Enough About Love (13 page)

Anna feels like crying. She would like to stand up and walk out of the church, but her legs will not obey her. A man’s warm hand takes hers, brings it to his lips. Anna huddles against Yves, the pain is too much for her, it overflows, she cries in his arms, shuddering as she sobs, she wants to stop, but she just can’t, she just can’t.

T
HOMAS THOUGHT
he would feel no pain. The analyst believed he was prepared for his father’s death, had so clearly inscribed the idea on his mind that he could already picture him under the earth. But he has a persistent ache, a blend of remorse and resentment. He never loved this absent father, this man he only ever called by his first name, Pierre, this father who showed so little interest in fatherhood that Thomas feels he can count the times they spent together on the fingers of one hand. As a teenager, Thomas wanted to change his name, he could have called himself Durenne, his mother’s maiden name. Then his anger lost its painful edge, was less of an issue. Eventually, he even thought he no longer bore him a grudge.

And yet when, almost twenty years ago now, “Pierre” said over the telephone, “I know you’re hurting, I know you resent me …,” Thomas sniggered to himself. He did it loudly
enough for his father to hear, and the freshly qualified analyst in him knew that meant the business was far from over, and he said, “I’m sorry, Pierre. You’re probably right. I resented you and I still do.”

As he drives to La Roche-sur-Yon, Thomas knows he is going to confront him. If Stoics are right, if there really is nothing between men, no love, tenderness, or friendship, but the body is everything, if all feeling really does germinate and take root in the individual, then this journey, however belated it may be, will not be pointless. Thomas is driving toward his own appeasement.

Louise has canceled all her meetings, she wanted to come with him.

“Thanks for being here, Louise.”

Tenderly, without a word, she rests her head on his shoulder, he breathes in her perfume. She closes her eyes, puts her arms around him. She is wearing a sober black suit, looks at the map, acts as copilot.

“We need to take exit 30,” she says quietly. “And then the first turn to La Roche-sur-Yon and Noirmoutier.”

“In one kilometer, turn left,” says the satellite navigation system, which has maintained a discreet silence for nearly five minutes.

“That’s what I just said,” sighs Louise. “Can’t you at least switch it to Italian or Spanish, so we can practice a language?”

“You can actually. You can also have a man’s voice, if you like.”

“In five hundred meters, turn left onto the D347.”

“Someone should invent a GPS for life,” Louise smiles, and she adopts the machine’s slightly nasal, disembodied voice: “In one week, take a lover. In one day, take a lover. Take Thomas
Le Gall now, on the left. In one month, leave your husband. In one week, leave your husband.”

“Leave your husband now,” smiles Thomas.

“Turn left now,” says the GPS.

“There, you see?” says Louise.

She puts the map down.

“When was the last time you saw your father?”

“Eight months ago, for his eightieth birthday. I hadn’t seen him for, what, fifteen years. But I wanted my daughters to meet their grandfather, the ‘real’ one, at least once. So it wouldn’t stay a family secret, a phantom link. They didn’t want to, I had to insist and explain, to keep at it. In the end I convinced them by saying that if he died tomorrow, before they got to see him, they’d regret it for the rest of their lives.”

“In one kilometer, take the second exit at the rotary.”

“You can shut up. So the girls agreed. It was in a big, fancy restaurant, near the Porte Maillot, the sort of place I’m glad I never set foot. It was kind of cheerful, even if I did find it hard relaxing completely. Alice and Esther thought he was very nice, and they loved their cousins.”

“Your sister’s children?”

“My half-sister’s. Aurèle and Just.”

“Just?”

“You’re right, Just is a weird name. I wanted my girls here for the funeral, but it was too complicated getting them over from Glasgow.”

Louise points at a road sign saying L
A
R
OCHE-SUR-YON
—15
KM
.

Thomas nods.

“I booked a pretty hotel in La Rochelle, in the old town, with views of the sea. We’ll leave right after the funeral. Is that okay?”

“Perfect. I have an overnight pass. I said I had to visit a lifer at Saint-Martin de Ré prison, for a review. It’s almost true.”

“How should I introduce you? Louise Blum? Just Louise? My friend?”

“Yes, Louise is fine, I think. ‘My friend’ is okay too, seeing I’m here as your friend. And I’m wearing black, which is appropriate.”

“Your dress really suits you.”

“It’s a suit, you moron …”

“Take the second turn on the right, onto the D347,” intones the GPS.

“Look,” Louise says, flipping up her skirt. Bright red lace with gray edging appears right at the top of her naked thigh. “I put on my sexiest underwear. To be honest, I even bought it for … for the occasion.”

“Fantastic, my love. I’ll tell my father as soon as I see his coffin.”

Thomas slides his hand onto her knees, strokes her legs and moves right up her thighs, which part to let him through. He slows down, the car shifts a gear.

“Good thing I rented an automatic.”

“Turn right now,” says the GPS.

Thomas absentmindedly obeys the computer’s instructions. His hand slips beneath the silk, flits over Louise’s pubis, which proves compliant.

“I love you,” says Louise.

Thomas’s fingers start to wander, so does he.

“Make a U-turn,” the GPS says flatly.

I
T IS
N
OVEMBER
and yet summer is still lingering in southern Europe. The French Institute in Florence has invited Yves for a reading of his first book, which has been translated into Italian. Yves takes Anna with him for a long weekend. Their room is very light, with a balcony overlooking the Arno. Anna is watching the river and suddenly spins around.

“Please can we go to Arezzo? I’d really love to see the Piero della Francesca fresco. It’s of the Virgin when she is pregnant, she’s standing like in Byzantine images of her, impassive, hieratic. She’s resting one hand on her stomach, the other on her hip. The colors are gorgeous and her features so fine. They used it in
Nostalghia
, the Tarkovsky film. Do you remember? The poet and the young blond interpreter are driving along in an old Volkswagen. It’s pouring rain, the sky’s black, it’s a winding road and the chapel’s right at the top of a hill, surrounded by cypress trees.”

Yves thinks he has seen the film, but is not sure he remembers the scene. Anna is insistent: “When they get there, they’re celebrating a Mass for the Virgin. The girl goes in alone and the poet stays on the doorstep. The roof has collapsed and the Roman beams are open to the storm. It’s raining inside the church, on the flagstones, but the fresco’s in an alcove, sheltered from the rain, lit by hundreds of candles. Do you remember?”

Yves wants to remember. Arezzo is in southeastern Tuscany, on the border with Umbria, they will need a car, he rents one.

Anna buys a guide to Tuscany, tries to find the church. With no luck.

Yves makes his inquiries. An hour later, he knows everything.

“Anna, I have bad news.”

“The church is closed?”

“It’s not that. Your church with the broken roof isn’t near Arezzo.”

“Really?”

“Yup. It’s a Cistercian abbey somewhere near Sienna, San Galgano Abbey. It’s so romantic it’s been used in several films, like
The English Patient.”

“Is it far?”

“Southeast of Sienna, an hour and a half by car. But you definitely won’t see the fresco from the Tarkovsky film there.”

“Why not?”

“Because the pregnant Virgin in his film is the
Madonna del Parto
. If you want to see her, you have to go to the Museo de Monterchi, a church not far from Arezzo. Actually, the director chose to film a reproduction of it which is much better quality: the
Nostalghia
Virgin. And that particular Virgin is somewhere else again, in the crypt of a Roman church in San Pietro, in Tuscany.”

“I see. Nothing’s true.”

“Let’s say Tarkovsky pieced everything together to make the scene. That’s movies for you, make-believe.”

Anna says nothing for a moment. When she does speak, her voice is sad.

“You know, that’s me all over. The things I want don’t even exist, it’s all make-believe.”

J
UDITH WAS SO FRIGHTENED
she is not even crying. Louise is trying to comfort her little girl, but Judith is terrified, she is shaking. There was a screech of brakes, the wheels hit the stroller, but Judith is unharmed. The van stopped with the stroller crumpled under its axle; the doll flew out onto the road. The driver leaped out, a big black man, he just keeps saying to Judith, “You’re not hurt, are you? You’re not hurt?” He is shaking more than she is.

It is a Sunday in December, the first Louise has spent with Thomas along with Judith and Maud: they have never met him before. Maud discovered that if you say Thomas Thomas over and over it sounds like “stomma stomma stomma.” Judith thought that mommy’s friend really did have a load of white hair, more than daddy, she chuckled and whispered as much to her older sister, so their mother could not hear.

“What’s all this muttering, Judith?” Louise asked.

Judith ran ahead, laughing, she turned to look at her big sister as she started crossing the road. Thomas was the one who saw it coming. He reached out his arm, grabbed the child, and hauled her back. He apologizes to her for squeezing her arm so hard. He hurt her, she gives him a hard time. She’s going to have a bruise. The driver has gone to get the doll, has extricated the stroller. It falls apart, is irreparable.

“What’s your name, sweetheart? I’ll buy you a new one.”

Thomas says there is no need, walks him back to the van.

They were meant to go to the Evolution Gallery at the Jardin des Plantes. Louise is completely drained, she just wants to sit down, have a coffee. Thomas asks the girls what they would like. Hot chocolate. Now, that’s a good idea. Four hot chocolates.

“Thomas saved your life,” Maud tells her sister. Marveling at the enormity of her words, she says them again: “Thomas saved your life.”

“What does that mean, mommy, saved my life?” Judith asks her mother.

Louise does not answer. She is hugging her daughter, suffocating her. She looks up at Thomas, closes her eyes, tears glistening beneath her eyelids.

Thomas drinks his hot chocolate slowly. Judith and Maud play with their spoons and the cocoa left in their cups. The fear is forgotten, for a moment. But the terror is gradually working its way through Louise. Thomas can almost read her agitated thoughts. What if Judith had died? She would have left him, most likely. Pain destroys desire, no love could survive guilt like that. She could only have coped with the shared suffering with Judith’s father, in fact she would only have wanted to try and overcome it with him.

“Thank you,” Louise says eventually.

Thomas shakes his head. In these few minutes of his life, he can see a fork in his own destiny. That was the word Anna used in her last session, when she said, “I don’t know whether Yves is my destiny.” Coming from Anna, the word was ambiguous, somewhere between freedom of choice and the inevitability of fate.

Thomas does not believe in fate. He would have the power of speech and actions shape our lives. To him, that is the point of psychoanalysis, giving the analysand the strength to become the driving force in his or her own life. If the accident just now had actually happened, he likes to think that, against all the odds, he would have known how to play it right, to become one of the people Louise would lean on.

As a teenager, he had endless discussions about the elasticity of individual fates and History (with a capital
H
, as Perec used to say). The budding Marxist confronted trainee Hegelians. If Hitler had died in a car crash in 1931, would some inertia in the powers that be have doggedly set the war and the Holocaust back on track? Was Stalinism conceivable with a different Stalin? Who could have replaced Trotsky?

Other questions hover. Where did he stand in Louise’s story? Did a lover have to turn up at this particular point in her life? Was he interchangeable? Thomas has no idea. He doubts there is some hidden agenda. A breakup has not already happened before the meeting occurs. There are more chance events and contingencies than necessities. Of course, in an ecosystem, occupying the same niche requires the same response: all large marine predators are alike, sharks for the fish, killer whales for mammals, plesiosaurs for dinosaurs. But man is not the natural world, history is not evolution, and Thomas has stopped trying
to find a material or scientific answer to a question that could never be either of these. He will never know whether he or Hitler was replaceable,
ersetzbar
. Suffice to say, life never serves up the same dish twice.