Page 35, “The Persuasion”
Sleep and I were strangers that night.
At one moment, the spectre of mon ami rose huge in the room where we’d loved; in the following one, I brushed Tonin’s kiss, still fresh on the back of my hand, across my cheek. Him. Tonin. Men.
My mind, a ferris wheel, a different problem swinging in every bucket.
The dark chestnut curls at Tonin’s throat, his bushy eyebrows curved down all wild around eyes set so deep they seemed from a different time, yet soft as if they’d seen the ages. The way he ran his thumb and forefinger along his eyebrow the way my father had, his unfortunate ears, large, sticking out, and looking not all that intelligent.
I giggled and then I couldn’t remember what he looked like at all as I was back in Oxford, arguing with him about the meaning of time, soaring through unknown universes of the mind with the smartest guy I’d ever met, the only one smarter than me.
I wanted my mother. I wanted to lie next to her in her smoky bedroom and tell her my problems as she lit one Pall Mall after another, tell her how cutting it off with him felt like losing a vital organ, how I’d made a list of pluses and minuses for being in a couple, how I’d decided to go solo until I was at least thirty, how I’d committed that I’d only do my work, how the only word in my head at this very moment was the unusual name of a man I’d only met a few hours earlier.
I should get up and write in my journal, I thought, but I didn’t, couldn’t. I flipped and twisted on the bed, cuddled the pillow in my belly, wrapped the blanket around my foot, and heard four bells strike at Notre Dame, then five.
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