Chapters (45)
- Cover
- Blame Iton Paris
- Copyright Notice
- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
- Book One
- One
- Two
- Three
- Four
- Five
- Six
- Seven
- Eight
- Nine
- Ten
- Eleven
- Twelve
- Thirteen
- Fourteen
- Fifteen
- Sixteen
- Seventeen
- Eighteen
- Nineteen
- Twenty
- Twenty-one
- Book Two
- Twenty-two
- Twenty-three
- Twenty-four
- Twenty-five
- Twenty-six
- Twenty-seven
- Twenty-eight
- Twenty-nine
- Thirty
- Thirty-one
- Thirty-two
- Thirty-three
- Thirty-four
- Thirty-five
- Thirty-six
- Thirty-seven
- Thirty-eight
- Thirty-nine
“See?” I said, once Sébastien had encouraged the man to leave. “See? This kind of thing would never happen where I come from.” That was because the only creatures that wandered close to the river where I grew up were a herd of cows, but it was too hard to make an argument for the superiority of my country if I kept bringing in those little details. I don’t know why I had started wanting to go back home; for years I had sought every opportunity to live somewhere else. But after seven months trying to find a professional foothold in Paris, I felt battered and needed to retreat, and when animals retreat they go back into small spaces they know well. I could have said, “See?” and laughed. See? This would never happen in my tiny former world. The world is crazier here; I have more contact with reality here; I see more life here. That was what I wanted, right? To live a full life, to see the world? But I didn’t. I wasn’t in that frame of mind.
“The thing is,” I said, “I desperately want to have self-respect again. I feel like I’m dying of other people’s contempt here.”
“You have a thin skin,” Sébastien said. Born and raised in a big city, he couldn’t believe how I let other people affect me. “You need to stop caring what they think. Why do strangers’ opinions of you become your opinion of you?”
He had a good point, but I needed a breather. Maybe if I had time for my thin skin to heal, scar tissue could build up and thicken it. “The thing is,” I said, “the thing is, you don’t think that, so far, I’ve been doing most of the risking in our couple?”
His face fell. “You know, I do a lot for our couple, too, Laura, even if you don’t realize it. I try to make you happy. I’ve changed my life completely for you.”
Not as completely as I had for him, I couldn’t help thinking. But I wondered if I could really know that, if I could really judge his efforts from my perspective. That apartment had probably seemed a nice, cozy size before a second person moved into it. “I know,” I said. And I did know. “But the thing is, the thing is . . .” The thing was, up until now, the question in our couple had been, Can I do this? Can I open heart and soul to the possibility of love, no matter how dangerous and fraught with Frenchness? Can I change countries, strive for jobs and a visa, try to adapt to his family and culture? Maybe I had done my share for a while. Maybe we should experiment with another question: Can he do the same thing?