Yves artfully drops his voice, slows its rhythm, to signal the closing sentence. The reading comes to an end. He gives a wave, the audience applauds, the lights come on and the director of the Heisberg says a few words. When the audience stands up, Anna goes over to Yves, almost running past the rows of seats, she smiles and takes his hand.
“My foreigner,” Yves says.
On the rue Érasme, Stan pays for his taxi. He then realizes he has forgotten his bicycle which is still locked up outside the Picasso Museum.
STAN AND ANNA
• •
WHEN ANN ARRIVES HOME, it is very late. She has just left Yves and is worried she may have his smell all over her. Even though he has bought her brand of soap for that obligatory shower so a familiar fragrance can protect her from Stan’s curiosity. Although she suggested the idea, she still found its realization as crass as it was diplomatic. She has soaped herself scrupulously.
Stan is at his computer.
“Haven’t you gone to bed?” Anna asks, amazed.
“No, I was reading Archives of Ophthalmology. I was seeing what there was about Fuch’s spots. I was waiting for you.”
“You shouldn’t have. I stayed and had supper with Sarah, from the seminar.”
Stan says nothing. Anna’s lie is pointless. He would not have asked any questions. He keeps looking at the screen, to avoid looking his wife in the eye.
Anna strokes his hair, affectionately. She still remembers the exact moment she was introduced to Stan, ten years ago now. The mutual friend had joked: “Mr. Stanislas Lubliner, you’re looking for a wife, may I introduce Ms. Anna Stein, who’s looking for a husband.”
Anna laughed as she protested, but when Stan looked at her, shook her hand powerfully yet gently and held her gaze, she immediately thought, Yes, this man could be my husband, the father of my children. That day, she thought she had her future before her, as if she had opened a door onto it.
Stan has been an essential transition, a fording place. She used him to escape the cocoon of her family, and her mother — who finds Stan so irritating — instinctively knows this. Her son-in-law is first and foremost her rival, because Anna used him to break away from her. This evening, at nearly forty, Anna feels that she is still in the middle of that ford.
She takes off her shoes, puts her clothes away in the wardrobe, on automatic. She finds it extraordinary that, having felt such happiness in Yves’s arms, she so easily returns to the peaceful family comforts of the rue Érasme. She feels a sense of balance, that’s it, a sense of balance.
“With you,” she once told Yves, “I’m always going somewhere, moving forward, but I’m not balanced, I’m never stable.”
He accepted the image and replied, “There’s nothing weird about that. When you’re in motion, each instantaneous position is unstable. If you want to be in a stable position, just don’t move.”
She also told him, “With my husband, I’m on a cruise ship, in first class. Everyone always tells me that.”
Yves had no trouble picturing her lounging in a deck chair, surrounded by her family, gazing at the blur of fog along the coast, without ever worrying about pulling up to shore. He wondered whether life actually could be like the teak deck of a steamer. Then she compared him to a sailboat, indulgently granting him the prestige of two masts. The image struck him as rather cruel, but not unfair.
“I don’t know,” she added, “if it’s such a good idea giving up a steamboat for a ketch.”
Stan watches Anna moving around the room. He wants to take his wife in his arms, but she would return the hug, and he is afraid he would hold the duplicity against her.
“I’m going to have a shower, my love,” Anna says. “I can smell the sweat on me from the day, and I can’t stand it.”
Stan does not look up.
“Well, I thought you smelled really good.”
Anna does not answer. She goes to take her shower, which will help to account for the overpowering smell of soap.
STAN
• •
STAN IS OLD. The thought cuts through him. When he looked at his face in the mirror this morning, he no longer knew himself. Or was it when Anna left, when the door closed behind her. He thought for the first time that she could easily not come back one day. He watched at the window as his wife walked away, then took his coat and went out, he walked all the way to the Jardin des Plantes. He went into the magnificent Grande Serre greenhouse, and here he is now, sitting on a stone bench, not far from the door. He has laid his hand gently against the bark of a large ficus, as if against an old friend’s lined palm, but all the bark does is stay cold, rough, and damp, and reiterate in its treelike way: “You’re old.”
Anna lied to him. She thought she could get away with it, that is all. But there was a gleam in her eye that he did not recognize, like a moment of truancy betraying her, and to think she was someone who never wanted to lie. Something in her eyes had to confess, had to speak for her, and Stan had to spot it so that she could leave without feeling ashamed. As she left, she kissed him that sexless kiss that she so frequently gratifies him with, she turned around and gave him a brief wave. Stan did not hold her back, made no move toward her, he listened to her footsteps dying away in the stairwell. Because of this new shadow, everything was now different and Stan thought that next time he would not bat an eyelid, that Anna could lie and it really would be a lie, because he would not know it.
Stan watches the water drip-dripping along the philodendrons’ large cutout leaves. In the early days, before Karl and Lea were born, Anna used to come and meet him when he got off night duty at the Pitié hospital. On the way, she would buy an apple danish and some croissants, she had a thermos full of coffee, and they had their breakfast on this bench in the Grande Serre. There was a building being renovated outside, the work had gone on for two years, and the sound of drills and saws was forever associated with this bench, with the smell of apple from the pastry and the almond taste of Anna’s kisses.
At the moment, there is a construction site on the rue Buffon, and the wind carries the creak of cranes all the way here. Stan likes these steel stick insects that prove life goes on, that the city is never finished and keeps moving, that the world changes. The outside air comes in through a window, breezing through his hair, chill as the beginning of winter. Anna must be at the hospital already, the gravel must be crunching under her feet, maybe she is walking quickly, Stan so loves the way she runs, like a big waterbird. Stan listens to the waterfall, the cheeping of finches, he watches the Chinese carp in the pond, the motionless turtles. I love you, Anna, Stan thinks, I’m going to tell you today, this evening, you will listen to me and close your eyes. I want you to close your eyes.
YVES AND THOMAS
• •
ANNA AND YVES
• •
OUTSIDE THE CHURCH, Yves brandishes the announcements page of Le Monde at his older sister. Lise is ostentatiously in mourning, veiled hat, black suit, black coat. Her eyes are red and she keeps blowing her nose, noisily. Yves speaks quietly, between his teeth.
“What the hell is this, Lise, this stupid Vigny quote? ‘We shall speak again in the darkest hour.’ ”
“It’s a line from Destinées,” Lise replies curtly. “What did you want, something right-on and witty from Desproges, a bit of Pierre Dac?”4