Enough About Love

STAN AND ANNA

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WHEN ANN ARRIVES HOME, it is very late. She has just left Yves and is worried she may have his smell all over her. Even though he has bought her brand of soap for that obligatory shower so a familiar fragrance can protect her from Stan’s curiosity. Although she suggested the idea, she still found its realization as crass as it was diplomatic. She has soaped herself scrupulously.

Stan is at his computer.

“Haven’t you gone to bed?” Anna asks, amazed.

“No, I was reading Archives of Ophthalmology. I was seeing what there was about Fuch’s spots. I was waiting for you.”

“You shouldn’t have. I stayed and had supper with Sarah, from the seminar.”

Stan says nothing. Anna’s lie is pointless. He would not have asked any questions. He keeps looking at the screen, to avoid looking his wife in the eye.

Anna strokes his hair, affectionately. She still remembers the exact moment she was introduced to Stan, ten years ago now. The mutual friend had joked: “Mr. Stanislas Lubliner, you’re looking for a wife, may I introduce Ms. Anna Stein, who’s looking for a husband.”

Anna laughed as she protested, but when Stan looked at her, shook her hand powerfully yet gently and held her gaze, she immediately thought, Yes, this man could be my husband, the father of my children. That day, she thought she had her future before her, as if she had opened a door onto it.

Stan has been an essential transition, a fording place. She used him to escape the cocoon of her family, and her mother — who finds Stan so irritating — instinctively knows this. Her son-in-law is first and foremost her rival, because Anna used him to break away from her. This evening, at nearly forty, Anna feels that she is still in the middle of that ford.

She takes off her shoes, puts her clothes away in the wardrobe, on automatic. She finds it extraordinary that, having felt such happiness in Yves’s arms, she so easily returns to the peaceful family comforts of the rue Érasme. She feels a sense of balance, that’s it, a sense of balance.

“With you,” she once told Yves, “I’m always going somewhere, moving forward, but I’m not balanced, I’m never stable.”

He accepted the image and replied, “There’s nothing weird about that. When you’re in motion, each instantaneous position is unstable. If you want to be in a stable position, just don’t move.”

She also told him, “With my husband, I’m on a cruise ship, in first class. Everyone always tells me that.”

Yves had no trouble picturing her lounging in a deck chair, surrounded by her family, gazing at the blur of fog along the coast, without ever worrying about pulling up to shore. He wondered whether life actually could be like the teak deck of a steamer. Then she compared him to a sailboat, indulgently granting him the prestige of two masts. The image struck him as rather cruel, but not unfair.

“I don’t know,” she added, “if it’s such a good idea giving up a steamboat for a ketch.”

Stan watches Anna moving around the room. He wants to take his wife in his arms, but she would return the hug, and he is afraid he would hold the duplicity against her.

“I’m going to have a shower, my love,” Anna says. “I can smell the sweat on me from the day, and I can’t stand it.”

Stan does not look up.

“Well, I thought you smelled really good.”

Anna does not answer. She goes to take her shower, which will help to account for the overpowering smell of soap.