“So,” he begins, without prelude. “How old is your daughter?”
Camille smiles sourly. It is unfair to start this way. “She’s three.”
He nods. This is the moment when another woman might take the bait and lightly ask if he’d like to have children of his own someday. Perhaps he is already testing her. She drops her eyes to the menu, allows the moment to extend uncomfortably.
“You don’t look like a mother.” He is not smiling, but staring with a directness that creates an animal confusion in her, a concurrent swelling and shrinking.
They eat their sushi rolls carefully, with strict restraint. She has heard it said that surgeons are wild. As he looks at her over the bamboo bento trays, she feels a pull from these darkening eyes that seem to tunnel away light.
He’s never been married, he confirms in a neutral voice that reveals neither regret nor pride. A surgeon’s life doesn’t leave much time for meeting women, he says, especially in a place like this.
She pictures his condominium, a spare shelter like her own with few furnishings. He must make money, she thinks, and have nothing to spend it on. She can tell from his clothing, a pale gray dress shirt with mother-of-pearl buttons, that he has a foundation for elegance.
“You must feel isolated,” Camille suggests.
“Sometimes,” he says.
Camille wants to reach across the table and squeeze his hand, tell him that she knows. Things are impossible here. Since Nick left, she’s been locked in a prison of women. Her days are nearly bereft of the male sex. She rarely sees Mark and Harris anymore and, anyway, they don’t count. From time to time a rogue father will join the crowd of mothers for preschool pickup. When this happens, she finds herself standing differently, out of habit, generating the old energy regardless of what the poor man looks like, however paunchy or beaten down. And he looks at her. They always do. She supposes that she receives some trifling pleasure from this, some pellet of reward, like a pigeon that pecks a lever for birdseed. But afterward, the satisfaction fizzles and she’s left with a vacant feeling, as if she’s shoplifted something too easily.
They finish a bottle of sake together. He asks questions and listens intently, gravely, as if the answers were credo. She hardly notices her noodle dish vanish and be replaced by pistachio ice cream, which vanishes in turn.
“I’ve always dreamed of living in Paris.” Camille allows herself to shift into a kittenish purr, leaning closer. “I was there once, during college. I thought someday I’d find an apartment with big windows and a fluffy white bed.”
“Mmm.” He smiles.
She laughs a tinkling arpeggio. But it is the truth. She has always romanticized living abroad—Paris, Barcelona, Rome—imagined herself living alone, the way a man might live. It is a quaint, clichéd nineteenth-century idea of liberation, perhaps, but the impulse to roam is native in her, and its continued denial a source of panic.
Of course, living alone is impossible now with Avis. So Camille has revised her vision of Paris to include a partner. The fluffy bed, she reasons, would be even better with a man in it. Now it’s only a matter of finding him, whose passion is equal to hers. Sadly, it’s nearly impossible to imagine such a man in a town like this, for whom the hills beyond the supermarket beckon with urgent promise. Nick, she has to admit, had been like that. He’d had that hunger in him. That much they had shared.
She does not mention Paris again, but it floats in the air between them like a specter. And the brief kiss they share in the parking lot, amid the doltish Volvos and Volkswagens, is like a pact, the first upward tug of a kite.
At home, the babysitter already has her coat on. Camille can hear Avis still awake in her room, singing to herself.
“I was supposed to be home by ten,” the girl grumbles.
“Can your mom pick you up?”
“I told her you were driving me home.”
On the road, Avis sits in her car seat in her pajamas and screams for a cookie. The cookies are in her other purse, Camille patiently explains, but her daughter does not relent. Already, within moments, she feels herself deflating.
“I wonder what your father’s doing right now,” she calls back, unconcerned about the preteen slumped in the passenger seat, listening. Let her hear it, let her be warned. Camille laughs bitterly. “Definitely not this, that’s for sure.”