Sublime

The air outside rumbles as planes lift into the sky, while inside garbled announcements blare over the loudspeaker. Somewhere behind me, an older woman speaks in sharp, staccato Italian. But I don’t look away from the curb, my eyes trained on the crowded sidewalk outside the terminal, searching for her, anchoring my belief—and my entire future—on t

—Charlotte Clingstone presented a kind of ideal. She was bohemian but accomplished. Worldly but rooted.

L’Auberge de La Môle, we agreed, was the kind of restaurant the French do better than anyone else: highly professional, and yet it felt like the extension of a friend’s kitchen, casual, easy, and comfortable. The restaurants with a row of stars, as good as they are, tend to have a similar veneer, polished, perfect, and international. The Auberge co

Grace Macaulay, then: seventeen, small and plump, with skin that went brown by the end of May. Her hair was black and oily, and had the hot consoling scent of an animal in summer. She disliked books, and was by nature a thief if she found a thing to be beautiful, but not hers. She didn’t know she couldn’t sing. She was inclined to be cross.

Whatever was not problematical and suspected about this young man – for example, a certain showiness as to foreign ideas, and a disposition to unsettle what had been settled and forgotten by his elders – was positively unwelcome to a physician whose standing had been fixed thirty years before by a treatise on Meningitis, of which at least one copy