Enough About Love

ANNA AND LOUISE

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TWO HUNDRED EUROS for a wool sweater, nearly a hundred for a simple black cotton scarf. Yves has hardly ever set foot in such an expensive boutique. Before Anna erupted into his life, he had no dealings with these almost empty places, half art gallery, half salon, where not one dress, not one skirt, not one coat on the racks is a duplicate, where there is often only one size — but one that seems to fit almost all the customers. All the clothes have the supreme elegance to appear not completely new.

“No, it’s not expensive, look, they’re half price,” Anna corrects him, “it’s a sale.”

Clothes are a compulsive passion of Anna’s. She follows fashion closely, knows how to work it, mix trends. Beside her, Yves slightly tarnishes the picture, with his walking shoes and his old duffel coat. She would like to dress him from head to foot, make him “sharp,” elegant. She already influences him: he sometimes wears fine shoes, dark shirts, pants with front pleats. Watching Anna in a boutique, her unselfconscious display of narcissism, amuses Yves far more than it annoys him. He senses that she wants to know just how far he will tolerate this addiction, this fondness for what she calls “an aesthetic” and which she has no intention of losing.

Anna likes being attractive, and does not want to give that up now or later, when age catches up with her. She admires those women who fight every step of the way, and still want to resist the injustices of time in their sixties. She sees nothing ridiculous about wanting to appear twenty years old right to the end. She is vigilant. One lunchtime, when Anna is walking arm in arm with Yves on the rue Oberkampf, they bump into a girlfriend of hers. The woman is still young, very slim, athletic-looking. A sudden ray of sunlight is cruel to her: in its glare, from that angle, the woman’s white skin looks like fragile ancient parchment. Anna shudders. They have barely said goodbye to the woman before Anna rushes into a pharmacy to buy some hydrating cream.

Another day, because she does not have enough time to go up to his apartment and she “doesn’t want to make love in five minutes,” he joins her downstairs, in her car. She suggests they just go for a drink in the café across the street. She takes out her bright red lipstick, eases it onto her lower lip, closes her mouth to spread it, then assesses the result in the rearview mirror. Now enhanced, she looks at him.

“Do you want me to do my eye makeup as well?”

He thinks she looks perfect.

“The actress Romy Schneider always put on makeup when her husband suggested they go out,” she adds, “even just for lunch in the restaurant downstairs.”

Mirrors are important. There are three of them in Yves’s apartment: the big one above the fireplace in the living room, the small one in the bathroom, over the sink, and the last one, a tall full-length mirror, in the bedroom, on the door of a closet. When Anna has to go home, each of them plays its part. First, in the bathroom, she checks the small details, then looks at the bigger picture in the bedroom, and finally proceeds to a general inspection in the living room.

He wonders whether this preoccupation with appearance could come between them one day. Anna’s father is right, though: you fall in love with the flaw. Yves knows this. In his apartment he has a wall light that he commissioned from a sculptor friend, and when it first arrived he was disappointed. He did not dislike it, but it was not what he expected. Now, though, that is partly what he likes about this wall light. It never quite manages to disappear, it is a palpable presence. He does not want a woman who blends in with the background either. Besides, Anna is many things, but not a wall light.

Anna cannot make up her mind between two dresses, one in pink and green, short, very 1960s Courrèges, and a longer, more sensible one in gray and red. The pretty blond woman beside her is facing the same dilemma.

“It really is very pretty,” says Anna, who has tried on the shorter one, “but I can’t wear it for work, and I’d never dare go out in it.”

“Well, I’ll buy it then,” says Louise, laughing, “I’ll wear it at the law courts under my long black robes.”