Part Seven: Isabelle
She had not moved from the front of the room.
Around her, the moment had rearranged itself: Renaud had gone to speak with someone, the MC had found his patter again, the caterers had moved in with the dessert course, and the room had done what rooms did when a difficult moment passed — found the nearest conversational surface and resumed contact with it.
But Isabelle stood with her microphone and her glass, and the ironic smile was gone.
What remained was something that she had not performed and could not perform, because there was no appropriate performance for it: the specific exposure of having been wrong in public, in front of the people whose opinion she had organized her life around, on the night she had arranged with such careful precision to reflect exactly the right things about her.
She had been laughing.
She had been certain it was funny — or had told herself it was funny, which was not quite the same thing and which she was only now distinguishing between. She had felt the specific pleasure of the person who says the thing others are thinking, who makes audible what is whispered, who turns private judgment into public wit.
Except she had been the only one laughing. Not really. The nervous sound that had gone through the room had not been laughter in agreement. It had been the uncomfortable vocalization of people who weren’t sure whether to collude or resist, and had chosen something in between.
She had not noticed this at the time.
She noticed it now.
Her mother was at the front table, and she was looking at Isabelle with an expression Isabelle had not seen before — or had seen once, perhaps, when she was thirteen and had done something she was not going to be forgiven for quickly. The expression of a woman who loved her daughter and was ashamed of her at the same time.
Her father was looking at the table.
Renaud came back to her side. He stood close to her, which was correct for the occasion, and his face when she looked at it was the face of a man who was managing several things simultaneously and was not doing it without effort.
“I didn’t know,” she said, quietly, to him.
“I know,” he said.
“You could have told me.”
“I thought it was Claire’s information to share.”
She looked across the room to table seven. Claire and Thomas were talking, their heads close together, the specific posture of two people who have made an agreement. As she watched, Thomas said something that made Claire laugh — the real laugh, the one Isabelle had heard all her life, that started quiet and then got bigger than you expected.
Something in Isabelle moved, looking at it.
She put down the microphone.
She put down the glass.
She walked across the room.
