Ariane is waiting for him in a café in the rue Monsieur Le Prince, she is drinking hot chocolate and reading. Before she sees him, Yves studies her. She really is very pretty, perhaps more so than Anna Stein in many people’s eyes. Gentler, too, more cheerful, he can tell already. He even knows that he will always think of her, of them, nostalgically, that he will soon miss this tender sense of peace, and knows he will never dare admit this regret to her later. But Anna Stein has captivated him, dazzled him, and Yves is not putting up a fight, he wants to be exposed to this blissful onslaught, he wants to experience the vertiginous fall once more, having given up hope of finding it again.
THOMAS AND LOUISE
• •
THOMAS DOES NOT LIKE THE ZIMMER HOTEL. He has not set foot in the place for ten years, but nothing has changed. Still too much velvet, too much red, too much carpeting. And too many cars on the Place du Châtelet. All the same, he does like not feeling at home: having to confront those rococo chairs and sofas gives him a boost. He is far too early, by almost half an hour, without meaning to be. Ten years ago, he would have spent the time browsing the bouquiniste stalls for secondhand books, or dropped in to look at stick insects and boa constrictors at the zoo. But his youthful curiosity has been dulled, and any reenactment would taint the experience with nostalgia. All the same, if Louise would like to, he will take her to shudder at the reptiles and tarantulas, he will tell her about the Galápagos marine iguana, the only animal whose skeleton shrinks when food is in short supply.
Thomas wants to sit at the far end of the room but he spots her at a table, with a cup of tea. She is wearing a floaty dress, very 1930s, with calculated elegance. This fearless way of wearing an outfit is something he has noticed in Anna Stein too. It demonstrates coquettishness, but then he is not averse to the idea that Louise might be just that, coquettish. She is typing away on a laptop, talking into an earpiece over her temple, it is a business conversation. He wants to move away but she smiles at him and gestures for him to sit down.
“I’m so sorry, your honor, I’m going into a hearing right now … We can talk about my client tomorrow, if that’s all right with you. Without fail … and I’ll see you on Tuesday, yes.”
Louise hangs up, Thomas studies her in the harsh sunlight, makes out for the first time the fine crow’s-feet around her eyes, the brown shadows under them, the hundreds of silvery threads in the blond of her hair.
“Hello. You’re good at lying.”
“I’m at the right school … It wasn’t me, sir … I didn’t steal anything, I didn’t kill anyone, I didn’t rape her. I meet liars every day …”
“An analyst spends his life with liars too, liars who know they’re lying, and sincere liars who don’t. Everyone lies.”
When Louise Blum thinks, she crinkles her brow, and Thomas is charmed by this vertical furrow.
“No, not everyone. Not my husband.”
“Really … that’s not normal at all. He should have analysis.”
“But that’s the way he is, he doesn’t lie. Romain is a scientist, and scientists don’t lie.”
“Romain Vidal, I know. He’s very well known.”
“Very well known? Well … quite.”
Louise does not say anything else. She puts away her papers and turns off the computer, then makes a few last notes in a notebook, in pretty, fluid writing. The sun gives her a blond halo, her eyes have a golden glint. He finds her so radiant, so wonderful that he immediately recognizes this feeling of exultation. Stendhal only too accurately defined that crystallization, the moment when the lover — Thomas does not know the sentence by heart—“draws from everything in sight the discovery that the object of his love has new perfections,” in the same way that, in just a few months, a tree that falls into the Salzburg salt mines is covered, every last twig, in “dazzling shifting diamonds.” But just because Thomas understands the whys and wherefores, Louise does not glitter any the less.
“I couldn’t have hoped to see you again so soon,” he says with that courage peculiar to the shy.
“I wanted a free session.”
“There is no such thing as a free session. It’s like with meals. There’s always a price to pay.”
“I’ll pay. So, tell me. How do you become a psychoanalyst?”
“Oh. Do you want the quick answer or the long answer? The long one takes five years.”
Louise wants the quick answer. Thomas explains the Jardin du Luxembourg, his pointless dilettantism, his rejection of self, the violent intrusion of death with Piette’s suicide, his metamorphosis, how he met the mother of his two daughters, and the sudden fear, when he was thirty and finishing med school, that he had no genuine longings, that he was nothing. He talks for quite a while, openly. He has already said it all, to a different person, in a different way.
“I had no idea what I really wanted. There was a wall in front of me. My life was behind that wall. I started in analysis, to live. It took time. It was a big wall.”
“And now?”
“The wall’s still there, but I know how to get through it, sometimes.”
Louise listens to him, looks at him. Thomas’s face is gentle, serene. His dark eyes and deep voice soothe her. She so rarely feels soothed, so rarely feels secure.
“Thomas … this morning, I was just leaving, and Romain didn’t ask me anything … but, even so, I told him I was having lunch with a client.”
She picks up her cup, puts it back down, waits, but Thomas never asks his question. She raises her eyebrows, tilts her head.
“Aren’t you going to ask me why? I thought you were a psychoanalyst?”
“That’s just the point: it’s not up to the analyst to say anything.”
Rather earnestly, Thomas takes a notebook and felt-tip pen from his pocket, and carefully writes the date at the top of the age.
“Mrs. Blum, I never charge for the first session. We can set the rate for our meetings later. Let’s start again. I’m listening.”
“Good. So, first of all I answered a question Romain didn’t ask. That surprised me. Then, I made you a client. I’ve been thinking about it all morning. In ten years I’ve never lied to Romain.”
She stops talking. Thomas watches her. She has a bead of sweat on the tip of her nose, her eyes are focused on the dregs of Thomas’s coffee.
“You see, I must have lied because I feel guilty about seeing you. Of course, I could have not told Romain anything, or told him all about you and the dinner the other night. But it would only have been to make me feel less guilty.”
She pauses, takes a sip of tea.
“But mostly, confessing to him would have been like trying to protect myself from how much I wanted to be here, and even from the pleasure I would get out of it. When, in fact, that was something I didn’t want to do.”
The bead of sweat slips off her nose. Louise is slightly short of breath.
“I’m completely nuts talking to you like this. In fact, I must seem …”