They agree on nothing. Yves has not shaken off every element of the Trotskyite he was as a teenager, Anna says she loathes Alter-globalizationists. One day when Yves is defending them over dinner, Anna’s temper flares immediately: “No society can have equality as its aim. Look what happened when they did try for equality. People just aren’t equal.”
Yves is on home territory with his reply: equality is not an aim at all, but the means to ensure that the best shine through, overcome their condition. Why, if “money is a driving force,” does she only admire artists, experts, and writers? She digs her heels in, they argue. The other people around the table calm things down.
When Yves is alone in the kitchen with an old friend for a moment, he smiles and says: “You must be wondering what I’m doing with that woman, or what she’s doing with me.”
“No,” the friend says evenly, although his eyes do seem to be mulling something over. “You’re just very different. A positive pole and a negative pole.”
Another thing Anna says is, “Nothing is ever good enough for me. You’ll hate me for that. It’s really frustrating for a man if nothing he does is ever good enough for a woman.”
Yves cannot argue with this point. It takes considerable effort on his part to allow himself to believe that, in spite of everything, Anna could gain from the situation.
One day, when he was seriously irritated, he looked through his bookshelves for Drieu La Rochelle’s book A Woman at her Window, so that Anna could read these superlatively reactionary, misogynistic words: “Women, who are always ingrained with a powerful realism, can only ever love men for their strength and prestige.”
“There. Do you really want that bastard Drieu to be right?”
“But that’s exactly the way it is,” Anna snapped. “You’re impossible. Look at you: you have a first-class ticket in your pocket but you prefer traveling second-class or staying on the platform.”
“I can’t stand the people in the first-class compartment. If you love me, come and join me in second-class.”
Yves loathed having to string out the metaphor. He thought it was full of pitfalls. If life were a train, who was dodging the fare in first-class, who was checking the tickets? It was bordering on the absurd, he did not want to take it any further.
And yet Anna drives him to change himself. After all, if success makes no difference, then why not be successful? He is not sure he has the profile for it. Every time he hears a note of admiration from the person talking to him, she kisses him. He feels sullied by it, wants to shrug it off like a dog shaking itself after the rain. He feels like an impostor. Feels the whole world is full of impostors.
But he has started writing again, and Abkhazian Dominoes is taking shape. Of course, Anna is not wrong. Why should the layout of a book obey a weird and universally forgotten game of dominoes? Yves smiles. And carries on building the edifice, all the more obstinately.
THOMAS AND ROMAIN
• •
AT 5 PM IN HIS APPOINTMENTS DIARY, Le Gall has written “Fabien Dalloz,” and that is exactly the time when the new patient, whom he has never met, rings the bell. As he opens the door to him, Thomas says smoothly: “Fabien Dalloz? Thomas Le Gall. Please come in.”
The man does so and, despite his tremendous height, it is only when Romain Vidal has sat down in the armchair that Thomas recognizes him. Of course: Roman — Fabian, that part’s clear, but getting from Vidal to Dalloz is a job for the dictionary.
Thomas sits down at his desk, opposite Louise’s husband. He thinks briefly of admitting that the ruse has fallen flat, a move that becomes more arduous with every passing second. But the familiarity of his setting and the effect of the surprise make him instinctively pronounce the usual words: “I’m listening.”
At first Romain says nothing. Not for a moment does Thomas imagine this is a coincidence, that Vidal is in this room for a consultation: Louise has talked to him, and Romain has come to measure up the man who wants to take his wife away. By simply changing his name, he thinks he holds all the cards. But sooner or later Le Gall and the real Romain Vidal will have to meet, and when the time comes to leave the analyst’s office, the false Fabien Dalloz will have no choice but to drop his mask.
Silence settles between them, and Thomas respects it. He does not want to insist that Louise’s husband speak frankly right away.
“I don’t know how to start. I don’t know where to start,” Romain blurts eventually.
Always start at the end, Thomas does not say. If you think of life as a book, you’ll never be able to see where it finishes.
Essentially, however strange it may seem, this conversation might be not unlike a normal session. A man comes to see another man, with a secret that is not entirely a secret, one he will have to consent to disclose. A man who often says nothing.
“Right,” Fabien-Romain says briskly. “In a nutshell, I’m married, we have children, two children, my wife’s met someone, and she said she’s leaving me. It’s pretty straightforward. I’m very … unhappy, but I don’t think having analysis is the answer. It takes years, doesn’t it, but it’s right now that my wife’s leaving.”
Romain stops talking. Thomas opens a notebook, jots down a few words to create a semblance of composure, but can keep the pretense up no longer: “You’re Romain Vidal, aren’t you? I’m sorry but playing cat and mouse isn’t a very good idea.”
Romain looks at him, then lowers his eyes and stares at the foot of the desk lamp. His whole face closes in, his breathing accelerates. Thomas stands up to break away from an analyst’s typical aloof, seated position. He walks over to the window, gently tilts the slats of a blind. He is waiting for Romain to give in to his anger, his sorrow. As Louise’s husband stays locked in silence, Thomas toys with the blind, smirking as he cannot help thinking this sort of blind is also known as a jalousie—a jealousy.
“I can understand why you’re here,” he says. “I felt the same curiosity, to see who you were. I went to one of your conferences.”
An ambulance passes outside, barely audible through the door. Thomas lets it pass, the sound fades.
“As you’re here in my office, you must be expecting something from this meeting. But I don’t know what. You haven’t come to ask me to stop loving Louise.”
“I–I don’t th-think so,” Romain murmurs, possessed by his teenager stammer.
“You’re here to put a face to your fears. That’s a good enough reason.”
Thomas stays looking at the sky, the trees in the courtyard. He is probably not who Romain was expecting.
“You don’t understand. By confronting me here, in this particular place, you’re trying to find the strength to win Louise back. But I’m five years older than you, ten years older than Louise; in other words, I’m old. You’re brilliant, famous even. So why me? It’s almost worse.”
Romain has looked up again. Thomas is still waiting for him to speak, but Romain gazes at motes of dust twinkling in rays of sunlight. The analyst continues, calmly, through a silence punctured by the least noise. “You’re looking at your shattered life as if it were someone else’s. You’re hurt, humiliated. You’ve lost your self-esteem. That’s what most people feel.”
Between each of his sentences, Thomas establishes a pause, leaves a space he would like Romain to fill. But Vidal cannot do it.
“You know, dozens of people have been through this room. People full of pain. My job is to step up and tackle that pain with my own experience of pain. My own pain, Romain, is grief, from a long time ago.”
Thomas has removed any emotion from his voice. By using Romain’s first name, he hopes to extract a response, but the man shows no reaction.