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she was horrified. Yet rather than endorse her distress and milk it for pity, I downplayed my humiliation and laughed off my pain. Doing otherwise would have forced me to confront feelings I preferred to forget.

    {Courtesy of Edith Kurzweil}
    Months after leaving Aiglon, I drew a map for my seventh-grade history class that obliterated my boarding school and everyone in it.
    When I graduated from high school, my mother unknowingly resurrected my boarding school anguish. “Remember how you tried to tell me Dad’s watch had accidentally fallen out of the window? I knew immediately that wasn’t possible. You would never have let that happen. You cried and cried when you finally admitted that one of your roommates, that tall troubled boy who lived in a château, had thrown it out the window. I was so annoyed at myself for having given it to you—that I hadn’t been more firm. I should have kept it, despite your pleading. I should never have given in. Maybe this will make up for my mistake.”
    Mom handed me a box containing a brand-new Omega that shehoped would serve as a worthy replacement for the one lost in the snowbank. It was a thoughtful and extravagant gift, and I had no right to be anything other than grateful. And I was, up to a point. But the watch never, not even for a day, left its velveteen cradle.
F RANÇOISE
    I gave little thought to Cesar during my early twenties. He’d pop up in conversation now and then, the way bullies do, but when that happened, I continued to cover up the pain in diverting narratives of boarding school hijinks. Humor kept the sorrow at bay. I got through college, had my heart broken a few times, worked at a newspaper in Rome, toyed with the idea of graduate school, and then, in fits and starts, embarked on a career as a journalist. Eventually I found a few editors willing to accommodate a freelance writer whose obsessive research habits all too often got in the way of deadlines.
    In mid-July 1985, I received an assignment from the International Herald Tribune to write about a television station launched by a group of Warlpiri Aborigines in Central Australia. Five hours after I drove into Yuendumu, a desert settlement three hundred kilometers northwest of Alice Springs, a French anthropologist named Françoise Dussart spotted me wandering toward a sacred site off-limits to visitors. Concerned for my safety, she drove up and warned me away. She was sitting in the cab of a Toyota Land Cruiser and cradling a baby kangaroo. How could I not fall in love?
    After four months of courtship—a long-distance affair chronicled in correspondence that now fills a small file cabinet—we decided to live together.
    Françoise packed up her field journals and reel-to-reel audiotapes. I packed up notes for a novel and a personal computer the size of a carry-on suitcase. She flew west, from Alice. I flew east, from New York. We met each other halfway, in Paris, broke and in love.
    For more than a year we lived in penniless bliss. Our needs were minimal, our indulgences restricted. We rented a crêpe-sized fifth-floor Latin Quarter walk-up facing the exhaust vent of a Lebanese shawarma joint and buried ourselves in our work. Françoise had a thesis to write on the ritual life of Warlpiri elders. I had my novel. Once a week we’d either catch a film at the local revival house or share a mango.
    A few months after moving to Paris, Françoise and I blew off work and spent the morning roaming the Louvre. Toward the end of our ramble, I stopped short in front of a fourteenth-century altar cloth depicting the Passion and Resurrection of Christ. Françoise caught me staring at one panel in particular, a gruesome scene of flagellation.
    Her forehead wrinkled. “You like that?”
    “No. It’s just that it reminds me of something that happened at boarding school.”
    “ Ah, oui, le Cesar, ” Françoise said. She had heard my stories. “Do you ever wonder what became of him?
    This was the first time anyone had