pointless too—this was his father, not some grade-school classmate—but he did not know how or when it would end.)
Aside from a few months of thinking seriously about becoming a lawyer, and a number of business ventures since college that he had invested money and only a little time in, Will had never felt that he had been called to do anything in particular. If he were meant to be a playboy or a jet-setting dilettante, he thought that even these dubious callings would have made their appeals to him by now.
What he was most interested in doing, more than anything before, was running. Aside from the one bad day when he had ended up in the hospital, he had a knack for it. His body burned oxygen efficiently and surprised him with its endurance, and this corporeal fitness filled him with optimism and strength. He was using minimalist running shoes now too, ones that he had gradually introduced into his workouts; he had reconfigured his stride to put less stress on his joints and had read and studied books by expert runners. There were people, ordinary in most other ways, who ran hundred-mile races, people who routinely ran fifty miles in a day. Some of them looked like greyhounds, their faces lean and intense and inquiring. When he ran through the streets of Paris toward the Bois de Boulogne or in the opposite direction toward Pére Lachaise and the eastern reaches of the city, he felt that he was running toward some great happiness. This sense of well-being lasted for an hour or two after his runs, sometimes longer. While he was walking off Elise’s troubling e-mail he wished that he could run instead, but at night, it wasn’t a good idea. Many of the ancient streets were poorly lit, and if he tripped and fell, he might have injured himself badly enough that running wouldn’t be possible for weeks.
He slept until ten the morning after his snowy, lovesick wanderings. When he woke up, it felt like he was on the verge of catching a cold, but after he drank two cups of coffee and ate a croissant, he felt better. Sitting by the Brancusi head, a sculpture whose eerieness Will had seen make a small boy burst into noisy tears two days earlier, he realized how lucky he was, how lucky he’d always been. His good fortune burned in the pit of his stomach, its heat spreading upward until he felt his face turn warm. He had to stop thinking about Elise and find someone else to be with. He would reply to Elise’s e-mail and tell her that she would not be hearing from him again. That he was sorry he had been so pushy and ignored her request that he leave her alone after the day they had spent together in Santa Barbara, where he had met her for lunch and they had walked together on the beach for two hours, she letting him hold her hand and kiss her several times. He had written another poem (it was actually the fourth poem that he had written for her, but he had not sent the second and third, believing them to be terrible). He had sent this new poem to her after the one phone conversation they had had in late April, during which she had told him that he must stop trying to see her, but he sensed that she was ambivalent, that he might need only to keep trying a little longer and she would yield to his wish to see her again.
And then, at last, she had. The second poem he sent to her was a little longer than the first, and he had ended it with the final three lines from James Wright’s “A Blessing”:
Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.
She had called him after receiving the poem and said that she loved it. That she remembered the Wright poem from college, and it had been one of her favorites, and how had he known this? He hadn’t, he said, but it was one of his favorites too. Then she had started crying, and he felt both guilty and gratified. It seemed that she really did care about him, that she was confused and maybe a little disoriented, but they would probably be fine. Even if his father disinherited him, he would survive, and perhaps this was what needed to happen so that he would stop