Half Life by Jillian Cantor (easy to read books for adults list txt) 📕

and each day he asks about my results. All morning I look forward to talking things over with him during lunch, then pondering the questions he asks, after.

“Come work in my lab full-time,” I implore him, one chilly afternoon in late November. I have assistants in my lab now, students, but I do not have a true partner. I desperately miss having a partner.

Paul smiles, shakes his head. “And who would complete my study on ultrasound waves then, Marie?”

Paul has his own work, of course, and maybe it is selfish of me to want him to work on my studies alongside me. But my studies could become his studies too, our studies. “Well, perhaps next year,” I say. “When you are finished your current work.”

He gets a strange look on his face, so I can’t tell what he’s thinking. Then he puts his hand on my mine, as he has been wont to do lately. It is familiar in a way, friendly enough that I don’t think that I should pull away, or that it is in any way improper. Usually it is to emphasize a point, or to interrupt what I am telling him about the lab to ask a question. Now, his fingers linger on my wrist just a few seconds longer than they normally would, and then he gently strokes my palm with his thumb. “I can’t work with you,” he says softly.

“Why not?”

“It would be impossible to be that close to you all the time and not fall in love with you.”

“Love?” I laugh a little. “I’m talking about science, Paul.”

“So am I,” he says, and his voice sounds completely serious.

A FEW WEEKS LATER, ONE EVENING IN MID-DECEMBER, I AM in my lab much too late. At lunch, Paul had given me an idea—why not use electrolysis to try and turn radium chloride metallic? And I spent the rest of the day planning out how this might work. But now my back aches from standing all day, and I can’t suppress a rising yawn. Outside it is snowing, and I know the walk to the train will be long and slippery, bitterly cold. Pierre’s watch tells me it is already after 8 p.m.

There’s an unexpected knock on the door—perhaps one of my assistants has forgotten something or couldn’t make it to the train in the snow. But when I open the door, there on the other side is Paul, his hat and thick wool coat covered in snowflakes. “I saw the lamplight through the window,” he says apologetically.

“You came to work with me?” I cannot keep the glee from my voice, and I tug on his coat sleeve to pull him inside my lab, out of the snow. He shuts the door behind him, and for a moment I just look at him, not letting go of his coat.

“I don’t know why I’m here,” he admits. “I just . . . didn’t want to go home,” he says quietly.

I remember that morning in Arromanches, the tiny slivers of glass I plucked from his hair. None of us had ever spoken about that again, and the following morning Jeanne had been her usual self, chattering with me over coffee about the children. I’d wanted to ask her about what might drive her to smash a vase against her kind husband’s head. But what went on between them really wasn’t my business—I hadn’t said a word.

The cut from Arromanches was superficial and has long healed, but I put my hand up to his face now, trace the lines of his forehead with my fingertips. His skin is cool and damp from the snow. He reaches his hand up to meet mine and holds it there. My fingers suddenly grow hot against his skin. I lean in closer, and it is chilly enough inside my lab tonight that his breath frosts the air.

I have not been with a man since Pierre; I have not wanted to until right this very moment. I remember what Paul said, that if he came to work in my lab, he would fall in love with me. And I wonder if love and science are, for me, one and the same.

Our faces are so close; I can feel his breath against my lips. I suddenly think of Jeanne, waiting up for him in their kitchen on boulevard Kellerman. “We shouldn’t do this,” I say softly, but I am shaking, my heart pounding in my chest. I run my fingers down his cheeks, trace his lips with my forefinger.

“One time,” Paul whispers. “Just this once.”

And then his lips are on mine, and my body is hot with wanting, and I can’t pull away. I don’t want to.

Marya

Krakow, Austrian Poland, 1909

Kaz’s treatise on elasticity posited the idea that materials were elastic if, and only if, they returned to their original form after all outside forces were pulled away. Our marriage, too, was elastic by this definition. The years and the things that had happened to us, the things we had done, had shaped and changed and molded us into something unrecognizable once in Loksow. But now, in a new city, a new life, away from everything and everyone, here we were again, simply a man and a woman who loved each other.

In Krakow, we rented a two-story brick house, walking distance to Jagiellonian University, where Kaz was teaching two mathematics courses each term and where he also had access to a lab to continue to further study elasticity. We had a small garden in the backyard where I began to cultivate lettuce and herbs. Enough money to enroll Klara in a private primary academy and weekly piano lessons. We could not yet afford our own piano for the house, but we were saving for it.

I made breakfast for everyone in the mornings, kissed Kaz goodbye before he left for work. I walked Klara to school, and then, and only then, I understood my own elasticity. The worries about money, about the Russians’ opposition to women learning—that was