Enough About Love

ANNA AND YVES

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ANNA STEIN’S OUTFIT IS DISTINCTIVE, as usual. Wide white pants that fit tightly over her buttocks to define them clearly, a fleetingly transparent, midnight blue blouse, and a shiny, black trench coat. She chooses her clothes carefully, her long tall figure allowing her to wear things that would be fatal on others. She sees herself as slim, lives being slim as synonymous with being rigorous. Gaining weight, she is convinced, is always a lapse.

Anna Stein sits down and apologizes for being late: her little girl, Lea, has a fever and there was nowhere to park. She gets comfortable on the couch and goes straight back to the meeting she mentioned the day before yesterday. She repeats the words she used then — he is a writer — and reveals his name, Yves. Thomas erases the X in his diagram from before, replaces it with a Y, and draws a second oval around the A to include her and her husband, Stanislas. Finally, he draws a third one, still including Anna Stein, but to which he adds his own name, Thomas. Anna Stein is now at the intersection of three rings, and no longer seems to belong to any of them.

Yves is “the same age as Stan,” her husband, “or not much older.” She thinks he is “pretty broke” and “besides, he lives in Belleville.” Writing has always been a fantasy for Anna Stein; she suspects Yves may be its embodiment. She has had no appetite for a week. “I don’t eat anything anymore, I’ve already lost five pounds, at least.” It seems to frighten her. “I don’t know what’s happening to me.” The evening of the very day they met, almost before she got through the door at home, she thinks she admitted everything to Stan. All she said, speaking casually as if discussing some pleasant surprise, was that she had met a man at a reception, “a man she found unsettling,” “for the first time in a long time.” Stan could find nothing to say in response and almost immediately talked about something else, Lea’s music theory lesson, how well she was getting on, an appointment Anna’s brother had made for a vision problem. Anna Stein would have liked her husband to react or, better, for him to act, for him to know instinctively that she was only saying it so he would hold her back. But Stanislas did not grasp, or did not want to grasp, the weight of her words. He allowed a window to be opened to her desires, and it makes her furious, disappointed, and delighted all at once.

Yves gave her his latest book, with the unusual title The Two-Leaf Clover, and wrote the most anodyne of dedications in it. The book, which is very short, relates with ferocious intensity an emotional disaster, a restrained and clinical dissection of a lover’s fantasy: a story as old as time itself about an older man who, having become infatuated with a young woman and having seduced her a bit, but not enough, decides to go and join her in Ireland — which explains the title — where he collides head-on with her withering indifference in the most magnificent fiasco. The irony with which it is told made her laugh, and she thought: this man’s an expert. She also found it reassuring that she liked his style, his lightness of touch. She is an attentive reader, critical and perceptive, she would have hated him to disappoint her, for him to write like someone who churned out novels, but she was probably in no state to be disappointed. She liked the fact that he could talk about love like that. But something in the way she says “talk about love” this morning makes it sound like an actual character. Thomas writes a note.

Because Thomas is paying close attention, meticulous attention even, it is one of those morning sessions when he will hardly say anything, when he will only ask Anna Stein to repeat a few sentences so that she realizes later that those were the exact sentences she spoke. He jots them down, classifies them, organizes them. If she were to forget them, he would make a point of sending them back to her, like a good baseline player on the tennis court. Years of experience have convinced him of the key role language plays, but he is wary of interpreting things too literally.

Thomas is interested in Yves: surely he himself is this older man who becomes infatuated with a younger woman? Maybe he will read one of his books, why not the very one that seduced Anna Stein? An attentive reader will always learn more, and more quickly, from good authors than from life. Perhaps because there is a strong analogy between psychoanalysis and writing. Like the analyst, the writer wants to be heard, recognized, and is afraid of being swallowed up in thought and words. Most likely Thomas also sees Yves as his own double. Perhaps Anna Stein is aware of this possible reading, of this turning point in her analysis. He is suddenly worried that his own situation might insinuate itself between them. In all the momentum drawing him toward Louise Blum, Anna Stein’s words have particular resonance. He must be sure to keep his distance.