“He is cute,” Valérie repeated at work to Giulia, who was au courant of the story. Due to my utter disinterest in dating this waiter, I couldn’t help talking about him to every person who gave me half a chance. The director rolled her eyes and left the room to care for her plants—avocados this month—but Valérie and our other colleague Giulia grinned at each other. Giulia, a thin, antique blond woman with an obsession for shoes, was half Italian, half New Yorker and therefore had many weird ideas. She shook her head in despair at my emotional incompetence. “I wouldn’t even hesitate. That’s what you do if you’re interested in someone. You ask him out. What century do you live in? Do you think it’s the male role to ask you out or something?”

She and Valérie exchanged glances. Behind Giulia’s head, metal shelves climbed to the ceiling, filled with the fat stiff binders favored for organization here. The only folders in the office were floppy colored paper things that sank ignominiously to the bottom of any hanging file folder, making it impossible to flip through them and spot what you were looking for. I had tried to convince Valérie and the director to order normal manila file folders, so I could use them in my two-drawer filing cabinet, but Valérie had looked appalled and handed me a binder. The fax machine beeped on the other side of the glass window of Giulia’s office, and a student in chunky tennis shoes ducked in to fill her water bottle at the office water cooler. Neither distracted Valérie and Giulia.

“You’ll never make it here,” Valérie scoffed, using exactly the same tone in which she normally spoke of the more helpless of our American exchange students. She’d be calling me a tête à claques any minute. “You’re competing with Frenchwomen, after all.” Her emphasis made it clear I was out of my league. “If a Frenchwoman sees someone she’s interested in, she’s not afraid to let him know. I would have asked him out the first evening!” She paused and glanced at me slyly. “You know, each day you hesitate, you increase the risk that someone else is going to grab him before you do.”

Giulia shrugged. “That’s the way it’s done, Laura.”

“A, someone’s already grabbed him. You don’t think someone that cute is running around loose, do you? And B, what if I don’t want to go out with him?” I ventured timidly. “What if I just want to have a nice little crush on him and never do anything about it?”

Valérie stared at me in open-eyed wonder and then exchanged disgusted looks with Giulia. “Well, I guess if you want to be a coward, no one can stop you.”