Enough About Love

HUGUES AND YVES

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I DON’T KNOW if I have a best friend. Sometimes I can wake up and not know how old I am. I’ve set my clock ten minutes fast to make sure I leave on time, but I now take the extra ten minutes into account, which cancels them out. I’d like to write a book with the title A Book Not Worth Reading and have it published by a company called Minor Press in a collection known as Complete Obscurity, so that I can say: “I had a book not worth reading published in complete obscurity by a minor press.” I was once left by a woman, and I cut my mattress in two, so that I didn’t have to sleep on her side. I can never find my keys when I have to go out in a hurry. I like the pillow to be cool when I go to bed. I once knew a man called Deadman who introduced himself like this: “Deadman, like dead man without the gap.” I will go to hell. I’ve watched the image of the tsunami unleashing itself onto the Indonesian coast at least ten times on television. I own sneakers, tennis shoes, climbing boots (worn only twice), lace-up walking boots, black moccasins, elegant black shoes, slippers, rubber-soled sandals, and yellow flippers. I know that my favorite film isn’t a very good film. I often wonder what would be different about the world if I didn’t exist.

Yves puts down Hugues Léger’s first book, Definition. A litany of sentences, almost a thousand of them, in which the writer sketches a self-portrait in disjointed fragments. The previous evening, Hugues killed himself, at home, with a bullet through the mouth. Anna is in Berlin for a few days, she probably does not yet know. Yves immediately wrote an obituary for Libération, and managed to arrange through a journalist friend for it to be published, even though a different article had already been approved for the page layout. In it he said this did not mean that Hugues’s last book, Autolyze, which deals with suicide, should be seen as “a will waiting to be unsealed”; it was not “the cathartic book his friends would have liked to see him write, the book that would open up the creative field he still needed to open. But Autolyze, his most accomplished book, could exist in its own right without the dim reflected light of his death, which he need not have foretold.”

The dinner Anna wanted would never happen, today’s lover would never meet yesterday’s. But Yves feels a blossoming friendliness toward Hugues, whose resolute death tries in vain to forbid friendship. He has reread his books, hoping to find in them the man Anna must have loved, and has identified a dark intelligence of life in his sentences. One he found particularly touching, violently so, was the closing sentence of Definition: “The best day of my life may already be behind me.” Before meeting Anna, Yves also thought the best day of his life was already behind him. He also knows that the woman who caused Hugues to cut his mattress in two is Anna. She is the sort of woman you might want to sacrifice a bed for.

Anna harbored more than affection for Hugues.

“You know, Hugues,” she once reassured him, “if you’re ever having difficulties, you can always come and stay with us for a few days. It wouldn’t be a problem, we have a guest room.”

One evening — two years later — he rang their doorbell, suitcase in hand. He had had a row with his partner, he was out on the street. Anna was in Normandy and Stan opened the door. He did not know what to say to the man in the hallway: he did not know him, Anna had never mentioned any invitation and, since then, Karl had been born and the guest room was now his. Stan asked Hugues in before calling Anna. She explained the new situation to her old boyfriend. Hugues did not take offense but went and slept in a hotel, in spite of Stan’s offer to put a cot in his office.

When she told Yves this anecdote, there was nostalgia in her voice. She had grown apart from Hugues, she said with regret, it would have been an opportunity to know each other in a different way, to become proper friends. But she actually said this: “It’s a shame. If Hugues had stayed with us, we could have had a different relationship.”

Yves laughed at the ambiguity. He knows that when Anna talks about “having a relationship,” it almost always means a sexual one.