beyond him. That year, between the book tour and reporting trips and holidays, I was out of town for seven months. I didn’t become celibate or start sleeping with strangers; instead, I’d inadvertently cultivated a collection of geographically scattered sex partners with whom I shared no obligations but was in regular and affectionate touch. In the Southeast and in the North, in Cleveland and New York and California, we’d get together whenever I was in town. Even after Haiti, I forced myself to go through with planned short trips, to the East Coast, to Ohio, to work panels and family obligations. When in the interest of full disclosure I informed one gal who was clearly trying to seduce me that she was about to join what my friends had come to call The Roster, she seemed taken aback.
But after a second she shrugged. “As long as it’s more like, a basketball roster than a football roster,” she said.
Everyone knew about Nico. A picture he’d sent me of himself and some other soldiers shirtless in the jungle had become the background wallpaper on my phone. And Nico was busy with another romantic life, too. When he returned to France, he went back to the girlfriend with whom he’d been on and off for years. He was giving it another honest shot. Therefore, since the unifying theme of our correspondence was how in love we were and that we couldn’t live without each other, we had to stop talking. He knew I was hardly saving myself for him, but he asked me not to get married until we figured everything out.
I thought that sounded good, if admittedly insane.
In the meantime, I was inconsolable. Not like I didn’t have bigger problems to worry about. Nor was I lonely by any stretch. But the days without Nico’s grammatically disastrous notes felt additionally isolated and empty. I missed him as if we’d been together every day for years. I described my sadness about it with such weight and frequency to Alex that she composed a fake letter from Nico, complete with a broken-English haiku about the quality of my blow jobs, and sent it to me to help fill the void.
The rest of my friends thought I had lost my mind. As though more evidence of my instability were necessary during the great sobbing drunkenness of late 2010, here I was babbling about how my soul mate was this guy I’d fucked one time in the middle of a mental health crisis. Who didn’t speak English. Who lived in France. Who—let’s not pretend class was no major issue here; a foreign software engineer or architect or fellow journalist would have sounded more viable—was a soldier. Who was, frankly, too young.
“How old are you?” Nico had asked me almost immediately after we’d had sex, when I was still on top of him and everyone was still panting and we were staring at each other, dumbfounded: What just happened?
“Thirty,” I’d answered.
“ Thirty ?” he’d exclaimed. “ Thirty ?”
Oh, my God , I thought. Oh, no! Had I just had sex with a teenager? He hadn’t looked young, but did you have to be an adult to enlist in France? Hadn’t they told us in school that the French were allowed to start drinking when they were like, six?
“How old are you ?” I asked, eyes wide.
He answered in French. I guessed the translation (correctly) out loud in English, but as he didn’t know the English words for the numbers, he couldn’t confirm whether I was right. He traced some figures on the wall with his finger. Twenty-four. No, wait. Twenty-five; he’d just had a birthday there in Port-au-Prince.
I didn’t care. As I’d told Gideon, I told everyone else: I loved him. I felt the absence of his letters every day, while I was doing everything.
So when he e-mailed me again after nearly a month of silence, it was all joy and heart-stopping relief. He missed me, he said. He couldn’t stop thinking of me all days . From there, we were back to our old routine.
Things were looking up, then. I remained extremely shaken by the experience of
But after a second she shrugged. “As long as it’s more like, a basketball roster than a football roster,” she said.
Everyone knew about Nico. A picture he’d sent me of himself and some other soldiers shirtless in the jungle had become the background wallpaper on my phone. And Nico was busy with another romantic life, too. When he returned to France, he went back to the girlfriend with whom he’d been on and off for years. He was giving it another honest shot. Therefore, since the unifying theme of our correspondence was how in love we were and that we couldn’t live without each other, we had to stop talking. He knew I was hardly saving myself for him, but he asked me not to get married until we figured everything out.
I thought that sounded good, if admittedly insane.
In the meantime, I was inconsolable. Not like I didn’t have bigger problems to worry about. Nor was I lonely by any stretch. But the days without Nico’s grammatically disastrous notes felt additionally isolated and empty. I missed him as if we’d been together every day for years. I described my sadness about it with such weight and frequency to Alex that she composed a fake letter from Nico, complete with a broken-English haiku about the quality of my blow jobs, and sent it to me to help fill the void.
The rest of my friends thought I had lost my mind. As though more evidence of my instability were necessary during the great sobbing drunkenness of late 2010, here I was babbling about how my soul mate was this guy I’d fucked one time in the middle of a mental health crisis. Who didn’t speak English. Who lived in France. Who—let’s not pretend class was no major issue here; a foreign software engineer or architect or fellow journalist would have sounded more viable—was a soldier. Who was, frankly, too young.
“How old are you?” Nico had asked me almost immediately after we’d had sex, when I was still on top of him and everyone was still panting and we were staring at each other, dumbfounded: What just happened?
“Thirty,” I’d answered.
“ Thirty ?” he’d exclaimed. “ Thirty ?”
Oh, my God , I thought. Oh, no! Had I just had sex with a teenager? He hadn’t looked young, but did you have to be an adult to enlist in France? Hadn’t they told us in school that the French were allowed to start drinking when they were like, six?
“How old are you ?” I asked, eyes wide.
He answered in French. I guessed the translation (correctly) out loud in English, but as he didn’t know the English words for the numbers, he couldn’t confirm whether I was right. He traced some figures on the wall with his finger. Twenty-four. No, wait. Twenty-five; he’d just had a birthday there in Port-au-Prince.
I didn’t care. As I’d told Gideon, I told everyone else: I loved him. I felt the absence of his letters every day, while I was doing everything.
So when he e-mailed me again after nearly a month of silence, it was all joy and heart-stopping relief. He missed me, he said. He couldn’t stop thinking of me all days . From there, we were back to our old routine.
Things were looking up, then. I remained extremely shaken by the experience of
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