With a pretty flick of her hand she pushes back a drooping lock of hair, she suddenly notices him and smiles: Thomas knows instantly that he is caught, and is happy to be. He feels an irresistible magnetic draw, one he takes pleasure in resisting. A pull that would be called attraction in physics too. He gathers the woman’s name is Louise, then she specifies: Louise Blum. She has fine features and is slim enough to emphasize her muscularity. What else to say about her, how to discern what he finds so erotic? The fleeting certainty, he will think later, that she smiled only at him? And he repeats it to himself: Louise Blum. He thinks how totally she suits her name.
As luck would have it, they end up sitting next to each other, but who believes in luck? She is still talking about organized crime and the role of defense lawyers, because there must be a defense, after all. He stays rather quiet, because he does not want to fill any gaps with his own words and also because he prefers listening to her. He likes her voice, the immediacy she injects into verbs. Then, when she shows an interest in him, he thinks he is telling her what he does but only says the word “analyst.” “Analyst?” she repeats, as if suspecting him of being an economist or a financier. He adds the psycho-. She behaves as if she is fascinated, perhaps she really is? Though she acts all anxious: “I often do slightly weird things. Like I talk to myself. Do you think I should have analysis?”
“Everyone should have analysis. It should be compulsory, like military service used to be.”
Thomas is only half joking. She nods.
“I know a place where everyone does, a whole nation of analyzed people: the East Village in New York. Never seen so many crazy people per square foot.”
Her laugh is deep in her throat, slightly hoarse, a laugh he instantly loves.
They play a social game: they look for things they have in common. And have no trouble finding some. He knows a psychiatrist friend of hers by reputation, she knows a lawyer he has done business with.
“He’s a complete asshole!” she says without a moment’s hesitation. It was not a slipup because she laughs as she adds, “He’s not a close friend of yours, is he?”
Thomas shakes his head, flustered, but then nods: true, he is a complete asshole. By digging deeper, they also find some journalists, a few artists …
“Pathetic,” smiles Louise.
“What?”
“How small the world is … No one ever just falls out of the sky.”
“I’m so sorry,” sighs Thomas.
His answer is formulaic but sorry he is, all the same. He would like to have fallen out of the sky. But they have found common ground, there is a familiarity between them — with her leading the way — that feels natural.
Very early on, in passing, she refers to a husband, children. From the twinge of disappointment these words produce, Thomas realizes how attracted he is to Louise. But he cannot draw any conclusions from the way she says them, certainly not that Louise is trying to convince him, or herself, that their meeting has no right to lead to anything. No, for the whole dinner, he leaves his experience as an analyst at the door. It is also true that, sometimes, women who say they have a husband and two children are just saying they have a husband and two children. Hey, he thinks at one point, Louise Blum could be Anna Stein’s blond twin. They are alike, they really are, even their lives are similar.
It is getting late, the evening is coming to an end, Louise hands out her e-mail address and telephone number. She has run out of business cards so she scribbles her details on the ends of napkins, which she tears off carefully. He folds the piece she hands to him and puts it in his pocket; on the way home he will check — twice — that he has not lost it, and as soon as he is home he will put the information on his computer and in his cell phone.
On this late summer’s morning, as he waits for Anna Stein, Thomas is writing this first e-mail to Louise Blum, so belatedly — he made a point of waiting a whole day — and so careful with respect to what he truly wants: “Thank you for such a nice evening, even though I wasn’t in great form. I hope I’ll see you again soon, at Sammy’s or somewhere else. Thomas (the analyst) XOXO.” Well, it’s hardly original, Thomas thinks. But if Louise replies despite his banal e-mail, that would at least prove she has some interest in him. He stretches in his chair, reaching his arms up and yawning loudly, a common gesture for the body to dispel the mind’s agitation. Click. Send. His Mac imitates a gust of wind and his nine o’clock appointment rings the buzzer. Anna Stein is ten minutes late.
ANNA AND YVES
• •
ANNA STEIN’S OUTFIT IS DISTINCTIVE, as usual. Wide white pants that fit tightly over her buttocks to define them clearly, a fleetingly transparent, midnight blue blouse, and a shiny, black trench coat. She chooses her clothes carefully, her long tall figure allowing her to wear things that would be fatal on others. She sees herself as slim, lives being slim as synonymous with being rigorous. Gaining weight, she is convinced, is always a lapse.
Anna Stein sits down and apologizes for being late: her little girl, Lea, has a fever and there was nowhere to park. She gets comfortable on the couch and goes straight back to the meeting she mentioned the day before yesterday. She repeats the words she used then — he is a writer — and reveals his name, Yves. Thomas erases the X in his diagram from before, replaces it with a Y, and draws a second oval around the A to include her and her husband, Stanislas. Finally, he draws a third one, still including Anna Stein, but to which he adds his own name, Thomas. Anna Stein is now at the intersection of three rings, and no longer seems to belong to any of them.
Yves is “the same age as Stan,” her husband, “or not much older.” She thinks he is “pretty broke” and “besides, he lives in Belleville.” Writing has always been a fantasy for Anna Stein; she suspects Yves may be its embodiment. She has had no appetite for a week. “I don’t eat anything anymore, I’ve already lost five pounds, at least.” It seems to frighten her. “I don’t know what’s happening to me.” The evening of the very day they met, almost before she got through the door at home, she thinks she admitted everything to Stan. All she said, speaking casually as if discussing some pleasant surprise, was that she had met a man at a reception, “a man she found unsettling,” “for the first time in a long time.” Stan could find nothing to say in response and almost immediately talked about something else, Lea’s music theory lesson, how well she was getting on, an appointment Anna’s brother had made for a vision problem. Anna Stein would have liked her husband to react or, better, for him to act, for him to know instinctively that she was only saying it so he would hold her back. But Stanislas did not grasp, or did not want to grasp, the weight of her words. He allowed a window to be opened to her desires, and it makes her furious, disappointed, and delighted all at once.
Yves gave her his latest book, with the unusual title The Two-Leaf Clover, and wrote the most anodyne of dedications in it. The book, which is very short, relates with ferocious intensity an emotional disaster, a restrained and clinical dissection of a lover’s fantasy: a story as old as time itself about an older man who, having become infatuated with a young woman and having seduced her a bit, but not enough, decides to go and join her in Ireland — which explains the title — where he collides head-on with her withering indifference in the most magnificent fiasco. The irony with which it is told made her laugh, and she thought: this man’s an expert. She also found it reassuring that she liked his style, his lightness of touch. She is an attentive reader, critical and perceptive, she would have hated him to disappoint her, for him to write like someone who churned out novels, but she was probably in no state to be disappointed. She liked the fact that he could talk about love like that. But something in the way she says “talk about love” this morning makes it sound like an actual character. Thomas writes a note.