It should only be for a few weeks, he was saying. Jean and I decided to leave today, get a good night’s sleep before the meetings and all that. Besides, the flights are better today, would you believe it? Aurelie could only get us coach on Monday and, but he stopped talking when he saw my face. When he saw something or other in it, in the lines of it, the lines around my mouth and eyes, or maybe it was the way I held my hands or maybe it was something else, but anyway he stopped. Then he said more softly, in his I’m-actually-really-and-truly-really-sorry voice, There’s no way to avoid it. He had to talk to some other men or women who owned or ran some other businesses in some other place or places. He really had to, he said. He wished he didn’t, he said, but Jean needed him. The company did. Conversations had to be had, handshakes and cards exchanged with those other men, those other women. Important people talking to other important people. Wine and lunch and decisions. Hotel lobbies, pressed suits and the right kind of laughing.

It’s not what you think, he said. These trips, they’re just meetings, they’re always so boring, they always run on and on, people saying the same things, telling the same awful jokes. It’s not all glamour, he laughed, and I laughed too. Poor you, I said, of course it isn’t glamorous, of course it’s work. Of course I was only picturing the cool white of the hotel sheets, the sheets that were tucked and fluffed and made right every day by a horde of efficient maids, the places that were clean without me cleaning them, the food that was there without me making it, the guests that clinked their rings against their glasses and ordered another round at midnight just for fun, and for being alive and because everything was constantly being taken care of, of course I was only picturing these things because I didn’t understand, how could I, what it was all about.

Of course I was also thinking of Aurelie, who would be there, who would be flying with him maybe with nothing to hold her back or down but her tiny gold-chained purse. She could have packed a hundred dresses in her tiny purse, they were so fine, the silk so delicate and sheer as to be almost only a trick of the light.

M walked into E’s bedroom and ran his hands through her hair while she slept. He told me he’d miss us. I said good luck and I really meant it. I said that E and B would miss him too. I told him that they loved him, that they were really lucky to have a father like him. I said that we would all be here for him when he got back. I said that we loved him, that we loved him very much and every day.

What else could I have said? I was almost chasing him down the hallway, saying this, saying that. He kissed the top of my head and I was suddenly so small and I was sinking and sinking into the carpet. He gave me dates and places, I’m going first here, he said, for this many days, and then I’m going here for this other number of days and nights, and then, he said there will be another place, and he listed more days and nights but I was too far away to hear him. I was floating off into another place even with him holding me there by the shoulders, kissing my cheek. We had a party, I wanted to tell him, we had a party and we left the door open all night, and I, and you, and after we, and afterwards it was all so and also. He kissed me but it wasn’t me, I wasn’t even there. He left and the whole apartment smelled like him for a moment and then it didn’t because he was gone.