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A cacophony of sound, of laughter and clinking glasses and voices shouting over each other for dominance of a useless, ever-fleeting conversation, and Nathalie and Gabriel, alone in their island of the grieving, are all the worse for it.
It’s so rote, this type of dinner they share: a hunger muted by failure and their bodies, roped with muscles that scream their soreness with a plea of fuel, begging for anything other than coffee and trail mix or the wine they douse their better senses with almost every night. A bottle at a time until they’re stumbling over words and bodies that aren’t theirs to share.
Gabriel’s eyes will be dropped to his plate in solemn confession for the whole meal, as if the delirious weeks they’ve spent together have convinced him that anything porcelain white and unblemished is the true vision of his wife and Emilie is there, under him, looking up with a forgiveness Nathalie knows she wouldn’t ever give. When the waiter comes, Gabriel will mumble his order with a voice grated by dehydration and coarse highland dirt and the groans he says he doesn’t make when Nathalie shifts on top of him.
Nathalie, as always, will repeat his order in refinement, clearing her throat before telling the waiter she’ll have unseasoned steak, rare, please, and they’ll take a bottle of the cheapest Pinot Noir. They’ll want the cheque on the table when the last glass is being poured, if possible. Early morning, she’ll say with a small smile as she snaps her menu closed, reaching across the table for Gabriel’s when he makes no effort to move from his grave position.
It’s just when her lines are concluded and the waiter walks away that the party across the dining room explodes into a chorus of laughter, the ends of which segue in uneven lilts into a song that makes Nathalie’s mouth drop open like she might know the words—but when she concentrates, they all fade like static on her tongue. The singers are drunk off their perpetually empty glasses and the company around them, and whatever they’re chanting sounds like French in Nathalie’s dreams, or a lullaby sung in another room, down the hall and thousands of kilometers away.
Not for the first time, something like regret twists her stomach into a tighter knot. One she couldn’t begin to pick at, not now. It’s the type that requires scissors and all she has now in front of her is a man and his sorrow and a couple of crisp white linen napkins. They haven’t given her a steak knife yet.
Gabriel turns his face into his palm, grimacing at the noise, the incongruent atmosphere. When he looks at her with bloodshot eyes, Nathalie wonders if he really sees her. If she left and joined the party at the other end of the dining room, would he notice? If she began to sink her nails into the knot in her gut, treating it like a stubborn shoelace, would he stop her? Would he reach out and take the knife away from her, or would he hesitate at the sight of blood?
A champagne cork pops through the tension. Nathalie wishes they had reason to celebrate. More laughter bubbling out like liquid. Briefly, she wonders if the whole restaurant is laughing.
She holds steady to Gabriel’s stare.
“When is our flight?” he finally asks, so low that Nathalie has to read his lips to understand him. He does that sometimes. Whispers words when she knows he really wants to shout them. Covers them up by burying his head into his hands or into the side of her neck.
“Five.”
His bottom lip quivers as if she’s given a time of death, their table a gory and unsuccessful surgery.
“We should stay another week. You cut too many corners this time.” He presses the meat of his palm into his eye, a muscle in his jaw rippling. “Your itinerary was sloppy, Nathalie. We spent two whole weeks sweating our asses off just to end up where we started—”
“You forget that’s how it goes,” she levels.
Petulance colors his face where the romantic candlelight is reluctant to touch.
“It took us years to find…” Nathalie trails off, swallowing and looking around the room of strangers.
Gabriel picks up the end of her sentence for her. “We don’t have years,” he growls.
“No,” she says simply. Drawing in a breath, she sits up straighter. Collects herself. “We don’t. Which is why we should go home. Emilie is—”
“Home,” he sneers, his frown folding new wrinkles in the valleys of his cheeks. “I gave you that room in exchange for what Emilie and I wanted. I don’t see myself in that life. Do you, Nathalie?”
Exhaustion wells up in her like a clogged sink.
"It will be good to be... to return," she parries. “I’m sure Adrien misses you, sir."
Somewhere in the room, silverware clatters to the ground. One roll, then two. Someone yelps as if they’ve caught a falling knife.
Gabriel catches her meaning. The look he trains on her is severe, challenging. Sparks the kind of thrill only felt when Nathalie knows she’s pushing a boundary. Trespassing. Try me, she thinks, forcing the meaning into her eyes.
“I wonder if he’ll miss you,” he says slowly, as if he’s tasting the joy in his words, “when he knows you gave him what killed his mother.”
Nathalie’s jaw protests as she grits her teeth again; a recent and terrible habit of hers. Fighting with him, she’s learning, is a battle of attrition. There is no right and there is no wrong: it goes only until they’re breathless and tired and dumb with their own fury.
She leans forward, her left hand finding the only silver it has ever curled around in the form of a three-pronged fork.
“Either Emilie dies while we’re away,” she hisses, “or she dies where we can be with her.”
Gabriel’s mouth drops open, but when the waiter returns with their wine, presenting it with an aloofness that borders on dreamlike surrealness before pouring their glasses, whatever fire was stoked falls under the crushing weight of its own embers, reducing it back to a mere kindling. Nathalie feels like an engine run too hot, feet pressing both pedals to the floor at the same time.
She slots the stem of her wine glass between her fingers, giving the liquid a firm swirl around the inside before lifting the glass to her lips and downing half of it in a gulp. She’ll bring her inebriation to their shared bed like a worthy offering for sleep, hugging her pillow close against her face if the room starts spinning. Sometimes, he’ll keep his hand on her head as if he’s grounding her, giving her a reference point in her madness.
They drank a lot in Tibet, too, he once said, splashing his face with cold water in the hotel bathroom and leaving Nathalie on the bed to wait for a towel. She was too tired to argue that it had been for pleasure, passing barley wine around in their collapsible cups and they only drank so much, she wanted to add, because they were counting down the shots before Emilie would have to stop in order to bear a child. They drank in celebration. They drank like they’d found a new god and left the whole world behind.
They drank because they loved her and she would laugh at them, cup their flushed faces and ask in a voice thick with starry-eyed intonation what she had done to deserve both of them.
Had it only been Nathalie back then that asked Emilie the same question in return?
Gabriel returns to his personal confession booth, leaving Nathalie unbearably alone in the world of the living.
In her periphery, the gaggle of party-goers has expanded like champagne foam, a few of them straggling from their table. She feels the keen stare of two of them, pricking the hairs at her neck. Steeling her nerves, she throws a quick glance their way.
The way their bodies twist and duck down as if Nathalie is hiding behind something reminds her of the way Emilie plays dumb, a questioning look and her finger poised on her bottom lip, wondering aloud where on earth her son could be, never minding the open kitchen cabinet next to her.
Nathalie’s hunger wrestles with her anxiety, an empty stomach eating itself in mania. She chokes back a gag as she downs another half glass of cheap wine, her mind growing fuzzy at the edges. Like Gabriel, his fingers buried in the fields of his rapidly graying hair, she too looks down at her plate like it has something to say.
“Nathalie?”
A voice so unlike any other she’s heard in years. A voice like static, like a dream between waking and falling asleep. A memory. For an oneiric second, she thinks it came from her plate.
Nathalie lifts her head like she’s confessing to something. Yes, this is me.
The faces belonging to the stalking bodies light up, their features softening and practically glowing with elation. Nathalie’s mind struggles to make the moment seem real.
“Merde, it really is you!”
The two people seem to split open and turn into three, four people, all of them looking at her like she means something. When’s the last time—?
It clicks. All at once. What would have been her graduating class, her colleagues at the archaeological institute, standing right in front of her as if she’d crawled out from a grave. The song they were singing, she used to know the words to as well.
Emilie always told her to dress her best, that she never knew who she might see, and Nathalie’s caught with sex-stale clothes and a guilty conscience.
She quickly sucks her bottom lip of remnant wine stains. Impresses something in her face that does not look like the mortification she so viscerally feels.
“What a surprise,” she says hoarsely.
“You’re telling us!” The group looks at each other with the same question. “How long has it been—five, six years?”
Adrien is four years old, Nathalie thinks.
“Around that, yes.”
Two of them leave, taking the news back to their table, and the two that stay slide their gaze with baited breath towards Gabriel, who has not indicated noticing them at all. They do not recognize him, his status or his grief-ravished face that has been on numerous magazine covers for the past decade, but Nathalie can see the exact moment they spy the ring on his finger, as obvious and horrifying as a black widow spider.
Nathalie, the drop out student and her boss, seven years her senior and irrevocably married.
Before they can look back at her, Nathalie hides her hands under the table.
“This is my boss,” Nathalie starts, trying to keep her voice from wavering. Boss? Friend? Lover? None of them fit and there is no true title, Nathalie fears, that she wants him to fill in her life.
Gabriel shoots her a look. Before he can say anything, Nathalie stands, tucking her hands behind her back.
“We’re traveling. On business.” She clears her throat, looking past her peers at the table they came from. “Why don’t we…?”
They catch her meaning. “Oh, of course!”
After taking a few steps, Nathalie turns around to tell Gabriel she’ll be right back, but he waves her off with indifference.
They shepherd her through the maze of tables to their own. Vaguely familiar faces turn towards her and Nathalie wonders what memory of her they’ve held on to. To her, they’ve all turned as hazy as childhood. She stumbles through small talk, catching only half of their names and nodding before sitting in someone else’s seat, warm and faintly smelling of cigarette smoke.
Voices chime in at intervals, each of them eager to piece together the last year they’ve spent together. A field study that’s spiraled into much more, a collaborative effort that has garnered them professional interest. A publishing deal, they laude, groaning while they smile. It’s the humble way to downplay their excitement in front of her. So much writing, they say in exasperation, but Nathalie chews at the inside of her lip and tastes blood.
She can tally her own achievements on one hand, one singular finger. Emilie, Emilie, Emilie—and by extension, the son she produced. A family secret, Emilie and Gabriel often joked, looking at Nathalie as if that included her. In the dark, Gabriel is all too excited to remind her otherwise. The clause in her contract details a non-disclosure agreement, barring her from using the information for any future academic purposes.
Across the way, one of them—Hugo?—elbows his friend (her old?), smiling dumbly. “And you thought she was on a date with a married man.”
The other man looks at Nathalie, pleading innocence with an ironic stare. “My apologies, truly.” He shrugs, his words slurring together. “What with the ring and candlelight and the way he was looking at her.”
Nathalie’s face grows hot. She forces a smile. “With that imagination, maybe you should be a writer instead,” she jokes weakly.
“So you’re just on business together,” he says slowly, leaning forward with a smirk as if he’s presenting unassuming evidence in front of a court. Despite Hugo’s deference, it feels as if the whole table is a jury. “Does that happen a lot?”
“Oh, come off of it,” someone else a few chairs down says. Their form is a shadow in the mix of celebratory bodies. Nathalie isn’t sure she’d recognize them even if she was told their name. “Nathalie? We were pretty sure she was a virgin up until she dropped out.”
The voice must have looked at her because it apologizes, something she almost misses as the party around her erupts into laughter, but Nathalie doesn’t say anything in return.
They’re so close, she thinks, but they can’t see the tally of teeth marks and bruises that score where her shirt covers. Emilie’s lipstick was always easy to wash off, much to Nathalie’s despair, but Gabriel embosses anger on her like a signature. Marking something as his.
Hugo reaches out across the table, offering his hand palm side up. “Don’t listen to them, Nathalie. They’re all drunk and keyed up.” For a moment, a conflicted expression passes over his face. “You know, everyone was really upset when you stopped returning—”
“Nathalie? Nathalie Sancoeur ?”
Nathalie turns in her seat just in time for arms to fling around her neck, the smell of ash potent and acrid in her nose. The giggle in her ear reminds her of Emilie, a windchime of a memory, but something else resounds in her chest—
The woman pulls away, bobbed blonde hair cropped close and curling smartly around her ears.
“Just who I’d want to steal my spot,” she says, and her name comes to Nathalie at once.
“Cecilia? ”
Cecilia dives in again, hugging Nathalie so tightly that she squeals. “You look just the same,” she says as if it’s a compliment.
Nathalie awkwardly pats her back, pressing her lips into a small smile. She hazards a glance over Cecilia’s shoulder and freezes when she catches Gabriel staring at her, something unreadable in his eyes. Even from here, the sound of his watch makes her stomach turn.
Nathalie drops her hand to her side.
Cecilia pulls back, dropping herself onto the empty seat next to Nathalie, eyes roaming all over her face. “I wondered if you dropped off the face of the earth!”
“Still here,” Nathalie says without mirth.
“You know,” Cecilia says, pressing closer to Nathalie and dropping her voice conspiratorially. “You really were the most promising out of all of us. I wished you were here all the time.”
Nathalie swallows around the lump in her throat. “That’s kind of you to say.”
Cecilia’s eyebrows flit together like Nathalie’s said something funny. Her hand finds Nathalie’s knee, still rug burned, and squeezes it. “I’m not being kind, Nathalie. I’m serious. We could have had this thing wrapped up in half the time if we had you.” She blows out a sigh, groaning at the end. “We’ve been out here for a year chasing our tails about this research. I thought for sure one of us would wind up dead with how we were at each other's throats.”
Nathalie thinks about how she always kept her crossbow close by, even when she shared a sleeping bag with Gabriel. You forget that’s how it goes.
“So,” Cecilia starts, raising her eyebrows, “I take it you no longer live in the same apartment?”
Nathalie shakes her head.
“When you dropped out, I tried stopping by.” Cecilia rubs her eyebrow, lips tugging downwards as if she’s embarrassed by something. “I carried all this junk food up to your apartment and knocked and knocked and knocked… I think I stood out in the hall until your neighbor, the one with that twenty year old cat, told me to go home. I left a letter underneath your door, but I never got a response.”
Nathalie takes a beat, measuring her words. Picturing Cecilia waiting, calling. Someone sweeping up the letter and throwing it away while Nathalie was in Tibet.
“I’m sorry,” she says.
Cecilia shrugs, tucking a lighter into her cigarette pack. Something in the motion stirs Nathalie, and it comes to her that Cecilia, so many years ago, offered Nathalie her first cigarette. “Don’t worry about it. I don’t know why I’m mentioning it.” She shakes her head, turning to Nathalie with a smile. “So, tell me what you’ve been up to.” She tilts her head back at Gabriel. “I thought he looked familiar. Didn’t he have a wife? I remember them coming by the institute sometimes and picking you up.”
“Has,” Nathalie quickly corrects. “We’re… He’s… She’s sick,” Nathalie says, chewing on her bottom lip. “We’re… trying to get her help.”
“Oh, that’s awful. I’m sorry, Nathalie. Is she expected to get better?”
Nathalie grinds her teeth and looks down at her hands, bare and empty and ringless. From the crowd, someone’s watch beeps. Her throat constricts. Gabriel says she isn’t getting better. He says it like a mantra, eating his own self-doubt for dinner, spitting it back up when he’s on top of her, one hand around her throat so she can’t talk.
Though his grip always loosens up when she opens her mouth, allowing her enough breath to spit venom right back.
Nathalie takes a deep breath, choked by the memory.
“Yes,” she lies. “I think so.”
“You know,” Cecilia whispers, closer now than a moment before, “It’s never too late to go back. To school, I mean. When she gets better. I’m sure they’d be lenient and let you finish in a few months. I still think about your thesis paper all the time. It deserved to see the light of day.”
A flurry of arms interrupt her as shot glasses are passed down in rows. Nathalie watches, disassociating from the moment as someone places one in front of her. Someone calls her name, and it’s the man whose name still escapes her who sits next to Hugo. He’s offering up his shot glass, winking cheekily.
“Sorry I said you were sleeping with your boss.”
Cecilia snickers behind her hand, looking at Nathalie incredulously. “What’s that about?”
Nathalie shrugs as if she doesn’t have a clue and squeezes her eyes shut, taking the shot. The memory comes in stages, taking their cue one by one: first, when the liquor hits her tongue and she remembers how Emilie swiped hers teasingly into Nathalie’s mouth. The lime, whose juices sting her wind-chapped lips, takes away the bite of the liquor, reminds her how Emilie smacked her lips when she came up for air between Nathalie’s thighs. The sinful smirk she wore, playful and challenging, as if Nathalie was a shot she could take over and over again.
She looks down at her shot glass and wonders if Emilie saw the same emptiness in her. In that moment, Emilie had shown her everything—so had it been love or only mercy that led her to press their bodies together, filling Nathalie back up?
If she chooses love, she thinks about death and how loud Gabriel’s watch sounds ticking away the seconds in the nights Nathalie can’t sleep.
If she chooses mercy, she thinks about how from above bedsheets, she sees the same excavation in Gabriel.
The headiness of the wine, the spirits, the bodies that press in on either side of her—she’s crowded in the moment. Nostalgia overtakes her like a second skin, a body-wide caress. Briefly, she wonders if everyone continues laughing, she’ll drown in it and forget to come up for air.
This time, when she looks back at Gabriel, still sulking, she has the urge to leave the table and comfort him. She thinks about home, or the type of house people call home. Why she sees Emilie at the bedroom window in her mind.
“It’s too bad he’s married,” Cecilia jokes, pulling Nathalie from her reverie. The strap of her dress falls like a curtain when she wriggles it coyly. Without asking, she flicks her wrist towards someone’s shot glass, untaken and full and throws her head back, drinking it with ease. Her words shudder out; tequila is clearly not her favorite. “The best ones always are, right?”
Nathalie, with an unbearable tightness in her chest, pictures Emilie.
“I think I should get going,” Nathalie says meekly. No one hears it or pays her any mind until she stands.
Cecilia tugs on her arm in protest. Frantically, she turns to Hugo, keeping Nathalie rooted in her spot with an iron grip.
“It just occurred to me—Hugo, what’s today’s date?”
Nathalie’s ears ring in stereo. She does not catch what he says, but all at once Cecilia’s face lights up.
“I knew it! Oh, I just had a feeling about why you showed up.”
She releases Nathalie’s arm and chokes the neck of a champagne bottle, messily pouring out five coupes, Nathalie’s overflowing as Cecilia swings it towards her.
When she speaks, the whole table listens, the whole restaurant seems to hold its breath, and the kindness in Cecilia’s voice, soft and sweet, is a flaming arrow in Nathalie’s armor. If she’s not careful, she might start crying while everyone looks on at her.
“Happy birthday, Nathalie.”
Everyone cheers as if this is something to celebrate. As if the calendar isn’t ticking off every moment towards a personal entropy for Nathalie, as if every day she fails to find a cure for Emilie isn’t pockmarked on her body in shameful bruises, some self-made and some asked for. She wants to protest this, recite what Gabriel tells her all the time, that she’s nothing without the Agrestes and she’s nothing with them, but they’re wiping champagne from their lips before she can convince them that she’s worthless.
They still see someone promising in what is rapidly becoming a void shape of Nathalie.
Every birthday from now on, Nathalie thinks, is one unrightfully taken from Emilie.
She downs her drink all in one go and turns without saying goodbye.
“See you back in Paris!” someone calls.
When Gabriel catches her eyes, Nathalie’s eyes sting terribly, resonating with an ache in her. She stops in front of their table, clenching and unclenching her fists.
“We should go,” she says. “Now.”
He squints up at her, frowning. “Don’t be ridiculous, we haven’t even eaten.”
Shoving her hand into her front pocket, Nathalie retrieves her wallet and rifles through the mixed currency notes until she gathers enough to pay for the tab, throwing the money on top of Gabriel’s empty charger. “You never touch your food anyway. It’s a waste of money.”
His eyebrows shoot up, creasing wrinkles into his forehead. He stands all the same and grabs for his jacket.
“I take it you had a nice chat with… them.”
Nathalie gives one last look back at the table of friends she once knew and the strangers they became. She should be sadder, she thinks. She should truly be mourning what she could have been. She shouldn’t want to hurry back and sink into the dark of their hotel room.
She walks ahead and does not wait for Gabriel.
It’s only when she emerges into the night that she stops, just in time to hear Gabriel curse behind her. Turning, she catches him wiping a wine stain from the inside of his jacket, the bottle she’d ordered stuffed comically into the inside pocket.
“You stole the bottle of wine?”
Gabriel hums low. “It isn’t stealing if you paid for it.”
Nathalie’s lips quirk, an inebriated laughter bubbling up unexpectedly. The mix of alcohol sloshes around in her empty stomach, warming her chest and convincing her that the wool over her eyes is due to being drunk, not a willful stupidity.
Stepping in front of her, he offers back his left hand to help her down the restaurant’s steps.
“Besides,” he says, “isn’t it your birthday?”
When he doesn’t let go of her hand, Nathalie breathes out her thanks into the night air that someone sees her for who she truly is.
How could she have ever questioned that?