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

moments of pleasure. It is something with breadth and longevity and importance. I am only forty-two years old, much too young to be a widow for the rest of my life. Paul is the one I want to be with. I want him as my partner at work, and in life. I want everything with him that I had once with Pierre.

“But now we have to climb five flights of stairs before we can be together,” Paul says, laughing as I lead him up the stairs into our very own space, our very own apartment together. But I know he enjoys vigorous physical activity the way I do. And I can practically feel the excitement coming off his body, an iridescent glow that makes his cheeks ruddy and his blue eyes lighter.

Once we are inside the apartment, I shut the door and pull him toward me. My heart pounds in a way it hasn’t since I was so very young, since I first stepped foot in Paris and the excitement of this new world, this new life, overwhelmed me.

Paul kisses me, and I kiss him back, holding on to his face in my hands. His fingers trail down to the buttons on my lab dress, undoing them slowly, one by one, with the careful precision of a scientist. So by the time his cool hand finally touches my skin, it is hot with wanting.

WE BEGIN TO MEET IN OUR PIED-à-TERRE EVERY DAY THAT WE can get away. Whenever our schedules can allow. In between, we write each other love letters and send them to the apartment, so some afternoons I find myself there even if Paul can’t make it, stretching out on the bed in quiet, reading his beautiful words to me.

I love your mind and your body equally, Paul writes, the delicate curve of your neck is perhaps surpassed only by the elegant prose of your research. That paper you wrote on radium chloride! I want to devour your brilliance.

“Maybe one day soon,” I say to Paul one afternoon in late April as we are lying in bed, still unclothed, my head resting against his bare chest. “We can consider this apartment our home.”

He leans down, kisses the top of my head. I feel the edge of his mustache against my forehead and it sends a tingle of warmth through my spine. He has already told me he wants to leave Jeanne, that we can get married soon, but that he needs time to get his affairs in order.

“We will need a bigger place, for all the children,” he says now.

“Yes, of course. But the children can all live in our big house in Sceaux. We’ll need a place closer to work, too. Just for us. For this.”

“And a summer home in L’Arcouëst.”

“L’Arcouëst? Where’s that?” I say, sleepily, wondering if I have time to take just a short nap here before walking back to the lab.

“In the cliffs, near Brittany. I wrote to you about it in my letter last week, remember? It’s where half the department is going for holiday this summer.”

I sit up, shake my head. I haven’t received a letter from him in weeks, and in fact I had been beginning to think that he was tiring of writing love letters to me. “You didn’t send me a letter last week,” I say.

“I did,” Paul insists. “I gave it to a house servant to mail and . . .” His voice trails off, and my skin grows prickly at the thought that Jeanne intercepted it. She has grown cold with me as of late. At a recent dinner at the Perrins’ on boulevard Kellerman, we’d both been in attendance, but she had sat on the other side of the table, refusing to meet my eyes. But I had brushed it off as a manifestation of my own guilt. Perhaps the letter just got lost in the mail.

“Well,” I finally say with a forced brightness I no longer feel. Outside it has begun to rain, and the window is wet, foggy, the street down below gray and blurry. “Your letter will turn up eventually, I suppose.”

THREE DAYS LATER I AM LEAVING MY LAB SO LATE, I WALK outside into the moonlit darkness, and when someone is standing there, unexpectedly right outside the door, it scares me half to death and I let out a small scream. “Marie.” My name in Jeanne’s voice sounds sour.

“Jeanne! You scared me.” I try and regain my composure, remembering we are still supposedly friends, but my hands are shaking. “It’s so late. Is everything all right?”

She doesn’t say anything at first. I make out her features in the glow of the streetlamp and they are calm and still. She reaches into her bag, then hands me an envelope. Paul’s letter.

I swallow hard. “What’s this?” I feign surprise, shake my head. How bad is it? He said he wrote about L’Arcouëst. But perhaps it was in general terms, talking about all the department going there together the way two friends, two colleagues, might correspond. Except I’ve read his other letters, and I know, this letter is bad.

“You must think I’m stupid,” she finally says. Her tone is measured, her words matter-of-fact.

“Of course I don’t think that, Jeanne,” I say quietly.

“Maybe I am not a scientist like you and Paul. But you think I cannot understand what you are doing?”

I shake my head, as if to say there is nothing going on, nothing at all. But I think of what he wrote me once in another letter, about the curves of my body, about the way they excite something in him, a fire. A light. Did you ever notice, he wrote, the way radiant and radium share a root word? I close my eyes now, exhale once slowly.

“You are going to leave France,” Jeanne says calmly.

I open my eyes. “What?” I laugh a little. “Why would I ever leave? France is my home now. My daughters are French. My work is right here.”

“You are going to leave