“I don’t give a damn,” she retorts, “I like it. It sets me free.”
Yet when they make love, Yves speaks her name, and the crude and gentle things he says make her head spin: “I love it when you call me Anna. It’s disturbing, like it’s new to me.”
Several times, she asks for a touch of violence. She says: Bite me, hit me. Yves, amused, does as he is asked, finds he knows how to, joins in the game. He quickly reaches his boundaries. He is happy to play along, but with too much pretending, he loses track of himself and of his desire.
After their pleasure, when their bodies refuse to cooperate anymore, the appetite they have for each other is still just as sharp. Anna kisses his neck, Yves fondles her breasts, the back of her neck, her buttocks, amazed by this hunger he cannot satisfy.
“My breasts are getting old,” she grumbles. “You’ve never known them any different, but they were so much better before. Arrogant, that’s the word. They were arrogant.”
He licks her nipples and they harden beneath his tongue, he nibbles them, takes them in his mouth. They are no longer a young girl’s breasts, and that moves him, deeply. Sometimes, appeased, Anna falls asleep, and the soft outline of a smile stays on her lips.
Another time, as she is putting her clothes back on, Yves pushes her down onto the bed again, unceremoniously spreads her thighs and plants a kiss on her pussy. Anna lets him manhandle her, laughing. When Yves stands up, she asks wistfully: “Why can’t I be like I am with you when I’m with Stan?”
She is sincere in her regret, painfully so. It is true, everything would be so much easier. Yves smiles. He has a remarkable capacity for taking these blows on the chin.
Like a teenager, Anna also frequently asks him: “Why do you love me, Yves, why do you love me so much?”
She is not simpering. She wishes the love he felt for her could give her some parameters, convince her she exists, because she exists so fully for him. She would like to feel consistent, as dense and heavy as a clay golem that never questions itself like this. She has such a need for other people. She sometimes says she is just a saprophytic plant, a parasite with a gift for life.
When Anna finally leaves, Yves likes staying in his apartment, making the most of the powerful inertia created by the happiness he feels when he is with her. If he has accepted an invitation for a drink or dinner, he cancels it, claiming he is busy, has a migraine. He wants nothing and no one to obliterate the note he can still hear inside, to disturb the color she has set down in him.
ANNA AND LOUISE
• • •
TWO HUNDRED EUROS for a wool sweater, nearly a hundred for a simple black cotton scarf. Yves has hardly ever set foot in such an expensive boutique. Before Anna erupted into his life, he had no dealings with these almost empty places, half art gallery, half salon, where not one dress, not one skirt, not one coat on the racks is a duplicate, where there is often only one size—but one that seems to fit almost all the customers. All the clothes have the supreme elegance to appear not completely new.
“No, it’s not expensive, look, they’re half price,” Anna corrects him, “it’s a sale.”
Clothes are a compulsive passion of Anna’s. She follows fashion closely, knows how to work it, mix trends. Beside her, Yves slightly tarnishes the picture, with his walking shoes and his old duffel coat. She would like to dress him from head to foot, make him “sharp,” elegant. She already influences him: he sometimes wears fine shoes, dark shirts, pants with front pleats. Watching Anna in a boutique, her unselfconscious display of narcissism, amuses Yves far more than it annoys him. He senses that she wants to know just how far he will tolerate this addiction, this fondness for what she calls “an aesthetic” and which she has no intention of losing.
Anna likes being attractive, and does not want to give that up now or later, when age catches up with her. She admires those women who fight every step of the way, and still want to resist the injustices of time in their sixties. She sees nothing ridiculous about wanting to appear twenty years old right to the end. She is vigilant. One lunchtime, when Anna is walking arm in arm with Yves on the rue Oberkampf, they bump into a girlfriend of hers. The woman is still young, very slim, athletic-looking. A sudden ray of sunlight is cruel to her: in its glare, from that angle, the woman’s white skin looks like fragile ancient parchment. Anna shudders. They have barely said goodbye to the woman before Anna rushes into a pharmacy to buy some hydrating cream.
Another day, because she does not have enough time to go up to his apartment and she “doesn’t want to make love in five minutes,” he joins her downstairs, in her car. She suggests they just go for a drink in the café across the street. She takes out her bright red lipstick, eases it onto her lower lip, closes her mouth to spread it, then assesses the result in the rearview mirror. Now enhanced, she looks at him.
“Do you want me to do my eye makeup as well?”
He thinks she looks perfect.
“The actress Romy Schneider always put on makeup when her husband suggested they go out,” she adds, “even just for lunch in the restaurant downstairs.”
Mirrors are important. There are three of them in Yves’s apartment: the big one above the fireplace in the living room, the small one in the bathroom, over the sink, and the last one, a tall full-length mirror, in the bedroom, on the door of a closet. When Anna has to go home, each of them plays its part. First, in the bathroom, she checks the small details, then looks at the bigger picture in the bedroom, and finally proceeds to a general inspection in the living room.
He wonders whether this preoccupation with appearance could come between them one day. Anna’s father is right, though: you fall in love with the flaw. Yves knows this. In his apartment he has a wall light that he commissioned from a sculptor friend, and when it first arrived he was disappointed. He did not dislike it, but it was not what he expected. Now, though, that is partly what he likes about this wall light. It never quite manages to disappear, it is a palpable presence. He does not want a woman who blends in with the background either. Besides, Anna is many things, but not a wall light.
Anna cannot make up her mind between two dresses, one in pink and green, short, very 1960s Courrèges, and a longer, more sensible one in gray and red. The pretty blond woman beside her is facing the same dilemma.
“It really is very pretty,” says Anna, who has tried on the shorter one, “but I can’t wear it for work, and I’d never dare go out in it.”
“Well, I’ll buy it then,” says Louise, laughing, “I’ll wear it at the law courts under my long black robes.”
ANNA AND YVES
• • •
SOME NIGHTS when Stan is on duty at the Quinze-Vingts, Yves drops in to see Anna on the rue Érasme, after she has put the children to bed. She cooks dinner for two and spends the evening in his arms, always worried Karl might wake and catch them together.
One evening, Anna takes Yves to her bedroom. She opens a closet, eases out three dusty shoe boxes, and carries them to the kitchen. In them are hundreds of photographs. She lays out her life before Yves, perhaps for him. It is a long time since she has looked inside these boxes.
He recognizes her in the dark-haired little girl in overalls using every inch of her body to thrust a swing into the blue of the sky; in the girl on the brink of adolescence dancing with her father, almost like a woman in love. In another she is wearing a white dress, sitting in a boat on a pond in a landscaped garden. The picture could have been taken in the 1920s. Yves recognizes the man holding the oars. He is a writer. “Isn’t that Hugues Léger with you, in that boat?”
“It is. Do you know him?”
“Not very well. I really like his books, we used to have the same publisher.”
“He and I were together, for a year. We’re still friends. I could get you together for dinner if you like.”
She continues rummaging through the boxes, takes out photographs of her wedding, pointing things out, making comments. Yves thinks that, in front of him, with him
, Anna is drawing up the inventory of everything she is preparing to lose. Right now, she is asking him to find the words that will help her draw on her own strength to give up what each photo says. Look at this happiness, my happiness, my husband, my house, my children, my parents, look. It’s all there, spread out on this kitchen table, years of life in fading colors, I give them to you, I’ll abandon them for you, my love. But what about you, what are you offering? Tell me that.
Anna is afraid she will never “be able to do it.” Sometimes, in order to convince herself, she cites Jane Birkin, Romy Schneider, other women—often actresses—who had several significant men in their lives; what Anna actually says is “several lives,” as if each man counted as a life. She looks for role models, examples, who say, Yes, she has a right to this too. Because it is something she is owed.
But she has her doubts.
“You know,” she says one evening when they are in the car, “I worry so much about not being able to do it. I often just tell myself: Anna, don’t. Do it.”
Yves bursts out laughing. “Did you hear what you just said? You said, ‘Don’t do it.’ ”
Anna did hear herself. All her ambivalence is in those words. “Don’t. Do it” or “Don’t do it.” All down to a period and the subconscious.
HUGUES AND YVES
• • •
I DON’T KNOW if I have a best friend. Sometimes I can wake up and not know how old I am. I’ve set my clock ten minutes fast to make sure I leave on time, but I now take the extra ten minutes into account, which cancels them out. I’d like to write a book with the title A Book Not Worth Reading and have it published by a company called Minor Press in a collection known as Complete Obscurity, so that I can say: “I had a book not worth reading published in complete obscurity by a minor press.” I was once left by a woman, and I cut my mattress in two, so that I didn’t have to sleep on her side. I can never find my keys when I have to go out in a hurry. I like the pillow to be cool when I go to bed. I once knew a man called Deadman who introduced himself like this: “Deadman, like dead man without the gap.” I will go to hell. I’ve watched the image of the tsunami unleashing itself onto the Indonesian coast at least ten times on television. I own sneakers, tennis shoes, climbing boots (worn only twice), lace-up walking boots, black moccasins, elegant black shoes, slippers, rubber-soled sandals, and yellow flippers. I know that my favorite film isn’t a very good film. I often wonder what would be different about the world if I didn’t exist.
Yves puts down Hugues Léger’s first book, Definition. A litany of sentences, almost a thousand of them, in which the writer sketches a self-portrait in disjointed fragments. The previous evening, Hugues killed himself, at home, with a bullet through the mouth. Anna is in Berlin for a few days, she probably does not yet know. Yves immediately wrote an obituary for Libération, and managed to arrange through a journalist friend for it to be published, even though a different article had already been approved for the page layout. In it he said this did not mean that Hugues’s last book, Autolyze, which deals with suicide, should be seen as “a will waiting to be unsealed”; it was not “the cathartic book his friends would have liked to see him write, the book that would open up the creative field he still needed to open. But Autolyze, his most accomplished book, could exist in its own right without the dim reflected light of his death, which he need not have foretold.”
The dinner Anna wanted would never happen, today’s lover would never meet yesterday’s. But Yves feels a blossoming friendliness toward Hugues, whose resolute death tries in vain to forbid friendship. He has reread his books, hoping to find in them the man Anna must have loved, and has identified a dark intelligence of life in his sentences. One he found particularly touching, violently so, was the closing sentence of Definition: “The best day of my life may already be behind me.” Before meeting Anna, Yves also thought the best day of his life was already behind him. He also knows that the woman who caused Hugues to cut his mattress in two is Anna. She is the sort of woman you might want to sacrifice a bed for.
Anna harbored more than affection for Hugues.
“You know, Hugues,” she once reassured him, “if you’re ever having difficulties, you can always come and stay with us for a few days. It wouldn’t be a problem, we have a guest room.”
One evening—two years later—he rang their doorbell, suitcase in hand. He had had a row with his partner, he was out on the street. Anna was in Normandy and Stan opened the door. He did not know what to say to the man in the hallway: he did not know him, Anna had never mentioned any invitation and, since then, Karl had been born and the guest room was now his. Stan asked Hugues in before calling Anna. She explained the new situation to her old boyfriend. Hugues did not take offense but went and slept in a hotel, in spite of Stan’s offer to put a cot in his office.
When she told Yves this anecdote, there was nostalgia in her voice. She had grown apart from Hugues, she said with regret, it would have been an opportunity to know each other in a different way, to become proper friends. But she actually said this: “It’s a shame. If Hugues had stayed with us, we could have had a different relationship.”
Yves laughed at the ambiguity. He knows that when Anna talks about “having a relationship,” it almost always means a sexual one.
ANNA AND THOMAS
• • •
ANNA HAS NEVER KEPT COUNT of her sessions with Le Gall, but Le Gall writes the number 1,000 at the top of the page. That’s a lot. You could have bought yourself a nice Porsche with some optional extras, Yves calculated. He is wrong: Thomas has paid off a small house in an Italian village near La Spezia.
Anna knows what she wants to talk about, Simon’s eyesight problem. The thought that her brother could one day go blind terrifies her. She talks about Simon’s wife, his children. Eventually, she confesses the fear she would feel if the man she loved could no longer capture her with his gaze, if she disappeared from his view, if that mirror she so needs were broken. The selfishness of this narcissism fills her with shame.
She also wants to talk about a Freudian slip she made the day before. She was out for a walk with Karl and Lea, and Yves was with them, they were all going out for lunch together for the first time. When she is with her children, Yves is never a lover, but a “friend.” Anna has not yet resolved to admit the position he holds in her life, Yves often doubts she ever will. She refrains from any affectionate gestures, any attentiveness. Karl ran on ahead, jumping from one paving stone to another, Lea slipped between the two of them, took one of their hands each and started to swing, screeching happily. The spontaneous affection Lea always shows for Yves unsettles Anna every time: her daughter could be consenting to this unavowed, unacknowledged union, granting her mother’s lover a role. Lea suddenly abandoned them to go look in a toy store window.
“We’re late and we’re hungry,” Anna scolded her. “Come on, Nora, hurry up!” Nora? Anna looked away, disconcerted, then pulled herself together: “Quickly, Lea!”
Nora. She cannot get over it. She called her daughter by her younger sister’s name, she was back in her childhood, in the days when she went for walks with her father, her mother, her sister, and her brothers. Lea did not appear to notice and hurried up.
Anna thought about this slip of the tongue all evening. She found an explanation, has already given it to Yves, and now produces it for Le Gall.
“I just can’t be a mother when I’m with Yves.”
“Mmm. But it wasn’t Yves you were talking to.”
“No.”
“It was to Lea, wasn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“So,” he suggests, “it could also be that in front of Lea and Karl, you can’t be a woman. You won’t let yourself.”
Anna stays silent. Le Gall has just inverted her view of the scene, giving the slip the exact opposite meaning. She feels he has pinpointed it.
“Maybe I’m trying to protect them.”
“Or to protect yourself.”
Le Gall rar
ely intervenes. He does it every time he sees another plausible and equally productive association. He tries to banish the word “because” from his vocabulary. It is not up to him to determine what is cause and what is effect. He limits himself merely to stating facts. Sometimes, all he does is reiterate what has been said. During one session, she blurted, “If I stay with Yves, I’ll have the life I’m dreaming of.”
Thomas repeated this: “Yes. The life you’re dreaming of. You’re dreaming.”
“Stan made me a mother,” she told Le Gall, “Yves made me a woman.”
Le Gall calls this formulization: a technique for turning life into aphorisms, for fixing it in words. It has its uses. Anna so likes “finding the words.” But does finding the words mean understanding? Animals do not need words. Thomas Le Gall sometimes has his doubts about the philosophy of language, but having doubts about philosophy—whether or not it has to do with language—surely that in itself is truly philosophy?
STAN AND YVES
• • •
CORPORATE SPONSORSHIP improves a company’s image, and the cost is tax-deductible. These two reasons explain why a water treatment corporation has raised the Pension Heisberg (what was once a private house, in the Marais district of Paris) to the ranks of a cultural venue. It finances concerts, discussions, and exhibitions there. On this particular evening, the Heisberg’s auditorium is playing host to three writers for a joint reading, on the politically correct theme of Foreignness. Their three original texts were specially commissioned and have been published as a limited edition by Carnets Heisberg, printed in twelve-point type on laid paper.
Enough About Love Page 8
