“So you are here as a student? Or for work?” she asks, sipping from her glass of red wine.
“I’m just here visiting this summer,” I explain, relaxing a little. My shyness can come off as aloof, I reason. Maybe people often misinterpret her intensity as aggression. “I start school in the fall.”
“Then you are leaving soon,” she says, frowning.
“Yes . . . still trying to figure out the timing.”
“And what about your husband? His job is very important, no? He cannot just leave Paris and go with you?” Her expression shows nothing but polite interest, but her stream of questions has me back on edge. When I don’t answer for a long beat, she presses. “Haven’t you talked about any of this?”
“Um . . .” I begin, but I have no idea how to respond. Her blue eyes are wide and penetrating, and behind them I see something larger there. Hurt. Restrained anger. I look past her and see that there are a few people in the kitchen now, and they are all watching us: fascinated, eyes wide in sympathy, as if observing a car crash in slow motion.
I turn back to her, growing anxiously suspicious. “Sorry . . . I don’t think I got your name.”
“I didn’t give it to you,” she says, with a small tilt of her head. “Maybe I am misleading you by pretending I’m not familiar with your situation. You see, I know Ansel very, very well.”
Understanding clicks like a lock in my mind.
“Are you Minuit?”
Her smile is elated, in an eerily wicked way. “Minuit! Yes, perfect, I’m Minuit.”
“I assumed you had black hair. I don’t know why,” I mumble, more to myself than anything. I have the sense of being balanced on a teeter-totter: I’m still not sure whether I’ll land on my feet in this conversation. I want to turn and look desperately around for Ansel, or Marie, but Minuit is watching me like a hawk, seeming to feed on my discomfort.
Somewhere behind me, I hear Ansel’s deep laugh coming toward us down the hall, hear him sing a few lines of the crazy French rap song he’s played the past couple of weeks as he shaves in the morning.
“I sh-should go,” I say, placing my drink on a table next to me. I want to find Ansel. I want to pull him aside and tell him about this conversation. I want him to take me home and erase her thunderous expression from my memory.
Minuit reaches for my arm, stopping me. “But tell me, how are you enjoying my apartment, Mia? My bed? My fiancé?”
My heart literally stops, my vision blurs. “Your fiancé?”
“We were going to be married before you came along. Imagine my surprise when he came back from a silly American vacation with a wife.”
“I don’t . . .” I whisper, looking around the room as if anyone there would help me. A few people look on with sympathy, but no one seems brave enough to interrupt.
“He only called me Minuit, you see,” she explains, her red hair sliding over her shoulder as she leans forward, “because I could never fall asleep. We got a new bed for our beautiful flat. We tried everything to wear me out.” Tilting her head, she asks, “How do you like sleeping in our fancy new bed in our beautiful flat?”
I open my mouth, and then close it again, shaking my head. My pulse is racing, my skin clammy and flushed.
I’ll get you a new ring. We’ll do it all over again. We can find a new flat with memories that are only ours . . .
I need to get out of here.
“We were together for six years. Can you even grasp how long that is? Six years ago you were only a child.”
Her accent is so thick and I’m continually falling behind, grasping on to individual words to cobble together my comprehension. But I understand six years. Ansel called it “too long,” but I never in my wildest dreams imagined it would be such a significant fraction of their lives. Or that they were going to be married. I don’t even know when they broke up—I’d assumed they broke up when he moved back here almost a year ago—but from the circles under her eyes and the way her hand is shaking around her glass, I know I’m wrong.
My heart seems to tear apart, piece by piece.
I hear Ansel enter the kitchen, hear him yell, “J’ai acheté du vin!” as he holds up two open bottles of wine to the small crowd gathered.
But his expression falls as his eyes catch mine across the room and then drift to the woman at my side.
She leans closer, whispering directly in my ear, “Six years ago you had not yet been run over by a truck, huh?”
My head whips around, back to her, and I stare up at blue eyes so full of anger it takes my breath away. “What?”
“He tells me everything. You’re a tiny spot of time,” she hisses, pinching her thumb and forefinger together. “Do you have any idea how many times he does crazy things? You’re his most ridiculous impulse, and he has no idea how to fix this mistake. My taste was still fresh on his mouth when he saw you in your trashy hotel.”