M’s shirt, when he leaned down to kiss me, smelled of a hundred different perfumes. He slipped a hand down my back but I was already asleep.

The next morning we left for the apartment. We’re going home! I told E and tried to make her feel that, that we were. M had taken the morning off, and when we left the hotel E stood in between us, holding both of our hands. On our way out I saw the same woman who had brought me the champagne the night before wheeling a cleaning trolley down the hall. I smiled at her but if she saw me she didn’t show it.

M spent the whole morning moving things around the apartment until I liked it, pushing the sofa this way and that while I looked on, squinting, trying to find the perfect place. We went to IKEA together and ate hot dogs and M looked so wonderful with mustard stuck to the side of his mouth and we talked seriously-not-seriously about the kinds of wine glasses we should buy and how many we needed and what it would be like when E spoke French. A driver came to pick us up, to drop me and E and B off at the apartment and to take M back to the office. The driver held the door open for me and I slipped into the car and sitting there in the parking lot for one second the inside, the inside of the car I mean, the cool leather seats, the dark sloping dome of the roof, it all felt like bienvenue madame. It felt like it was all for me.

2

The weather had been wonderful in June. Now though it was July and we were in the apartment and summer was dragging us through its belly. We could have been the pulpy carcasses of goats swallowed whole by a crocodile. It was that hot inside the apartment. M was always gone. I found his undershirts on the floor and washed them, put his socks away and left dinners for him on the counter if I thought he might be back after we went to sleep. If I was finding everything to be harder than I had thought I might find it, well, I told myself, M was working hard too. I knew he was working so hard and everything would be easier for him, and more equal really, if everything at home was perfect and dinner was cooked well and left ready for him.

Things were going well for M’s company. Money was putting down roots and growing and growing inside all of the company’s accounts. Fields of fresh green data promised happiness to come. Everything was budding, bright and young and green. There were a lot of people to meet and shake hands with. M was travelling and travelling and shaking hands and every time he shook someone’s hand he became more like the person he was becoming. The person in a room who could be taken at a glance to be someone in charge of things, of people, of money.