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meant and she loved him dearly and spoke often of how much she liked it when he spent the night.
    As far as the child went, my periodic presence in the apartment was a matter to be approached with tremendous care. Leonard knew of my existence long before Giselle was allowed to see me kiss her mother. I recall taking Giselle to her little school at the end of the street some months after our first meeting—I’d been kicked out for an hour, to stand in a morning downpour underneath the awning in the courtyard, in order to return as Giselle was eating her cereal—she held my hand as we walked down the street and she sang a children’s song I didn’t recognize, in French. Her friends ran up to greet her and she let go my hand and went running to them without a word. I watched her run all the way down the street to the school. The parents of the other children were kissing them and patting down their hair as they squirmed. The parents nodded
bonjour
to me. I nodded back and watched to see if the child got in okay, to wave to her. She ran straight up the steps, lifting her knees high, like she was running through mud. Her eyes might have wavered five degrees from the door just as she disappeared. I turned to go back to her mother.
    Eventually Leonard asked to meet me in one of those American bars on the right bank, in the Marais. This, I suppose, was a gesture of some sort. He was there already waiting for me and I was fifteen minutes early. He ordered whiskeys without asking.
    “I loved the States when I was there,” he said, sitting back down after we shook hands. “I guess she told you, I did my degree at MIT.” I nodded, smiling like a fool and taking a sip of my whiskey.
    “I would have stayed but for my family, I guess. And visas were a headache in those days. Plus, she wanted to live in France.”
    Her account had been pretty different.
    “So, I wanted to meet you,” he said, and took a big gulp of his whiskey, looking past me, into the mirror behind the bar. He swallowed heavily and set his glass on the bar. “Because I thought it was about time we got together and talked about arrangements.”
    “Why didn’t you want her to know that we were going to meet?” I asked.
    “Well, you know, these things get so much more difficult if we start mixing broken hearts into all this.”
    As I recounted this conversation to her that night, sitting on the Quai aux Fleurs, she laughed like an idiot, on and on: “Oh God, how foolish he can be! He’s not really so serious as he must have sounded, you know. I suppose he thought he was being adult.” She handed me the wine bottle and I tipped it to my lips. Her friend Carol, from art school, was minding Giselle, a favour they exchanged often. We had another hour.
    He went on: “I guess what we should talk about is what you intend to make in the way of a commitment. I think that it should be easy to understand that I’m not prepared to keep paying the apartment rent if you are going to live there more or less permanently.”
    “Sure.”
    “So what sort of a commitment, exactly, are you making?”
    “Uh, you know, she and I haven’t even had this conversation yet, I don’t know what answer I have for you. I don’t know what I’m going to do after my fellowship runs out. For the time being, I’m keeping my little apartment over in the seventeenth. I think that right now, we’re letting the relationship define itself.”
    “That means nothing.”
    I sat back in my stool and held my shoulders a little straighter. “If you say so,” I said.
    “I say so.”
    And it went from there.
    I handed her back the wine bottle. “Basically, he told me that I was an irresponsible trifler who was toying with your affections, not that it was any business of his, but also with the affections of his daughter, and he would not allow her to be hurt and that I had better be aware of that. He knew what I was up to, he said.”
    She stopped laughing. “I don’t need him to watch out