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Chapters (45)
  1. Cover
  2. Blame Iton Paris
  3. Copyright Notice
  4. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
  5. Book One
  6. One
  7. Two
  8. Three
  9. Four
  10. Five
  11. Six
  12. Seven
  13. Eight
  14. Nine
  15. Ten
  16. Eleven
  17. Twelve
  18. Thirteen
  19. Fourteen
  20. Fifteen
  21. Sixteen
  22. Seventeen
  23. Eighteen
  24. Nineteen
  25. Twenty
  26. Twenty-one
  27. Book Two
  28. Twenty-two
  29. Twenty-three
  30. Twenty-four
  31. Twenty-five
  32. Twenty-six
  33. Twenty-seven
  34. Twenty-eight
  35. Twenty-nine
  36. Thirty
  37. Thirty-one
  38. Thirty-two
  39. Thirty-three
  40. Thirty-four
  41. Thirty-five
  42. Thirty-six
  43. Thirty-seven
  44. Thirty-eight
  45. Thirty-nine

I read the letters over and over. I looked at my books, all those books I had read and studied for my prelims, all those photocopies of articles I had analyzed, all those papers I had written. I didn’t really like being a graduate student, but I’d always thought I should finish what I started. It looked like I had started two things.

“I miss you,” I cried on the phone.

“Please don’t cry,” he said. “God, this is awful. Little pinky shrump, just imagine I’m there, holding you. See? I’ve got big strong arms and they’re holding you and you’re all warm and scrunched up against me, and now I’m starting to get distracted. . . .”

“Awwwww.” Heart-rending sobs from my end. “I don’t know what to do. I can’t stand this. You know we can’t do this for years.” And I couldn’t ask him to come to the U.S. for me. I knew that. I had started this—I had left him that invitation, this poor innocent man in Paris who thought I was living there indefinitely. I was the one who had traveled to his world and started something I had no way of continuing. Now I couldn’t ask him to travel to my world for me.

It was up to me.

“I miss you,” Sébastien said. “I miss the way your nose scrunches up when you’re trying to figure out whether avocado or grapefruit would go better in the salad you’re making, and I miss the way you complain when I mess up your hair. I miss the way you slip into English when I tickle you and you say, ‘Stop it, Sébastien, stop it.’ I want you here so I can pinch your nose and hear you say, ‘I am not a crevette.’ Say it for me now,” he begged. “Go ahead, say it. Say, ‘I’m not a crevette.’”

“I don’t know what to do,” I said. I did know what I had to do. I had to choose between a fairly useless Ph.D. and Sébastien. “But if I come to Paris, where would I live? I wouldn’t have any money, I wouldn’t have a job, I wouldn’t even be legal this time. I’d be trying to find a way to get a visa and get a job.”

“Here,” Sébastien said. “With me.”

“But we’d kill each other in that little apartment. We’d break up in no time.” And I would have given up my Ph.D. for a romance that failed.

“You say we’ll break up if we try to live in opposite countries for two more years, too.”