(It was rumored to be impossible.)

“Um, what I meant is that I’m too heavy. You wouldn’t be able

to pull me over.”

She shook her head. “You aren’t that heavy.”

Paul smiled to himself at the perceived compliment.

“Has Christa been rude to you?”

Julia looked down at the snow-covered sidewalk in front of them.

“I’ve been staying up late every night working on my thesis. Professor 177

Sylvain Reynard

Picton is very demanding. Last week she rejected several pages of my Purgatorio translation. I’ve been redoing it, and it just takes so long.”

“I could help you. I mean, you could email your translations to

me before you give them to her so I could check them.”

“Thanks, but you’re busy with your own stuff. You don’t have

time for my problems.”

He stopped walking and placed a light hand on her arm. “Of

course I have time for you. You’re working on love and lust, and I’m working on pleasure. Some of our translations will overlap. It would be good practice for me.”

“I’m not working on love and lust anymore. Professor Picton

made me change my topic to a comparison between courtly love

and the friendship between Virgil and Dante.”

Paul shrugged. “Some of the translations will still overlap.”

“If we’re working on the same passage we could compare transla-

tions. I don’t want to bother you with stuff that’s unrelated to your project.” She looked over at him tentatively.

“Send me what you have and what your deadlines are, and I’ll

look at it. No problem.”

“Thank you.” She appeared relieved.

He withdrew his hand, and they began walking again. “Did you

know that the Chair of Italian Studies sent out an email announce-

ment about your admission to Harvard? He said that you won a

pretty big fellowship.”

Julia’s eyes went wide. “Um, no. I didn’t know that. I didn’t get

that email.”

“Well, it was sent to everyone else. Emerson made me print out

the email and post it on the bulletin board next to his office, after he insisted that I highlight all the important information, including your name, with a bright yellow marker. Figures. He was nothing

but rude to you while you were in his seminar, and now he’s prob-

ably going to take credit for your admission to Harvard. Asshole.”

Julia’s eyebrows furrowed, but she didn’t comment.

“What?”

She flushed slightly under his scrutiny. “Nothing.”

“Julia, spit it out. What were you thinking just now?”

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Gabriel’s Rapture

“Um, I was just wondering if you’d seen Christa hovering around

the department? Or Professor Emerson’s office?”

“No, thank God. It looks as if she’s moved on to someone else.

She knows better than to talk to me. I’m just waiting for her to give me a chance to tell her off.” Paul winked and patted her shoulder

fraternally. “She better not give you a hard time. Or I have a few stories I could tell.”

P

On Thursday, Julia met with her therapist in preparation for her

meeting with the Dean, which was scheduled for Friday morning.

Recognizing that Julia needed to discuss what was happening,

Nicole set aside her goals for that session and listened patiently before offering her opinion. “Stress can be very destructive to our health, so it’s important to deal with it adequately. Some people prefer to talk about their problems, while others prefer to think about them.

How have you dealt with stress in the past?”

Julia fidgeted with her hands. “I’ve kept quiet.”

“Can you share your concerns with your boyfriend?”

“I can. But I don’t want to upset him. He’s worried about me

as it is.”

Nicole nodded sagely. “When you care about someone, it’s un-

derstandable that you would want to protect them from pain. And

that’s perfectly appropriate on some occasions. But on others, you run the risk of shouldering more than your fair share of stress or responsibility. Can you see why that might be a problem?”

“Well, I don’t like it when Gabriel keeps things from me. I feel

like a child. I’d rather have him share things than shut me out.”

“It’s possible that Gabriel feels the same way, that he worries about you shutting him out. Have you discussed this with him?”

“I’ve tried to. I’ve told him I want to be equals, that I don’t want to keep secrets.”

“Good. And what was his response?”

“He either wants to take care of me or he’s worried about disap-

pointing me.”

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Sylvain Reynard

“And how does that make you feel?”

Julia gestured with her hands as she tried to find the words.

“I don’t want his money. It makes me feel poor and dependent

and — and helpless.”

“And why is that?”

“He gives me so much already, and I can’t reciprocate.”

“Is it important to you that your relationship be reciprocal?”

“Yes.”

Nicole smiled kindly. “No relationship is absolutely reciprocal.

Sometimes, when couples try to split everything in half, they discover that the relationship is not a partnership but a bean counting exercise.

Striving for reciprocity in a relationship can be unhealthy.

“On the other hand, striving to have a partnership in which each

partner is valued equally and shares both burdens and responsibilities can be healthy. In other words, it isn’t a problem if he makes more money than you. But he needs to understand that you want to

contribute to the relationship, perhaps not financially but in other ways, and that those ways should be respected just as much as the

money. Does that make sense?”

“Yes. I like that idea. A lot.”

“As for protecting one another…” She smiled.

“You could make a biological argument as to why men feel the

need to protect their women and children. Whatever the reason, it’s a fact. Men tend to find their self-worth in actions and accomplishments. If you refuse to let him do things for you, he’ll feel useless and superfluous. He wants to know that he can take care of you and protect you, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Partners should want to protect one another. But like any view, it has its extremes and it has its middle.

“What you and your boyfriend should do is to strive for the

middle. Allow him to take care of you in some ways, while exerting your independence in others. And you should impress upon him the

need for you to take care of him too.”

Julia nodded. The concept of moderation appealed to her. She

wanted to care for Gabriel, and she wanted him to care for her, but she didn’t want to be a burden, and she didn’t want him to look at her as if she was broken. But sorting all of that out practically was a different matter.

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Gabriel’s Rapture

“Some men have what I call chivalry syndrome — they want to protect their women as if they were absolutely helpless. And this might be romantic and exciting for a time, but eventually reality will set in and it will become stifling and patronizing. When one partner does all the protecting and the other does all the receiving, it’s unhealthy.

“Of course, some women have the feminine equivalent of chivalry

syndrome — wounded duck attachment. They seek out men who are bad boys or broken and afflicted and attempt to fix them. But we’ll table that discussion for another day.

“At his extreme, a chivalrous male can do all kinds of rash things to protect his woman, including riding into battle on his horse, or taking up arms against thousands of Persians, when he should be

running in the opposite direction. Discretion is the better part of valor. ”

She chuckled slightly. “Did you see the film 300?”

Julia shook her head.

“It’s about the Battle of Thermopylae, when three hundred Spar-

tans held off two hundred and fifty thousand Persians before being defeated. Herodotus writes about it.”

Julia regarded Nicole with no little interest. How many psycholo-

gists could cite Herodotus?

“King Leonidas was an extreme case. One could argue that his

last stand was precipitated by political concerns rather than chivalry.

But my point is that sometimes the chivalrous man ends up doing

more damage through his protection than can be done by the force

threatening his partner. Spartan women used to tell their husbands and sons to come home carrying their shields or on them. If you

found yourself in that situation, you’d probably prefer that Gabriel didn’t die holding the line against thousands of Persians and came home to you, instead.”

Julia nodded in absolute agreement.

“In your conversations with Gabriel, you might want to talk about

that — how you feel about being protected to his own detriment,

how you should share your risks and responsibilities, why you want to be a partner rather than a child or a helpless female.

“Perhaps Gabriel would be willing to attend joint sessions with

us even though he isn’t coming in privately.”

Julia wasn’t quite sure that she’d heard Nicole correctly. “Pardon?”

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Sylvain Reynard

Nicole smiled. “I said that in your conversations with Gabriel,

you might want to talk about how you feel protected — ”