Yves pauses, has a drink of water.
On the rue de Turenne, Stan walks past his wife’s car without noticing it, and hails a taxi.
Yves looks briefly at Anna, and continues.
65. I have thirteen entries left to talk about you under the heading Foreignness: you as a foreigner. 66. But, you see, what I like about you is not that you feel foreign. 67. And I don’t think you ever did feel entirely foreign. 68. But I like the fact that something about you still resists, refuses to become familiar, remains invincibly foreign. 69. And it means that when I’m with you, I’m always rubbing up against a foreign element, something mysterious, irreducible, ever present, and full of happiness. 70. Something that might be love’s equivalent of the color of a foreign language in your mother tongue. 71. A little je ne sais quoi, those French words that have passed into so many foreign languages. 72. It makes the way you walk and some of the things you do feel foreign to me for a moment. 73. The curve of your breast, your shoulder, foreign for a moment. 74. Your voice, on the end of the phone, from time to time: foreign. 75. Your perfume, its vetiver fragrance, your own delicate smelclass="underline" both foreign. 76. Your subtly sinuous thought processes are so foreign to my own meanderings, and yet clearer and sharper. 77. Of course you are not a foreigner, but how I value this foreignness in you. 78. Perhaps keeping that foreign element is the secret.