It was just a possibility, an inevitable thought. When he asked if she would like to see him again, she said she would if he wanted to. She didn't say she'd had a good time the night before. She didn't mention that at all—almost, Austin felt, as if that time had never happened. But it was an attitude he found attractive. She was smart. She judged things. It wasn't an American attitude. In America a woman would have to seem to care—more, probably, than she did or could after one harmless encounter.

That evening they had gone to a small, noisy Italian restaurant near the Gare de l'est, a place with bright lights and mirrors on the walls and where the food was not very good. They'd ordered light Ligurian wine, gotten a little drunk and engaged in a long and in some ways intimate conversation. Joséphine told him she had been born in the suburb of Aubervilliers, north of Paris, and couldn't wait to leave home. She had gone to a university and studied sociology while living with her parents, but now had no relationship with her mother, or with her father, who had moved to America in the late seventies and not been heard from. She said she had been married eight years to a man she once liked and had had one child with but did not especially love, and that two years ago she had begun an affair with another man, a younger man, which lasted only a short time, then ended, as she had expected it might. Afterwards she had believed she could simply resume married life more or less as she'd left it, a lifelong bourgeois muddle of continuance. But her husband had been shocked and incensed by his wife's infidelity and had moved out of their apartment, quit his job at an advertising firm, found a woman to live with and gone to work writing a novel which had as its only subject his wife's supposed indiscretions—some of which, she told Austin, he'd obviously made up, though others, amusingly enough, were surprisingly accurate.

“It's not so much I blame him, you know?” Joséphine had said and laughed. “These things come along. They happen. Other people do what they please.” She looked out the restaurant window at the row of small parked cars along the street. “So?”

“But what's happening now?” Austin said, trying to find a part of the story that would allow him into it. A phrase, a niche that could be said to invite his closer interest—though there didn't seem to be such a phrase.

“Now? Now I am living with my child. Alone. That is all of my life.” She unexpectedly looked up at Austin, her eyes opened wide, as though to say, What else is there? “What more else?” she in fact did say.

“I don't know,” Austin said. “Do you think you'll go back with your husband?” This was a question he was quite happy to ask.

“Yes. I don't know. No. Maybe,” Joséphine said, extending her lower lip slightly and raising one shoulder in a gesture of carelessness Austin believed was typical of French women. He didn't mind it in Joséphine, but he usually disliked people for affecting this gesture. It was patently false and always came at the service of important matters a person wished to pretend were not important.

Joséphine, though, did not seem like a woman to have an affair and then talk about it matter-of-factly to someone she barely knew; she seemed more like an unmarried woman looking for someone to be interested in. Obviously she was more complicated, maybe even smarter, than he'd thought, and quite realistic about life, though slightly disillusioned. Probably, if he wanted to press the matter of intimacy, he could take her back to his room—a thing he'd done before on business trips, and even if not so many times, enough times that to do so now wouldn't be extraordinary or meaningful, at least not to him.