Enough About Love

YVES AND ANNA

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YVES IS TRYING TO SPOT ANNA at the entrance to the Rennes Métro station. He cannot find her. She is just across the street, on the sidewalk. She cannot believe he has not seen her. It must be because he does not see as well as she would like to think.

They walk together until they come to a café, where they sit at a table outside. Yves does not like sitting outside, where Anna — on the grounds that they are exposed to prying eyes — is distant, untouchable. He is sure that, already, they both know there are things that have not been said. But before anything else, Anna tells him about yesterday evening, at a friend’s apartment. She talks … about primitive communism, about a book that should be written on children’s education, and Yves watches her more than he listens. He watches and wonders about his own feelings, his desire for her, about the gap between illusion and reality. He knows she is going to leave him, just when everything has become so clear to him.

Anna is talking about her husband, the things that connect her to him “incontrovertibly,” that is the word she uses, and she comes out with: “Yves, I’ll never be able to leave Yves.”

The Freudian slip makes Yves smile, but he can tell that she will, she will be able to leave Yves.

He does not repeat the things that have been said a thousand times. Perhaps this time he would succeed in formulating them even better, but what would be the point? You cannot spend your days saying the same things around and around in circles.

In spite of everything, he does say: “You’re leaving me because you’ve never known how to give us a future. That’s the invisible barrier you’ve kept coming up against, like a moth against a windowpane. I should have guessed, the future wasn’t for me: in your letters you always talked about might and could.”

Anna says nothing.

“You were waiting for some sort of sign in the clouds,” Yves goes on, “a bolt from the blue, what do I know? Some instruction from the world telling you you absolutely had to live with me. The sign never came, and it never will. It’s not for the sky to send instructions. Nothing will come, and that’s why I have to leave, it’s as simple as that.”

They stand up, he does not make a scene, he never has. The café where they are having lunch is called The Horizon. He merely points out the irony. And hands her an envelope.

“Here. I’ve written you a villanelle.”

“A what?”

“A poem, a sort of round with the first and third lines repeated … You can read it later.”

She puts the envelope in her handbag, carefully. Anna would so love it if, in just one letter, a man could change a woman’s fate forever. Yves does not want to do anything to nurture that hope.

Even as they walk toward her car, when they really are going to leave each other, the happiness he feels from still being beside Anna is so strong that, right until the last minute, it protects him, stops him being entirely sad. A stroke of her hand, a kiss on her cheek, and her perfume, still. This will be his last sensual memory of Anna Stein. When he turns away from her, when he walks away, sadness will tear through him and a great void will open inside him.

Truman Capote could not finish In Cold Blood so long as Perry Smith and Dick Hickock had not been executed. He just cannot get any further with Abkhazian Dominoes so long as their relationship continues. This book which is about them will be written in the present tense. The present will definitely have been their tense. Of course the word also means gift. Let it be one.

He does not know this but behind him, Anna has turned around. She is watching him walk away. In a store window, just across the sidewalk, there is a pretty little dress, short, low cut, in blue cotton with drawstrings on the sleeves and a floaty flounced hem in navy tulle. Yves disappears at the end of the street, Anna has such a strong urge to cry, she goes into the store. She tries the dress on. It suits her so well.