Enough About Love
Page 17
Thomas looks at Louise, dumbstruck. She has not told him anything. She kisses him gently on the side of his head, takes Judith on her lap.
“I’ve known for exactly three minutes. When I went to the pharmacy, it was to buy a test.”
“And does the test say if the baby’s going to be a little brother or a little sister?” Maud asks.
“No, my darling, it just says that I’m pregnant. And I’m very happy. The baby will be here in seven and a half months.”
“In September?” Thomas asks.
Louise nods.
“Hey, mommy?” Judith asks.
“Yes, sweetheart. I’m listening.”
“Hey, can I have another waffle?”
ANNA
• • •
DRAGONS AND WITCHES, shooting stars and planets spin across the white wall in Karl and Lea’s bedroom. Lea chose this nightlight among all the others with their images of flowers and animals. Anna was not convinced, but Lea reminded her that dragons and witches do not exist, that no one should be afraid of them, and the argument was so rational it persuaded her mother.
“You have to go to sleep, children,” Anna says.
But Karl and Lea are not tired. Lea jumps on her bed and asks for a story. Anna takes a big illustrated copy of Alice in Wonderland from the bookshelf. She reads for a few minutes. Lea falls asleep first, breathing peacefully. Anna continues a little longer for Karl. A big marmalade cat smiles in the middle of the page.
“Alice,” Anna reads in a soft voice, “was a little startled by seeing the Cheshire Cat sitting on a bough of a tree a few yards off.… ‘Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?’ ‘That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,’ said the Cat. ‘I don’t much care where—’ said Alice. ‘Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,’ said the Cat.”
Karl has gone to sleep. A blue witch on a broomstick launches across the door when Anna turns out the light.
Yes, Anna thinks, the Cat’s right, when you don’t know where you want to go, it doesn’t matter which path you take.
ROMAIN
• • •
From: romain.vidal@parisdescartes.fr
To: danielreynolds@stanford.edu
Subject: associate professor
Prof. Daniel P. Reynolds
Leland Stanford Junior University
Dept of Evolutionary Biology
Dear Daniel,
I’m using this prompt means of communication because I’m delighted to confirm that I would very much like to accept the post of Associate Professor for six months and to run the HumanL@nguage project, as we discussed in Stockholm.
I will email you again shortly to let you know the dates for the weeks when I will return to France, so that you can set up the university schedule accordingly. I have arranged the details of accommodation with John, and am planning to arrive next week to be ready for the first conferences.
I’m so happy that I’ll be working with your team, with John and Marina.
With warmest wishes,
Romain Vidal
YVES AND ANNA
• • •
YVES IS TRYING TO SPOT ANNA at the entrance to the Rennes Métro station. He cannot find her. She is just across the street, on the sidewalk. She cannot believe he has not seen her. It must be because he does not see as well as she would like to think.
They walk together until they come to a café, where they sit at a table outside. Yves does not like sitting outside, where Anna—on the grounds that they are exposed to prying eyes—is distant, untouchable. He is sure that, already, they both know there are things that have not been said. But before anything else, Anna tells him about yesterday evening, at a friend’s apartment. She talks … about primitive communism, about a book that should be written on children’s education, and Yves watches her more than he listens. He watches and wonders about his own feelings, his desire for her, about the gap between illusion and reality. He knows she is going to leave him, just when everything has become so clear to him.
Anna is talking about her husband, the things that connect her to him “incontrovertibly,” that is the word she uses, and she comes out with: “Yves, I’ll never be able to leave Yves.”
The Freudian slip makes Yves smile, but he can tell that she will, she will be able to leave Yves.
He does not repeat the things that have been said a thousand times. Perhaps this time he would succeed in formulating them even better, but what would be the point? You cannot spend your days saying the same things around and around in circles.
In spite of everything, he does say: “You’re leaving me because you’ve never known how to give us a future. That’s the invisible barrier you’ve kept coming up against, like a moth against a windowpane. I should have guessed, the future wasn’t for me: in your letters you always talked about might and could.”
Anna says nothing.
“You were waiting for some sort of sign in the clouds,” Yves goes on, “a bolt from the blue, what do I know? Some instruction from the world telling you you absolutely had to live with me. The sign never came, and it never will. It’s not for the sky to send instructions. Nothing will come, and that’s why I have to leave, it’s as simple as that.”
They stand up, he does not make a scene, he never has. The café where they are having lunch is called The Horizon. He merely points out the irony. And hands her an envelope.
“Here. I’ve written you a villanelle.”
“A what?”
“A poem, a sort of round with the first and third lines repeated … You can read it later.”
She puts the envelope in her handbag, carefully. Anna would so love it if, in just one letter, a man could change a woman’s fate forever. Yves does not want to do anything to nurture that hope.
Even as they walk toward her car, when they really are going to leave each other, the happiness he feels from still being beside Anna is so strong that, right until the last minute, it protects him, stops him being entirely sad. A stroke of her hand, a kiss on her cheek, and her perfume, still. This will be his last sensual memory of Anna Stein. When he turns away from her, when he walks away, sadness will tear through him and a great void will open inside him.
Truman Capote could not finish In Cold Blood so long as Perry Smith and Dick Hickock had not been executed. He just cannot get any further with Abkhazian Dominoes so long as their relationship continues. This book which is about them will be written in the present tense. The present will definitely have been their tense. Of course the word also means gift. Let it be one.
He does not know this but behind him, Anna has turned around. She is watching him walk away. In a store window, just across the sidewalk, there is a pretty little dress, short, low cut, in blue cotton with drawstrings on the sleeves and a floaty flounced hem in navy tulle. Yves disappears at the end of the street, Anna has such a strong urge to cry, she goes into the store. She tries the dress on. It suits her so well.
THOMAS AND PIETTE
• • •
IN THE ONLY PHOTOGRAPH of Piette that Thomas still has, her lovely legs will be long and tanned forever. Thomas has burned all the other pictures he took of her, including the nudes she had such fun posing for. Before throwing each image on the fire, he described it quietly: “Piette sitting on a stone bench, naked, her feet on tiptoes, thighs spread, doing nothing to hide her pussy, elbows on knees, her head resting in her hands, staring at the lens and laughing,” … or “Piette in the bathtub, with her chin on the white enamel rim, her buttocks emerging from the bubbles, as well as one foot.”
The flames left nothing. This photograph that Thomas did not want to burn tries to comprise all the different Piettes. Lying on a bed in a white cotton dress, with her legs in the air, she is reading through the speech that a friend wrote for their engagement party. It was an engagement just for the fun of it, but Piette had thought big and invited fifty friends to her parents’ old farmhouse.
Summer has started early, there is a warm breez
e blowing and the sky is fittingly sky blue. They have put baskets of fruit out on the large table, apricots, cherries, the first peaches.
“Come with me,” Piette says in Thomas’s ear when coffee is being served.
In just a few days in Provence, her skin has caught the sun, her hair is lighter, and her nose and shoulders have a smattering of freckles. She is pregnant: beneath her dress her small breasts have grown heavier, become firmer, the nipples larger, and, as soon as they are alone, Thomas touches them gently, filled with emotion. Angels have pussies and breasts.
“Come,” Piette says again.
She takes his hand, leads him down a path between the cypress trees. It takes them to a stream which has almost run dry, trickling over great slabs of limestone. They walk on and on through bottlebrush shrubs, stocks, and Jupiter’s beard. Piette is the one who knows every plant by name. At a turn in the path, the brook flows into a Roman-style tiled basin.
“I always used to come here when I was little,” says Piette. “I did watercolors. The only things I drew were caterpillars, centipedes, and scarab beetles, can you believe it?”
Yes, Thomas doesn’t doubt it for a moment. There isn’t a girl in the world more unusual than Piette. Later, he will take a picture of a stag beetle that she drew when she was thirteen, and have it framed.
“Do you think we’ll be happy, Thomas? Tell me about our life, tell me.”
Thomas tells her. The birth of Daniel (or Claire), the sleepless nights spent talking in the half-light, spent making love, the quarrels about whose turn it is to do the feeding, the first steps, the first words, and getting old too, together, with no fears. He describes the buildings of steel and glass that the great architect Piette will design in London, Berlin, and Tokyo. “And Métro stations, Thomas,” Piette says, “I want to build Métro stations.” Fine, let’s have some Métro stations.
Piette has lain down on the dried grass, she closes her eyes so she can concentrate on listening to Thomas, to his warm gentle voice rolling out the years to come. He says: “We’ll travel, we’ll take the children to the Greek islands.” “Will you read them the Odyssey? Will you show them dolphins and flying fish? Will I teach Claire to swim in the Aegean?” Yes, that’s right, Thomas answers every time.
Then Piette stands up, they walk around the pool and she puts her arms around him. The basin overflows through a small notch in the rim, they follow the stream through scrubland to a stone aqueduct like a miniature Pont du Gard.
The aqueduct spans a storm drain and carries the water to the large tank at Anselme de Montaîgu. The bridge is far too narrow to walk along, with a sheer drop of about twenty feet to the white rocks below.
Piette has stepped along the first few feet of the parapet. Thomas stays behind, he reaches out to her but she is too far away.
“Stop, Piette. It’s dangerous.”
She turns, standing on the stone bridge, her feet so close to the void. She speaks softly and that very softness frightens Thomas.
“Do you think I’ll be able to bring up our child, our children? I am ill, you know.”
“I know, Piette.”
Yes, Thomas knows. Manic-depressive psychosis, bipolar disorder, hypomania, cyclothymia, he has learned all the words along with Piette. He also knows every label on the boxes in that little case that goes everywhere with her: lithium nitrate, lamotrigine, benzodiazepine, and plenty more.
“Come back, Piette, please.”
“What I’ve got is a piece of shit, Thomas, it’s a piece of shit. Somewhere in this jumble of me, there’s a normal part, a part that doesn’t envy other people’s ordered lives, but then it’s my bad luck that I also have the other part that does envy them. Do you think I could ever be happier than I am today?”
“I promise you you can, my Piette. Come back.”
“You’re so soothing, Thomas, and I love you and my parents love you too, they want you to save me because they’ve never managed it. Why do I sometimes so want to be alive but also already dead? Why?”
“I love you, Piette, you’re scaring me.”
“I don’t want to die, I swear to you.”
Piette grabs Thomas’s hand, he draws her to him and holds her tight in his arms, the precipice now far away. Tears stream over their cheeks. She is still shaking.
“If this illness takes me away, Thomas, will you look after the children?”
“Stop it, Piette. We’ll come to see this aqueduct in fifty years’ time, with the children, and our grandchildren.”
“And our great-grandchildren too?”
Piette shivers, then falls silent. They walk toward the farmhouse, toward the party where people are already dancing. Thomas looks back at the stone aqueduct, the valley, and the olive trees in the sunlight, almost a Cézanne. It is the last time he sees it.
All his love will be unable to save his Piette or to triumph over her melancholia. In twenty-five years, Thomas’s entire trajectory, all his knowledge and skill will strive to do only that, to save the life of a young dead girl. With analysis he has found his feet again, but accepted? Never.
Thomas puts the photo down on the desk. If Piette looked at him now, she would see a gentle smile on Thomas’s lips. Something has changed, because he can now remember her and feel happy.
EPILOGUE
• • •
TIME WILL HAVE PASSED. It will have worked its spell. A year, two years, perhaps more.
There will be a reception at the New Morning venue in Paris. Yves Janvier will have finished Abkhazian Dominoes, which will have a different name. He will have taken Anna’s advice: love is in the title. This book, or another one, should mean—his new editor will tell him—that he now finds his readership. This party will celebrate its publication.
All the others will be there: in alphabetical order, because some sort of order is needed, Anna, Louise, Romain, Stan, Thomas. There will be a good reason for each of them to be there.
Anna’s invitation will have arrived at rue Érasme a week earlier, on a Saturday morning. As Anna’s name and address were printed, Stan will have opened the anonymous-looking envelope out of habit. Unsettled to see Yves Janvier’s name, he will have pulled himself together before handing the invitation to his wife without betraying any feeling. She will put down her cup and he will watch as she in turn feigns the same indifference. He will be grateful to her for this tactful lie. Anna will simply say: “Yves Janvier? He’s a friend. I’ll go.”
But speaking his name will make her shiver.
“I’ll go with you,” Stan will say provocatively. “We’ll get someone to babysit.”
Anna will add nothing to this. She will talk about something else. A minute later she will drop her cup.
Louise will go as Thomas’s guest. He will have met Yves the previous year when, after a public reading, he will have asked him for a dedication. Hearing his name, the writer will look up, an ironic smile on his lips: “Aren’t you the analyst of a friend of mine?”
“She has finished her analysis,” will come Thomas’s reply.
The two men will be friends from then on, good friends. But every time Yves talks about Anna and the regrets that refuse to die, Thomas will remain very discreet.
As for Romain, his presence is easily explained. He will have recently started overseeing a popular science collection for Yves’s publishers. He will be surprised to see Louise at the party. He will be thinking about remarrying. The future Mrs. Vidal will be called Natalia Vassilievna and will be twenty-nine. Without even knowing her, Louise will find her annoying. The future will prove her partly right.
After the inevitable speeches, when a group of klezmer musicians, friends of Yves’s, step onto the stage, Anna will make her excuses and slip away for a moment. When she is alone, she will search through her bag and open a very worn envelope. It holds a poem that she has read many times over.
I wanted to write a villanelle for you
To talk of fleeting time that leaves no trace,
For An
na who leaves like the morning dew
Pain and time are sometimes one, not two
And love itself has a fragile transient face,
I wanted to write a villanelle for you
What lies ahead in life, I have no clue
I must find within me the courage to embrace,
For Anna who leaves like the morning dew
Lightning bolts, fire and sparks I eschew
I need no shield to hide my face,
I wanted to write a villanelle for you
To life alone do we stay true
But desire should be given its rightful place,
For Anna who leaves like the morning dew
Rugged is our path, harsh through and through,
In the shadow of poets we venture and pace,
I wanted to write a villanelle for you,
For Anna who leaves like the morning dew
But that’s enough about love.