Enough About Love (19 page)

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:

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.