Meredith first noticed the woman in the airport security line, standing some heads in front of her. She was tall, slim, seemingly around Meredith’s age — twenty-five — and wearing a denim jacket virtually identical to Meredith’s own. Meredith stared, slightly stuck: she found something compelling in this similarity, but also repellent — the strange, embarrassing recognition she sometimes had that she was a type, that all her individual neuroses and idiosyncrasies actually only kept her strictly in line with other women.
The flight to New York would be Meredith’s first return trip to the United States, symmetrical with the trip to France, her first time leaving the country. Upon her arrival in Paris, truthfully, she had been slightly disappointed and disoriented by the airport, by immediately being somewhere so entirely bland, albeit overseas. Her whole life, she read and heard about abroad and so she had imagined that even the airport would be interesting even in the most basic ways, with pristine glass windows and an ever-unfurling French flag. The airport, though, had felt so American that she had wondered at once at the point of traveling at all. That sensation, like the other unruly ones she had been trying to manage, had dissipated and strengthened in turn in Paris. Although she’d faithfully explored more of the trembling, glistening world than ever before, she’d remained chronically herself. And, as she waited to depart, she was drawn to the most familiar, similar person to herself: the woman a few feet ahead of her in line.
But only a few minutes after Meredith first noticed the woman, her phone buzzed, and she glanced down to find a text notifying her that her flight to New York was delayed. Meredith clicked on the link to a glitchy website indicating the new time of departure, set back from five to eleven PM, and sighed. It was three.
Meredith wasn’t entirely surprised by a delay, even such a long one; she was flying with one of the cheaper airlines, the kind that appeared almost literally out of thin air and then combusted only years later, filing for bankruptcy after a lifespan of serving only people willing to endure all the various mutations of Economy-Economy- Economy the airline could provide. She had booked the trip at the last minute, a moment of post-breakup impulsivity that made her feel like the incompetent female protagonists of the movies Oscar had liked, and the only flights left had been the inexpensive and inconvenient ones. But, still, like any customer always right, she thought, she was frustrated. A large portion of the people in line, clearly similarly notified, groaned together and turned to each other sympathetically, muttering things like, “Unbelievable,” in English and rolling their eyes.
And the woman in front of Meredith said loudly, and seemingly to no one, in an American accent, “Oh, fuck this.”
Meredith spoke loudly, then, too, wanting to commiserate. “It’s classic.”
The woman turned around. Her side profile was attractive, Meredith noted: great nose, clear skin. “I forgot to download a movie,” she said, plaintive.
Meredith shook her head. “I might just go get drunk.”
“Good idea,” the woman said, then turned around.
Privately, Meredith decided she would first find the gate, certify the delay, and then relocate to a bar with a constant view of the departure screen, just to be sure. She had always generally thought of herself as a sort of steely person, someone solid and capable. Other people had seen her that way, too: an old soul, parents had called her as a child; the mom friend, people called her in college. As an adult, though, she felt like she had softened, or begun to leak. Her judgment and thoughts often slipped and spiraled. The airport, for example, made her anxious, and she wanted complete, unimpeachable information before she began to drink. She now had two tasks, she thought, to enjoy herself and get on the plane, but the first and foremost task would always be to be on the plane. She thought highly of her constant anxiety, like a little alarm in her brain, or a siren or a robot — something hovering over the processes, guiding them, re-prioritizing them.
“You’re going to go to a bar?” the woman asked Meredith abruptly after a few minutes in line. Meredith thought her voice was sort of both thrillingly and annoyingly breathless.
“I think so,” Meredith said, and then, on another impulse as unfamiliar to her as travel itself, added, “Do you want to come?”
“Sure! If that’s okay,” the woman said. She reached out her hand, which was thin, and adorned with slim gold rings and bracelets that Meredith admired, wondering briefly if they were real. “I’m Natalie, by the way.”
“Hi,” Meredith said, shaking her hand. She rarely shook hands with women her age, used to the preemptive, premature hugging of friends of friends at parties. “Meredith.”
“Do you live in New York?” Natalie asked. She turned sideways and Meredith moved to stand across from her. Natalie’s nostril was pierced, Meredith noticed, with a ring, not a stud, which was also gold; her eyes were brown; her teeth were very straight. Her face was beautiful, Meredith thought, almost impossibly smoothly fit together. She wore a red sweater under the denim jacket, different than hers, under closer inspection, and ripped in the front. Meredith grimaced quickly — she’d never understood that, buying denim exaggeratedly tattered, purposely ruined. But she liked Natalie’s sweater, which looked thick and well-made. It had a tiny patch sewn on over the heart that spelled something in cursive she couldn’t discern.
“Prospect Heights,” Meredith said, nodding, squinting at the patch. “Do you?”
Natalie smiled. “Oh, I love that neighborhood!”
Meredith smiled back. She paused to see if Natalie would respond to her original question. After a moment, she did. “Oh, I don’t live in New York. I used to, but I’ve been in Paris for about a year now. I’m going back to see my boyfriend.”
“Cool,” Meredith said. She assumed the boyfriend must be extraordinarily beautiful, too, and pictured someone tall, with good eyebrows and a pleasant, toothy smile. She thought, involuntarily and momentarily, about Oscar. The line ahead of them moved forward, and both women shifted automatically, pulling their bags. “What do you do?”
“I work in media. What about you?”
“I’m an accountant,” Meredith said. Natalie nodded slowly. Meredith, slightly unsure, continued, “Do you like Paris?”
“I love it.” Natalie’s tone changed, like she had begun to pledge an oath. “I love it so much. I never want to leave.”
“Don’t say that! It’ll jinx this delay,” Meredith said, laughing slightly.
Natalie grimaced, which Meredith noticed had the effect of making her both slightly uglier and also more beautiful. “I’m worried that I did jinx it.”
“What do you mean?”
“I just mean, sometimes, I don’t know. At a certain point, you start to connect the dots.”
Meredith was familiar with this kind of comment — superstitious, spiritual, finding lessons in the debris of life — but she didn’t do well with those sentiments, and in fact had a general contempt for them, stirred in moments like these, like when an acquaintance expressed too much interest in her zodiac sign. She was silent for a minute or two, looking down at her bags on the floor, until Natalie gently prodded her arm. “I think we’re almost up.”
***
They walked towards their assigned gate, adjacent to the others that the airline served, all sectioned by the letter A. They had the choice between three bars: a minimalist, sort of depressing version of an aesthetically modern bar; a little “classic” pub; and a resort-style bar advertising beachy drinks. Stuck, Natalie suggested they migrate between the three. Meredith agreed to the plan, which felt fun and spontaneous, even if simultaneously silly and strange. They started with the windowless beach bar, where they found a booth by the far wall.
They tucked their bags beneath the table. Natalie’s carry-on was wheeled, shinily shelled, and jet black; her blue pocketbook was made of a taut canvas material with leather handles — a luxury bag that Meredith recognized but couldn’t place. Her own carry-on was less mobile, a weighty blue duffel, and her purse was simple and anonymous, a black leather clasped thing that fell to her waist. As they sat, they adjusted their hair. Meredith had just had hers cut up to her collarbone the week before her trip and was still unused to it, vacillating between love and hate. She still constantly touched it, pushing it around and feeling its phantom weight. When a waiter came to them, they both ordered piña coladas. Sixteen euros each, Meredith noted.
They tried talking about where they’d gone to school, but neither had heard of the other’s college and so had no mutual friends to discuss. Instead, when Natalie said she was from Los Angeles, Meredith fit the knowledge into her general sense of L.A. and filled in the benign mystery of Natalie with what she knew of L.A. It made sense; Natalie had that shimmering frailty that Meredith associated with the city, and both liked and mistrusted. Meredith, who had grown up in the farther reaches of Long Island, mentioned her hometown and received the expected vacant nod of half-recognition.
“Why were you in Paris!” Natalie asked, her sunny tone asserting the question as an exclamation, just as Meredith began to drink quickly. Natalie still mixed her drink, slowly crushing the tiny yellow umbrella with her thin fingers.
“I was just here for a week,” Meredith said, after she’d swallowed. “It was a solo trip.”
Meredith debated saying more. She liked Natalie and wanted to contribute. The trip had opened some space in her mind, and she saw that this was a possible opportunity — a chance to see how she could frame the breakup with Oscar going forward. But there was, she thought, the inconvenient, base inexplicability of her relationship’s demise. “My boyfriend and I just broke up. I thought it’d be a, you know, girl power type thing. Eat Pray Love, whatever,” she continued impulsively.
“That’s awesome! Good for you.” Natalie smiled. “I’m so sorry about the breakup, though. How are you feeling now?”
Meredith was grateful to her for the response, which was sweet and charitable, especially from a stranger. It reminded her of the random kindnesses completely unknown women had granted before: a free tampon at a college basketball game when there was not one to be found in the arena from the woman selling popcorn; Plan B from a pharmacist, though she frowned, when Meredith was underage, crying in the store. Meredith wasn’t sure if Natalie’s empathy was as intentional as theirs, but it felt nice, nice the way these things could just be.
It reminded her of the week just after a breakup, when she always listened exclusively to pop music about the perils of men — a genre ready-made, ripe in its wisdom, applicable to any tragedy everyone else saw coming. Meredith would sing to the songs in the shower like a teenager, so that the music, however hollow, bounced off the walls of the bathroom and became an ecosystem, a world with its own anti-logic, a place where, no details needed, someone said, oh, honey, it’s men, it’s not you. Come here, I’m so sorry. Although, in her case, she thought, she enjoyed all these things and still felt that she remained a double agent, because she had actually caused the damage herself, immolating the man and then herself, in that order, so that her tears were only evidence of collateral damage.
Meredith wondered how much more to tell Natalie. She felt warm inside the immediate cocoon Natalie was offering. She wanted to curl up against Natalie, to be soothed by her, to grow wholly devoted to her in the space of an hour. The details weighed against her, though, Meredith thought, so she took another moment before she spoke.
“I’m okay. I think the trip did really help. It’s hard to imagine my life in New York without him, and I felt this instinct to leave, to kind of reset and think about it from a different perspective.”
“I totally know what you mean,” Natalie said, nodding.
Encouraged, Meredith continued. “It was strange walking around Paris by myself, completely alone, like — I often went days without saying really more than a few words out loud to anyone, and I felt crazy. But I realized that it was the first time in a long time that, for extended periods of time, no one knew what I was doing. At the end of the day, I just went to sleep; I didn’t update anyone on anything. No one knew, and it still happened, my life still was happening and had value outside the context of him. That felt good.”
“Yes,” Natalie said, nodding almost rhythmically. “It’s so true! I’ve gotten that way, now, with long distance, too, where it’s like, our relationship is just us updating each other at night, it’s not actually communicating — it’s just not love if it’s not communicating.”
Meredith was quiet for a moment; she saw the connection Natalie drew but was unsure of the direction she had taken it, and she was apprehensive again, thinking Natalie seemed self-absorbed. She squinted and thought about whether to wind their conversation down, or to trust her. Then she sipped her drink. The piña colada was excellent. “Yum.”
They flagged down a waiter for another round. Sixteen more euros, Meredith noted.
When the drinks arrived, Natalie said, “My boyfriend Adam, he’s not a great communicator. I knew that all along — we’ve been together since college, so, forever, but the long distance is now this really big challenge and this idea of us having two completely different perspectives — it totally resonates. I mean, I admire how you just got on a plane and came here. You knew what you needed to do and you did it. Adam would never. He’s addicted to New York, like, obsessed. Can leave to see me for a few days, but can’t really leave, can’t imagine living anywhere else.”
“Yeah, I get that. I feel like it’s a relatively common attitude amongst guys our age, though it’s so brutally lame.”
Meredith sipped more. She felt somewhat like they were bonding over false pretenses. She hadn’t told anyone the story yet, not her friends in New York, nor her cousins nor her sister. But what restrained her from honesty with all of the people she’d known for years was exactly the opposite of what Natalie offered: the weighty basket of assumptions about her, the most loaded of which was her famous, unceasing stability. She reminded herself that they stood in an abyss of anonymity — they were in an airport bar miles south of Paris, across the ocean from her family, plants, ex-boyfriends, old apartments.
“I cheated on Oscar,” Meredith finally continued. The first words came out of her mouth like the hot stones placed on her back at the end of the massages she’d been getting on weekends over the past months in Brooklyn, chasing the neon letters of ‘SPA.’ “That’s why we broke up. So the trip to Europe — I didn’t ‘need’ or ‘deserve’ this, I just wanted it. I thought it would help, and it did. But I caused the break-up.”
Natalie bit her lip, and Meredith flinched, wondering if she’d misjudged her companion. Then she said, “I’m not sure that it works like that, Meredith. It’s like they say, cheating isn’t the cause, it’s a symptom.” She reached out, putting her hand over Meredith’s. “I’m so sorry.”
Meredith smiled, grateful for Natalie’s response, the tacit understanding it referenced and promised. “Thank you. I mean, that’s very nice.”
“Did you love him?”
When Meredith spoke again, the words flowed more normally, as if she had just remembered again the operation of speech itself. “Oscar?”
“Yeah. But the other person, too?”
“I did love Oscar, yes, or, I mean, I definitely thought I did,” Meredith said. In her mind, she saw Oscar as he had been at his most frustrating: glowering over the bill from brunch; tired, arguing about their plans for the evening; ignoring her texts for a day at a time, distracted by some European soccer game. His face, which was sometimes beautiful, she pictured at its most hostile, most generic: the thin mustache; the narrowed light blue eyes; the sunken cheeks.
“I guess I’m not sure if I still did by the end, but we dated for three years before that, and, yeah, I loved him. I can remember what it was like, when I really did, in the beginning. It’s bizarre to think about.” Meredith stopped. Natalie nodded, and she continued, affirmed, “I didn’t — I don’t love Justin, the other guy, not in that way. I mean, I loved him in that moment, in that moment I was, you know, like, intoxicated by him, it felt like something I absolutely needed to do. But they weren’t, overall, equal. It really wasn’t the same.”
“What do you mean, you were ‘intoxicated’ by the other guy? Intoxicated. ”
“I don’t know. There are times in my life where I’ve really felt like the main character, you know, like I’m running around in a video game. I touch something, I knock it over. I decide things. There are other times where it’s not like that, so much. It’s like, I’m watching everything happen to me, that my life is a series of events outside of my control, yeah, right, what I just said, that things just happen to me, that I control nothing.”
Meredith was a little tipsy, and suddenly wanted water, and yet she continued, mixing up words. The memories of Justin were readier, stirring her brain around. The first night, dancing to jazz music he played on his phone in the white- light kitchen of his one-bedroom apartment.
“With Oscar, I don’t know, but I would wake up every few months, and it’d be a new season, and then, a few months later, it’d happen again. My life was fine, not good, but fine. I went to a party, I saw Justin, he was someone I had known a few years before, and it made me crazy. I acted crazy! But it made me a full person again. I mean, it made me, like, plot. I was doing horrible things, of course, I was cheating on my boyfriend, but I was ‘intoxicated’ by the choice. Does that make sense?”
Natalie squeezed Meredith’s hand, her eyes a little glazed. “Meredith, of course that makes sense. I just, I think you can forgive yourself for that. You wanted to feel alive. It’s a natural pull, it’s a human pull. It’s a womanly pull.”
“Thank you,” Meredith said. She furrowed her forehead, and stared at Natalie. Then she looked around for the waiter to ask for water.
“Do you wanna switch bars?” Natalie asked. “This sugar is making me a little sick.”
“Oh, okay,” Meredith said. Her throat cracked as she stood up.
Meredith pulled her jacket on. She laughed at herself, her quickly plummeting alcohol tolerance. The jean jacket was lined inside with white fleece. She’d bought it with Oscar at the Bloomingdale’s outlet store on the Upper West Side on the way to dinner. It was a great jacket, she told herself, and her best jacket for the weather, but she winced at the memory. She saw Natalie’s denim jacket — thicker, sturdier, darker material — again — and looked back at her jacket sleeves, noticing for the first time that her jacket might be flimsy, even cheap.
She flushed, folding her hands over, thinking she’d shared too much now. Natalie’s reaction, the gooey affirmation, had bothered her though she thought it shouldn’t have; there was something so irritating and cloying about the way Natalie had spoken, something that destabilized the rest of the day’s encounters. Natalie was already walking ahead, her slender body moving a bit frenetically from side to side; Meredith followed like a distracted child.
***
They sat on stools at the pub’s bar, and ordered beers, keeping in their vague accordance of drink with theme. Meredith had a Heineken, just because she liked the color green. Ten euros. Natalie ordered a Guinness, dark and fat with foam. Eleven euros.
For a few minutes, they were silent. Behind the bar, a soccer game played on the television, and Meredith watched men in striped uniforms with wet bangs pace up and down the field. Natalie began tapping her nails against her glass, creating a rippling clicking sound, and Meredith looked back over to her, pulling her eyes away from the television with some effort. Natalie’s nails were a perfect pink, unchipped, long and rectangular; the sound and sight of them was hypnotic, until Meredith noticed that Natalie’s whole body was moving, her long legs shaking. When Meredith looked up, she saw that Natalie looked very anxious, like she might even be ill.
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I think I’m just a bit triggered.”
“What?”
Natalie seemed not to have heard her. “I’m trying to remember that, just, the universe wouldn’t have sent me this if I wasn’t ready,” Natalie said. “But I don’t feel good about this. At the same time, you know, it makes sense, right when I’m going to New York.”
“What do you mean?” Meredith said, and furrowed her brow again, frustrated and yet a little concerned, thrown, as always, by any indication of living seriously, stubbornly, according to signs and symbols. Natalie looked around the room searchingly, as if to find instruction in the vicinity. Meredith decided to take charge; she reminded herself she was quite used to, skilled at, caretaking. “Why don’t you have some water?”
“Do you want to put in anything to eat?” the bartender asked them, interrupting. He was blonde, with acne-scarred skin. He reminded Meredith a bit of Oscar, if he’d been both taller and somewhat worse- looking. Neither woman had yet considered the food options.
“Not right now,” Meredith said, watching Natalie, who didn’t seem to have heard him, either. “Maybe in a few minutes.”
Abruptly, Natalie said, “I have this problem. I have a problem.” Her hands began to shake, too, and her gold bracelets jingled.
The bartender immediately left. “Okay,” Meredith said, nodding to indicate her willingness to listen in an exaggerated and drunken way. “You can tell me.”
“It’s big but it’s also, like, very simple, at the same time,” Natalie said, tapping the bar’s counter, now, with her nails. “I’m in love with someone else, in Paris. His name is Jules. I want to tell Adam, maybe this trip.”
“Oh, wow,” Meredith said, her eyes widening involuntarily, like pupils automatically dilated at sudden light. “Okay.”
“I know. But you understand, of course. How this happened to me.”
“Hm.” Meredith shook her head a bit, as if to evacuate a gnat from her ear. “Is it… simple? Do you really think so?”
“It’s simple, to me, in that it’s like — all these nights, days, whatever, I’ve spent trying to figure it out, and it’s just this very simple story: I’m in love with two people. It’s almost an ancient story, really,” she said. Natalie’s eyes grew wider, too, as she spoke, and Meredith involuntarily bared her teeth, remembering, with a rippling, jealous feeling of rancor, how beautiful Natalie was. It was strange, then, the mismatch of her voice. “Sometimes I feel honestly more connected than ever to just, like, the human race. Like, to you, for example. Because it happens to everyone at some point or another, and now it’s happening to me. It’s a rite of passage.”
“Ah.” Meredith took a sharp breath. “Yeah. I guess so, I guess it is just a thing — ”
“Sorry, I must sound insane! But of course, you get it.” Natalie brought her hand to her mouth and bit the ends of her pink nails. Then she took a long sip of the drink.
“Jules is a cool name,” Meredith offered; the first neutral thing she thought to say. She looked around, wondering if it would be too rude to abandon Natalie at some point soon.
“It is. He’s French.”
“Hm,” Meredith said. Around them, the other waiting travelers peacefully touched the smudged glass of their phones. “What does he do?”
“He’s a sculptor.”
“Oh!” Meredith leaned forward a bit, more interested again.
“They’re gorgeous, he’s so talented. He lives right near me.”
“What are the sculptures? I mean, what are they like?”
“They’re enormous, all of them. He’s lucky, because he lives in this huge apartment — so there’s plenty of room.”
Huge apartment, Meredith thought, of course. But she should be nice, Meredith chastised herself, she should be nice and sympathetic, as usual. “That’s awesome — how great.”
“They’re great. Really great. They’re really erotic, a lot of them. He can really portray sex in a way that few people can. Well, I see them as erotic.”
“Oh, like naked women?”
“No, well — often they’re bodies, but sometimes, you know, more abstract shapes. But I just know him so well, so I can see it in all of them — you know, I know what he’s intending. It’s special. I feel lucky to know him in that way.”
The bartender came back over to them. Meredith smiled with a toothy, uncomfortable gratitude. “Another round? Any food?”
“Let’s look at the food,” Meredith said, realizing at once that she needed to eat.
“Okay,” Natalie said, nodding. They pulled the menus open, and, after a minute or two of scanning, both ordered the croque monsieur sandwiches the French-British-Irish pub offered. Twenty-one euros each.
“I just don’t know how to say it,” Natalie said when the bartender walked away. “It’s not that I don’t love him, it’s not that he’s done anything wrong. It’s that I have to announce that I love someone else, and that I can’t come back to New York right now. So he would have to move to Paris, I think. I just don’t want to choose Jules, all on my own — I want Adam to have the choice.”
“What? But you are, by default, then, kind of choosing Jules, no?” Meredith said. When she cocked her head, her short hair still hung above her shoulder in one blunt line.
“No, no, I don’t think so. It’s important that Adam makes the decision.”
Meredith’s glass was empty, but she picked up an ice cube with her fingers mindlessly and chewed on it. Meredith remembered that in middle school a girl had told her that if you chewed ice, it meant you were anorexic. The girl had left the school for anorexia the next year, but Meredith had chewed on ice for years after. “True. I guess that’s true.”
Meredith sat in the silence for a few moments. “Have you — do you and Jules, you know — ” Meredith finally asked, cutting off speech to gesture with her hands like a young student in health class.
“Oh, no,” Natalie said. She drank more, quickly. “We haven’t done anything physical. I feel guilty, plenty guilty about the emotional, you know, I feel awful — I mean, this plane, it really feels like a sign. But no, we haven’t kissed, haven’t slept together, haven’t touched like that. Of course, he knows I love him. I mean, I tell him I love him. Sometimes I, do things, like, I don’t know, oh God, this is so embarrassing —sing him to sleep, brush his hair. But no, I don’t… I don’t touch him. I couldn’t do that, I could never do that, while I’m still with Adam.”
Stung, Meredith didn’t respond. Natalie’s tone had changed from their previous conversation, and in her meditatively drunken speech — almost babbling — Meredith sensed that she heard the truth from Natalie for the first time that day, that all the previous empathy and comradery from before had been totally false, only the manipulative but natural ingratiation as Natalie would have with almost anyone. So, cheating was not a symptom; so, cheating was a cause. Good to know, Meredith thought, biting ice. Good to know.
“Well, I guess that’s something to be proud of,” she snapped.
“I sleep there often, just to be near him,” Natalie said, drinking more heavily now.
Meredith lost focus. Natalie was in love with two people, on two continents, in two countries; she wouldn’t fuck one of them, she stayed ‘loyal’ to the other. That kind of loyalty, Meredith thought, apparently, included telling another man that you loved him, singing someone to sleep, brushing their hair, certainly touching them. Fine, fine, fine, she thought — but Natalie just didn’t have the literality or proof that sex carried, the additional, final resonance of two tumbling physical bodies.
Meredith thought of what it had been like with Justin in bed, squirming around like eels under the influence of wine for hours at a time, waking up with headaches in the morning, taking pain medicine and then showers, washing the hangovers off each other. It had been shameful and stupid, it was true, fine, she knew that, too, but it had been a stupidity that presents itself only so often. She sensed that Natalie was speaking to her, now, but she couldn’t hear. Meredith thought now about Oscar, their nightly rituals: the well-practiced, the rehearsed. Him on his back, naked besides a flannel. The rolling over, the checking of phones.
“Do you want to switch bars?” Meredith heard Natalie say. “After the food comes?”
“Okay,” Meredith said. She wondered if her eyes had flashed. “Let’s check the screen and see the status of our flight, though. On the way. To be careful. Safe.”
Natalie shuddered at the mention of the flight, closing her eyes. “I just feel like it’s my fault, Meredith. I’m so sorry. Though, of course, here I am, apologizing too much — we spend so much time apologizing.”
Meredith thought about saying the things that she always told herself: You just can’t worry about it right now; it’s outside of your control. But she didn’t say any of them. “We do. But do you think — maybe — the fact that you think the flight delay is a moral judgment means that you know you’re doing something wrong, and should just break up with him?” Meredith asked instead.
“What?” Natalie said, sounding wounded.
The waiter walked over with two plates of food. “Croque monsieurs,” he said, and Meredith reached out to grab her sandwich.
***
They laid on opposite booths in the back of the modern bar, still drunk, two hours before boarding time. Natalie had said that her stomach hurt, though they had more drinks — gin and tonics, sixteen euros each — waiting on the table, which they sipped on intermittently, biding their time. When Natalie spoke, she spoke to the ceiling, and her tone of voice recalled for Meredith the secrecy and openness of confession of elementary school sleepovers, enabling that special kind of communication, the things you’re able to say to a faceless being in the dark. Through the windows of the airport bar, the airport’s lights broke the fuzzy, monotonous night.
Meredith closed her eyes, and, breathing through her hazy annoyance, focused on the song the bar was playing, something familiar but strange, like an acoustic cover of an electronic song she’d heard in a club once, in another time.
“This bar is like a warped Starbucks,” Meredith said. “And I already hate Starbucks.”
“What? Why?”
Meredith yawned and shrugged her shoulders back. She missed the resort bar. She’d never been to a real island — a beach paradise, a getaway — but she imagined she was on one then, the waves lapping at her, at her feet which hung off the end of the booth, growing slightly numb, weighing her down. “How did you meet Adam?”
Natalie began a long monologue on the beginning of her relationship with Adam. In her fake-island reverie, Meredith ignored all the details. Instead, she felt proud of a joke she had just come up with: maybe there could be a new professional sports team in Manhattan, the New York Delusion. After a few minutes, Meredith realized Natalie had gone silent, and opened her dry mouth to prod her again.
“So, why are you still with him?” Meredith asked, her eyes closed. “Why not just break up — a while ago? You’re not even in the same place.”
“I love him,” Natalie said quickly. “Yeah. Okay.”
“Why did you go to Paris?” Natalie retorted with a hint of anger, like she felt empowered to enact revenge, an implied ‘anyway?’ hanging at the end of her speech. “Why Paris?”
Meredith thought. Why Paris. She could say: the tiny cafés; wide bridges, streets; views from the towers and hills. The dirty steps, covered in graffiti, the pigeons, and the men who catcalled her while she walked alone at night. The obvious tourists, bright shirts, rip-off menus, tacky artists on the street, Segway tours. She said, “I think in a way it was synonymous to me with travel itself.”
“What do you mean?” Natalie said, sounding surprised. “You’ve never traveled before?”
“No,” Meredith said, still thinking: the cooled underground tunnel of skulls; the elevated path, covered in plants, leading to the isolated, suburban area where teenage boys tried to follow her for a minute or two; the yellow city lights at night; the women in black heels she envied on the metro. The foaming coffees in the morning; the little cars turning corners and switching lanes. The pharmacists opening their doors, bells ringing; the old men — whose retirement she envied, too — closing newspapers and putting out their cigarettes in tiny trays, their small dogs on the street, basking in the sun. The museums. The twists, turns of the brushstrokes of oil paintings, illuminated by light. The glass of the shops reflecting the noon sun. She added, knowing it would provoke Natalie, “I didn’t grow up rich.”
“Me neither,” Natalie said immediately. “We grew up, just, comfortable. We traveled, like, once a year.”
“Right,” Meredith said. She yawned again. “God, going back will be weird.”
“Mm. Yeah.”
“I wonder if he’ll be in the apartment.”
Natalie turned from her position on the opposite booth bench and looked at Meredith. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, I have to go see. I don’t know if the lock will have changed.”
Natalie blinked, uncomprehending. Impatiently, Meredith continued, words coming out more quickly, and then all at once. “When I told him about Justin — well, I don’t think he suspected anything. But I got so tired of the whole thing — the ruse, but also the logistics of an affair, so I just told him. I thought I’d make everything easier on everyone. I just said it all out loud. And I knew, thought, assumed, he’d break up with me as soon as he knew — sort of like you think your guy will. Even the kind of dawning logistics of a break up — well, you understand, after all, as you said — it was too much. I thought, Oscar will dump me, and then I’ll dump Justin, and it will be over.”
“Oh — ”
Meredith sucked breath in through her nose, then continued. “But he didn’t. Oscar didn’t. He tried to talk about it; he wanted to forgive me. He said he knew me better than I knew myself. I kept trying to give him basically all the gory details. I said I knew what I had done, that I understood he’d want to break up. But he said we could figure it out.
We stayed up, like, all night, talking about it, for hours and hours. And by the morning, I realized I was no closer to being out of the relationship than in it. Meanwhile, I’d texted Justin, and he was sending me, you know, dozens of messages, trying to get in touch, to know what was happening. So in the morning, when we left to go to work — I just went to the airport. I took the train to the airport. I blocked them both. And then I came here.”
Natalie looked horrified. “What?”
Meredith was quiet for a moment. She sighed, then said, “Yeah. That’s what happened. It was the only thing I thought would work. We’ll see, I guess.”
“Oh my God.”
“Yup,” Meredith said in a deadpan way, then rolled her eyes up at the ceiling. She didn’t know exactly why she’d told Natalie, but she thought she was glad she had; it had continued the arrival of the after, pushing her further from this day and the past, right into the future.
When she looked back at Natalie, she saw Natalie open her mouth, then close it, just as an announcement came over the speaker. They heard their flight number called, and both women rose from the booths, looking across the table, eyes a matching glossy red.
Flight 7843 to NewYork JFK has been canceled. Please go to your gate for more information. Flight 7843 to New York JFK has been canceled. Please go to your gate immediately for more information.
They howled together, slamming their hands on the table at the same time. For a moment, Meredith thought she might cry, or vomit from the lawless combination of exhaustion and frustration. Looking at her phone, she saw that it was now close to 10 PM.
“Fuck, no,” Meredith said, lowering her head to the table.
“There is something fucking wrong with this trip to New York,” Natalie said, biting her nails. “We’re being punished. For real.”
“Maybe. Who cares,” Meredith said. “Let’s just go to the gate.”
***
The gate was chaotic, dozens of passengers swarming ahead of them in a beehive pattern that Meredith and Natalie tailed, unmoored, swaying slightly to the back. Announcements were made that they couldn’t hear, complaints made that they couldn’t support or reiterate. Opinionated middle-aged couples stood around them, crossing their arms; Meredith asked them desperately for information about the flight.
“Oh, it’s a nightmare,” said a man nearby, shaking his head. “Flight is canceled, rescheduled for tomorrow, at the original time. But they’re saying every hotel in the area is booked up. Saying there’s nothing they can do.”
“For tomorrow?” Meredith turned to Natalie. “Can you keep our spot here, watch our stuff? I need to run to the bathroom.”
Natalie nodded as Meredith was already walking away. She had taken the next day off work as time to recover; she could still come into work, half-alive but triumphant, the day following, she thought. She wrote a first draft to her boss in the bathroom stall: Dear Mark. I’ll send updates soon. Thanks so much. Then she washed her hands and looked at herself in the mirror. On the counter was a gold comb, which she considered taking — her bangs were greasy, skewed to one side of her face, her short hair stuck out, forming a triangle — and then ignored. Her face was blotchy, too. She saw a long chin hair, and a stray zit under her left eye. “Everything will be fine,” she whispered to herself.
Natalie was in conversation with the same British man when she returned. She turned to Meredith. When Natalie spoke, she sounded different: more roughly solid, clear- eyed, decisive. Her hair, somehow, still looked perfect. “They’re offering refunds, some people are switching their flights to the early morning tomorrow.”
Meredith nodded. People moved around them, blurry in the periphery. She blinked and searched herself for the steady part, the part that knew what to do next. She felt stuck, torn, but not between two options; stuck like a small bug in a spider’s web; torn like that web floating away in the wind.
“Let’s try another desk,” Natalie said, and Meredith nodded again, shrugging.
They crossed the airport, past
empty desks, until they finally enlisted the help of an attendant behind the marbly blue-gray counter of the airline. After an explanation of their options, Meredith and Natalie chose new flights: Meredith would fly at six the next morning, and Natalie at eight.
“I’m so tired,” Natalie complained, yawning, when they’d walked away. Her eyes looked gauzy, frosted. “And we’re not going to get any sleep in this airport.”
Meredith was startled, not having fully registered that they would have to stay the night.
“Aren’t you going to go home?”
“It’s not worth it,” Natalie said, glancing at her watch, gold with tiny glittering crystals embedded around the rim. It was the gesture of a competent person, and Meredith was a little impressed. “I’d get home at, like, midnight, and have to leave at five again? I think we should just look for the comfiest spot to sleep. Maybe — the booth chairs?”
“Yeah, okay,” Meredith said — yawning, but still impressed.
They walked back to the modern bar, and put their bags back on the plush benches, both a brownish reddish color. Incidentally, they switched places from where they sat before.
Natalie removed a long sweater from one of her bags and laid it on the booth. She pulled out another one — sheer, gauzy — and folded it into a small pillow. Then she set an alarm on her phone, and put it with her wallet, enormous and embossed with a crocodile print, in her largest bag, stowing it under the table. Meredith tried to prop up her own jacket on her side, the fleece lining serving as both her blanket and pillow.
“What a day,” Natalie said, lying down on her makeshift bed.
Meredith said, smoothing over her jacket, “Big, long day.”
Natalie didn’t respond. Within a few minutes, Meredith heard her breathing change.
Meredith quietly extracted herself from the booth. She walked over to the bar, and ordered a gin and tonic. Sixteen euros. Sitting with the bartender, she asked, “When do you close?”
“Three. But when we close down, you can sleep here,” he said, nodding to Natalie’s thin lump. “We’ve let people do it before. My manager is here, so I’ll check and make sure.”
“Thank god,” Meredith said, closing her eyes.
“Cash register will be empty, though, so don’t get ideas,” he said, laughing.
Meredith laughed, too. When she finished her gin and tonic, she asked for another. Sixteen euros again. After that drink, she left him alone and stumbled back to the booths at the far end. She laid down, and as soon as she closed her eyes with finality, she fell asleep.
At four forty-five, Meredith woke up. Her mouth felt completely devoid of moisture, her head as though a rubber band had been tied around it. The bar was dark, her and Natalie alone. Her phone had no alarm set, and she knew she was lucky the hangover had woken her up early enough to make her flight.
Slowly, Meredith moved around and organized her things. She took one last look at Natalie, still asleep on the opposite side of the table. She looked almost like Sleeping Beauty — her perfect face, her plush lips. Meredith paused, then very quietly crouched down to the level of the table, resting her weight on her front toes. She unzipped Natalie’s largest bag, and slipped her fingers into Natalie’s crocodile wallet. She felt a large, wide pocket, fingers touching starchy paper. She pulled out half of the cash in the wallet, slid it into the arm of her jacket, zipped the bag back up, and stood. Then she walked out of the bar, hoisting her duffel silently.
In the concourse, she counted the money. Three hundred euros. Well, how much had she spent that day? She tallied the numbers of the drinks and the food with Natalie: sixteen, sixteen, ten, twenty-one, sixteen, sixteen, sixteen. One hundred and eleven euros total. One hundred and eleven euros to hear Natalie talk about herself, yodel and whine, stretching and vibrating her vocal cords. Really, what Meredith had taken was compensation. In a sense, she was just doing her job: counting money, and moving it around. It was only more income, ultimately, to set aside for the toll of her new rent. Eat the rich, bitch, Meredith thought, and then she walked over to her gate.
Madeline McFarland is a writer living in New York. She graduated from New York University’s MFA program in 2023. She is currently working on a collection of short stories as well as a novel.