What We Have Read Free

that!
    We both had grandparents from Lithuania. We’d both had Labrador retrievers as children. We both loved Thai food, and political cartoons, and were both down at the Charles River early every morning—Jacques to ride his bike, me to go running.
    Our birthdays were one day apart in May. A year and a day, to be exact, since he’s a year older. 366 days. “Do you know what three hundred and sixty-six is?” I asked Julie, who still sounded skeptical.
    “I think you’re going to tell me,” she said.
    Three hundred and sixty-six happens to be the number of love poems Petrarch wrote to Laura in The Canzoniere . One for each day of the year, and then one more, to represent perfection. Perfection plus .
    I was smitten, and it wasn’t just Jacques’s accent. I loved everything about him. I loved how tender he sounded when he talked about taking care of his tiny house, with its postage stamp of lawn and its burnished pears. It reminded me of the Little Prince swabbing out his miniature volcano each night, and in fact, Jacques looked to me like a dark-haired version of the Little Prince, a mop of curls and eyes an extraterrestrial shade of blue. By the time we reached New York, we’d exchanged phone numbers. When he got off at Penn Station, we waved passionately, like Yuri and Lara in Dr. Zhivago . The next week, back in Boston, he called me up, sounding shy, and asked me to meet him in the Square for dinner. The next night, too. By the following week, we were spending almost every evening together. “That was fast,” Annie observed dryly, when I spent half my time at the English job fair that December phoning Jacques to report how my interviews had gone, and by January he was coming with me to visit universities where I had callback interviews. I didn’t even pretend to be open-minded anymore. I didn’t want to be in Tempe or Lubbock. I wanted to stay as close to Boston as possible. Georgetown, a short flight away, was by now my clear first choice. It also happened to be the best place for Jacques, if he were to leave Boston and come with me. That was a big if—it was way too soon for planning, as I reminded my mother and my sisters, one at a time. Sara, in a different time zone and preoccupied with Geoff and her daughters, was long out of this phase of life. But Julie zeroed right in.
    “It’s too soon for any of that,” I said.
    “Hah,” Julie said back.
    She was on to me. Of course I was planning—I couldn’t help myself.
    I could see two different versions of the future. One was craggy and dim, hard to make out, and it scared me.
    The other was lit up from underneath, sparkly. Later that spring, in a bay in St. Kitts, Jacques taught me how to snorkel. I’d never done this as a child—my father doesn’t swim, and my mother hated getting her hair wet. At first I kept spluttering to the surface, afraid I was running out of air, but Jacques just held on and tugged me through the shimmery water, squeezing my hand every once in a while to signal whenever there was something just ahead. We saw fish of every gem-like hue: yellow, vermillion, sapphire blue. If you didn’t think about it, if you just kept scissoring forward through the water, trusting your snorkel, there was this whole breathtaking world.
    That’s how I pictured the future I hoped for, being with Jacques. Luminous, shot through with sparks of unexpected color.
     
    JACQUES CAME DOWN TO DC with me for my callback interview. The night after I gave my job talk at Georgetown, we met Julie and Jon for dinner in Adams Morgan. Halfway through the appetizers, Julie pulled me into the bathroom to tell me what she thought of him.
    Julie had never liked anyone I’d gone out with before. She’d actually threatened to have me committed if I kept seeing the history grad student, who’d once spent a whole Thanksgiving dinner lecturing her on Stalin. Jacques, though . . . I waited, nervous. Julie was the first family member to meet him.
    “His accent is