Enough About Love

ANNA AND YVES

• •

DESIRE WILL NOT ALLOW for simple explanations. When a cat runs after a mouse, it is not because cat molecules are drawn to mouse molecules. Anna does not understand why her body likes Yves’s hands so much, no more than Yves can explain what drives his hands toward Anna’s body.

Because she allows him to do everything, everything feels natural. Nothing is shameless anymore. Or is it because nothing goes against nature that there is nothing she forbids him? All the same, one evening, after he has taken her way beyond the bounds of convention, she is suddenly worried and whispers: “If you write a book about us one day, don’t talk about that.”

“What do you mean ‘that’?” Yves asks.

“You know what I mean. That.”

Yves shakes his head, kisses her. Why worry, he could never put it into words.

Anna does not like Yves’s desire to be derived from her own. She would sometimes like his passion not to be addressed to her, would like him to take her “as a woman,” “just like that,” so she is reduced to an object in his hands, losing herself in an almost mechanical thirst for sex. She once had a lover—“a bit of a prick,” she admits — who, seeing her naked, said, “A woman is such a beautiful thing,” and that sentence struck her as the most wonderful declaration. Yves, by contrast, finds it utterly predictable, naive, the pronouncement of a truck-driver poet, of a romantic in a wifebeater.

“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.