It was Louise who told him that bistro means “quick” in Russian, that the French word dates back to the occupation in 1815, when Russian soldiers asked for a drink bistro, bistro, before their officers arrived. Romain told her that the Japanese were going to modify coffee genetically so it no longer had any caffeine in it (or so it had more caffeine, she does not remember). Louise told him that the oldest house in Paris is on the rue de Montmorency, that the alchemist Nicolas Flamel lived there (or died there). Romain told her that Mouton-Duvernet was a general and Denfert-Rochereau a colonel (or perhaps it was the other way around). In ten years they had told each other a lot of things: Louise has not remembered much of it, Romain a great deal more.
Romain will already have ordered her coffee.
He will probably be worried, will sense that Louise’s already absent-sounding voice foreshadows her imminent absence. At first he will refuse to hear what she is saying, then he will want Louise to say she is sorry but she has to go, to prolong that final moment, for time to stretch out like a wave; he would like Louise’s words alone to be enough to keep her there as if, terrified by the weight of what she is saying, she will suddenly find she cannot leave.
But Louise will find the opening words and the ones that come next. She has a solution to everything, the children, the apartment, she has thought of everything. He will ask her to give him one chance, he will say he is going to change, that everything can start again. She will say it’s not about him. It’s her.
YVES
• •
YVES HAS STARTED WRITING AGAIN. He has read that in Abkhazia, a small former Soviet republic on the Black Sea, they play dominoes like nowhere else. First, they use as many sets of twenty-eight dominoes as there are players, less one. One set for two players, two sets for three players, etc. Most importantly, in Abkhazian dominoes, any tile put into the chain can be removed and played again. Which is what happens when, for example, a player can no longer play any of his tiles even after two turns drawing from the talon. Once a tile has been removed, there are then two chains which can be played indiscriminately. Also, any player who holds a double is allowed to lay it down and start an independent chain. It is a very complex game in which bluffing is allowed, and it ends when there are no dominoes left in the talon. The average game lasts a long time.
Yves wants to write a novel around six characters. He will associate each of them with the numbers on dominoes, with the blank applying to a secondary character, though never the same one. The novel will reproduce the trajectory of a game of Abkhazian dominoes: every double played will give rise to a chapter with just one character, a tile with two different numbers to a chapter with two characters, very occasionally three if one of them says and does nothing. Double zero is an interesting case: it will produce a chapter with two secondary characters, or just one. Yves has chosen a game between two teams of two players, played in 1919 at a tournament in Sukhumi. It is a famous game because it lasted two hours, the 1–3 and 2–6 tiles were reused several times, and three chains were formed. The Abkhazian writer Dmitry Iosifovich Gulia mentions it in his Apsny, the diary he kept in the 1920s. Yves’s novel will be called Abkhazian Dominoes, but nothing about its structure will be explained to the reader. Particularly as Yves ends up never entirely respecting his own rules.
When he described how it would be put together to Anna, she shook her head: “Too complicated. Pointless. My darling goy, you really do go to great lengths to make sure your books don’t sell. And as for the title, it’s kind of hard to remember.”
“No it isn’t. ‘Abkhazian’ is intriguing and dominoes are child’s play.”
“Not with you on that. Make it simple. Is your book about love?”
“Yes.”
“Well, put ‘love’ in the title.”
One day, in a bookstore, Yves recognizes one of his poetry collections stacked in a pile by the register, with a little handwritten card saying: BOOKSELLER’S CHOICE. Amused, he points it out to Anna discreetly.
“You see, I do sell a few.”
Anna is delighted. Without a moment’s hesitation, she tackles the proprietor with: “Do you know you have the author himself standing before you?”
Yves is dumbstruck. He could smile about it, absently, extricate himself with a joke, but he just wants the ground to swallow him up. He is reliving the “Kennedy affair” and his mother’s stifling pride. He would have hoped to have grown out of that.
Anna wants him to be more outgoing, more dazzling. She is actually less eager for him to be successful than for him to want to be successful.
“If you were famous,” she once admitted to him, not without shame, “I would probably be with you already.”
He shook his head, dispirited. He remembers the verdict given by a British friend who collects vintage cars and alimonies, after he had introduced him to Anna: “My dear, that girl’s a Bugatti. A lot of maintenance.”
Some days, nothing is right. It can be a painting on the wall (“a bit crass”), a book on a shelf (“Please don’t say you liked it”), four cans of spaghetti in a cupboard (“I don’t believe it, that’s a bit obsessive-compulsive”), or the way Yves twists the spoon around in his mouth when he eats yogurt (“taking far too much pleasure in it”). And if Yves drives a little too quickly for her liking for a moment, she sighs, “How could I ever trust you with my children?”
Anna would so like to be able to admire him, the way she admires Stan, his scientific earnestness, his respect for patients, his work on retinas “that’s going to save thousands of people,” she is convinced of it.
Because Stan is infallible, he cannot help but be infallible. And the tiniest disillusion destroys her: one Sunday afternoon Stan is cooking with the children, making a cake known as a four-by-four — four eggs, 250 grams of flour, 250 grams of butter, and (fatal slip) 250 grams of salt … When the cake comes out of the oven it looks different. Anna tastes a bit and immediately spits it out, making a face and flying into such a disproportionate rage that the children run to their bedroom for refuge. She talks about it in her session with Le Gall two days later, shattered to find tears welling in her eyes again as she relates the incident.
Thomas felt Anna had had enough that day. The analyst was afraid she would leave Stan, that she would go ahead and do it even though, at that stage, she could only go from one father figure to another, because all there was room for in her was fathers and lovers. Yves belonged only to the second category. Le Gall took the unusual step of warning her: “Sometimes, Anna, changing men means actually not changing at all.”
As on every other Thursday morning, Yves was waiting for Anna when she emerged from the session. She told him what had been said, and he felt just how right Le Gall was, how unprepared she was to make this leap. And Yves, who wanted her so desperately, could almost have thanked the analyst for holding her back.
Yves is often irritated by Anna’s demands. She is so afraid of “becoming poor” with him. The day she admits this, he looks at her, lost for words, says that the fear is ungrounded and that — more than anything else — the very thought of it is beneath her, but she presses the point, genuinely worried: “I need security. I can’t live without it. It’s neurotic. I’m trying to work on it. Don’t hold it against me, please. Do you want to know the exact word? Living with you, I’d be scared of … of decline.”
Decline: “fall,” “degeneration.” Yves sighs at the cruelty of synonyms.