Hours passed; the apartment was still. Susan couldn’t sleep and she snuck from Malcolm’s room to the kitchen to make herself a cup of tea. She found Frances there, standing in the dark, smoking. “Oh, hello,” Susan said.
“Hello,” Frances answered.
Susan filled the kettle. She noticed that Frances had changed into a red cocktail dress, and she asked, “What are you doing?”
“Just what it looks like.”
“Can’t you sleep either?”
“I can sleep.”
Susan put the kettle on the stovetop. Frances stubbed out her cigarette and lit another: click! The women had nothing to say to each other and Susan dreaded the silence. Just to make a sound, she said, “I don’t know Paris very well.” Frances merely looked at her. “I want to know it,” she added, and Frances made a sweeping motion toward the window, in the style of the game-show beauty summing up a stageful of glittering riches. The gesture said that the city was Susan’s for the knowing, but it also implied something more critical, an accusation of stupidity or helplessness. Susan thought, I won’t say another word to her. I’ll make my tea and leave without a good night, even. But then Frances’s face softened, and she spoke in a tone Susan had never heard, no longer arch, but candid, and without spite.
“I came here all the time when I was your age, and younger. It was the thing to do, for certain of our generation, and I loved it in a way that took me by surprise—startled me, actually. Even the decay was elegant. And I felt anonymous, as if all the consequences of Manhattan society were irrelevant. I had a secondary life here, which was needed, and good.
“Once I was married, then I began to come with Malcolm’s father. It was different in a way I couldn’t define for a while, then I realized he’d ruined it for me.”
“Ruined it how?”
“The simple fact of his being.”
“He didn’t like it here?”
“He did, somewhat, but that’s not what I mean. With Franklin here I was no longer anonymous, and he was the reasonable voice I’d been free of. He inhibited the way I walked, dressed, the way I spoke, everything.”
“All right.”
“So, I stopped coming here, blaming the city: it had changed, it was spoiled. I put Paris out of my mind. But then Franklin died, and now it was me and Malcolm. He heard me speak French to a waiter in New York one day, which made him curious, so much that we came here together, and I could see him having the same reaction I’d had when I was young.”
“He liked it?”
“Very much. I taught him how to order a croissant in French, and he went to the patisserie every morning on his own, and was so proud of his efficiency. His first knowledge of worldliness. Then when we came home he asked for French lessons, and it wasn’t very long before he had it down. We started visiting Paris together. We bought an apartment. I’d become enamored of the place again, through him.” Frances drew from her cigarette. This was the end of the story, apparently.
“How do you feel about Paris now?” Susan asked.
“I still love it here, but I feel that I’ve been forced to return, which I resent.” She stubbed out her cigarette and lit another. The kettle whined and Susan turned the stove off. She was very tired; also she was still drunk. The combined effect was a sense of calm confidence, and she found herself asking, “Why are you always so vicious to me, Frances?”
“Because you want to take him away.”
Susan opened her mouth to argue against this but then she thought, That’s true. “All right,” she said, “but what if you’re getting in the way of his happiness?”
“He’s happy with me.”
This too was true.
“I don’t like myself when I’m around you,” Frances added. “I don’t like the way I behave, which of course is my own fault, but in the end it’s just another reason to disapprove of you.” This was said in such a way as to represent an olive branch. Susan felt a smile growing across her face.
“I can’t win, then,” she said.
“No,” said Frances. “You can’t. But perhaps that doesn’t matter so much.”
Susan told Frances it did matter and that she knew it did.
Frances said, “Perhaps it will matter less soon.”
The next day, Susan told this story to Malcolm: “All of a sudden she said, ‘Here, let me help you,’ and she took over making my tea. As she handed me the cup, she asked if you were asleep and I said you were. She said that if I drank the tea—she’d picked valerian root—I’d fall right to sleep, too. I told her I hoped she was right and she said, ‘Go to sleep, Susan.’ She sent me away but stayed in the kitchen, standing in that same stiff way as before, arms crossed, smoking in the dark in her cocktail dress with the price tag still hanging off the hem.”