Enough About Love

YVES AND ANNA

• •

ANNA WILL BE FORTY TOMORROW. For the first time in years, she has not planned a party. She could not imagine celebrating her birthday without Yves, and, in her indecision, she waited until it was too late to send out invitations.

She is walking along the street, in a hurry. She is meeting Yves and he has promised her a present. Not long after they met, he gave her a ring, a silver one, which swivels and opens like an oyster to reveal its secret, a yellow diamond nestled in golden mother-of-pearl. But this piece of jewelry has stayed in the bottom of a drawer, under a silk scarf.

Of course Yves is already at the café, he is reading the paper, in no rush. Anna hates being waited for impatiently, she hates being a prisoner to someone else’s attachment. She wants something that does not exist: a lover who adores her, but is utterly indifferent.

She has hardly sat down opposite him before he hands her a small package wrapped in red crepe paper. She opens it, it contains five books, all identical. They are small, ivory-colored, about sixty pages long.

She looks up again. Almost frightened.

“Don’t worry,” says Yves. “Only ten copies were made. You have half the edition there.”

“Thank you,” says Anna. “Can I read it now?”

“I hope you will,” Yves replies. “It’s not very long.”

Where do our memories file themselves away? Broca proved that the left hemisphere controls speech, Penfield maintains that the temporal lobes house memory. So an arrangement of neurons, a chemistry within the brain stocks the images, sounds, and smells that I call memories of you. Why is it my hands themselves hold the memory of your skin?

I want forty memories of you, Anna. For the reason you can guess. Forty is a lot, think of Ali Baba’s thieves. And forty is too few: it means resigning myself to never retracing a gesture you make, one so specific to you, so intimate; not describing the sight of a street with your silhouette outlined against it; not referring to something you said even though it touched me; it means abandoning certain characteristics on the grounds that I have already put them in writing, somewhere else.

Describing too precisely is pointless, and I am conscious of the risk I run, which is platitude. And yet I run it, for memory itself runs a greater risk and that is forgetting, given that forgetting is merely the natural fate of all memory. But what I know above all else is that each of these memories is here, set down in words in order to accomplish the impossible: never to lose you.

ONE

It’s a very vague recollection, a haze of a memory. You’re talking, standing in the middle of the huge foyer in an apartment on the Left Bank. I say “you,” but that’s absurd because I don’t yet know that you are you. The people who will play a part in our lives are always strangers the day before we meet them, and writing it has less to do with naïveté than wonderment.

You’re talking about incest and rape. Your eyes reveal a rare vivaciousness, your voice has a penetrating lilting quality, your diction is precise, confident, I detect an urgency in your quick-fire delivery that is not related to the subject but to the way you are. The clothes you’re wearing seem to float over you. Your hair skims your shoulders. I don’t look at you much, only because I so desperately want to look at you. I don’t want my eagerness to betray my growing desire, I don’t want my too obvious attention to embarrass you. Even now, I regret those first minutes when I didn’t allow myself to grasp you more fully, see you more clearly.

TWO

You may remember this better than me. We’re having tagliatelle al pesto ligure for dinner in that Italian restaurant on the rue Mazarine, surrounded by people I know nothing about. We don’t know each other, I’m drawn to you, aroused by you. If you had not followed us there for dinner, I would have gone home.

We’re talking about the Holocaust, the camps, Belzec, and it’s more than I can take, I can’t hide the tears in my eyes; later you will tell me you found that moving. You suddenly say these words: “my husband, my children.” I think: obviously. A woman like you couldn’t not have ties. The distress I feel when you indicate that nothing is possible lays me bare, it tells me how lonely I’ve always been, without you. A self-evident fact comes to light: I’m no longer in any doubt that you are a woman for me.

You’re the one who will use the word “thunderbolt.” But later, in a profile published in the periodical Quinzaine, when the journalist asks me the ten key dates in my life, my last milestone will be: “September this year. Struck by a thunderbolt.”

THREE

Let’s say this right away, there will be no chronology, no true logic, and definitely no hierarchy. The last memory described will simply be the last. It will just be the face of a die showing when it has stopped rolling, because every die thrown eventually stops rolling. As far as this third memory is concerned, it isn’t in its rightful place, but who cares.

It’s an autumn evening, you drop by my apartment toward the end of the afternoon, and bring some pastries for the three of us, because my daughter is with me: an apple tart, a pear tart, and a custard tart. You have split the three pastries and you’re eating the filling, leaving the crust and bottom. I point out to my daughter that she mustn’t behave like that if she’s invited to someone’s house. You burst out laughing: you’ve just realized that you’ve “made yourself at home.”

You’re no longer visiting.

FOUR

We’re naked in bed, lying beneath the sheets. You’re listing things you like: going under bridges, looking down over open countryside, scouring your mind to find the exact word for something, feeling the men you love looking at you … You haven’t mentioned “buying clothes.” I remind you of this one; you’re amazed not to have thought of it. I wanted to remember everything: you also like to have a very soft light on when you sleep alone at night, old churches, being wanted and being taken, and quattrocento art. In no particular order.

FIVE

You’re asleep. You’re lying on your back with your knees together, legs bent and feet splayed. The whole arrangement forms a very stable pyramid that I can’t push over. There’s a draft under the duvet and it’s not warming up. No one can sleep in that position. And yet you’re asleep, fast asleep, no chance of getting you to move an inch. The following morning you won’t believe me, obviously.

SIX

It’s a telephone conversation. We will have a thousand of them, and that’s not much of an exaggeration. This one is about the five hundredth.

The train is cutting across the Moran region, I’m drinking coffee in the restaurant car, watching the undulating fields scud past. I hear you say: “I was thinking, for our wedding I’ll wear a red dress.” I will wear, not I would, I can feel the difference. If you’re picturing your clothes then it’s really serious. For the next ten minutes we talk about the ceremony, the venue, the guests, the musicians, I know you’re joking, I also know that you’re enjoying the game, that it gives you a right to project us into the taboo that a union between us would represent.

From time to time, the train passes a village. I spot a church tower, there is probably also a register office, but almost certainly no synagogue.

SEVEN

One more round on the carousel at the Jardin des Plantes and your little girl climbs down from the wooden horse. Lea hasn’t succeeded in hooking the pink pompom, despite the best efforts of the woman in the booth: a redheaded child — in a better position and more competitive — managed to get it before her every time. We sit at a table by the refreshment stand, two coffees, one hot chocolate. Lea has forgotten her scooter and you have to go and get it, so she and I are left facing each other, watching each other in silence, me rather cautiously looking down, she mischievously peering up.

It’s the first time we’ve met properly. I think she looks like you, despite her blond hair and blue eyes. You come back over, and we head toward the largest conservatory. All of a sudden, Lea sneaks in between the two of us. She takes your hand and then, by surprise, mine, and starts swinging between us. With that one gesture, your little girl is giving me permission to exist, and her tiny hand is offering me a position that it alone has any right to grant.

We go down the steps into the conservatory, with Lea between us skipping and laughing. Thanks to her, we are side by side for the first time.

EIGHT

I heard the water running, secretly opened the door to the bathroom, and now I’m watching you. You’re naked, taking a shower. Mind you, one of your friends has given you a piece of unfaithful woman’s advice: “Never smell of soap when you go home in the evening.” Under the circumstances, it’s difficult to do without it, but at least let’s make sure it’s the same soap as usual. I have bought myself some. You arch your back, avoiding getting your hair wet so there is no moisture on it to give you away. Your buttock shadows into a dimple I have never seen before, your smooth skin forms goose bumps in the cold, your nipples are still erect.

You will tell me, later, that you like very hot showers, or very cold ones, showers that produce a burning sensation. The window behind you looks out over the city, its lights coming on as night falls. You’re not aware of me watching you; soon you will turn, will be surprised, and, delighted, you will smile at me.

NINE

We’re walking down the hill on the rue du Chevalier de la Barre (1743–1760). I have my arm around your waist and you’ve allowed me to, even though Paris may be full of all these “people you know,” which means that from the Place de la Concorde to the Marais I’m not allowed to kiss you. But, in the middle of the street, you take my hand and put it on your ass, spontaneous and provocative in equal measures. My hand seems happy with the arrangement, and so does your ass. I immediately want you. One day you will formulate a sentence referring to, if I remember, “the role played by desire in the corpus of our relationship,” and I will smile. For now, I like feeling your buttocks moving beneath my hand.

TEN

It’s just a desk, straight lines, a modern feel dating from the sixties. There it is, abandoned on the sidewalk on the rue des Abbesses. You really like it, so do I. You love hunting around for antiques, I thought you would. You decide to take it and go to get your car; we have some trouble putting it into the trunk. You’re planning to paint the steel feet red. Or black. I agree. Where will it live? With you, in Paris or Burgundy, or, one day, with us? That last option gets my vote. Either way, it’s our first piece of furniture. Wherever it lives its desk life, it will bring you back to memories of us.

ELEVEN

I also have memories of you that don’t include you, memories of the two of us that you won’t know about at all. Where you are such a strong presence in me that your absence is almost imperceptible. It’s the imprint of you on the sand of me, the silent melody that your existence leaves in me. In one of these memories, I’m walking along the cloisters of an abbey, sheltered from the rain by a Roman vaulted ceiling. I sit down on some stone stairs, surrounded by the sound of footsteps, voices, children calling. All I can think of is you. The day before, I held you in my arms for the first time, and you’ve invaded me already. Sentences about you come to me, and I write them down, with no clear intention yet. Legend would have it that a piece of shrapnel lodged in Shostakovich’s brain meant that, if he tilted his head a particular way, he could hear unknown pieces of music. You are my Shostakovich’s shrapnel. Shostakovich’s Shrapnel would make a good title for a novel. Life is full of good titles for novels.

TWELVE

I know the exact place. I could trace the outline of your feet and mine with white chalk, the way a forensic scientist draws a line around the body at a crime scene, or a dance teacher makes diagrams of basic dance positions. It’s here, in the kitchen, between the refrigerator and the wooden table. You’re in my apartment for the first time, you’re walking ahead of me and you suddenly stop. It’s so obvious that I should take you in my arms. Besides, I am walking so close behind you that, if I don’t, I’ll run into you. I put my arms around you, my chest touches your back, my mouth reaches for the back of your neck, you turn in my arms and we kiss.

One day, I’ll draw those marks on the floor tiles. They’ll prove to you that you’re not a mermaid, because mermaids don’t have feet.

THIRTEEN

You’re succumbing to tiredness, your breathing’s getting quieter, your eyes closing in the warm bed. You suddenly start talking about tobacco pouches. What you’re saying is incoherent, but even so I try to make some sense of it (I know the people close to you who do have tobacco tins); I’ve forgotten what I said to you, but you use the words “tin” and “red paper,” your words growing less distinct. I haven’t grasped that you’re already asleep, haven’t yet discovered that, of all the threads connecting you to the conscious world, speech is the most enduring, the one you consent to relinquish only after you have sunk into sleep.

FOURTEEN

Without thinking what you’re doing, and not even aware you’re doing it, I think, you put your hand firmly against my temple and force my head down onto the sheet. Either way, it’s clear that you want to use me to your own ends. I’m surprised at first, so surprised that my neck — which is as amazed as the rest of me — resists for a moment before giving in to your invitation. Then I laugh, and so do you, about the intimacy between our bodies over which we have no control.

FIFTEEN

You drag me into a clothing store, opposite the pretty Enfants-Rouges market on the rue de Bretagne. It’s the first time. I’ve not yet gauged how important jewelry and fabrics are to you. You go into the boutique with all the confidence and simplicity of a regular, fingering dresses and tops, asking my opinion, which I give. The prices seem high but I’m far from informed: in the months to come, I will learn a lot. You slip into a fitting room to try on a denim dress, through the gap in the white canvas drapes I glimpse your hips and red lace panties. I don’t know you well enough yet to risk popping my head in and gazing at you almost naked. But just for the time it takes you to try on a dress, I like being the man beside you in life: I think the hat fits me pretty well.

SIXTEEN

The telephone rings, and it’s you. Your breasts are “enormous,” that’s the word you use, because you’re pregnant, you’re in absolutely no doubt: “I know my body,” you say, unequivocally. I’m at Roissy airport, about to board for Berlin, and, given that I believe in this pregnancy and feel no shred of fear at the prospect, I see something clearly: I want a life with you. You hang up and there I am, for a few hours, the potential father of a little Sarah or a little, now what would it be, Jude?

And, in spite of the inevitable drama, the tears to come and the heartache, do you know what? I’m happy.

SEVENTEEN

“Do you know what?” That’s your phrase. A relic from adolescence that you haven’t shaken off, a linguistic weakness I find touching. What do you use it for, what role does it play in the way you speak? Is it a pause you allow yourself to give you a better chance to formulate an idea that comes to you? I take the question seriously every time, I answer no, quietly, which is my own discreet way of saying how interested I am in you, and how much I care too.

EIGHTEEN

It’s already dark on the rue de Grenelle, you’re back with your children. But, so that I don’t have to leave you quite yet, I’m following the three of you around Monoprix, with no valid excuse.

Karl and Lea are energetically maneuvering between the aisles with their mini shopping carts decked out with flags. On your instructions, they pile up cornflakes, sugar, yogurts … For their sakes, you transform the chore of shopping into an exciting game, a treasure hunt. I briefly interpret this frenzy as your fear that life might stop being a party, as if you owed it — to yourself and your children — to be a fairy.

A fragile side of you emerges from this feverish activity as an attentive wife and mother, and I find it touching, it bowls me over. I restrain my mounting urge to take the kindly sorceress in my arms, and protect her from the demons of routine and boredom.

NINETEEN

You think you know how to go about catching me. You do. But how can I describe my desire, the way my hands thirst for your skin, my lips for yours? There’s no point describing what we do, choosing one thing among a thousand. That’s what I’m doing here.

Our nakedness, side by side. I like looking at you naked, you like me looking at you. You’re lying on your stomach, desirable, offered up, but a man’s body doesn’t always obey him so readily; and you may deny it, but that is something you definitely regret.

I am sitting on the bed looking at your nakedness, when your buttocks turn and rise up toward me, their every curve wanting to arouse me, their soft, soft skin intended just for me. You smile, and this gesture gets the better of me, I’m gripped by desire, you are mine and I take you.

TWENTY

It’s very late, you have to go: your husband is on duty, the children with their grandparents, but your guilt won’t let you sleep at my apartment, it persuades you to go home.

It’s winter, the weather’s cold. As usual, I walk you to your car, expecting to accompany you to your neighborhood and come back by taxi afterward. It’s a ritual we have, a way of stealing another half hour from the time we don’t have together. We’re getting close to the Renault, I see you stop dead in your tracks. There’s a man sitting in the driver’s seat, sound asleep. You’re petrified, unable to make a single move. I knock on the window, in vain, I open the door, pat the man on the shoulder gently, then more insistently. He wakes, with some difficulty, and I ask him, not unkindly, to get out of the car.

This homeless person is young, probably a foreigner, Polish, Russian … he’s embarrassed, mutters a few words of apology, he hauls himself out of the vehicle, still groggy with sleep, and walks off into the night. He’s left his backpack on the passenger seat, I run after him to give it back. You’re still standing on the sidewalk, shocked, unable to get into the car that’s been desecrated by an intruder. You feel sick, you’re still shaking. “I’ll drive, if you like,” I suggest. You agree, you know I’m happy to shoulder the role of a man you can depend on. You’ve just discovered a facet of me you didn’t know, and it seems to amaze you.

We drive to your apartment, you seem flattened by exhaustion. You say, “You’re nice,” and it’s not meant as a reproach, even though you hate people being “nice.” I shake my head but you insist: “Yes, you are, you’re nice. You were very nice to that man. You’re not frightened of people, you’re not frightened of approaching them.” You suddenly like the fact that I can be nice. From now on, it’s no longer just a sign of weakness to you.

TWENTY-ONE

Your perfume: Eau de lierre. A “nose” would define it like this: the head notes are very green with a vegetal elegance, until the ivy discreetly gives way and eclipses itself before tones of stone and dry wood. It could be a fragrance worn by an effete man, but on your skin the warm musks and spices win over. We’re already a long way from our animal state, and when I close my eyes, I can’t conjure up that smell as well as I can the image of your face. It will always be the color of the back of your neck where I completely lose myself, and, if I lose you, it will be the smell of my nostalgia.

TWENTY-TWO

It’s an evening in December, the car is pulling away from the neon lights on the Place Clichy and easing as best it can onto the busy Boulevard des Batignolles. You’re off to pick up your children.

I don’t know how we’ve ended up talking about death, but you suddenly say: “If I had a terminal illness, a cancer, I don’t think I’d have any hesitation, I’d come and live with you.” Perhaps it’s out of modesty, but I quote Woody Allen: “Life is a terminal illness.” But you’re already parking, and your words are still worrying away at me.

I measure the scope of your declaration. It’s not the emergency itself you’re talking about here, but the requirement for truthfulness that emergencies demand of us. All at once, I grasp something else, between the lines: that, with me, you would leave the serenity of an illusory eternity where your days are not counted, for an unreliable world in which they are. Illness would finally launch you into that world where time actually passes. I understand what it is that I give you, it’s being afraid.

TWENTY-THREE

A café outside the Scuola Musica, in winter. You’ve left me to look after Lea, or maybe it’s Lea who’s keeping an eye on me. At first she wants to play a board game with kings and queens, then, because she gets bored with it or because she wants to show me different games, picture dominoes. She has hot chocolate, I have coffee, as usual: I like feeling she and I have our own habits. She stirs the froth with her spoon, I make sure she doesn’t spill any. You’ve taken Karl to his music theory lesson, but you come right back.

To Lea, I’m Yves, mommy’s friend who sometimes has a suitcase because he’s going a long way away. I don’t know what makes you think of this question but you ask: “Who’s the wolf?” “Me!” Lea replies artlessly. Then, very pleased with herself, she adds: “Mommy is mommy wolf and Yves is daddy wolf.” You’re embarrassed but also upset, you correct her, bringing the real daddy back into the equation.

I can still picture Lea, with that impish look you sometimes have, bursting out laughing.

TWENTY-FOUR

It’s a memory of memories. You leading me through your apartment, to your bedroom. You go to a closet and take out some cardboard boxes. Photographs, lots of them. Then you take me to the kitchen so you can show them to me properly.

It’s your life.

You with your little boy, under a Christmas tree. Your daughter running across a garden I don’t recognize, another one of her, with your husband. You hesitate for a moment, then show me still more photos, your wedding I think, though I’m not sure. I’m launched into your world, submerged by a wave of snapshots of your life before, where I don’t belong. I understand what you’re doing, what it means, the desire for intimacy that it presupposes, but I’m slowly drowning in this tide of pictures. You don’t notice, but imperceptibly I take a step back, to avoid suffocating. You rummage through the box some more. One by one, you take out pictures of yourself, set them to one side, give them to me.

I know who took them, who you’re smiling at, but all of a sudden that doesn’t matter. It’s you that you’re giving to me. I accept the gift.

TWENTY-FIVE

You’ve run to get here, late, to this restaurant by the flea market in Saint-Ouen which, over the last few weeks, has become our Monday meeting place. You sit down opposite me, I can tell from the haphazard way you’re moving that something’s going on. You’re putting on a sort of performance, saying you’re sick, some infection you can’t pin down, later you go on to call yourself a “stupid bitch,” not a word you normally use. You don’t want to meet my eye, you don’t feel any love for me anymore, your desire has evaporated. You’re not all anger, but I’m in pieces.

A gaping hole opens before me. I picture myself permanently and irrevocably indebted to you, and yours. You know how the story ends, which is almost laughable, so this memory is only there to describe that moment, that feeling of vertigo, the capsizing, when our relationship switched from happy and lighthearted to ugly and messy. A stain, that’s the word that comes to mind at the time, but I don’t say it for fear it could be so accurate that it spatters onto us. But it keeps coming back to me, filling my whole head, stopping me from speaking, when I really should speak.

TWENTY-SIX

We’re in the car heading for Paris, I’m driving. My hand has eased between your bare legs, where it feels happy. A few minutes ago you were still wearing jeans. At a service station, where you thought I wouldn’t dare stop, you swapped them for a dress. My stroking becomes more focused, my right hand growing adventurous while my left drives attentively. Your thighs open for my fingers, they creep still farther up and start having fun. I’m playing with your desire in the same way that you’re playing with mine. What we’re doing is more spontaneous than provocative, more to do with amazement than perversity. Your whole body smiles at mine, happily.

TWENTY-SEVEN

We’re in the toy department of Bon Marché. You’re looking for a princess dress for Lea and a cowboy outfit for Karl. You move away a few feet, and I watch you surrounded by Barbie dolls, Playmobil garages, and boxes of Legos. I follow you through the aisles: undecided, you call the children’s father for advice, then, almost before you’ve hung up, you want my opinion. I give it, amazed that you see me as such an intimate stranger. You’re leaving the door to your life ajar for me, while I stray through the cuddly toys, gazing at them tenderly with a bittersweet taste in my mouth.

TWENTY-EIGHT

“Take care of yourself.” Those are the words you’ll leave with. Really leave. We’re standing next to the car, opposite the Gare de l’Est rail station, it’s December, a beautiful day.

Only minutes earlier, you spoke the few sentences which make it impossible for us to stay together with the same happy-go-lucky feeling as before, sentences that mean I have to say I’m going. Not leaving now would mean losing you, and that’s why I’m leaving, to keep intact the possibility of coming back to you.

“Take care of yourself.” The tender, tender words a father says to his son before he goes away, to die. They tell me you will no longer be there to watch over me, but have you ever watched over me? You head for your Renault, turn back to face me. Then, after briefly catching my eye, your body suddenly rebels, throws itself at me, holds me tightly. For a fleeting moment, I fill myself with its smell, its warmth, then you resist and break away from me, for real. The wind carries off your sweet perfume, by the time the car starts up and drives off, there’s nothing of you left, I walk mechanically toward the bus that will take me home.

I cross the street on autopilot, watching out for the number 31 bus speeding past, I have no desire to die, the pain makes me feel unbelievably alive.

TWENTY-NINE

This twenty-ninth memory is of a short night spent writing feverishly. Remember: a little iron box, stolen because you hid it in your handbag. I gave it to you four days after we met. It held “Twenty-six tiny moments between us,” printed on pieces of paper the size of a Métro ticket. One of them said:

I’ve done the math, we’ve seen each other

Three times, it’s almost unbelievable.

Do you think you can dream something like this?

That none of it is real?

THIRTY

They’ve sold two and a half million of your Renault Twingo cars, a million of them in and around Paris, and almost one in three is black (I’ve checked). It’s in this virtually invisible model that we’re driving around the Place de la Concorde. It’s dark and raining, the windows are opaque with condensation. I try to kiss your neck. You protest sharply. “I know everyone around here.”

THIRTY-ONE

It’s a photocopy of an insurance statement that I’ve lovingly kept. You slammed on your brakes on the rue Pouchet in the Seventeenth Arrondissement, opposite the passage Berzélius, and the car behind ran into yours. On the back of the statement, where it says “Circumstances of the Accident,” still shaken by the event, you wrote: “My vehicle (A) must of knocked …”

You show it to me later, laughing at your slipup, your mistake. Sometimes, quite often actually, I read that statement, and it immediately makes me smile. You who always do the right thing, who’s always so precise in her choice of words, you easily get swamped by the contingencies of daily life. What that statement, that “must of,” reveals is a trace of you rubbing up against the world.

THIRTY-TWO

You’re having a bath (a very hot one) in my apartment. I sit down beside you on the wooden step and slip my right hand into the water, up to the elbow, it comes to rest on you. It’s an instinctive move, I have so little control over what I do when I’m with you. Talking alone takes such a lot of my concentration. My fingers glide over your breasts, your hips, stroke your stomach, move down between your legs. I kiss you and your lips open slightly, your tongue plays with mine, you close your eyes. My middle finger is intrepid but respectful, pushing gently into your pussy and between your buttocks. I fill myself with the moment, already aware that this sensual experience will only ever be a sensory memory, will never be captured by words trying to define it.

THIRTY-THREE

A text message makes my cell phone vibrate. I look at the time, and know that you’ve typed it at Kennedy Airport, where you’re about to take flight AF 544 to Paris — Charles de Gaulle. In a moment of panic before getting onto the Boeing, you write: “if anythg happens 2 me, my 2008 notebks r 4 u.” Still a respect for punctuation. I can’t help smiling and this is the reply you get: “U r crazy. But I want somethg 2 happen 2 u.”

In one of Virginia Woolf’s novels, a woman dies in an accident, a suicide perhaps? She bequeaths her personal diary to her husband. In it he discovers the existence of another man, a more and more prevalent presence as he reads on. He sets out to find this other man and, particularly, the other man’s wife.

If you died, how would I dare claim those notebooks? I can’t imagine it and yet I would do it. What you’re offering me is the subject of a play: one man knocks at the door of another man who is in mourning. They don’t know each other. The first simply says: “I’ve come to ask for your wife’s notebooks, the ones she’s written over the last year. We were in love. She left them to me.”

THIRTY-FOUR

The Porte de la Chapelle one Friday afternoon, at nearly four o’clock. I get into your little car and we head for your children’s school, you’re late, of course.

All these journeys — how many of them were there, twenty, thirty? — get confused in my memory like a multicolored mosaic. Over all those months, we saw blue skies and gray ones, driving rain and summer sun. You wore jeans, black dresses, white skirts, woolen sweaters, floaty blouses, you were too hot and you were very cold. But the rue Saint-Martin was always the same, noisy and stagnant with traffic, inside your black Renault, laden with files and papers. Our conversations covered everything and nothing.

One hour. Every Friday. I smile.

THIRTY-FIVE

Florence. I’m there for a reading and have succeeded in taking you with me. From among all the postcard memories, and other more intimate ones, I’ve chosen a dinner we had in a chic restaurant with working-class decor, as so many of them in that city are.

We’re sitting side by side and you’re talking to Luciana, the young blond woman opposite you. From time to time I turn toward you and Luciana smiles, touched by my little look which means I’m watching over you. She recognizes in it the look of attentive kindness her husband gives her when his banking job means he has to take her along to dinners with clients, and he’s worried she’s getting bored. Now it’s your turn to laugh, and because there is a growing friendship between you, you mention your husband and children, that other life I don’t belong to, and you take my hand, in a spontaneous gesture that expresses your love and your uncertainties.

THIRTY-SIX

It’s a Saturday in late October: I’m walking through the Père-Lachaise cemetery where tourists wander among the graves, getting lost down its pathways. I go slowly in the direction of the crematorium.

Hugues Léger’s body is being burned beneath the zinc cupola. I write that sentence in all its extraordinary violence. I can picture you, mute and petrified, confronted with this, with Hugues’s second, definitive disappearance. I came so that I could be there by your side, without asking whether I could. I took the initiative, it seemed the right thing to do. I sit down on a bench, send you a text, and wait.

For reasons that still escape me, now that Hugues Léger is no more, I feel a closeness to him that has nothing morbid about it: I’m not fascinated by death, but his suicide has affected me. I would even go so far as to say, without feeling presumptuous, that it overwhelms me. I know how different we were, but can now see our similarities. Is the best day of my life already behind me too?

It’s as I sit on that bench that I realize with genuine sadness that I let a friendship — between men, between writers — pass me by, and that you would have liked it if we’d become friends.

You don’t seem to figure in this memory, and yet it’s for you, and you alone, that I’m here, on this bench.

THIRTY-SEVEN

You’re asleep, I’m not. You fell asleep in my arms without completely leaving me but now you really are fast asleep, already.

Propped on one elbow with my head resting on my hand, I watch you. You snore almost imperceptibly. Your eyes are closed, your mouth half open, and your lips sketch that very soft, very rare smile — and this is not a cliché—that belongs to you alone. You’re beautiful, free. Thoughts come to me: What are you dreaming about? Where are you at that moment? Who are you that I’m so afraid of losing you, why do I so want you to be mine, why am I sure you’ll never be completely mine?

I’m ashamed of this longing for ownership that I can’t quite put my finger on. It reveals my share of the terror that a woman’s freedom to desire arouses in men. I don’t like the dumb beast in me awakened by the fear that one day you’ll no longer desire me. I wish I could be serene, feel no more doubt.

I lie on my back, I can’t get to sleep.

THIRTY-EIGHT

Stay a couple more minutes, you say. We had said goodbye for the last time, yet again. But then my cell phone rang and it was you, we talked, possibly just to hear each other’s voices one last time. I was about to hang up: “Stay a couple more minutes.” It’s okay, I stay a couple more minutes. I don’t say anything and neither do you, I can just hear your breathing, from time to time. Your breathing is more devastating than any words you could have said. Time passes, I walk up the street, reach my building and go in, but I stay in the lobby, leaning against the wall. We stay like that in silence, for a long time. I’m sure that, like me, you’re filling yourself up with this shared silence, in anticipation of a much longer one to come, one we won’t be sharing anymore.

THIRTY-NINE

Of course, this little book is coming to an end and I’m regretting it already. I promised myself I would be strict, but just remember: a text telling me you’re going to do four things (the first was to have your ears pierced); me almost like a teenager the first (and only) time I met your parents; your little boy deciding to hit me by way of a greeting at Luc’s concert; you, at the wheel of your car, on the first day, struggling to fasten your seat belt and, when I try to help, uttering a polysemic “Oh, are you getting involved?”; you at your house, wearing a black dress and a doubly secret ring; your voice reading Dorothy Parker to me on the banks of the Seine; your hand dragging me into the corner of the kitchen where the neighbors can’t see us; you kissed avidly under a porch in the Jardin des Batignolles; and you, again, always you, coming down the stairs of a library where I’m doing a reading of one of my books, discovering my public persona, feeling thrilled and in love.

FORTY

My die has finally come to rest on this surface. I promised a lack of logic and yet there has been some: this last memory is imaginary, it happens at some time in the near future as I write to you now. I don’t know where we’ve arranged to meet, I don’t know if we’ve even really split up, I only know the date, around January 10.

I look at you and say: “I have a present for you. For your fortieth birthday.” I produce this tiny book. You read the title, leaf through it for a moment. You may be moved, perhaps very moved. I know what you want more than anything: for me to work. This is a piece of work, and you can tell. You know that every sentence was written and rewritten, not just for you but for everyone else too, you sense that what you have in your hand is the raw material for another piece, a longer one, still to come. But, in spite of everything, this is a book, a book that really was written for you.

I won’t add, “I wish it had been longer,” because that’s not true, or “I wish I’d had more time,” because I did have time, almost too much. I wish I could have written it in a week, been caught up in writing it and not in the upheavals of our relationship. That is not how it happened, I wasn’t granted that whole week.

Because I myself am moved, disarmed, I might quite easily whisper an “I love you,” already regretting that sometimes that’s all I can think to say to you.

And if you can read one more sentence, and these few words, then a real declaration could never bring a real book to a conclusion.