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

he wants me to stop talking, to undress instead, but it is so hard to love someone for only an hour a week. It is hard to love someone and not be able to share your thoughts and your hopes and your dreams and your worries. I keep them inside of me all week long, and now that he is here, so close, it all comes pouring out of me. I can’t help myself.

“They are all old men,” Paul says. “They’re worried about a woman who is smarter than them, upsetting their old ways of thinking. Ignore what’s being said in the press. They’re just trying to force you to drop out. Stay strong, and keep on with your brilliant work.”

“Do you think it will really come down to my work?” I am skeptical now. I wish I’d never put my name in to begin with. It is hard to see so many negative and untrue things being printed about me in the papers now and hard to only have Paul to reassure me for just this one single hour.

“Marie,” Paul says my name softly, kisses my other cheek. “We don’t have much time. Come to bed.”

IN JANUARY OF 1911, THEY TAKE THE VOTE, AND I DON’T WIN the spot in the Academy. A man, with half the qualifications and more than twenty years my senior, is elected instead. It is not necessarily surprising, though I feel more disappointed than I would expect. My whole life I’ve been told no simply because I’m a woman. It was foolish to believe this time would be different.

Still, the next day I am back at it again in my lab. I will work even harder. Prove them all wrong, as I always have.

I am still trying to establish the decay of polonium and also planning for my new, bigger laboratory that the university has agreed to build. I am still working to achieve the international standard for radium, and we are so very close that I can almost taste the success of it.

I will show those men; I will show everyone.

EASTER WEEKEND, PAUL MANAGES TO GET AWAY ON SATURDAY afternoon, and I take the train to meet him at our apartment. I get there, and I find the door ajar. It is unlike Paul to forget to shut it, and I push it open a bit, alarmed. “Paul,” I call out. “Paul?”

But the inside of the apartment is quiet, the drawer where we keep all our letters to each other in the living room wide open and shockingly empty. “Hello?” I call out into the apartment, my heart pounding wildly, but no one answers back. I walk through and the rooms are empty.

Paul opens the door a few moments later, walks in, takes one look at me and says, “What’s wrong, ma lumière rayonnante?”

“The letters,” I say. “Someone must’ve broken in and . . . stole all our letters.”

Paul’s face instantly becomes bloodless, and he hangs his head down between his knees as if he might vomit, or faint. I go to him, rub his back gently, until he stands up again. I put my hand to his face, trail my finger softly across the swirl of his mustache, his lips.

He leans down and kisses me gently. “I have to go,” he says softly.

“But, Paul, you just got here.”

“I’m sorry,” he says. “Marie, I’m so, so sorry.”

“SHE WANTS MONEY,” PAUL SAYS TO ME THE FOLLOWING WEEK. He has come to my lab during lunch hour, and my research assistants stare at him now, curious. They haven’t seen him in months, since Jeanne threatened me, and we agreed, through Jean Perrin, not to see each other. I take his hand and lead him outside to the street. The midday sun is hot, blinding, and I shield my eyes.

“How much?” I ask.

“Five thousand francs,” he says, lowering his voice, looking at his feet.

I remember once how I had offered to help Jeanne if she needed money, but not like this. “And if I pay her . . . then she will let you end the marriage?” I ask.

He looks up at me, his eyes wide, and he shakes his head. “Then she will not release our letters to the press,” he says softly.

The press. They’ve finally stopped printing lies about me now that the Academy vote has passed and I’ve lost the spot. I remember the poetry of Paul’s words about my body in his letters. I shiver, even in the heat of the sun.

“They already tried to crucify you, a woman, daring to go up for a spot in the Academy,” Paul is saying now. “Imagine what they would do with these?”

I do not want to imagine. I lean against the wall of my lab, put my head in my hands. “Okay,” I say. Five thousand francs is a lot of money, but it will not destroy me. “I’ll give her five thousand francs.”

“And we cannot meet anymore,” he says softly. “I cannot risk what she will do to you now that she has those letters. She could ruin you. And I love you, ma lumière rayonnante. I would never forgive myself.”

“No.” I refuse to accept that. “Not being with you will ruin me. We will keep our distance for now. But I know we will be together, soon. I know it.”

“Marie,” he says my name so softly and so sadly, like he is singing a funeral song. “Marie, Marie, Marie.”

I WAS WRONG. LOVE AND SCIENCE, THEY ARE NOT ONE AND the same. Love has come and gone in my life, permeating me with nothing but sadness in the end. Kazimierz. Pierre. And now Paul.

But science, it is always here. It never leaves me or abandons me or hurts me or stops needing me. My lab calls for me and waits for me. It is my life and my home, and the truest thing I have ever devoted myself to.

Jean Perrin reports that, in spite of my five thousand francs, Jeanne Langevin is still telling everyone on boulevard Kellerman she