“Then, Rabbi?”
“Then the water level in the river will rise, an incredible flood, you’ll lose everything, the land will be carried away, the rabbits will drown in their thousands, you’ll be ruined, your wife will leave you, cursing you for your lack of foresight, your children will refuse even to speak to you, and you’ll end up drunk and penniless like a poor schnorrer. That’s what will happen.”
“But Rabbi. I don’t understand. You were supposed to tell me what ‘alternative’ meant.”
The rabbi thinks for a moment and says: “The alternative, Moshe? The alternative is ducks.”
LOUISE AND ROMAIN
• • •
AN AUSTRALIAN BIRD, called the superb lyrebird, can imitate any sound, from the noise of a diesel engine to a jackhammer. That afternoon, it would only have taken a dozen of them to reproduce the sounds of Paris.
Louise feels light, suspended in air, in love. If she really is leaving Romain, it is for this forgotten sense of lightness. The sky is an infinite gray. It somehow manages to hide the sun and the shape of the clouds. Louise would like a brighter sky, an Argentine blue. She went to Buenos Aires five years ago, and the name will always remind her of the blue of the sky slicing between apartment buildings.
The signs say TRADITIONAL BAKERY, NEWSAGENTS & LOTTERY, CRÉDIT AGRICOLE BANK. That rural word “Agricole” stranded in a city does not strike her as incongruous. Louise has always liked the adjective “incongruous,” because it is itself incongruous. On the bus stop there is a poster for an American film with Nicole Kidman, another one for a German sedan; it flips over to make way for a Korean cell phone. Louise is traveling across Paris to leave Romain, yet she is looking at advertisements. She draws energy from the light in the sky, the glistening leaves and shifting branches. She looks at posters, some workmen digging a trench through concrete, boutiques, dresses, and ankle boots. She is going to leave Romain and yet she is looking at dresses and ankle boots.
She has put on her makeup and this black dress which—she knows for sure—really suits her. She is wearing that ivy and sandalwood perfume that Romain gave her for her birthday, the one that is too woody and precious for her. She does not know why she took so long getting ready, when it would have been far more tactful to have made herself as plain as possible, to have tried to be as unattractive as possible. She wonders whether she has gone to all this trouble for him or for herself.
She knows that there are men on café terraces looking at her, right now, as she walks up the Boulevard Saint-Germain. Any woman walking through Paris may, at any given moment, have a man looking at her.
She is heading off to leave Romain. She will have the courage to tell him that she actually left him a long time ago. She is walking through Paris to demonstrate that the thread between them has broken, that she is tied to him by the children, but that can never be enough. She can no longer see herself by his side. She has already forgotten the happiness that, only yesterday, she felt beside him.
First, Louise made mental lists, lined up columns. She put together a grid as logical as the blocks in an American city. One column For Leaving Romain. One Against. Or rather, she no longer loves him the way she ought to love him to keep on loving him.
As she filled in the lines, she could have written: the way you sometimes smile, the slightly English way you have of looking bored, your slightly bitter humor, your green eyes that are sometimes gray, your long thin hands. The For and Against columns would have been full of the same words; she realizes that what once attracted her puts her off now. The almost feminine charm that seduced her no longer has any effect on her, what she wants now is fiercer. The shy way he stroked her, that she used to find so arousing, exasperates her now, she needs passionate urgency.
Louise has also made a list of their differences. At the movies, Romain always chose a seat at the back of the theater, but she preferred being close to the screen. They took buses 30, 31, 53, 27, and 21, and Romain developed incredible strategies to get seats for them both. Louise was quite happy to stay standing. They did their shopping at Franprix, Carrefour, and Monoprix, and Romain had a logical way of filling the grocery cart: not one squashed strawberry, not one crushed baguette. Louise could never manage it. They argued about bread being over- or underbaked, about the war in Iraq which should or should not have been fought, about painting the bedroom; Romain gave way with a sigh every time: it didn’t matter. Louise doesn’t know what does matter.
Yes, Louise has made lists, it is her way of organizing her life.
With Romain, she liked the smell of cut grass beside the pond in the Jardin du Luxembourg, even though she is allergic to cut grass. She liked the mermaid on the barge gliding beneath the Passerelle des Arts, and the wind lifting her skirt. She liked the cold wind of a Siberian depression blowing across Place Blanche one morning, even though she does not like the cold, or Place Blanche. She liked the pink of a sunset from the top of the park at Buttes Chaumont, creasing up her eyes to look at it. She liked the taste of her too-hot hot chocolate in a café on the rue des Abbesses, even down to how much the scalding hurt. She liked all of that, and Romain was there, with her, right when she liked it. She wonders whether she liked it because he was there.
Romain is waiting for her in a bistro on the rue Montmartre, he is drinking a cup of coffee.
It was Louise who told him that bistro means “quick” in Russian, that the French word dates back to the occupation in 1815, when Russian soldiers asked for a drink bistro, bistro, before their officers arrived. Romain told her that the Japanese were going to modify coffee genetically so it no longer had any caffeine in it (or so it had more caffeine, she does not remember). Louise told him that the oldest house in Paris is on the rue de Montmorency, that the alchemist Nicolas Flamel lived there (or died there). Romain told her that Mouton-Duvernet was a general and Denfert-Rochereau a colonel (or perhaps it was the other way around). In ten years they had told each other a lot of things: Louise has not remembered much of it, Romain a great deal more.
Romain will already have ordered her coffee.
He will probably be worried, will sense that Louise’s already absent-sounding voice foreshadows her imminent absence. At first he will refuse to hear what she is saying, then he will want Louise to say she is sorry but she has to go, to prolong that final moment, for time to stretch out like a wave; he would like Louise’s words alone to be enough to keep her there as if, terrified by the weight of what she is saying, she will suddenly find she cannot leave.
But Louise will find the opening words and the ones that come next. She has a solution to everything, the children, the apartment, she has thought of everything. He will ask her to give him one chance, he will say he is going to change, that everything can start again. She will say it’s not about him. It’s her.
YVES
• • •
YVES HAS STARTED WRITING AGAIN. He has read that in Abkhazia, a small former Soviet republic on the Black Sea, they play dominoes like nowhere else. First, they use as many sets of twenty-eight dominoes as there are players, less one. One set for two players, two sets for three players, etc. Most importantly, in Abkhazian dominoes, any tile put into the chain can be removed and played again. Which is what happens when, for example, a player can no longer play any of his tiles even after two turns drawing from the talon. Once a tile has been removed, there are then two chains which can be played indiscriminately. Also, any player who holds a double is allowed to lay it down and start an independent chain. It is a very complex game in which bluffing is allowed, and it ends when there are no dominoes left in the talon. The average game lasts a long time.
Yves wants to write a novel around six characters. He will associate each of them with the numbers on dominoes, with the blank applying to a secondary character, though never the same one. The novel will reproduce the trajectory of a game of Abkhazian dominoes: every double played will give rise to a chapter with just one character, a tile with two different numbers to a chapter
with two characters, very occasionally three if one of them says and does nothing. Double zero is an interesting case: it will produce a chapter with two secondary characters, or just one. Yves has chosen a game between two teams of two players, played in 1919 at a tournament in Sukhumi. It is a famous game because it lasted two hours, the 1-3 and 2-6 tiles were reused several times, and three chains were formed. The Abkhazian writer Dmitry Iosifovich Gulia mentions it in his Apsny, the diary he kept in the 1920s. Yves’s novel will be called Abkhazian Dominoes, but nothing about its structure will be explained to the reader. Particularly as Yves ends up never entirely respecting his own rules.
When he described how it would be put together to Anna, she shook her head: “Too complicated. Pointless. My darling goy, you really do go to great lengths to make sure your books don’t sell. And as for the title, it’s kind of hard to remember.”
“No it isn’t. ‘Abkhazian’ is intriguing and dominoes are child’s play.”
“Not with you on that. Make it simple. Is your book about love?”
“Yes.”
“Well, put ‘love’ in the title.”
One day, in a bookstore, Yves recognizes one of his poetry collections stacked in a pile by the register, with a little handwritten card saying: BOOKSELLER’S CHOICE. Amused, he points it out to Anna discreetly.
“You see, I do sell a few.”
Anna is delighted. Without a moment’s hesitation, she tackles the proprietor with: “Do you know you have the author himself standing before you?”
Yves is dumbstruck. He could smile about it, absently, extricate himself with a joke, but he just wants the ground to swallow him up. He is reliving the “Kennedy affair” and his mother’s stifling pride. He would have hoped to have grown out of that.
Anna wants him to be more outgoing, more dazzling. She is actually less eager for him to be successful than for him to want to be successful.
“If you were famous,” she once admitted to him, not without shame, “I would probably be with you already.”
He shook his head, dispirited. He remembers the verdict given by a British friend who collects vintage cars and alimonies, after he had introduced him to Anna: “My dear, that girl’s a Bugatti. A lot of maintenance.”
Some days, nothing is right. It can be a painting on the wall (“a bit crass”), a book on a shelf (“Please don’t say you liked it”), four cans of spaghetti in a cupboard (“I don’t believe it, that’s a bit obsessive-compulsive”), or the way Yves twists the spoon around in his mouth when he eats yogurt (“taking far too much pleasure in it”). And if Yves drives a little too quickly for her liking for a moment, she sighs, “How could I ever trust you with my children?”
Anna would so like to be able to admire him, the way she admires Stan, his scientific earnestness, his respect for patients, his work on retinas “that’s going to save thousands of people,” she is convinced of it.
Because Stan is infallible, he cannot help but be infallible. And the tiniest disillusion destroys her: one Sunday afternoon Stan is cooking with the children, making a cake known as a four-by-four—four eggs, 250 grams of flour, 250 grams of butter, and (fatal slip) 250 grams of salt … When the cake comes out of the oven it looks different. Anna tastes a bit and immediately spits it out, making a face and flying into such a disproportionate rage that the children run to their bedroom for refuge. She talks about it in her session with Le Gall two days later, shattered to find tears welling in her eyes again as she relates the incident.
Thomas felt Anna had had enough that day. The analyst was afraid she would leave Stan, that she would go ahead and do it even though, at that stage, she could only go from one father figure to another, because all there was room for in her was fathers and lovers. Yves belonged only to the second category. Le Gall took the unusual step of warning her: “Sometimes, Anna, changing men means actually not changing at all.”
As on every other Thursday morning, Yves was waiting for Anna when she emerged from the session. She told him what had been said, and he felt just how right Le Gall was, how unprepared she was to make this leap. And Yves, who wanted her so desperately, could almost have thanked the analyst for holding her back.
Yves is often irritated by Anna’s demands. She is so afraid of “becoming poor” with him. The day she admits this, he looks at her, lost for words, says that the fear is ungrounded and that—more than anything else—the very thought of it is beneath her, but she presses the point, genuinely worried: “I need security. I can’t live without it. It’s neurotic. I’m trying to work on it. Don’t hold it against me, please. Do you want to know the exact word? Living with you, I’d be scared of … of decline.”
Decline: “fall,” “degeneration.” Yves sighs at the cruelty of synonyms.
They agree on nothing. Yves has not shaken off every element of the Trotskyite he was as a teenager, Anna says she loathes Alter-globalizationists. One day when Yves is defending them over dinner, Anna’s temper flares immediately: “No society can have equality as its aim. Look what happened when they did try for equality. People just aren’t equal.”
Yves is on home territory with his reply: equality is not an aim at all, but the means to ensure that the best shine through, overcome their condition. Why, if “money is a driving force,” does she only admire artists, experts, and writers? She digs her heels in, they argue. The other people around the table calm things down.
When Yves is alone in the kitchen with an old friend for a moment, he smiles and says: “You must be wondering what I’m doing with that woman, or what she’s doing with me.”
“No,” the friend says evenly, although his eyes do seem to be mulling something over. “You’re just very different. A positive pole and a negative pole.”
Another thing Anna says is, “Nothing is ever good enough for me. You’ll hate me for that. It’s really frustrating for a man if nothing he does is ever good enough for a woman.”
Yves cannot argue with this point. It takes considerable effort on his part to allow himself to believe that, in spite of everything, Anna could gain from the situation.
One day, when he was seriously irritated, he looked through his bookshelves for Drieu La Rochelle’s book A Woman at her Window, so that Anna could read these superlatively reactionary, misogynistic words: “Women, who are always ingrained with a powerful realism, can only ever love men for their strength and prestige.”
“There. Do you really want that bastard Drieu to be right?”
“But that’s exactly the way it is,” Anna snapped. “You’re impossible. Look at you: you have a first-class ticket in your pocket but you prefer traveling second-class or staying on the platform.”
“I can’t stand the people in the first-class compartment. If you love me, come and join me in second-class.”
Yves loathed having to string out the metaphor. He thought it was full of pitfalls. If life were a train, who was dodging the fare in first-class, who was checking the tickets? It was bordering on the absurd, he did not want to take it any further.
And yet Anna drives him to change himself. After all, if success makes no difference, then why not be successful? He is not sure he has the profile for it. Every time he hears a note of admiration from the person talking to him, she kisses him. He feels sullied by it, wants to shrug it off like a dog shaking itself after the rain. He feels like an impostor. Feels the whole world is full of impostors.
But he has started writing again, and Abkhazian Dominoes is taking shape. Of course, Anna is not wrong. Why should the layout of a book obey a weird and universally forgotten game of dominoes? Yves smiles. And carries on building the edifice, all the more obstinately.
THOMAS AND ROMAIN
• • •
AT 5 PM IN HIS APPOINTMENTS DIARY, Le Gall has written “Fabien Dalloz,” and that is exactly the time when the new patient, whom he has never met, rings the bell. As he opens the door to him, Thomas says smoothly: “Fabien Dalloz? Thomas Le Gall. Please come in.”
The man does so and, despite his tremendous height, it is only when Romain Vidal has sat down in the armchair that Thomas recognizes him. Of course: Roman—Fabian, that part’s clear, but getting from Vidal to Dalloz is a job for the dictionary.
Thomas sits down at his desk, opposite Louise’s husband. He thinks briefly of admitting that the ruse has fallen flat, a move that becomes more arduous with every passing second. But the familiarity of his setting and the effect of the surprise make him instinctively pronounce the usual words: “I’m listening.”
At first Romain says nothing. Not for a moment does Thomas imagine this is a coincidence, that Vidal is in this room for a consultation: Louise has talked to him, and Romain has come to measure up the man who wants to take his wife away. By simply changing his name, he thinks he holds all the cards. But sooner or later Le Gall and the real Romain Vidal will have to meet, and when the time comes to leave the analyst’s office, the false Fabien Dalloz will have no choice but to drop his mask.
Silence settles between them, and Thomas respects it. He does not want to insist that Louise’s husband speak frankly right away.
Enough About Love Page 12