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do with toilet paper except the obvious? Still, I got the message. Hoard thy toilet paper! Far better to trek up and down stairs clutching a roll of soft stuff than get stuck on the dungeon potty with either no paper or the sandpaper that someone else had ever-so-cheaply provided.
    At least the exercise kept my blood circulating.
    One evening , while making the bed, I bonked it against a slight rise in the wood-plank floor and actually rolled around exercising my newfound French expletives. And so the next trip to the toilet had to be taken “ au derrière ,” sweeping the floor with the seat of my shorts. Which would be a pain to wash, by the way, since I was not up to finding a Laundromat and had to rely on the water-in-the-sink method. I’d been wearing crumpled clothes for days. Truth was: I had turned into some kind of dirty mad hermit with useless feet. But did I regret coming to France?
    No. Not one bit.
    I only wished I could phone Jeannot. Too bad I’d made it clear to him that I preferred to be alone. And he was just considerate enough to give me what I wanted.
    So be it.
    One morning I awoke with a piercing headache. I staggered into the bath for a shower and groggily began to brush my teeth. It wasn’t until after I had the toothbrush inside my mouth— foamy stuff tasting like the underside of a rock—that I realized I’d used the tube on the edge of the bathtub instead of the sink.
    The toe medicine. In my mouth.
    I vomited. Afterward, I leaned out the window inhaling deeply. The café below had “Radio Fun” printed on its yellow umbrellas, over and over again, like a demented mantra. You’re in France. Have Fun ! In a fit of childish pique, I pushed the vile tube of medicine off my window sill, and it tumbled to its death on the cobblestones below.
    To my surprise, Jeannot Courbois suddenly rose into view from under a Radio Fun umbrella. He was wearing jeans and a yellow shirt that matched his hair, and he carried a rolled-up magazine. He glanced down at the ground and back up at me with a strange mix of amusement, relief, and apprehension. “ Ca va ?” he called.
    I stuck out my tongue at the offending tube of faux-toothpaste. He laughed. Then I said the first authentic sounding French phrase since arriving in Montpellier: “ Ca va pas ,” I said.
    That goes NOT.
    He raised his eyebrows and headed in my direction. Three minutes later he was at my door, his magazine in one hand, my tube of medicine in the other.
    He said something cheerful and I nodded and let him in. I had no idea what he’d said, of course. Didn’t matter anyway. The point is: I opened the door wide and invited him back into my life, and he walked in with more confidence than I could ever fake.
    Which brings me back to the topic of heat. I accepted my one-time lover into my home, and after brushing my teeth with real toothpaste and rinsing with some killer mouthwash, we ended up in bed again.
    Heat.

II
    Our shared language was physicality and sensation. Sunshine. Smells of food, sounds of community and nature. Warm skin. Sweat. Damp hair. Guitar music downstairs. French with different accents as gypsies fluttered past.
    Over the next series of indistinguishable days, Jeannot and I had sex on the floor under the shuttered windows. We had sex on my stingy bed. We had sex in the bathroom, against the sink. We had sex wet and we had sex dry.
    We did not have sex in his apartment, though he’d asked me—or maybe he asked me. Not knowing was part of the freedom: my freedom. The joy of Tabula Rasa .
    You ca n’t get overly involved if you can’t communicate, right?
    Like a small creature in a shell, I wore my house on my back and did not venture far without it. That worked for me.
    For a while.

III
    The rains arrived on the second Sunday in June, changing everything.
    I woke up late and alone—Jeannot had gone to run errands. Moisture came down in sheets, a symphony of raindrops. Like the heroine in a musical, I nearly soared