Vinca had strewn my life with stars, but she had also instilled in me a fear: the fear of losing her. Which is what had just happened on that snowy day.

Although we were both preparing for the Grandes Écoles, we had barely seen each other since the beginning of the term. She was studying humanities, and I was taking advanced math, but it was more than that; I felt as though she was avoiding me. She no longer answered my calls and letters, and she ignored my suggestions for things we could do together. A few of her classmates warned me that she was infatuated with Alexis Clément, a young philosophy teacher. There was even a rumor that their flirtation had blossomed into a full-blown affair. At first, I refused to believe it, but I was being slowly eaten up by jealousy. I needed to know the truth.

3.

One Wednesday about ten days earlier, while the humanities students were taking a mock exam, I’d blown off study period to go see the school caretaker, Pavel Fabianski. Pavel liked me. I came by every week to give him my copy of France Football after I’d read it. That afternoon, while he was getting a can of Coke from his fridge to thank me, I pocketed a bunch of keys to the student dorm rooms.

Then, clutching the master keys, I raced over to the blue Nicolas de Staël building where Vinca lived and searched her room.

I know, love doesn’t give someone carte blanche, and I know I’m a scumbag, probably worse than that. But, like most people consumed by their first love, I was convinced I’d never feel this deeply about anyone ever again. And that, unfortunately, would prove true.

The other mitigating circumstance was my thinking that I knew all there was to know about love because I’d read novels when, in fact, the only thing that truly teaches us about life is a punch in the face. By December 1992, I had long since drifted from the shores of romantic love and entered the turbulent waters of passion. And passion has little if anything to do with love. Passion is a no-man’s-land, a bombed-out war zone situated somewhere at the intersection of sorrow, madness, and death.

Searching for proof of a relationship between Vinca and Alexis Clément, I flicked through every book on my friend’s shelf. From between the pages of a Henry James novel, two neatly folded sheets fluttered to the floor. Hands trembling, I picked them up and was struck by the lingering scent, at once fresh, woody, and spicy. I unfolded the paper. They were letters from Clément. I had been looking for proof, and what I had found was irrefutable.

December 5

Vinca, my love,

What a glorious surprise you gave me in taking the risk of coming to spend last night with me!