Since she is the one who has forgotten something important, something the two of them discussed during the drunken night, she will decide she might as well commence the communication that Theo wants. She can feel his intent to sit on the stair until either she, or he, begins.
She will say, “I hear you breathing up there, Theo. I am old, not deaf. If you want to say something to me, come down here, pull up a stool, and we can talk like the adults that we are. Oui?”
In an instant, Theo is on the studio floor, his bare feet kicking up dust, lifting one of the many stools in the studio, placing it close, swiveling to face her.
Paloma will not move, only stare at the bottom of the butternut wood, chiseled away. She thought it might be a flat base, but the wood is demanding there be no base at all, just the two forms freestanding, everything else carved away.
Then she will sigh, and swivel, and she and Theo will be face-to-face, just inches apart.
“Miss Rosen,” Theo will say, and Paloma’s heart will sink, for the lost artifact must be major.
He only calls her Miss Rosen when he is very nervous. Most of the time he does not use her name, neither first nor last. She knows he finds calling her Paloma challenging, as if he is not entitled to presume such closeness, and yet ils sont proches, the two of them spend more of their spare time with each other than with anyone else. He calls her Miss Rosen when he feels he has something to confess—when he runs the vacuum over some trinket that was sucked up into the hose and makes the machine smoke and splutter and die, when he borrows one of her old books and accidentally leaves it on the subway. These small things will never faze Paloma, but cause Theo grievous pain. She will wonder what happened in his young life to make him fear that such small mistakes would incur the ire of another, result in untoward fury he expects to be expended on him. More than once, she will have to say to him firmly, and as kindly as she can, that he is not to worry, that she knows he did not do whatever it is on purpose, aware, when telling her of some misstep, how he seems to fear the slap of a hand, the punch of a fist.
While he stares at her, and Paloma stares at the base of the wood, she will again wish she remembered more of the particulars of the family stories he told her last night, wonders if, within their coming conversation, and without inflicting too much insult, she might ask him to repeat what she cannot recall.
“Miss Rosen,” he will say again. “I want to talk about the plans for the dinner party Saturday night. We sent out all those email invitations last night, and most everyone has confirmed.”
Dinner party? Emails sent out in their drunken state? Screw her schedule, she thinks, and pulls the packet of cloves from her overalls, her hand slightly shaking when she lights it, breathing in deeply and exhaling a stream.
“Theo, please explain. Too much rye last night. I have no recollection of discussing, or agreeing to, a dinner party. I don’t have dinner parties anymore, not in years. I cannot believe I would have agreed to such a thing.”
“But you did,” Theo will say, keeping his voice even. “You thought it was a great idea, then had me explain who everyone was before I added their name to the email invitation we sent. You even chose the evite we selected.”
“Oh, mon Dieu, qu’est-ce que tu racontes? Je ne comprends pas. Un d?ner? Non, c’est impossible. Je ne l’ai pas jeté un d?ner pour un certain temps. Exactement qui ne nous invitons?”
When Theo does not respond, she will realize she has spoken to him entirely in French, and he has only picked up the basics in the several months he has lived with her, doing her bidding.
“The whole thing is impossible,” she will say. “I was drunk.”
“Maybe later, but not then, or at least you didn’t seem drunk to me, just telling me about the dinner parties you used to throw.”
A discussion of the dinner parties she used to throw is strong evidence; when she’s had a little too much to drink, she tends to remember the past. Only then does she permit herself sentimentality, an essential release valve for how tightly controlled she is in her work, where sentiment is forbidden. Sober, the past has no place, only the future.
“How many people did we invite?”
“Besides you and me? Eighteen. You said, ‘It’s time we fill the space with laughter again, and music, and delicious food. It’s time to have the dining-room table properly used, the chairs occupied by interesting people.’”
She will think first, what kind of language is besides you and me, then she will think, Yes, she could feasibly have spoken such words. In the past, she regularly threw gorgeous, raucous dinner parties, but now she wants no such thing in her life. Theo, however, apparently does. And she apparently agreed.
“When you interviewed me, you wanted to know if I could set the table for a formal dinner party. You haven’t had me do that yet. And I can. I Googled how to do it, and printed out pictures of how everything should look on the table.”
“D’accord. Return, Theo, to the beginning of it all. Whom did we invite?”
“I have the list,” and he will unfold a wadded piece of paper pulled from the back pocket of his jeans, unfolding, and unfolding, and then smoothing it out, and then he will say, “Ready?”
“Non, mais read your list anyway.”