The fish tank in the living room attracted me. The tank was black and had fluorescent lights, but there was nothing inside except water and silver pebbles. I studied the spines of the books in a bookcase: titles on deep-space organisms and intergalactic travel and black holes. I wondered if the person who owned this apartment ever dreamed of astronauts. A woman with crystals glued to her cheek in the shape of a heart tried to talk to me, but I couldn’t follow what she was saying. I just nodded until my neck hurt and the apartment felt airless. I pushed past a group of people wearing masks adorned with feathers and back into the kitchen. I filled my champagne glass and went out onto a small balcony with iron railings. It faced the same street as the bay window. Below, I saw the tops of heads and garbage can lids and slick stone streets. No one else was on the balcony and I couldn’t talk to the people indoors. I hadn’t seen Jean-Paul, Alain, or Dominique since we entered the party. I was starting to feel lonely for home. I went inside and slipped into a bedroom.
I sat on the edge of the bed. I stared at the black phone on the bedside table. It was an old-fashioned rotary, an antique possibly. I dialed my husband’s international cell. I was surprised when he answered after the first ring.
“Hello,” I said. “I didn’t think you’d pick up.”
“I’m in Amsterdam,” he said. “My connection was delayed.”
“Are you going back to Hartford? Back to the house?”
“Where else did you think I’d go?”
“I don’t know.” He had a brother who lived in upstate New York, a best friend from college in Des Moines. “Someplace I wouldn’t come back to.” I’d left the door cracked open and noise from the party seeped into the room.
“Where are you?” my husband asked.
“A party,” I said. “I met some people after you left.”
“Oh,” he said.
“So do you think you should get the house?”
“Isn’t that a little premature?”
“Leaving someone in a foreign country seems pretty final to me.”
“Do you want the house?”
“I never liked that house,” I said. “It was too dark. And the neighborhood was too quiet. It kept me up at night, it was so quiet. It short-circuited my nerves, it was so quiet.”
“I like quiet.”
“I know,” I said. “I always hated that about you.”
“Let’s figure the house out when you get back.” He paused. “When are you getting back?”
“I’m not sure.” I pressed the receiver against my forehead and shut my eyes. I heard him ask me to not take so long between answers, because these international minutes were costing him a fortune. Finally I said I had a question for him.
“Shoot.”
“When we were sitting on the bench this morning, you were saying something to me. Something important.”
“I could tell you weren’t paying attention,” he said. “You kept looking over my shoulder.”
“That’s true,” I said. “I was distracted. There were these acrobats.”
“And now you’re wondering what I said?”
“I was hoping you’d repeat it for me.”
“We all have to live with our deficiencies.”
“That’s what you said?”
“No. That’s what I’m saying now.”
“What does that mean? That you’re not repeating it for me?”
“There are consequences for the things we do. That’s what I’m saying.”
“Consequences?”
“Consequences.”
“I don’t believe in consequences. There’s just what happens and what doesn’t.”
“I’m glad to hear you still sound just like yourself.”
“Did you say that you loved me?”
“No.”
“That you never really loved me?”
“No.”
“That you’d met someone else?”
“Wrong again.”
“That you’re planning to kill me and collect my life insurance payout?”
“It’s crossed my mind,” he said. “But no.”
I felt like beating my head against the wall until my nose was bloody. I asked why we kept trying for so long, why we even came to Paris, if we both knew we never really stood a chance.
“Because that’s what you’re supposed to do,” he said. “You’re supposed to keep working on your marriage.”
It was awful to me, this idea that keeping a marriage together was like laying pipe or digging a ditch. But he was right: it was what people had told us we were supposed to do. We had listened to sentences containing words like “salvage” and “repair” and nodded dumbly, pretending we didn’t know any better. It was an affront to everyone involved.
I leaned against the pillows and the headboard. I breathed in deeply, but when I exhaled, no air seemed to come out, like something inside me had eaten it. “How was the flight out of Paris?”
“Turbulent.”
“Did you miss me?”
“Not as much as I thought I would, to be honest.”
“I don’t miss you that much either.”
I waited for him to say something else. I listened to his breath on the line. For a moment, I thought I was on the brink of profound clarity. I silently counted backward from ten and when I hit zero, I hung up.
I lay on the bed for a while longer, my fingers gripping the black silk of my robe. I blinked behind the mask. All of a sudden, darkness replaced the knife-blade of light that had been visible under the doorway. I went back to the living room, forgetting my empty champagne glass with its miniature acrobat charm on the comforter. The apartment was dark. The music changed to techno, which I hadn’t heard since college. I hadn’t liked it then, but now it sounded okay. Someone activated a strobe light and white beams cut across the room. People were dancing all over the apartment, in their bells and sequins and feathers.
“Henri,” Jean-Paul whispered in my ear. He had appeared behind me, his hands on my shoulders. “He went to the clubs in Monaco one summer and he’s been obsessed with those lights ever since.”
The lights beamed one way, and I saw into the kitchen, where Alain and Dominique were dancing with the woman in the dolphin bathing suit. The glass bowls on the counter looked like they were holding blood. It seemed everyone was smiling. Some of the smiles were painted on, of course, but I wanted to believe that everyone was smiling for real. I saw teeth and gums and tongues, just a glimpse here and a glimpse there, never enough to identify what belonged to who.
“Henri is from America originally,” Jean-Paul continued. “Our favorite American import.”
“I thought I was your favorite American import,” I said, bumping against him. This was the first time I’d tried to flirt with anyone in years.
“But of course!” Jean-Paul said. He draped his arms around my neck. Intersecting white lights shot across the apartment. I put Jean-Paul’s hands on my hips and we danced. We didn’t dance close. We jumped up and down, left and right, knocking into other people. We held hands, and when we let go of each other, it was too dark for me to see if he was dancing with someone else or waiting for me to return, if he too was smiling. I let out a scream and felt a little thrill. I did it again and got the same rush. It was dark and I was masked and no one knew who I was or where I was going next or whether I was losing my mind or finding it.
When the song ended, Jean-Paul took my hand and led me out of the apartment. It was still pitch dark and no one could see that we were escaping. I marveled at all that could be gotten away with in the dark. Someone’s life could fall apart — or together — without anyone noticing a thing. I thought of all the nights I lay beside my husband in bed and agonized about where my life was going, where it had gone, about being thirty-five and having not done much of anything. All those hours in darkness, a shadow life that was never revealed to him. I might as well have been robbing banks on the sly or having an affair.