Enough About Love

ANNA AND YVES

• •

YVES. YVES. However many times Anna Stein says it, she cannot find anything attractive about the name. She would have preferred something else, not so unfashionable, less dated. A Lucas, a Serge, or a David. Something less “French,” more international, more cosmopolitan, a name that did not smell of the earth beneath our feet: I can’t get used to the idea that he’s called Yves, the idea that I’m in love with an Yves.

Yves, then. She has called him three times already, for reasons that are only too obviously excuses. Saying “Hello, Yves?” is exhilarating. That in itself is an adventure, feeling the breath leave her as she pronounces his name. She likes his voice, on the telephone, how he holds on to every word for a moment, slowing the pace, she is unsettled by the way he seems to struggle to find the words, the way he concentrates and hesitates. She likes his intonation, his timbre, his almost writerly turn of phrase. She sees an intensity in this, and that intensity cuts right through her, she reads a spirit of life into it, something he carries in him, not something she could manifest. This man owes her nothing. He did not wait for her to get on with his life, and the foreign territory of a man’s past in which she does not exist draws her in like a whirlwind.

Until now, Anna only knew one Yves: Yves Beaudouin, her manager. Usually when she came home from work she would simply tell Stan: Yves this, Yves that. But yesterday she added his last name: Yves Beaudouin, as if this specifying were needed.

Stan was taken aback and asked his wife, rather sardonically, “Is there another one?”

Anna looked at him, frowned, feigned bafflement.

“Another Yves,” he explained.

She concealed her embarrassment, smiled: “You’re so silly.”

Of course an answer like that was an admission. She would have liked it if Stan had guessed and pressed the matter, but because he did not notice, because he refused yet again to open his eyes, her guilt feels correspondingly slighter, and now look, he’s even more guilty than she is.