Enough About Love

ANNA AND YVES

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ANNA HAS NOT SEEN YVES again since Christiane’s party. He sent her a recent piece of writing, a play for four characters, and they have arranged to meet in a bistro on the rue de Belleville.

When Anna arrives, she looks around the room, sees him, and is amazed not to have recognized him. She thought he was taller, a ridiculous idea given he is sitting down, remembers a younger man, had not noticed how much hair had deserted his forehead. He is reading a magazine, has a cup of coffee, catches sight of her, smiles. The thrill that has gripped her every other time fails to materialize. She was as apprehensive about the sensation as she was looking forward to it, and the fact that she does not feel it frustrates and placates her at the same time.

She sits down and launches straight into criticizing the dialogue, the trajectory of the play, confessing that she prefers novels. He offers to show her his first novel: he lives very close by, the coffee is much better at his apartment, she accepts. Walking beside him, the feeling grips her again, just as acute, and she welcomes it excitedly.

They cut across the tree-lined courtyard of a renovated apartment building, climb the stairs, and he opens the door to a spacious apartment with high ceilings and a warm masculine atmosphere. The huge, bright living room is littered with a jumble of things, movie lighting equipment, an écorché model in an opera hat, a driftwood sculpture. Anna walks over to the large bay window, looks at Paris gradually picked out by sunlight, the basilica of Sacré Coeur, Beaubourg to the south, the apex of the Eiffel Tower in the distance. Yves rummages through a cardboard box, takes out a book, and hands it to Anna.

“I’ve found it. There you are. Sorry about the mess, Anna. I’ve only just moved in.”

“It’s huge.”

“Yes. Too big for me and my daughter.”

“Do you rent it?”

“No, I have too many different employers to keep a landlord happy. I’ve always had to buy. I live off my capital.”

So it is possible then, Anna thinks, quashed. She had pictured a dirty, dilapidated building, a small cluttered apartment, modest means, even slight embarrassment. She wanted him to be poor, wanted his poverty to make him unthinkable, she would have preferred having some excuse at hand, wanted to be able to say reproachfully: “Whatever sort of life could you offer my children?”

“I promised you a coffee. Over here.”

Anna cannot help smiling at the American-style kitchen: she and Stan have the same design, from the same Swedish supplier.

She walks ahead of him, he breathes in her perfume. She moves very slowly. Yves will learn later that when she cannot cope with tension, she slows her pace as if the moment itself were taking all her energy. Now she stops altogether, suffocating. Yves’s arms are around her, she does not push him away, his arms turn her, she pivots, Yves draws her to him, she half opens her lips, he takes them. Without a word, he leads her to the bedroom, she lets herself be led.