Breathless

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Authors: Nancy K. Miller
did I know who lived with a bathroom? Not to mention a bidet.
    Bernard and I spent a lot of time in the bathroom. We had our best conversations in the peaceful green-tiled room, separated from the traffic in the apartment. Filling the tub itself was such a production that not to take full advantage of having the hot water didn’t make sense. Once you had climbed over the steep edge of the tub and lowered yourself into its enameled length, there was a distinct sense of well-being. The sound of the chauffe-eau turning on with a kind of deep chug promising future warmth always gave me a small frisson of pleasure that matched the little blue flame, like the sound of pipes clanking when the heat first comes on in Manhattan apartments in early fall. One of us would sit on the bidet and smoke while the other took a bath. Then we’d switch. We didn’t mind sharing the water. Alone in the bathroom, we speculated about what would happen the following year when I no longer had my fellowship. Maybe the lycée would take me back. The directrice had told me to come and see her if I decided to stay on in Paris.
    I asked Bernard what he would do if he didn’t pass the exams. He had already failed once. If he failed again, he would have to do his military service.
    “Maybe I’ll be assigned to Tahiti,” he said, dripping water down my back. “And you could teach English to the natives.” It wasn’t completelya joke. Thomas, my friend from Poitiers, had just been posted to Tahiti, where he would be teaching French. Micheline and Fabrice were planning to accompany him.
    I imagined the notice in the Barnard Alumnae Magazine . “Nancy Kipnis has married Bernard Alvarez. She will be living in Tahiti while Bernard completes his military service. Nancy looks forward to hearing from all alums living in the area.” Right, I could start a Barnard club in Polynesia. South Pacific . “Some Enchanted Evening.” I knew the song by heart. My father loved to croon the words as he stood at the edge of the living room, even when we begged him to stop.
    M Y FATHER MOVED IN HIS brief from questions of struggle between the generations to even loftier zones of universal value and morality. True independence, which was always the pole around which my struggle for freedom revolved, was about consequences. My sleeping arrangements seemed to suggest that I had missed the essential lesson of my upbringing: living “as if there is a tomorrow, because there is one. I’m not suggesting a cloistered existence, but surely between it and libertinism there is an area of human satisfaction and gratification that need not stifle the most restless spirit.” My father signed his letter, “As ever (because you can’t change it), D” ( ad crossed out).
    Was there or wasn’t there a tomorrow?
    I was tempted to tell my father about a famous eighteenth-century story titled “No Tomorrow,” in which a married woman has a one-night stand, experiences great pleasure, and does not get punished for it. But I figured that would just make his case. I was neither married nor a French countess.
    The only way I could put an end to the criticism of my libertine tendencies was to say that things had become serious between Bernard and me. (That was how my parents always framed relationship queries: Is it “serious”?) In fact, I hinted, we were thinking about getting married. Thinking about it wasn’t the same as having a concrete plan, of course, but the idea of marriage had entered our conversations in part because Alain and Monique had decided to marry when Alain finished hisdegree, and in part because it seemed a way to deal with the uncertainty of the future, to curb the anxiety of the drift. Bernard and I had become engaged, for lack of a better word, despite the financial impossibility of translating that word into action. My father had not been entirely wrong about the tomorrow problem.
    S OMETIMES, WHEN I RETURNED TO Paris from my weekly trip to Poitiers, often

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