Enough About Love (22 page)

“Come,” Piette says again.

She takes his hand, leads him down a path between the cypress trees. It takes them to a stream which has almost run dry, trickling over great slabs of limestone. They walk on and on through bottlebrush shrubs, stocks, and Jupiter’s beard. Piette is the one who knows every plant by name. At a turn in the path, the brook flows into a Roman-style tiled basin.

“I always used to come here when I was little,” says Piette. “I did watercolors. The only things I drew were caterpillars, centipedes, and scarab beetles, can you believe it?”

Yes, Thomas doesn’t doubt it for a moment. There isn’t a girl in the world more unusual than Piette. Later, he will take a picture of a stag beetle that she drew when she was thirteen, and have it framed.

“Do you think we’ll be happy, Thomas? Tell me about our life, tell me.”

Thomas tells her. The birth of Daniel (or Claire), the sleepless nights spent talking in the half-light, spent making love, the quarrels about whose turn it is to do the feeding, the first
steps, the first words, and getting old too, together, with no fears. He describes the buildings of steel and glass that the great architect Piette will design in London, Berlin, and Tokyo. “And Métro stations, Thomas,” Piette says, “I want to build Métro stations.” Fine, let’s have some Métro stations.

Piette has lain down on the dried grass, she closes her eyes so she can concentrate on listening to Thomas, to his warm gentle voice rolling out the years to come. He says: “We’ll travel, we’ll take the children to the Greek islands.” “Will you read them the
Odyssey?
Will you show them dolphins and flying fish? Will I teach Claire to swim in the Aegean?” Yes, that’s right, Thomas answers every time.

Then Piette stands up, they walk around the pool and she puts her arms around him. The basin overflows through a small notch in the rim, they follow the stream through scrubland to a stone aqueduct like a miniature Pont du Gard.

The aqueduct spans a storm drain and carries the water to the large tank at Anselme de Montaîgu. The bridge is far too narrow to walk along, with a sheer drop of about twenty feet to the white rocks below.

Piette has stepped along the first few feet of the parapet. Thomas stays behind, he reaches out to her but she is too far away.

“Stop, Piette. It’s dangerous.”

She turns, standing on the stone bridge, her feet so close to the void. She speaks softly and that very softness frightens Thomas.

“Do you think I’ll be able to bring up our child, our children? I am ill, you know.”

“I know, Piette.”

Yes, Thomas knows. Manic-depressive psychosis, bipolar disorder, hypomania, cyclothymia, he has learned all the words along with Piette. He also knows every label on the boxes in that little case that goes everywhere with her: lithium nitrate, lamotrigine, benzodiazepine, and plenty more.

“Come back, Piette, please.”

“What I’ve got is a piece of shit, Thomas, it’s a piece of shit. Somewhere in this jumble of me, there’s a normal part, a part that doesn’t envy other people’s ordered lives, but then it’s my bad luck that I also have the other part that does envy them. Do you think I could ever be happier than I am today?”

“I promise you you can, my Piette. Come back.”

“You’re so soothing, Thomas, and I love you and my parents love you too, they want you to save me because they’ve never managed it. Why do I sometimes so want to be alive but also already dead? Why?”

“I love you, Piette, you’re scaring me.”

“I don’t want to die, I swear to you.”

Piette grabs Thomas’s hand, he draws her to him and holds her tight in his arms, the precipice now far away. Tears stream over their cheeks. She is still shaking.

“If this illness takes me away, Thomas, will you look after the children?”

“Stop it, Piette. We’ll come to see this aqueduct in fifty years’ time, with the children, and our grandchildren.”

“And our great-grandchildren too?”

Piette shivers, then falls silent. They walk toward the farmhouse, toward the party where people are already dancing. Thomas looks back at the stone aqueduct, the valley, and the olive trees in the sunlight, almost a Cézanne. It is the last time he sees it.

All his love will be unable to save his Piette or to triumph over her melancholia. In twenty-five years, Thomas’s entire trajectory, all his knowledge and skill will strive to do only that, to save the life of a young dead girl. With analysis he has found his feet again, but accepted? Never.

Thomas puts the photo down on the desk. If Piette looked at him now, she would see a gentle smile on Thomas’s lips. Something has changed, because he can now remember her and feel happy.

T
IME WILL HAVE PASSED
. It will have worked its spell. A year, two years, perhaps more.

There will be a reception at the New Morning venue in Paris. Yves Janvier will have finished
Abkhazian Dominoes
, which will have a different name. He will have taken Anna’s advice: love is in the title. This book, or another one, should mean—his new editor will tell him—that he now finds
his
readership. This party will celebrate its publication.

All the others will be there: in alphabetical order, because some sort of order is needed, Anna, Louise, Romain, Stan, Thomas. There will be a good reason for each of them to be there.

Anna’s invitation will have arrived at rue Érasme a week earlier, on a Saturday morning. As Anna’s name and address were printed, Stan will have opened the anonymous-looking envelope out of habit. Unsettled to see Yves Janvier’s name, he will have
pulled himself together before handing the invitation to his wife without betraying any feeling. She will put down her cup and he will watch as she in turn feigns the same indifference. He will be grateful to her for this tactful lie. Anna will simply say: “Yves Janvier? He’s a friend. I’ll go.”

But speaking his name will make her shiver.

“I’ll go with you,” Stan will say provocatively. “We’ll get someone to babysit.”

Anna will add nothing to this. She will talk about something else. A minute later she will drop her cup.

Louise will go as Thomas’s guest. He will have met Yves the previous year when, after a public reading, he will have asked him for a dedication. Hearing his name, the writer will look up, an ironic smile on his lips: “Aren’t you the analyst of a friend of mine?”

“She has finished her analysis,” will come Thomas’s reply.

The two men will be friends from then on, good friends. But every time Yves talks about Anna and the regrets that refuse to die, Thomas will remain very discreet.

As for Romain, his presence is easily explained. He will have recently started overseeing a popular science collection for Yves’s publishers. He will be surprised to see Louise at the party. He will be thinking about remarrying. The future Mrs. Vidal will be called Natalia Vassilievna and will be twenty-nine. Without even knowing her, Louise will find her annoying. The future will prove her partly right.

After the inevitable speeches, when a group of klezmer musicians, friends of Yves’s, step onto the stage, Anna will make her excuses and slip away for a moment. When she is alone, she will search through her bag and open a very worn envelope. It holds a poem that she has read many times over.

But that’s enough about love.