Page 102 of Where the Snakes Sleep

Maybe adventures simply become quieter after enough years.

I feel foolishly hopeful.

Perhaps that is all I wanted from this journal—to embarrass myself privately until I remembered that relationships do not repair themselves through observation.

You have to reach.

You have to choose one another again.

So I am choosing him.

Henri is choosing me.

I want to believe that is enough.

It feels like enough tonight.

* * *

17 April 1996

Henri brought a new researcher to supper tonight.

Nadia Moreau.

She is young and possesses the particular kind of intelligence Henri has always found irresistible, the kind that makes a person impatient with easy answers. She is studying ethnobotany in Montpellier and has apparently been working on medicinal plant compounds, which Henri believes may complement some of the vascular research being done here.

He spoke of her before she arrived as though he had discovered her rather than hired her. That should have annoyed me, but I found myself amused. There was a time when Henri spoke about me that way.

Perhaps he still does when I am not in the room.

Nadia has a little boy. Camille. Barely one year old.

She showed us a photograph without being asked, which I liked about her immediately. The boy has enormous eyes and an expression of grave suspicion, as though already disappointed by the adults entrusted with running the world.

I told her he looked serious. She laughed and said he is only serious until someone gives him something sweet.

Henri asked whether motherhood would interfere with the work.

The question embarrassed her.

It embarrassed me more.

I told him not to be an ass.

He gave me that look afterward—the one that says I have contradicted him publicly and will pay for it privately—but he smiled when he did it, so perhaps I am forgiven.

Nadia will be useful here. Maybe she will even become a friend.

* * *

2 September 1998

Henri says I worry too much about rules written by men who have never handled the things they regulate.

There are specimens here now whose paperwork I have not seen. When I asked, Henri said the acquisition was complicated. When I asked again, he said it was private. When I asked a third time, he became angry.

Not frighteningly angry. Henri is rarely theatrical. That would be easier.