What We Have Read Free Page B

tell? Some of my natural anxiety seemed to be lifting. Maybe Jacques’s expansive, spontaneous worldview was rubbing off on me. Moving to a new city without a place to live . . . “ Wow ,” was all Julie could say. (She and Jon, for one thing, were putting us up until the perfect spot turned up.) For my family, “last minute” has always been tantamount to chaos. Jacques, for his part, just assumed things would go our way.
    And at first they did. After a short spate of house hunting we found a place we loved, a narrow town house facing the aviary in the zoo. We weren’t married yet, so we set up a legal partnership, splitting everything fifty-fifty—Jacques had money from his house in Arlington, and I had the contents of my savings account—and after we signed stacks of papers, the house was ours. I couldn’t get over it. I’d never owned more than a file cabinet and a futon. I loved every last stick of that house: the moldings; the sagging floorboards; even the ominous burn marks on the exposed brick in the kitchen. We met our neighbors, and to my amazement, one, Lori, turned out to be an old friend I’d known when I was studying in England. We’d lost touch, though I knew she was writing for a newspaper here. She and her husband, Dave, lived in a house that backed onto our alley, nine houses farther from the park.
    It was easy to think nothing could go wrong in a place like this.
    I loved my department at Georgetown. I had my own office with my name on a plaque on the door, and classrooms full of bright-eyed, attentive students who took notes on things I said. After being a graduate student for so many years, it was liberating to be an assistant professor. Students dropped by to see me and I loaned them books. I talked for hours with my colleagues. In graduate school, my advisors barely spoke to one another (or by the end, in the case of the first one, to me). Here, my colleagues met on purpose for drinks after work, sharing stories about students with a mixture of concern and genuine affection. This was a whole new world.
    And people in DC were friendly! Much friendlier than in Boston. Sometimes people I didn’t even know said hello on purpose.
    We closed on our house and split a bottle of champagne in our empty dining room with Julie and Jon. I sent pictures of our unkempt garden to Sara. Life was good.
    Granted, there were issues. For one thing, Jacques wasn’t actually working in DC. Not officially. He was commuting, an arrangement that had evolved when he talked to his company over the summer about leaving his job. Every Tuesday morning he flew back to Boston for a day of meetings (US Airways, 7:00, Terminal B). Other days, he rode his bike to an office share in Foggy Bottom, where he kept flexible hours, held telephone conferences, and wrote computer code.
    I worried about this. Could it last? Wasn’t it tempting fate to fly so much? “It’s fine,” Jacques said, when I shared some of these worries with him. “What’s the problem?”
    Privately I call Jacques “the Optimist,” and during those first months in DC his approach to life was so infectious I started adopting some of his phrases—like “what’s the problem?” or “why not?”—phrases previously as unknown to me as the odd bit of Farsi or Aramaic. “It isn’t like you,” Annie pointed out, when she called to check on me. “You used to be so . . .” She was hunting for the word. “Skeptical,” she managed, after a pause.
    I could change, couldn’t I?
    Why not?
    Secretly, though, I hated the commuting. I watched the Weather Channel every Monday night and dreaded approaching storms. I did research. Ice can collect on airplane wings at thirty-two thousand feet. Birds can be sucked into a plane’s engine on takeoff. Drug-resistant infections circulate in closed cabins. The more you fly, the greater the chance of an incident.
    “Nothing will happen,” Jacques told me, over the static of the early morning forecast on NPR.
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