Although she had been to Paris. Twice. Dale had taken her there for a week after she’d discovered he’d been having an affair, and she had decided to give him a second chance. It had been an attempt at a second honeymoon. April in Paris. Aside from racing through a couple of churches which didn’t interest either of them all that much and a museum that had secretly bored her—as a group, the Impressionists had lost their appeal for Jane when their paintings started showing up on neckties—virtually all they’d done was wander through the city in lazy circles with no idea what they were looking at, then go back to their hotel and fight, fuck, and eat, usually in that order. Then, three months before Gerald was born, she and Thomas went to Paris for ten days on his semester break. Thomas had designed a rigorous itinerary that hit every major cultural and artistic highlight of the past several centuries and had delivered a beautifully researched lecture to elucidate the significance of each block of granite they stepped on. Oddly enough, she ended up feeling as if she’d seen more of the city the first time around. What Desmond’s room really brought to mind wasn’t being young or single, but rather the hotel room she and Dale had stayed in on that trip. The hotel was called the Claude something, and theirs had been a dark, incommodious room, and she hadn’t thought about it in years, and she wished the memory of it hadn’t stabbed at her so violently and unexpectedly. “It has Bohemian charm,” she said quietly. “But at this stage of my life, I doubt I could live like this.”

“No,” Desmond said. He had his back to her and was preparing the tea with a plastic electric kettle, the kind of cracked and stained appliance you’d expect in this kind of room. “It definitely wouldn’t do for a family of three.”

She could feel a headache coming on. She hadn’t been thinking about a family of three at all; she’d been thinking about herself. Maybe Desmond saw her as part of an undifferentiated mass, Janethomasgerald. But sitting on the bed and bouncing her legs, she didn’t know whether to feel insulted over this loss of individuality or concerned that she herself hadn’t included her husband and child in her configuration of “this stage of my life.”