Half Life Jillian Cantor (trending books to read .txt) 📖

Pierre died . . .” Paul starts, and then his voice trails off. Perhaps he remembers the way I got so upset when people spoke Pierre’s name, shortly after he died.

Now that time has passed, I want to hear his name again, want to talk about him, remember that he was real and alive and beautiful and brilliant. And mine. But no one talks about him much anymore. “It’s all right,” I say gently. “You can say it, Paul. Please.”

“When Pierre died,” he begins again, his voice soft, wistful, “I just really admired your strength, that’s all. There you were, all alone with two young girls, and you could’ve taken a widow’s pension from the university and lived quite comfortably. But instead you took Pierre’s job. You made it your own. You made the work your own. You’re brave and amazing, Marie.”

No other man scientist has ever seen me this way. Except Pierre. “Am I?” I say. “Or am I foolish and crazy?”

Paul smiles. “Don’t we all have to be a little bit foolish and crazy to work long, thankless hours in a lab in pursuit of something no one else can quite see but us?” I smile back. It’s true. “Will you tell me more, about polonium?” Paul asks. It’s a simple request, one scientist to another, but his voice is soft and clear, and his question carries so much weight. It’s as if Paul is truly asking about me, about my heart.

“Of course,” I tell him. “What do you want to know?”

“Everything,” he breathes, and for a second, I think of Pierre, that first night I met him in the Kowalskis’ suite, when he was breathless in his fascination for my work. Paul sounds nearly the same way now. He wants to know and understand who I really am underneath everything else, and all at once, I feel lighter than I have in years.

I open my journal and show him the notes I’ve been writing down all summer long. What fascinates me about polonium, I tell him, is the way it exists in the pitchblende with radium, but how its properties could not be more different. I suspect the alpha decay is drastically different as well. But I haven’t had the time or space or money to prove it yet, and polonium has become something I think about only in my time off from radium. “Polonium should be just as revered as radium,” I insist, my voice rising. “Or else I named them wrong in the first place. I wanted to honor my homeland, give it . . . something.”

“You can take the scientist out of Poland,” Paul says lightly. “But you can’t take Poland out of the scientist, hmm?”

I shake my head and laugh just a little, delighted by how much Paul understands me. The sun has begun to come up, and now I close my journal. The sky is pink and orange, but the light is still dim enough for the lamp. I hold it closer to Paul’s forehead, examine the wound again, and he’s right. The bleeding has stopped. It does appear to be superficial.

I think about how Jeanne always tells me Paul is cruel, but I wonder if she has been the cruel one all along. It is strange the way you cannot really know what goes on in other people’s lives, their marriages, even when we were neighbors on boulevard Kellerman for so many years, and friends for even longer. That even now, living here with them this summer, I don’t really understand Jeanne or Paul or their marriage.

Paul turns back to me, smiles a little in a way that makes his handlebar mustache appear suddenly lopsided. I have the strangest desire to reach up and touch it with my fingers, but I restrain myself.

He moves first, puts his hand on my shoulder gently, pulling me toward him in a half hug, in a way we have never touched before. But I do not shift away. Instead I pull in closer to him and the two of sit there like that for a little while, staring out at the water glistening in the sunrise. Paul is right—this really is calming.

“When we are back in Paris,” I finally say, “you should come to my lab and I’ll show you more about my studies of polonium.”

“I would like that,” Paul agrees, his voice breaking a little. “I would very much like to visit your lab.”

SIX MONTHS LATER, IN THE SPRING TERM OF 1909, WE GIVE UP on our collective school. All of us are stretched too thin with our own work to continue teaching one another’s children as well. And though I have a brief moment of sadness, I feel relief more—I am exhausted all the time, and I find a better school to enroll Irène in than the one she’d been in before. She will need official schooling to get into university later on, anyway. And without extra lessons to plan for the children, I can focus solely on teaching my classes at the Sorbonne and my work in the lab.

Though we are no longer schooling our children together, Jean Perrin and Paul Langevin and I often still take our lunches together near the university. But now instead of schedules and the children, we discuss our lectures and our lab work. Then Jean’s lab becomes quite busy in the fall of 1909, as he is working hard to verify Albert Einstein’s predictions on atomic theory, and he begins working right through lunch. So only Paul and I take a quiet table together by the window, lingering some days over our coffees and our conversation, long past the end of the lunch hour.

In the months since our summer in Arromanches, Paul has taken me up on my offer, come to visit my lab from time to time. And always, at our lunches, he asks me about my work, for updates on my progress, not just on polonium but radium too. Lately, I’ve been trying to achieve radium in a metallic state,