I kept cooking dinner every night, even though I sometimes saw Nell in my head while I did it, while I cooked I mean, and wondered what she was getting up to, lying maybe in the sun all afternoon. I thought too sometimes of Aurelie, I thought of a kitchen filled with bouquets. A kitchen with no pots or dishes in it, only flowers.

I made sauces for pasta with tomatoes so ripe and heavy with juice that it seemed a mercy to slice them open, a relief to them. My knives were so sharp that they shivered through the skin of the tomatoes, or the eggplants or the berries or the grapes. I could have shaved my arm with them.

I made salads the way we liked with olive oil and large flakes of salt. We would wait for M in the apartment, sitting at the dinner table, ready and eager to see him. We would wait however long it took.

Well, Spanish people wouldn’t think of eating dinner before ten o’clock. We could be so cheerful thinking of ourselves like that, E and B and I. We’re becoming so European I would say to them and no one as the hours ticked past us. As the food became cold. It was always such a delight to have him home at night, to be the kind of family that ate dinner together, to be doing these important, these universally recommended things. I felt a lifting in my shoulders, somewhere just under the bones, a lightness, that carried me through the week. I didn’t mind washing dishes at midnight. I didn’t mind it a bit. I wondered if Nell washed dishes, if Aurelie did, I wondered how they felt if they did or if they didn’t.

I began going out at night. Only when M was home. Only when he was asleep. I would say to myself, we need this or that, a sponge, or dish soap, even though I knew the corner store was long closed for the night. I would say perhaps, tonight, perhaps right now, it will be open. Or I would say, I’ll take the garbage out. I would say it quietly, whispering, only talking I guess to myself, and to the apartment but still, I would say it, just to be saying something.

I would get dressed carefully when I left, put on a skirt maybe, or the heavy earrings that I had worn when I got married, something special, and instead of taking out the garbage or looking in the shop window at the sponges, I would go and sit in the cafe across the street and order a coffee and pretend that I smoked cigarettes.

Maybe I was going there because the old woman with the long purple coat was there too. I know you, I thought, and maybe I did. I could see the way she must pin her hair in front of the bathroom mirror in her apartment, the hook that she must hang her purple coat on, the drawer of rolled nylons in her dresser. Perhaps she knew me too, could see the rumpled pouch I kept my blush in, how all the powder was old and crumbly, how I wore it anyway, the blush, the skirt, the earrings, all of it, to sit alone in a cafe across the street from my apartment building, looking most of the time at the locked-up shutters of my living room.