"Even when she was silent, he always knew what she was thinking about."

"Même quand elle était silencieuse, il savait toujours ce dont elle pensait."

Part of a series from a page titled "Practice Quiz on Relative Pronouns."

She was hunched over in the cramped Parisian bathroom, scrubbing the stain out of her skirt. She had asked him to tell her when he was almost there so she could adequately prepare with tissues, but like usual he didn't say anything. Was it an honest mistake? Did he do it out of spite? She wouldn't put it past him to do it out of spite. Right now the only thing she didn't hate about French hotel bathrooms was the handheld shower head, which made stain removal slightly more tolerable.

He, meanwhile, was sprawled on the bed, flipping through the channels, not lingering more than a few seconds on any one because he didn't understand the language of the broadcast. After completing the cycle twice, he came upon something he had missed the first time: oddly-tanned Europeans fucking in a park. 3 of them (of which 2 were men wearing white sneakers). Free porn à la française. He thought she might find it funny, so he started to describe it to her with careful attention to the exact placement of the tan lines and the grooming of pubic hair. He loved pointing out the details that made most people uncomfortable.

The only response that came from the bathroom was the drone of the water. Even when she was silent, he always knew what she was thinking. She must be doubled over with laughter.

She wasn't doubled over with laughter. She was seething. This porn dictation was the salt vigorously rubbed in the wound created by a semen stain on her skirt. These past two weeks had made her reconsider their relationship. She was studying abroad; he surprised her with a visit. As a result, she spent every spare minute being his tour guide and interpreter. She had to go Dutch on a hotel room because her dorm forbid male guests, and he had pleaded with her over the fact that he didn't feel comfortable staying by himself in a hotel in a country where he didn't speak the language (the fact that every single hotel receptionist in Paris speaks at least a passable English meant nothing to him). It wasn't a job she would have minded, in principle; but put into practice, it made her realize how absolutely, functionally stupid he was.

She had developed an interest in him several months earlier; they would sit for hours at a coffee shop downtown and he would listen to her as she spilled her thoughts. He listened without judgment. It definitely wasn't love; it was whatever drives people to develop feelings for their therapists. Dependence mixed with curiosity, she had guessed. They had rarely ventured outside of the coffee shop and its proverbial Freudian couch. Now, out in the world, she noticed all sorts of things that showed his ostensible solipsism: he didn't watch where he was going. He talked too loudly. He tried using his high school Spanish to communicate with the person at the metro guichet when he had stupidly put his ticket in the machine incorrectly and it didn't work.

But none of this compared to what he had said other day while they were seated at a restaurant. These past two months abroad had been difficult, she had explained. French people aren't easy to befriend. The headmistress of the dorm was an Anti-Semitic Pétainiste. The man at the sandwich shop made fun of her when she asked him to repeat what he had said. A homeless man on the subway said her curly hair made her look "too Jewish." In short, she was homesick.

His response: it's all in your head. It's impossible, incomprehensible even, to hate springtime in Paris. Quit your bitching and get over it. Then he took a bite of his croque-monsieur, and as melted cheese and béchamel dripped down the site of his face, he made that characteristic grimace she had grown to loathe.

All of this was at the front of her mind as she left the bathroom. She put on a pair of pajama pants and sat next to him on the bed. "I'm jealous of you that you get to go home in a few hours," she said. He didn't look at her. "Envious," he corrected her, as always, "and I think you're crazy." She chose to ignore this. "The first thing we should do when I return is go to that one restaurant downtown and get some beet chips. And a tall Dinkelacker. French beer is shit."

He set down the remote. "Yeah...we should probably talk about that."

We need to talk--she noted the inherent paradox. A call for discourse, when in fact the mere utterance of those words was sufficient. An implication of self and other as subject, when in fact the other is deprived of enunciation. There was another paradox, this one not inspired by all the coursework she had completed toward her literature major: while only a few minutes earlier she was creating a mental list of all the ways she hated him, after hearing these words she was on the verge of tears.

"I don't understand," was all she could say without breaking down. Crying in front of him was the last thing she wanted to do.

"We don't have good chemistry." He was always going on about his fucking chemistry. "I can't be with someone who doesn't appreciate the opportunities they've been given."

She nearly snorted at his hypocrisy--there were too many instances to mention. Instead, she let it go. "How long have you known this?"

"It's been about a month now." That meant he had already decided to break up with her before he left the US. "It's been a bittersweet vacation," was his only explanation.

That was the last straw. All of the frustration she had put up with over the past two weeks--and he knew the entire time that he was going to break up with her mere hours before his return flight left? She lost it. She sobbed harder than she could remember ever having sobbed. She hated him for taking advantage of her. She hated herself for letting herself be taken advantage of. She hated Paris for its uppity service-level employees, unaccommodating restrooms, smoky streets, stupid game shows, and saturation with Ugly American tourists. She hated the unfavorable Euro/Dollar exchange rate. She hated the dry baguettes that nearly made her choke every time she attempted to eat one. She hated that ugly uvular fricative R uttered countless times in each sentence--an entire country of people trying to hock a loogey, she thought at this moment. She hated Baudelaire's sad-sack poetry. She hated herself for not breaking up with him first. She hated an infinite number of indefinable things. She clung to her tissue and cried violently...

*****

...it was as if she had awoken from a coma. She had no idea how long she had cried; the best she could do was estimate from the number of tissues inundating the bed. He had made no attempt to disturb her in this state. Instead, he had continued to watch the porn channel, not for any sexual purpose, but rather in a didactic way: this is how Europeans fuck. She sat up; this sudden movement inspired him to move his hand to her knee, but she promptly swatted it away. She sat on the edge of the bed for a few moments; then, the phone rang and she was forced to answer it.

"Allô mademoiselle, le taxi est arrivé."

"D'accord, il descend. Merci." She hung up the phone and turned to him, carefully avoiding his eyes. "Taxi's here." She stood with her arms crossed as he got his things together. He unlocked the door and paused. No, no, no--her silent prayer--but he did it anyway: he pulled her into his arms.

This proximity of two bodies, this forced confrontation that denied everything she had begun to cope with over the past couple hours, broke her all over again. She sobbed into his shoulder. He allowed this for a few seconds, then whispered, "I have to go." And he went.

She locked the door behind him and went to the bathroom to check on her skirt. Still damp. She crawled into the bathtub, content for once that French bathrooms inexplicably shunned shower stalls, and cried herself to sleep.