Enough About Love

EPILOGUE

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TIME WILL HAVE PASSED. It will have worked its spell. A year, two years, perhaps more.

There will be a reception at the New Morning venue in Paris. Yves Janvier will have finished Abkhazian Dominoes, which will have a different name. He will have taken Anna’s advice: love is in the title. This book, or another one, should mean — his new editor will tell him — that he now finds his readership. This party will celebrate its publication.

All the others will be there: in alphabetical order, because some sort of order is needed, Anna, Louise, Romain, Stan, Thomas. There will be a good reason for each of them to be there.

Anna’s invitation will have arrived at rue Érasme a week earlier, on a Saturday morning. As Anna’s name and address were printed, Stan will have opened the anonymous-looking envelope out of habit. Unsettled to see Yves Janvier’s name, he will have pulled himself together before handing the invitation to his wife without betraying any feeling. She will put down her cup and he will watch as she in turn feigns the same indifference. He will be grateful to her for this tactful lie. Anna will simply say: “Yves Janvier? He’s a friend. I’ll go.”

But speaking his name will make her shiver.

“I’ll go with you,” Stan will say provocatively. “We’ll get someone to babysit.”

Anna will add nothing to this. She will talk about something else. A minute later she will drop her cup.

Louise will go as Thomas’s guest. He will have met Yves the previous year when, after a public reading, he will have asked him for a dedication. Hearing his name, the writer will look up, an ironic smile on his lips: “Aren’t you the analyst of a friend of mine?”

“She has finished her analysis,” will come Thomas’s reply.

The two men will be friends from then on, good friends. But every time Yves talks about Anna and the regrets that refuse to die, Thomas will remain very discreet.

As for Romain, his presence is easily explained. He will have recently started overseeing a popular science collection for Yves’s publishers. He will be surprised to see Louise at the party. He will be thinking about remarrying. The future Mrs. Vidal will be called Natalia Vassilievna and will be twenty-nine. Without even knowing her, Louise will find her annoying. The future will prove her partly right.

After the inevitable speeches, when a group of klezmer musicians, friends of Yves’s, step onto the stage, Anna will make her excuses and slip away for a moment. When she is alone, she will search through her bag and open a very worn envelope. It holds a poem that she has read many times over.

I wanted to write a villanelle for you

To talk of fleeting time that leaves no trace,

For Anna who leaves like the morning dew

Pain and time are sometimes one, not two

And love itself has a fragile transient face,

I wanted to write a villanelle for you

What lies ahead in life, I have no clue

I must find within me the courage to embrace,

For Anna who leaves like the morning dew

Lightning bolts, fire and sparks I eschew

I need no shield to hide my face,

I wanted to write a villanelle for you

To life alone do we stay true

But desire should be given its rightful place,

For Anna who leaves like the morning dew

Rugged is our path, harsh through and through,

In the shadow of poets we venture and pace,

I wanted to write a villanelle for you,

For Anna who leaves like the morning dew

But that’s enough about love.