Half Life

by Jillian Cantor

  He sighed, like I was not the first woman to come in here and ask him that this week. “Introduction to chemistry,” he said. “Professor Mazur.”

  It was likely I had self-taught past any introductory chemistry course. But I signed up for her course anyway, and, a physics course taught by a man. Both were given during hours while Klara would be at her own school. This would have no effect on her or Kaz’s life or routine, but it would have a drastic effect on mine.

  I put the remaining crowns back in my pocket and walked back toward Golebia Street. My legs were sore, quite tired now.

  But it didn’t matter. I had my wings again.

  Marie

  Paris, 1910

  By the beginning of 1910, I have crawled out of the long, dark tunnel of paralyzing grief and loneliness. And what is waiting for me on the other side? Paul.

  Once, one time was a lie we told each other that first night we were together in December. But once is not enough. We spend more stolen nights together, late in my lab. But that is not enough, either. I want more; I need more.

  So I rent us an apartment on the fifth floor at 5 rue Banquier, an inconspicuous sort of pied-à-terre. It is convenient to the university, easy to sneak away to during working hours.

  From the outside, the building is quite plain looking, white plaster, with a small number 5 etched in front of the brown entrance door. The apartment itself is up five flights of stairs and has two bedrooms. I tell the landlord it is for me and my daughters, that I am needing a second home closer to my work now that my father-in-law has recently passed. Our home is in Sceaux, I say, nervously overexplaining, but my work is always here.

  Most of that is true, except for the second bedroom, which is not at all necessary. I will never once bring the girls here. They are in Sceaux with their governess. We are all very sad in the wake of Dr. Curie’s death, but we take comfort in the fact that he lived a good long life. And I have made an effort for the girls’ daily routines to remain unchanged. I take this apartment because the location and price are good, despite the extra, unnecessary bedroom. And I like that in order for anyone to stumble upon this place, they must first undertake the inconvenience of five flights of stairs.

  Paul laughs when I tell him that, the first time we meet here together in the winter of 1910, just weeks after the girls and I have laid Dr. Curie to rest. Perhaps it is Pierre’s father’s death that has finally, finally allowed me to admit the truth to myself: I am falling in love with Paul. What we have together is more than fleeting moments of pleasure. It is something with breadth and longevity and importance. I am only forty-two years old, much too young to be a widow for the rest of my life. Paul is the one I want to be with. I want him as my partner at work, and in life. I want everything with him that I had once with Pierre.

  “But now we have to climb five flights of stairs before we can be together,” Paul says, laughing as I lead him up the stairs into our very own space, our very own apartment together. But I know he enjoys vigorous physical activity the way I do. And I can practically feel the excitement coming off his body, an iridescent glow that makes his cheeks ruddy and his blue eyes lighter.

  Once we are inside the apartment, I shut the door and pull him toward me. My heart pounds in a way it hasn’t since I was so very young, since I first stepped foot in Paris and the excitement of this new world, this new life, overwhelmed me.

  Paul kisses me, and I kiss him back, holding on to his face in my hands. His fingers trail down to the buttons on my lab dress, undoing them slowly, one by one, with the careful precision of a scientist. So by the time his cool hand finally touches my skin, it is hot with wanting.

  WE BEGIN TO MEET IN OUR PIED-à-TERRE EVERY DAY THAT WE can get away. Whenever our schedules can allow. In between, we write each other love letters and send them to the apartment, so some afternoons I find myself there even if Paul can’t make it, stretching out on the bed in quiet, reading his beautiful words to me.

  I love your mind and your body equally, Paul writes, the delicate curve of your neck is perhaps surpassed only by the elegant prose of your research. That paper you wrote on radium chloride! I want to devour your brilliance.

  “Maybe one day soon,” I say to Paul one afternoon in late April as we are lying in bed, still unclothed, my head resting against his bare chest. “We can consider this apartment our home.”

  He leans down, kisses the top of my head. I feel the edge of his mustache against my forehead and it sends a tingle of warmth through my spine. He has already told me he wants to leave Jeanne, that we can get married soon, but that he needs time to get his affairs in order.

  “We will need a bigger place, for all the children,” he says now.

  “Yes, of course. But the children can all live in our big house in Sceaux. We’ll need a place closer to work, too. Just for us. For this.”

  “And a summer home in L’Arcouëst.”

  “L’Arcouëst? Where’s that?” I say, sleepily, wondering if I have time to take just a short nap here before walking back to the lab.

  “In the cliffs, near Brittany. I wrote to you about it in my letter last week, remember? It’s where half the department is going for holiday this summer.”

  I sit up, shake my head. I haven’t received a letter from him in weeks, and in fact I had been beginning to think that he was tiring of writing love letters to me. “You didn’t send me a letter last week,” I say.

  “I did,” Paul insists. “I gave it to a house servant to mail and . . .” His voice trails off, and my skin grows prickly at the thought that Jeanne intercepted it. She has grown cold with me as of late. At a recent dinner at the Perrins’ on boulevard Kellerman, we’d both been in attendance, but she had sat on the other side of the table, refusing to meet my eyes. But I had brushed it off as a manifestation of my own guilt. Perhaps the letter just got lost in the mail.

  “Well,” I finally say with a forced brightness I no longer feel. Outside it has begun to rain, and the window is wet, foggy, the street down below gray and blurry. “Your letter will turn up eventually, I suppose.”

  THREE DAYS LATER I AM LEAVING MY LAB SO LATE, I WALK outside into the moonlit darkness, and when someone is standing there, unexpectedly right outside the door, it scares me half to death and I let out a small scream. “Marie.” My name in Jeanne’s voice sounds sour.

  “Jeanne! You scared me.” I try and regain my composure, remembering we are still supposedly friends, but my hands are shaking. “It’s so late. Is everything all right?”

  She doesn’t say anything at first. I make out her features in the glow of the streetlamp and they are calm and still. She reaches into her bag, then hands me an envelope. Paul’s letter.

  I swallow hard. “What’s this?” I feign surprise, shake my head. How bad is it? He said he wrote about L’Arcouëst. But perhaps it was in general terms, talking about all the department going there together the way two friends, two colleagues, might correspond. Except I’ve read his other letters, and I know, this letter is bad.

  “You must think I’m stupid,” she finally says. Her tone is measured, her words matter-of-fact.

  “Of course I don’t think that, Jeanne,” I say quietly.

  “Maybe I am not a scientist like you and Paul. But you think I cannot understand what you are doing?”

  I shake my head, as if to say there is nothing going on, nothing at all. But I think of what he wrote me once in another letter, about the curves of my body, about the way they excite something in him, a fire. A light. Did you ever notice, he wrote, the way radiant and radium share a root word? I close my eyes now, exhale once slowly.

  “You are going to leave France,” Jeanne says calmly.

  I open my eyes. “What?” I laugh a little. “Why would I ever leave? France is my home now. My daughters are French. My work is right here.”

  “You are going to leave France, or I’m going to kill you,” Jeanne says. Her voice is so calm, so quiet, her demeanor so still now, that her words wash over
me with a slow and chilling clarity. Then, just like that, she walks away.

  ONCE, I TOLD PIERRE THAT I WAS MARKED BY DEATH. MY ENTIRE life, it has hovered and held on to me. Whenever I believe I am well and life is good, there it comes again: my mother and my sister, my baby, my husband, my dear, sweet father-in-law. But I have not before ever been threatened so directly, considered my own fleeting mortality. I have never believed that my own life might be in danger before the very moment Jeanne Langevin stands before me outside my lab in the darkness, clutching Paul’s letter.

  After she leaves, I find it very hard to breathe. I wonder, for a fleeting moment, if I imagined the whole encounter. But I am still holding on to Paul’s letter—the evidence is right here, in my very shaking hands. You are going to leave France, or I’m going to kill you. Jeanne said those very words to me.

  What would happen to my work, my lab, if I were to die? And the children? They’ve lost their father and recently lost their grand-père. What would happen if they lost me too?

  And then I don’t know what to do. I can’t just go home to Sceaux, forget this happened, can I? I can’t go to the gendarmerie. I don’t even know what I could possibly say. This man I’m in love with . . . his wife threatened to kill me. Can you help me? Oh, how the press would love that if it got out.

  I check Pierre’s pocket watch, running my fingers over the smooth surfaces.

  What am I supposed to do now, Pierre?

  The watch ticks on in my palm, unknowing, uncaring. It is half past eleven, and despite the late hour I find myself walking toward boulevard Kellerman. The familiarity of my old neighborhood courses through me, filling me with regret, longing. Once, in what feels like another lifetime, Pierre and I sipped coffee in our garden here with the Perrins and the Langevins. Jeanne and I were friends; we talked about the children. She brought me lemons from her own garden.

  You took her husband, mon amour, I hear Pierre’s voice in my head. What do you expect?

  But their marriage is already over. She doesn’t even love him anymore. And he loves me!

  I find myself standing on the Perrins’ doorstep. Jean and his wife still live on boulevard Kellerman, and he remains a close friend to both me and to Paul and Jeanne. I put Pierre’s pocket watch back in my pocket. It does me no good to wallow in a pretend conversation with a dead man. Instead, I ring the Perrins’ bell.

  Jean answers the door in his dressing grown, looking alarmed. And it is not until he says, “Marie, you’re crying,” that I realize I am. That my face is wet with tears.

  “I can’t die,” I say to him. “I don’t want to die.”

  “Calm down,” he says to me gently, ushering me inside his house. “No one is about to die.”

  JEAN SPEAKS TO JEANNE AND HE NEGOTIATES AN AGREEMENT with her. She will leave me alone if I stay away from Paul. We will not speak, or write letters, or even work together in a professional capacity.

  I agree, and so does he, and yet, for weeks, I go to our pied-à-terre and wait for him each afternoon during our lunch hour anyway. But he keeps his end of the bargain; he does not come to me, and I lie on the bed waiting for him, feeling cold and lost and empty.

  Summer comes, and we leave the city for vacation. We go to L’Arcouëst after all, and Hela comes with Hanna and meets us there. I ache for Paul, and I write him a very long, very detailed letter and send it to our apartment. This agreement we have made is absurd, I tell him, and it must be temporary until we can figure out a better plan, a way to be together.

  I don’t know, he writes back, a week later. I am too busy with work now for a detailed response. I will write more soon when I can.

  It is short and terse, but it is a response, and it is telling in and of itself. If he has received my letter, read my letter, he must’ve gone to our pied-à-terre in my absence. He is thinking of me, loving me still, wanting us to be together. And he is in the lab, working, not on vacation with Jeanne. When I return to Paris in the fall, we will find a way.

  “What are you smiling about?” Hela asks, walking into the house, her cheeks aglow from spending the morning with Hanna and Irène and Ève by the water. In all these years, she has almost gotten over her fear of it, though I still have not seen her go in farther than her ankles.

  “I’m working on writing up my findings on achieving radium in a metallic state,” I answer her. Which I truly had been doing before Paul’s letter arrived.

  “Hmmm,” she says. “Working, working, always busy working. Why don’t you join us at the beach this afternoon? Your daughters tell me they hardly ever see you.”

  Hardly ever see me? But I am charting their growths in my notebooks in spectacular detail as I have done since they were born. Irène’s body has begun to develop this summer, and Ève has grown two inches, started lessons in maths and sciences at my insistence, piano at hers. I tell Hela this now, and she laughs. “I’m not talking about their growth and development,” she says. “They just want to spend time with you, enjoy your company,” she says. “Come, sit by the water with us.”

  I don’t understand the point of going to sit with them simply for the sake of sitting there, when I have ideas rolling through my mind I must jot down. “I can see the water from here.” I point to the wide picture window behind me. “I need to get some more work done before dinner.”

  Hela frowns and puts her hand on my shoulder. “You work so much,” she says, “and one day you will blink and your girls will be grown. And you will wonder how you missed it all.”

  But I tell Hela she is being silly; the girls have her and their Polish governess with them on the beach. They don’t need me outside with them too. And besides, I’ll see everyone later, at dinner.

  Marya

  Krakow, 1910

  Klara made it into the Chernikoff Institute of Music on her first try, and at only seven years old, she became their youngest female student ever. It was a rigorous course of study on piano—four to six hours of playing and piano studies daily, except for Sundays. And I worried it would be too much for my sweet young child. But Klara insisted that it was what she wanted, what she loved more than anything, anything in the whole entire world. And so Kaz agreed that the hefty tuition was worth it, and I agreed that she could give up her primary maths and sciences lessons, as long as she would allow me to continue to teach her those subjects at home at night.

  “Do you really think we should let her do this?” I worried to Kaz in a whisper in our bed, the night before she was to begin her studies in the program in November. It was much warmer, more temperate in Krakow than it was in Loksow, but in only two years living here, I had adjusted to the climate so that now I was chilly during the mild falls and winters, and I needed an extra blanket even on temperate nights like tonight.

  “Can you imagine?” Kaz whispered into my hair. “If your parents had the resources to help you reach your dreams?” His parents had; they had chosen not to after we got married. He had gotten here with his own hard work and determination. And if Papa had the money to send me to Paris right after I’d finished at the girls’ gymnasium, I never would’ve become a governess, never would’ve met Kaz.

  I reminded him of that now, and he pulled the blanket tighter around us, pulled me closer to him. “I don’t know,” he said. “I believe I still would’ve met you somewhere, somehow, kochanie.”

  And even after he fell asleep, after I heard him snoring softly next to me, I wondered if that was true. If no matter what choices we made, what we had and what we were given and what we took for ourselves or not, if there were certain people in our lives who we would find our way to, no matter what.

  I COMPLETED MY FIRST TWO UNIVERSITY COURSES WITH PERFECT marks, scoring the highest of anyone in my classes on my exams in both chemistry and physics. But the remainder of the money from the sale of my bicycle went to Klara’s Chernikoff tuition. And I didn’t return in the fall.

  Professor Mazur noticed my absence, and I was both astounded and pleased to find her knocking on my front
door one morning, the week after Klara began at her new school. She was a small woman, smaller than me, and she wore her dark black hair in a bun so tight it almost appeared to raise the lines of her face into a permanent state of questioning.

  “Marya,” she said, when I answered the door. “Are you ill?”

  “Ill? No. I am perfectly well, professor.”

  “Then why aren’t you in school this term?” I was surprised she’d noticed, that she had come here looking for an explanation. But I had been the only woman in her chemistry course last term. The best performing and oldest student, too.

  I invited her in. Offered her a coffee, which she declined, and then I sat with her in my parlor, and I explained to her about Klara’s new piano school, both the expense and the time I would need to devote to teaching Klara other subjects in the evenings. And how I would no longer have the money nor time for my own studies this term.

  She frowned. “But you showed so much promise, Marya. You can be a mother and a scientist. I promise you, you can. I am. I have two girls.”

  She said it like it was so easy, and that perhaps I was crazy for thinking that it wasn’t. But I assumed, with her full teaching schedule, her time in the lab, either her girls were older than Klara or she was paying someone else to look after them. I had neither the money nor desire for that. Klara was my heart and my breath, and as much as I loved learning and science, I would always love Klara more. I did not want to pay someone else to raise her; not that I could afford it either.

  But I smiled at her, genuinely flattered by her attention. “I hope to come back next fall, professor. Perhaps I could save up and manage by then.”

  She frowned again, looked down at her shiny black boots. I had the feeling she was not used to people saying no to her, and I felt bad that I was. Because truly, I wanted to continue at the university. Nothing made me feel happier and more content than when I was learning, studying, working. Nothing except for Klara.