And I ended up in Marin. I never told him I came home to be with him.”
“Why not?”
“Because once I got there, I rarely saw him.”
Josie thought of her dad’s last visit. They never talked about Simon again. They ate pasta and salad, they drank their wine in silence. After a while, he told a long story about two boys who tried to rob the grocery store but they got in a fight in the middle of the robbery. One boy punched the other, and they chased each other out of the store. Josie told her dad to sell the place; maybe Palm Springs was a good idea. It was so simple, sitting and sharing dinner with her father. When he got up to leave she said, “I’ll come down next weekend.” His face lit up.
And then Simon died. She called her father and told him she was sick in bed and couldn’t travel.
“I’m tired of talking,” Josie says to Nico, but she keeps her arm tucked around his. “Tell me about the woman you love. The other tutor.”
“Did I mention her?”
“You did. You sleep with her but not with her boyfriend.”
“Hmm. I must have had too much to drink at lunch.”
“What is her name?”
“Chantal.”
“A pretty name.”
“A pretty woman. I only slept with her once. Though she’s in my mind many nights when I go to bed.”
“We imagine love so easily.”
“Yes. That is the simple part.”
“Does she love you?”
“She has a boyfriend, remember.”
“Does she love her boyfriend?”
“I can’t imagine. But then I don’t understand women very well. He has a reputation of sorts. He’s been known to sleep with his students.”
“Not you,” Josie says, smiling. “You wouldn’t do a thing like that.”
“I would not get so lucky,” Nico says.
