The Fugitivities, стр. 29

saw that her other hand had slipped under the elastic of her shorts. She stopped and gave him a long serious look. Then she rolled over, pressing herself on top of him. He felt her heat as she placed his hand. “I want to get this over with,” she said. When it started, he felt like her body was squirming away. They thrusted in contradictory motions, meeting in tense shocks. When he shuddered, she jerked away violently. He apologized and she did not answer. They stayed that way for a time, breathing. At one point, he feared she was crying, but she wasn’t. When she got up, she wiped the back of her thigh with his T-shirt. Suddenly, there was a sound at the front door. Arna bolted. Within seconds, she was somehow dressed again, her backpack slung over her shoulder, saying something to his mother with a quick laugh of surprise in the front hall as she slipped out onto the landing. Jonah went to the balcony. He watched her cross the street in a dash, walking, then running, as she turned the corner and disappeared.

That was the early summer of their graduation, as Arna was preparing to leave for England and he was waiting to go off to college in the States. She asked to meet him the day before she was set to go. They met for a coffee not far from the school, but ended up walking for almost an hour, down along the river and then through the hot, dusty Tuileries Gardens crowded with tourists. Arna was going to study politics, philosophy, and economics at Oxford, a compromise with her father, who had wanted her to follow the family tradition and attend one of the grandes écoles in Paris but consented to let her go abroad as long as she promised to return and not to study anything frivolous.

They ended up standing in the proscenium by the ticket booths at the entrance of the Métro station at Concord. The pneumatic gates of the turnstiles whooshed and clattered. Against the wall opposite the ticket booths was an old indicateur d’itinéraires, one of those connecting boards that lights up when a steel node is pressed down next to the label for a destination. Punch in Mairie des Lilas and a string of pale, green dots illuminate your trajectory across the city. Jonah and Arna took turns pressing possible destinations. The board lit up, dutifully, colored bracelets radiating outward in crossing paths.

Jonah had hoped at least for a warm farewell. Instead, they struggled to find things to say. Arna was distant. It became clear that there was too much they hadn’t acknowledged over the years. As if they had crossed some threshold, run afoul of the obscure bylaw that states that past a certain point of ambiguity in a relationship, the real one can no longer be recovered. The realization felt strange, because the possibility that they would become vastly different from each other had never really occurred to him before.

Arna said she thought it would be a good thing to have some real distance between them. He quickly agreed. She gave his shoulder a gentle, playful nudge. Sweaty faces were streaming past them out of the tunnel. He thought to kiss her, but the jostling of the crowds, the heat, the noise, it was all so overwhelming that they briefly hugged instead.

It was Arna’s idea that they should correspond, and he enthusiastically co-signed. They kept in touch “across the pond” while attending university. Though there was no positive sign of the romance that had made their friendship special, the letters, which increased in volume over time, took on increasingly intimate hues. He knew a good deal of what was going on in her life—at least, the portion she wished to share with him.

Jonah said he only saw Arna in person once during college, however, around the same time the following year back in Paris. On that occasion she was in town for a few days and said she could only do coffee. They met at one of the large corner-sweeping brasseries by Courcelles. Even though it was a little windy, they sat on the terrace in rattan chairs, not facing each other, but side by side, oriented outward toward the traffic of the boulevard and beyond it, the high gates sealing off the cool verdant mass of the Parc Monceau and the plump facades of the grand villas overlooking its “English” gardens.

Arna told him she was seeing someone, a guy who went to the London School of Economics, who played in a band and was studying to be a human rights lawyer. She spoke well of him, without particulars, but added that she wasn’t sure it was going to work out on account of her plan to take a postgraduate fellowship with the Directorate-General for Regional and Urban Policy under the European Commission. In theory, it was based in Brussels, but in practice she would travel almost the entire time, all across the Union, gathering statistical data and meeting with local and regional political actors to gauge various measures of compliance. She would essentially be “taking the temperature of the European project,” as she put it. Once people could see the numbers, she explained, recalcitrant populations that were being manipulated by local politicians would realize the many benefits that they were ignorant of or took for granted. She had learned at Oxford that a totally politically integrated Europe was now only a matter of time, possibly less than a decade away, and it was crucial to martial more popular support for the supranational conception of citizenship that it would entail. She was animated about her looming professional debut, and it struck Jonah, as he in turn explained to her something about his dismay at the decline of the film industry, that their conversation in person was far more formal and stilted than in their letters.

“Ack, I’m sorry. I hate it. This will just take a sec.”

“No worries.”

She