Free Breathless by Nancy K. Miller

I am), come to class with an astounding regularity.” I was especially eloquent on the subject of Indians, their unfortunate fate in American history. The French, I knew, were always well disposed to groups like Indians they perceived as persecuted in America, and I shamelessly flattered their prejudices.
    I quickly made two good friends among the students in my class at Poitiers, Thomas and Micheline Gauthier, who were completing their degrees in English. They had married when Micheline found herself pregnant in their first year at university. They named their son Fabrice after the charming hero of Stendhal’s novel The Charterhouse of Parma —their favorite novel. Micheline’s parents, who lived in Tours, an hour away, took care of their exquisite blond child while they finished school. I was surprised that Micheline had not had an abortion. She said she was lucky: her parents loved taking care of Fabrice. I tried to imagine the reaction of my parents, faced with the news of a pregnancy out of wedlock, as they liked to say. My mother had already warned me she had no intention of babysitting for grandchildren, if that was what I had in mind.
    The Fulbright commission had provided me with a letter of introduction for Madame de Rosemonde, a tiny, elderly woman whose house was a short walk from the Poitiers train station and the university. When I arrived in town at the beginning of the fall term, she showed me a large square bedroom, twice the size and half the price of my maid’s room in Paris, with a big window facing the street. The room was furnished with a chest of drawers, a double bed covered with an eiderdown quilt, and a large desk. A flowered, porcelain chamber pot was tucked away behind the door of the night table; it matched the pitcher and basin on the washstand.
    A simple black crucifix hung on the wall directly over the bed.
    My first night I contemplated the crucifix and the chamber pot uneasily. Both presented a novelty. I wasn’t sure, and had failed to ask, whether the chamber pot was meant to be used. But at night it was so cold in the staircase and in the cabinet at the bottom of the stairs that necessity resolved the quandary. The crucifix posed a problem of adifferent order. I had never slept under a crucifix, and now this would be a regular feature of my life. I could have taken the cross down, I suppose, and put it back up when I returned to Paris. I could have explained my discomfort to Madame de Rosemonde, but what would I have said? It’s not as though I didn’t know France was a Catholic country. The crucifix, I concluded, was just a symbol, like the national flag, and it did not prevent me from sleeping.
    Madame de Rosemonde, approaching eighty, had trouble walking and so her confessor, Father Anselme, came to the house once a week. He was tall and wore a cassock that looked rather elegant, I thought, even if I couldn’t help thinking that it looked like a dress. He seemed quite sophisticated, though I had no point of comparison, of course, having never known a priest. I sometimes talked with him over the tea that Madame de Rosemonde served in the salon—about America, especially about President Kennedy. I cherished my conversations with Madame de Rosemonde and Father Anselme. I never mentioned that I was Jewish, but my ignorance about things Catholic no doubt gave me away.
    One day Madame de Rosemonde reported one day that Father Anselme told her that I was “une fine mouche.” A fine fly? As always, when confronted with a new expression, I pretended to know what it meant until I could look it up in the dictionary: shrewd, clever, the opposite of a ninny. I was pleased, even though shrewdness, according to the dictionary examples, could also shade into the less flattering zones of ruse.

No Tomorrow
    A S FAR AS MY PARENTS knew, when I wasn’t in Poitiers, I was living in my maid’s room, which I always used as my return address. But in early December, I entrapped myself. I had