So we sit by the carillon. Me and Jules. The most terrible days of life always seem to have the best weather. She’s stopped needing to look directly into my face to tell me everything she’s telling me. Because now she’s told me. And I’ve listened. And there’s nothing else to say so we listen to the bells. That’s one hour: that’s four o’clock. And it’s past the next hour and almost to the next one after that before either of us says anything. And it’s Jules.
She says: "Take me somewhere we can eat?"
I just take her in my arms and pick her up from the stone bench and put her in my car and drive her home. Then I order pizza, delivered. I’m not leaving this girl anywhere, not on a bench in the Dorothy Lane Market, not in my car for five minutes while I run in somewhere to get some food. She’s staying in my sight, she’s staying under the covers in my bed, and when she eats pizza I’m feeding it to her, every bite. She doesn’t get to decide, and she doesn’t want to. All she needs is back rubs and neck rubs and hot baths and favorite movies. She doesn’t get to pick the movies—I know what they are. Unfortunately Jules’s favorite movies are Life is Beautiful and Amelie and the night is still early, so we’re gonna have to watch both of them. I play Amelie first, hoping she’ll fall asleep and we can skip Life is Beautiful, but she doesn’t, so after we’re done laughing and crying at Amelie we’re lying there laughing and really crying to Life is Beautiful. But she does fall asleep before the end of that one. But I don’t turn it off. I watch it to the very end, to my least favorite parts, and I hold my girlfriend’s body in my lap, and she sleeps.