Free Higher Ed by Tessa McWatt Page A

under him, the other bent back, almost curled). The plates on the table are matte white, which makes them appear almost solid, but she’s not fooled, she knows that none of this really exists, and that molecules and breath and sympathy are an illusion.
    “I used to come here with my ex,” Patricia says, lifting up the wine list. Francine wants to block Patricia’s radar, so she lifts her menu too, in front of her face. This is the first time Patricia has ever mentioned a partner, and Francine waits for a pronoun.
    “We’d argue about whether it was right to eat foie gras and veal; of course, it was not what we were really arguing about. It was my way of telling him he was thoughtless, his way of telling me I thought too much.”
    Francine lowers her menu, feeling safer now, and looks at Patricia. “How long were you together?”
    “Five years, not that long, in the scheme of things, but he was the first person I’d ever lived with. I was a late bloomer.” Patricia puts the wine list down. “I’d never pinned myself down before that.”
    Francine would not in a million years eat foie gras, but she briefly considers it now.
    “I travelled a lot—on field research trips, and he was just there, happy when I got home.”
    Francine might order escargots—she used to love them in her twenties when eating French food was exotic and showed you knew a thing or two about love and garlic. Love comes with … blah blah.
    “So did you only argue when you came home?” she asks.
    Patricia doesn’t answer. She looks for the waiter, signals to him, and orders a bottle of Chablis. Then she looks at Francine so sternly that Francine feels she is in school again, in trouble for forgetting her gym shorts. Patricia’s mouth twitches like it doesn’t know what to do next. And then her face softens. The tears that might have flowed aren’t coming after all. The English: they know how to do that.
    “I think I just needed him to resist me, somehow, resist just being there and happy. I don’t know. I’m not easy.”
    And in Patricia’s voice is that little girl who tortured dolls, collected butterflies, made life difficult for others because it was hell to be Patricia. Francine looks down at her menu, but she has begun to perspire and has to wipe her brow.
    “How about you and John. Did you fight?” Patricia asks.
    I’m speaking for myself and you’re perfectly welcome to speak for yourself. I take full responsibility for my own feelings and am not blaming you, but I feel angry when you don’t respect my space
, said John, in his gobbledy-gook, self-help jargon, so that whatever anger shemight have had about him not calling her for two days was redirected back at herself and her so-called responsibility for her own feelings, which she knows now was just the Fuckface’s way of shutting her out, shutting her down. So that when the day came—when she finally was able to raise her voice and yell: “Why is it always about you?”—well, he slammed a door and she ended up foetal on the floor. Only when he declared that he would never have children, even though he claimed regularly how great he’d be at it, did she finally twig that John Clarke was not the man she had imagined him to be; twig that she had known this all along; twig that John Clarke was a fuckwit. But he was her fuckwit, and she believed in sticking with things.
    “No, John didn’t like to fight.”
    “Like to fight? That’s not what I asked,” Patricia says with a smirk. And suddenly Francine can see through Patricia’s skin, through to the blood in her veins, through to her bones. It makes her tummy rumble with hunger and makes the Chablis smell like vinegar. She sits forward in her chair, her elbows on the table, and clears her throat.
    “Patricia. What is it, exactly, that you would like to hear from me?” She holds this forward tilt for two, three, four seconds, then sits back and picks up her menu, but she can feel her lip starting to tremble.