Coniugare

By Lisa Gornick

/ Third Place, 2026 Plentitudes Prize in Fiction /  

People often ask how I met my husband. It’s a common question, especially at weddings when marriage is on everyone’s mind and strangers are seated thigh to thigh for a four-course meal, but given how mismatched we appear, it perhaps happens more often than usual. To start, Jean Paul is French and movie star handsome and at six-foot-four hovers fourteen inches—he prefers to say 36 centimeters—over me. (If you do the math, you’ll understand my brother was not unjustified in calling me Shortie.) He carries himself with the ease of someone raised by a father who was the most sought-after cosmetic surgeon in Lyon and a mother with perfect skin and creamy cashmere coats, whereas I am from one of those states you probably could not locate on a map and was raised by hog farmers who turned taciturn and alcoholic-light after the evening feeding.

We met on an airplane, I say. I smile and if the person next to me is wearing a gold band, flip the question to ask how they met their spouse. Most people, I’ve learned, are really not interested in others’ stories, but with minimal encouragement will tell their own with ample details to stretch from salad to wedding cake.

The truth is only my husband and Sasha and I know the full story of how we met since I was forbidden to say why I was at the airport by Uncle R, who wasn’t my uncle but Sasha’s. Sasha had been my roommate since I’d arrived the month before in New York, having dropped out of a community college where I was learning nothing I couldn’t get from reading on my own—books, not the photocopied excerpts we were assigned since the instructor correctly assumed that most of the students barely read anything at all. I closed my bank account (this was before Venmo and twenty-year-olds having credit cards), put into travelers checks the fifteen hundred dollars I’d saved waitressing at a place too far from the highway for eighteen-wheelers but still called the truck stop, and bought a bus ticket to New York City. 

The short-order cook had briefly lived in New York and told me I could look for an apartment share in the back of the Village Voice. A village? When I got off the bus after a day and a half, I found a copy and screwed up my courage to ask the cashier, a woman wearing a button that read SMILE OR ELSE, if she could change a dollar into dimes. She pointed to the NO CHANGE sign above the donut case. I started to blubber. Good grief, girlie, she said, handing me a fistful of dimes. Just don’t ask again. 

I planted myself in front of a phone booth and studied the ads for roommates. Sasha’s number was the first I called. She said it was kismet. She’d been about to rent the room to a girl who reminded her of the villainess in Murder Is Easy, her favorite Agatha Christie book. You don’t sound like someone who would poison my tea, she said. Her only question: Did I know how to type? I mumbled something, after which she told me to come right over. 

I washed my armpits and face in the spooky Port Authority bathroom, dug out of my suitcase the pink pussy bow blouse I’d worn when I’d given the valedictorian address at my regional high school, and took a cab (I didn’t yet know how to use the buses or subway) to the address Sasha had given me. Sasha had thick red hair that fell with impressive volume past her shoulders and was wearing black patent leather boots, tight on her plump calves. She showed me what would be my room, just large enough for a single bed and a dresser, with a window looking onto the air shaft. After I said I’d take it, she informed me that in addition to sharing the rent, I could solve another problem for her. She wanted to stop working for her uncle, who ran an import-export business, so she could start the buyers training program at Bergdorf Goodman, the poshest of posh department stores, she explained. I could take over her job. She’d bring me to meet Uncle R the next day. 

In the morning, Sasha narrowed her eyes when I emerged from my room in a floral skirt I’d made in Home Ec class. No good, Chicky, she said. You look like you’re off to churn butter. She pulled a pencil skirt out of her overstuffed closet, pinning it to not fall off, and handed me a pair of what she told me were kitten heels and some cotton balls to stuff in the toes. 

Uncle R’s office was in the basement under a laundromat. He had more hair sprouting from his ears and nostrils than atop his head. Just a temporary leave, Sasha said. Her roommate, Lindy here, would fill in. Lindy won the Idaho country fair typing award, Sasha added. I didn’t correct her, not even that I was from Iowa.

Does Lindy here have a passport? Uncle R asked Sasha. Oh yes, Sasha said, after which Uncle R told me to arrive the next day at eight—sharp! Whew, Sasha said, once we were back on the street. That was easier than I thought. She took me to the post office on Eighth Avenue, the largest building I’d ever seen, and helped me apply for an expedited passport, which came just days before Uncle R handed me an airline ticket to Montreal. 

I would be leaving in the morning, Uncle R informed me, to hand deliver a package. I was not to tell anyone where I was going. When I asked about Sasha—she would be worried if I didn’t come home at night—Uncle R instructed me to say that I was housesitting for him, feeding the cat while he and his wife went to Atlantic City.

The package, Uncle R told me, was a briefcase. I was to leave it in locker 3217 located in Zone 4 of the Montreal airport. What if that locker is already occupied? I asked. No more questions, Uncle R barked. It will be unoccupied. After that, I would take a taxi to the Hilton hotel, spend the night, and fly back in the morning.

The plan did seem a bit sketchy, but everything about Uncle R, I’d learned by then, seemed a bit sketchy and I needed the job to pay my half of the apartment rent. In the morning, Igor, whose role in Uncle R’s business I’d never figured out, picked me up. He put my overnight bag, which he said I should check, in the trunk and drove me to Kennedy Airport, where he handed me the locked briefcase. When I showed my stiff new passport, the customs inspector smiled. Your first time abroad? I nodded, too embarrassed to say it was my first plane trip too.  

Once on the plane, I followed Uncle R’s instructions. My seat, he’d told me, was on the left side of the plane; I was to put the briefcase under my coat in the overhead compartment across the aisle and keep an eye on it. While we were in queue for take-off, I studied a French phrase book I’d bought in the airport. I’d never learned a foreign language since after my high school was designated as regional, the classes had been phased out in favor of auto mechanics and large animal husbandry. Each phrase had a phonetic version next to it. In my head, I sounded out Comment-allez vous? Comb on tal ee voo?

We were still on the runway when an announcement came over the intercom for passengers to direct their attention to the stewardess, what flight attendants—in those days, all women—were then called. I glanced at the overhead compartment, which remained securely shut, rested the phrase book on my lap, and watched attentively while the stewardess pointed to the emergency exits and held up a seat cushion to show how it could be converted into a flotation device. I was wondering how the floating seats would help if we were not over a body of water when there was an enormously loud sound and the plane shook violently. People screamed and a baby wailed as my head hit the tray attached to the seat in front of me. It took a few seconds to realize that something (a food truck, I’d later learn) had plowed into the right side of the plane.

I could feel a lump forming on my forehead, but otherwise I was okay. When I looked up at the overhead bin where I’d put the briefcase, the door was flung open and it appeared to be empty, the contents having toppled out and catapulted down the aisle.

There was chaos getting everyone off the plane. Vite, a stewardess yelled, afraid, I presumed, that the plane might burst into flames. I was only able to locate the French phrase book and my purse before we were escorted down the stairs, past the firetrucks spraying the plane, and into the airport medical station. Hiding the lump on my head under the wool hat I’d stashed in my purse, I was quickly released to the processing station, where we had to show our passports and leave a description of our luggage. With Uncle R having forbidden me telling anyone about the trip, I decided it best not to report anything.

Afterwards, I sat in one of the departure lounges clutching the French phrase book and trying to figure out what to do. If I called Uncle R, would he scream at me for not reporting the briefcase or commend me for doing the right thing?

I opened my purse and counted the hundred dollar bills Uncle R had given me to cover my expenses in Montreal and the remaining travelers checks, which I’d taken, imagining I might purchase a souvenir. 

A little dog wandered over. He sniffed my shoes, and for a moment I wondered if he was smelling pig.

Lover! the woman across from me cooed. She smoothed back her frizz of shoe polish black hair.

It’s okay, I said, leaning down to pat the little dog. 

He’s very ill-behaved, but it’s my fault. I spoil him terribly. I let him eat from my plate and of course he sleeps in my bed.

I thought about my father and his firm rule: no dogs in the house. 

She pointed to my phrase book. You are going to Paris?

I glanced down at the cover. I’d not noticed before the cartoonish picture of the Eiffel Tower. I would like to, I said. Would you happen to know how to buy a ticket?

Lover, she called again, this time adding clucking sounds with her tongue. She seemed no more surprised by my question than the little dog ignoring her. Paris, she said, was my favorite city in the world until my second husband came down with food poisoning there and died. 

I’m so sorry.

Don’t be sorry. He was a nasty man. If I’d known how to do it, I would have poisoned him myself. She sighed. Not that number three was much better. Air France. Tell them your grand-mère is très malade. They will find you a seat.

At the Air France counter, the agent patted my hand, how sad that my grand-mère was ill, and next I knew I had a first class ticket at the discount emergency price on a plane that would depart in two hours.

By the time I was settled in my seat, the lump on my head had turned the color of an eggplant and was impossible to hide under my hat. Next to me was a handsome man, a bit older than me, wearing a cable-knit sweater and soft leather loafers and reading a book I assumed was in French since I couldn’t understand any of the words on the cover. I took out the phrase book. My head was hurting too much to attempt to sound out words, so I flipped to the back—a section titled “Conjugations.” I knew the word conjugal, but I’d never heard of conjugations. There were lists of verbs, some of them labelled regular and others irregular, but the airplane suddenly seemed very cold and I was shivering and couldn’t decipher what it all meant.

The stewardess in first class went through the same safety instructions I’d seen just a few hours before, though her movements were more balletic. Not until we were up in the air did the handsome man glance at me. I blushed because he appeared to be contained in his skin whereas mine, I noticed, had left a blood stain on the sleeve of the pink pussy bow blouse I’d worn, thinking it would suggest a lady lawyer rather than someone carrying a briefcase to stash in a locker. 

Comb on tal ee voo? I blurted. 

I am fine, he said, in French-accented English. But you, he tilted his head slightly, you are perhaps not so fine?

For the first time that day, I began to cry. Cry and shake. The handsome man handed me a monogrammed handkerchief—JPS, for Jean Paul Saltier, I would soon learn—and took off his sweater and wrapped it around my shoulders, after which I told him about the plane to Montreal having been hit by a food truck. I didn’t realize he’d pressed the button for the stewardess until she was standing in the aisle and he was speaking to her in French. A few minutes later, she returned with an ice pack, which he gently placed on my forehead, guiding my hand to hold it in place, and a blanket, which he draped over my legs. 

I am a doctor, he said. Actually, a plastic surgeon. Not that you will need plastic surgery for this injury. But you do need to stay awake in case you have a small concussion.

I nodded, though I couldn’t imagine how this would be possible since I felt terribly tired and was the sort of kid who fell asleep on the annual car trips to visit my mother’s parents, who’d never seemed happy to see us. 

I will have to entertain you, he said, smiling shyly. 

Later, I would learn that Jean Paul, like me, was not inclined to talk about himself, but after he ran out of the La Fontaine Fables he could recall, he began telling me his own story. He was in his final year of a plastic surgery residency in Paris. His father expected that Jean Paul would join his cosmetic surgery practice in Lyon, to which women from Paris traveled to discreetly have face lifts and eyelid surgeries. 

I didn’t know anyone who’d had a face lift and wasn’t sure what was meant by an eyelid surgery. It sounded extreme—more than a perm, which my best friend in high school had urged me to get so my hair wouldn’t just hang there, but I’d refused, thinking it too expensive and vain.

A medical school classmate, Jean Paul continued, was working for an organization that repaired cleft lips and palates for children in India. He’d come to New York to attend a training for the procedure. He’d yet to tell his father. It had been painful to see images of so many disfigured children, only a fraction of whom would be able to receive the surgeries. One afternoon, needing a break, he’d snuck away to wander through the Greek and Roman galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Studying those perfect faces was a balm.

Try as I did to stay awake and despite Jean Paul having urged me to drink a third cup of coffee, my eyes were closing. He pinched my arm. 

Sorry! I said. So you want to go to India and fix cleft lips and palates?

Jean Paul smiled sadly. It’s complicated. My fiancée. Thérèse. She is a writer for French Vogue. My salary would be very low and... She would never be happy with that life.

By then I’d begun to worry about the briefcase, which I felt certain must have been filled with cash. What would happen when the authorities who inspected the plane found it? Oh my God, I’d not thought about this! When Uncle R realized I’d disappeared, would he think I’d run off with the money? Punch drunk from my throbbing head and mounting anxiety, I spoke bluntly to Jean Paul, not something I’d ever done before save with my brother when I would say that I might be short, but at least I washed regularly whereas he stunk from the pigs. It does not sound like your fiancée is your soulmate, I said.

Soulmate, Jean Paul slowly repeated, as though he were inspecting each syllable.

With the seriousness of his expression, I jolted fully awake. I don’t know why I used that word, I said. It just popped out. 

What do you think it means? he asked.

I took the icepack off my head and let it drip onto the tray next to the cup with the last dregs of coffee and the French phrase book.

I think, I said, it means someone who wants the same things you do.

Jean Paul took a deep inhale. And what do you want? 

No one had ever asked me that question. Nor had I ever asked myself. I touched my forehead, still cold from the ice. I want to live somewhere, I said, that smells nice. I want to have a husband who doesn’t call me Shortie. I want my children to have passports. 

I looked at the phrase book. I want to learn French and teach it to kids who grow up on farms. I paused. I don’t want Uncle R to think I stole his briefcase.

Of course, Jean Paul asked what I meant. I think you better remain out of sight for a few days, he said after I explained. Had he known then the phrase lay low, he would have used it. Uncle R may report you to the police. If they learn you boarded a plane to Paris, they will send out an alert to hotels.  

I had no idea what Parisian police looked like, but I imagined night sticks and snarly dogs.

You will stay with me. My friend who is a neurologist will examine you to be absolutely certain you don’t have a concussion.

We still had four hours before we would land in Paris. Jean Paul called for the stewardess and gave her the melted icepack and my coffee cup. He dried the tray with his handkerchief and flipped to the back of the phrase book, where I’d folded the corner of the page at the section titled Conjugations. We will start with the regular verbs, he announced.

I raised the shade. I presumed we were over the Atlantic. It was the first time I’d seen it, though I couldn’t make out anything aside from endless swatches of inky black dotted with milky patches. Jean Paul had me repeat after him the endings for the er, the ir, and re verbs. Then he walked me through the tenses and moods. By the time he explained the conditional—what could or would happen—and the subjunctive—desires or doubts about what might or might not transpire—I was imagining what could or would happen when we reached Jean Paul’s apartment, surveying my desires and doubts, and I understood why conjugations and conjugal came from the same root: coniugare.

You can guess the next chapter of this story, and you are right. From the airport, I phoned Sasha. Leave it to me, she said. Jean Paul broke it off with Thérèse, and we prepared to move to India, where he would repair cleft deformities and I would study French while I taught English at a school that didn’t ask to see my degrees. 

Was Sasha a girl who should have been a private investigator figuring out who poisoned whom rather than a buyer at Bergdorf Goodman, or was she simply a good person? I can’t answer that. All I know is that when I phoned her again before Jean Paul and I left for India, she said it was best not to talk over the phone. I couldn’t believe Uncle R had bugged her line, but I didn’t say anything other than that I was sorry I hadn’t been able to give her notice and she could give away my clothes. 

Once Jean Paul and I were settled in what was then called Bombay, I sent Sasha our address. Over the few months, a series of postcards arrived. On the first, she’d written: Eye 1/2 it. The second read: Know 1 nos; the next. Ha! Say VD ur donkey, baby chicken ee!  I had to turn the final postcard upside down: .5 4 u.

I laid the postcards in a row and showed them to Jean Paul. It’s an acrostiche, he said. 

An acrostic? 

I was very fond of them when I was a boy. 

I studied the cards: I have it. No one knows. Ha! Saved your ass, chicky! Half for you.

Three years later, we returned to Paris, where I eventually got a PhD in French literature. I wrote my dissertation on the evolution of French grammar in the Middle Ages and Jean Paul began doing facial reconstructions for persons who’d suffered terrible injuries. The operations would often take twelve or more hours. Using screws or pieces of bone or tissue from other parts of the body, he sculpted new faces, sometimes more beautiful than the original. 

The year I turned thirty, we had twins, a boy who is tall and contained like Jean Paul, and a girl who Jean Paul claims takes after me—pure flattery since our daughter is a math prodigy who taught herself algebra at six and geometry by the time she was twelve. When the twins were thirteen, we moved back to the States to keep an eye on my parents, who’d turned the hog farm over to my brother and were in an assisted living facility, where they liked no one and nothing aside from the five o’clock happy hour. I organized a campaign to convince the school board to offer French at the regional high school I’d once attended, and when the trial was approved, became the teacher myself despite being over-qualified for the job. Jean Paul took a position at a branch of the state university, where he opened a clinic to train residents on cleft surgeries. On the occasions he’d be asked to do a cosmetic procedure, he would politely refer to someone else.

I didn’t return to New York until the spring of the twins’ junior year of high school when they were looking at colleges. I trailed behind them on three campus tours, careful not to ask embarrassing questions, and then left them to explore the Village on their own. It was a perfect New York afternoon, warm and sunny, and I decided to walk north on Fifth Avenue, and then through the park to our hotel. 

I was marveling at a Beaux-Arts building with a mansard roof when I realized it was the Bergdorf Goodman department store. Was it possible Sasha still worked there? I entered through a revolving door that opened into a vaulted room with crystal chandeliers and marble floors. A perfumy scent emanated from the dozen or so cosmetic counters, behind which stood impossibly tall and skinny women in lab coats that suggested something more scientific than night creams and lipsticks. 

The girl at the information desk looked up Sasha’s name in the employee directory. The buyer in the shoe department, she asked? 

I nodded. Shoes. That sounded right for Sasha.

Let me call and see if she’s in her office.

Sasha put her arms around me as though I’d just returned from housesitting for Uncle R. She was plumper than she’d been twenty-eight years ago when she’d lent me her pencil skirt and kitten heels, and her red hair was now in a sleek chic bob. It was kismet, she said, that I’d come today. Tomorrow she was headed to Rome to attend an Italian trade show. Come on, Chicky, she said. Let’s get a drink!

We walked to a nearby wine bar, where Sasha ordered us a bottle of champagne and foie gras that she spread thickly on tiny squares of dark bread. After Uncle R had heard about the plane having been hit by a food truck, she told me, he sent her with a fake driver’s license that had my name on it and her picture to the baggage recovery room. Only if the briefcase was unopened should she say it was hers. 

The briefcase was unopened and given that it matched her description, it was turned over to her. She took the subway from the airport back to the city. What would one of Agatha’s girls do? Sasha asked herself. She thought about Margaret Ravenscroft and Frances Cary. Wigs! They both wore wigs. Donning a black one she bought at a Halloween store, she brought the case to a key shop, where the ancient man behind the counter followed her instructions to unlock but not open it. Back in her apartment, she drew the shades. It took a long time to count the cash. Eighty thousand dollars, all in hundred dollar bills. She put the money in a mutual fund that she’d not touched in the three decades since. Last she looked, it had grown nearly six-fold. 

The truth is, I’d forgotten about the money. Sasha, however, had been certain that I would find her eventually and she could then give me half. What about Uncle R? I asked. Oh, him, she said. Don’t worry about him. He’s living in Florida and playing golf. 

After my second glass of champagne, I confessed to Sasha that I’d not known how to type when we met. 

I waited until I was back in Iowa and Jean Paul and I were lying in bed, each propped up on pillows with our reading glasses perched on our noses and our French novels in our hands, to tell him about the money. I want you to decide how to spend it, I said. 

Why me? he asked.

Because I would have slipped into a coma if you hadn’t kept me up all night on that flight to Paris.

No, you wouldn’t have. The newest research shows that people with head injuries rarely later lose consciousness. 

I patted my husband’s arm. I’ve never forgotten, I said, your asking me that night what I wanted. But I don’t think I asked you. I must have seemed very self-centered.

You were in shock. And you did something more important. You told me that it didn’t sound like Thérèse was my soulmate.

Jean Paul took off his reading glasses and rubbed his eyes. Had I not met you, he said, I might have married Thérèse and joined my father’s practice in Lyon. That would have been a tragedy. 

I thought about how that sentence would be so much more precise, more elegant, in French, using the past conditional: Cela aurait été une tragédie.

 Jean Paul reached across our white duvet for my hand. Not once had he called me Shortie. Our children had passports. We lived in a home that smelled nice. French and Spanish classes were now permanent offerings at the regional high school. 

I’d like to study sculpture, Jean Paul said. 

I turned onto my side so I could see my husband’s face. His jaw line was a bit slacker and his lips a bit thinner than when we met, but he remained a beautiful man.

I’d like to understand how the bones create the planes and curves in cheeks and foreheads and jaws. Jean Paul paused. The grammar of the face. 

I was certain Jean Paul was also thinking about how on the day we’d met, he’d drilled me on French conjugations. I’d not retained any of the verb endings, but I’d glimpsed how grammar was the bones of logic and the vehicle for possibilities. There would be no more Uncle Rs, no more briefcases. There could be no face lifts, no eyelid surgeries.

My husband lifted my hand, these days a bit swollen at the knuckles, and planted a kiss on the back. I envisioned the twins at colleges in New York and Jean Paul and I spending a year there so he could study at the Art Students League and wander through the Greek and Roman sculpture galleries at the Metropolitan Museum. Perhaps I would be able to teach at the Alliance Française. I could walk every day in Central Park and have drinks with Sasha. A mystery might knock at one of our doors and together we’d solve it.

Jean Paul and I kissed, more affectionately than passionately, though we do still have moments of passion, and we turned out the lights and both slept as soundly as middle-aged married people ever do.