Enough About Love Read online

  Copyright © 2009 Éditions Jean-Claude Lattès

  Originally published in French as Assez parlé d’amour by Éditions

  Jean-Claude Lattès, Paris 2009.

  Translation Copyright © 2010 Adriana Hunter

  Production Editor: Yvonne E. Cárdenas

  Stag beetle illustration on page 255 copied from Albrecht Dürer

  by Marie Berville

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from Other Press LLC, except in the case of brief quotations in reviews for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast. For information write to Other Press LLC, 2 Park Avenue, 24th Floor, New York, NY 10016. Or visit our Web site: www.otherpress.com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

  Le Tellier, Hervé, 1957-

  [Assez parlé d’amour. English]

  Enough about love / by Hervé Le Tellier; translated from the French by

  Adriana Hunter.

  p. cm.

  Originally published in French as Assez parlé d’amour.

  eISBN: 978-1-59051-400-9

  1. Married people—Fiction. 2. Middle-aged persons—Fiction.

  3. Adultery—Fiction. I. Hunter, Adriana. II. Title.

  PQ2672.E11455A9213 2011

  843′.914—dc22

  2010040656

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE:

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  v3.1

  FOR SARAH

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Thomas

  Anna

  Thomas and Louise

  Anna and Yves

  Thomas and Louise

  Louise

  Yves

  Thomas and Yves

  Yves and Ariane

  Thomas and Louise

  Anna and Yves

  Romain

  Anna and Stan

  Louise and Alain

  Stan and Simon

  Yves and Anna

  Romain and Louise

  Thomas and Louise

  Anna and Yves

  Anna and Stan

  Louise and Thomas

  Anna and Yves

  Anna and Louise

  Anna and Yves

  Hugues and Yves

  Anna and Thomas

  Stan and Yves

  Stan and Anna

  Stan

  Yves and Thomas

  Anna and Yves

  Thomas and Louise

  Anna and Yves

  Louise and Thomas

  Anna

  Anna and Yves

  Louise and Romain

  Yves

  Thomas and Romain

  Anna and Morad

  Yves and Stan

  Yves and Anna

  Yves and Anna

  Thomas and Louise

  Stan

  Thomas and Louise

  Karl and Lea

  Thomas and Judith

  Anna

  Romain

  Yves and Anna

  Thomas and Piette

  Epilogue

  For me, love has always been the most important of matters, or rather the only one.

  STENDHAL, The Life of Henry Brulard

  PROLOGUE

  • • •

  THAT YEAR THE PLANET EXPERIENCED its hottest autumn for five centuries. But the climate’s providential clemency, which may have played its part, will not be mentioned again.

  This tale covers a period of three months, and perhaps a little more. Any man—or woman—who wants to hear nothing—or no more—about love should put this book down.

  THOMAS

  • • •

  TOWNS SHOULD BE GIVEN LARGE PARKS. Parks are a condition necessary for young people’s lives to change course, to set off on a different tack, down an unforeseen fork. For them to realize part of their potential. It is into just such a park, the Jardin du Luxembourg in Paris, that a young man walks one February morning in 1974. He has long hair and is wearing a woolen scarf, his name is Thomas, Thomas Le Gall.

  Thomas is a good student. He is just sixteen and is already in his first year of an advanced math class: he has to satisfy his mother’s ambitions for him, and get into one of the elite universities, ideally the highly competitive Polytechnique. But on this February morning, Thomas left home—he lives in Barbès in the Eighteenth Arrondissement—and took the Métro, and did not get off at the station where his school is. He stayed on Line 4 all the way to Saint-Michel, then walked up the boulevard to the park. He walks toward the large pond, passes statues of the queens of France, and sits on a metal chair. He has prepared for this getaway: he has several books in his bag. It is not all that cold.

  In the evening he goes home to his parents. He is hungry: he had a baguette sandwich and a piece of fruit for lunch.

  The next day, the day after that, and every other day, Thomas goes back to the Jardin du Luxembourg. The park becomes his headquarters. He sometimes meets up with bohemian companions: a girl his age, Manon, blond, ski-jump nose and freckles, even more adrift than he is (the smell of patchouli will remind him of her forever); and Kader, a tall black man, maybe thirty, a guitarist who plays in the Métro. When it rains, Thomas takes shelter by one of the kiosks or warms up at the Malebranche, a smoky café where he quickly falls into a routine with some art students from Louis-le-Grand. They discuss politics and literature, row about Proust, Althusser, Trotsky, and Barthes, his vehemence in proportion to his ignorance of the texts. When he comes to read them properly, later, he will blush as he remembers the idiocies he uttered, and marvel at the impunity of his imposture.

  March comes, then April. Thomas has informed the teachers that he has abandoned his studies. To his parents, of course, he lies. He discovers how easy that is, exciting even, how gifted he is at lying. He reeks of tobacco? He rants about how stressed smokers get before their practice exams. He is short of money at lunchtime? From now on the cafeteria likes you to pay with cash, he says he suspects the bursar of corruption. He comes home too early by mistake? An oxidation-reduction experiment went wrong and the chemistry teacher—“You’re not going to believe this”—burned himself. He never talked about his studies so much until the day he quit them.

  One May evening, almost before he has set foot in the house, Thomas starts elaborating that day’s fiction. His father watches him, in silence. All at once his mother explodes. They know. The school called: he failed to return a book to the library, even though he defected three months ago. Angry words, flaring tempers, big arguments. Thomas will never be admitted to one of the elite universities. He leaves his family home and finds refuge at a friend’s house. He lives off small jobs—still possible in those days of a healthy economy—and vaguely takes up studying psychology and sociology, prolonging his adolescence by ten years. One May morning, a telephone call from a police station ejects him brutally from this cocoon. The woman he loves, Piette, who had been hospitalized for depression, has only just been released. She has thrown herself under a train. In three days Thomas completes all the paperwork, organizes the ceremony and buries his friend. With the grave filled, he goes home. He does not emerge until a week later, clean-shaven and with his curly black hair as good as shaved off. He goes back to his studies.

  At the point w
here this story begins, a copper sign screwed to the door frame of 28 rue Monge, not that far from the Jardin du Luxembourg, summarizes his trajectory.

  DR. THOMAS LE GALL

  PSYCHIATRIST, PSYCHOANALYST

  FORMER INTERN AT THE

  PARIS PSYCHIATRIC HOSPITALS

  The sign paints a professional portrait of him, but when all is said and done, Thomas Le Gall is very professional now.

  On the fourth floor, through the door on the left, a one-bedroom apartment has become a psychoanalyst’s office. Thomas has kept the spacious modern kitchen. He occasionally eats there, perhaps a spring roll from the Chinese restaurant. The bedroom, to the left of the front door, is now a waiting room: waxed floorboards, two deep armchairs, and a coffee table give it an English country club feel; the window has no curtains and looks out onto the street. The thirty-minute sessions are held at hourly intervals, patients never meet. On set days Thomas sees patients in the large living room: the view of the sky and the plane trees in the courtyard would be clear, if not for exotic wood blinds filtering the light. The door is padded with black velvet. The olive-colored leather of the couch is intended to be soothing. African masks watch over the room benevolently, like the Moai statues, turning their backs to the sea and protecting Easter Island. Behind the Louis-Philippe desk hangs a blue-gray industrial landscape by Lowry. On the opposite wall there is a very small and very dark painting by Bram Van Velde, dating from his friendship with Matisse. It is the only valuable piece. Thomas acquired it at the Drouot auction house, probably paying a little too much—if it actually makes sense to talk about paying too much for art—with the precise intention of stopping himself from buying things at Drouot.

  Thomas is well aware that he has made this space a caricature of a psychoanalyst’s office. At least he has spared his patients the Malian sculptures and Congolese nail fetishes. But decorum and what it represents are not without importance, and Thomas knows this.

  On the extensive bookshelves against the far wall, literature rubs shoulders with psychoanalysis in peaceful conflict. Joyce mingles with Pierre Kahn, Leiris is shoehorned against Lacan, a book by Queneau which has been put back in the wrong place—a good sign for a book—leans up against a Deleuze. When Queneau died, Thomas was not yet fifteen. Si tu crois xava, xava xava xa, xava durer toujours la saison des za la saison des zamours …1 It is a long time since Thomas Le Gall has believed it will. The wrinkles are growing deeper, his curly hair, now more salt than pepper, is receding from his forehead, the face has broadened, is thickening slightly, the former forty-year-old is heading toward the sixty-year-old and is expecting worse to come.

  The bow-fronted clock on the mantelpiece says nine o’clock. Thomas has deactivated its chiming mechanism to keep control of his sessions. He sits in his armchair, waiting. He reads a two-day-old copy of Le Monde, tidies a few papers. His first appointment is late. Anna Stein is always late. By two, ten, sometimes fifteen minutes, always for a good reason: the babysitter didn’t arrive, Paris traffic jams, nowhere to park. Thomas suggested a different time to her, she turned it down. Perhaps she likes playing hard to get. Thomas trusts the wisdom of popular expressions.

  Anna Stein. Twelve years of treatment, now reaching the end. For the first few years, like many people, Anna did nothing but talk. She unrolled her life. Then when she had exhausted her recollections, grappled every crumb of memory, she felt like a river that had run dry, been spent, used up, and she could not think straight for a year, perhaps more. It was when she admitted defeat, when she gave up, angrily—“Well, what else do you want me to say?”—that she could start talking without thinking, to say, as Freud put it, “whatever came into her head,” without trying to re-create some fiction or construct a logical narrative. Now Anna makes associations, discovers links, reestablishes meaning. She is getting somewhere.

  Two days earlier, in the last minute of the session, she blurted: “I’ve met someone. I’ve met with someone. A man, a writer.” In the big book dedicated to Anna Stein, Thomas merely jotted down a few words, unhurriedly, “met with someone”—the pleonasm intrigued him—then added “man,” “writer.” On the left, he isolates what he perceives to be factual about something, on the right he underlines what he feels is caught in the words, sifting out the formalities. Anna added, “a real thunderbolt.” Thomas was amused by the expression, so electric and unequivocal.

  Then, in pencil, he drew a dotted line, and at the end of it he wrote the letter X, which he linked to the A of Anna. Changing perspective, shifting logic, he associated the two letters X and A in an oval diagram, a Boolean notation. He did not press her for more information. His Westminster clock was already several minutes past the half hour. He simply said: “See you on Thursday.”

  1. If you think it’ll, itll itll itll, go on forever, this season of, unov unov, season of love …

  ANNA

  • • •

  ANNA STEIN IS ABOUT TO TURN FORTY. She looks ten years younger in these well-heeled circles where the norm is more like five. But the imminence of this expiration date and the witchery of the number itself send a chill through her, and to think she still feels she is in the comet’s tail of her teens. Forty … Because she thinks there is a before and an after, as in commercials for hair products, she is already living in mourning for what has been and in terror of what is yet to come.

  Childhood memory: Anna is seven, one sister, two brothers, the youngest barely talking yet, she is the eldest. It is not easy being the big one, the one who is argued with because the others are too little. But Anna the charmer managed to remain her mother’s favorite. She sits her brothers and her sister around her in a semicircle. The golden light pouring through the window is that of a day coming to a close, probably a Sunday spent in the country. She is standing, book in hand, reading out loud. She spices up the story, which is too straightforward for her liking, with dragons and fairies, ogres and princes, and it all becomes very muddled, she even gets lost herself in places. The children listen to their happy, glowing big sister, fascinated, captivated, frightened too. Gesticulating wildly with her arms, sometimes jumping about, Anna mimes the action and makes sure her intonation sustains the attention of her young audience. She has no doubt: she will be an actress, or a dancer, or a singer.

  At fifteen, Anna ties her black hair up to reveal the nape of her neck. She triumphantly inhabits her brand-new woman’s body: she wears leopard-skin leggings and high heels, aggressive bras. She dreams of a life in the public eye, a career under the spotlight, and the names of cities—New York, Buenos Aires, Shanghai—make her swoon. She starts a rock band with herself as the singer, and baptizes them Anna and Her Three Lovers. The lead guitarist, bass player, and drummer are all in love with her, after all. In vain in all three cases, one a little less than the others, but so little.

  At twenty, Anna looks elegant in her medical student’s white overalls. She chose one that barely fit her, sacrificing comfort for elegance, wearing it open one button too low at the front, and, as her shoes are the only other thing that show, she puts a great deal of energy into picking them out. Often they are fluorescent. Over the years she becomes Dr. Stein. Intelligent but with a dilettante attitude, she passes every exam: she is probably too proud to mess up in her studies. She is not yet proud enough to dare to want to fail. The adventurous life that would have required so many transgressions is now further and further from her, and she knows that, despite her long legs and beautiful breasts, she will never dance in cabarets. Her mother is a doctor and Anna becomes a psychiatrist, she marries a surgeon, also Jewish, they have two children, Karl, then Lea. “A little Jewish business,” she sometimes laughs. But she has kept something from when she was twenty, a hint of nostalgia for the bohemian: a bold quality in her walk, a light in her smile. Her own tactful way of admitting that she has never completely given up the idea of the stage.

  Yes, Anna became Dr. Stein. But does she completely believe it?

  Once when she called the hospital to spea
k to a colleague, she said confidently: “Hello, could I speak to Dr. Stein please?”

  Utterly stunned, she hung up immediately, praying the receptionist had not recognized her voice. It was more than an hour before she had the courage to call back.

  THOMAS AND LOUISE

  • • •

  “THUNDERBOLT.” At first Thomas Le Gall smiled to hear Anna use that expression. He did not ask whether she had counted the seconds between the flash of lightning and the sound of thunder. But life is facetious: a few hours after that appointment with Anna, Thomas was to be struck by a thunderbolt too. It would be at the “ritual” dinner held by Sammy Karamanlis, a young sociologist who held an open house evening once a month. Thomas did not know Sammy, but a friend took him along: “You won’t be bored, you’ll meet people, pretty women, delightful people.”

  Sammy lives in a one-bedroom apartment on the rue de Grenelle, just where the Seventh Arrondissement likes to think it is already part of the Latin Quarter: high ceilings, bourgeois furnishings, views onto a massive paved courtyard. It would be improbably luxurious for an employee of the National Center for Scientific Research if the researcher’s father were not involved in banking in Lausanne. The guests, about thirty of them, seem to be regulars, but their conversations only rarely roam in the direction of their private lives. Thomas circulates discreetly from one group to another: someone else might have fun diagnosing a case of hysteria here, a breakdown pending there, the odd depression. Thomas knows how social posturing can mislead with its pretenses, appearances, and control. He forbids himself opinions.

  He quickly notices a young woman with short blond hair, pale eyes, and a lot of people around her. She is leaning against the wall in the huge hallway, holding an orange-colored cocktail glass, its surface quivering from her voluble conversation. Thomas moves closer, listens. He grasps that she is a lawyer. She is talking about Chinese, Albanian, and Romanian mafias, about their extreme violence, their explicit threats, about the interpreters who dare not translate every word, she describes terrified witnesses and the sinking fear in her stomach when she looks into the cold eyes of a killer. Three weeks earlier, a Romanian pimp bound one of his girls’ hands and feet, gagged her with duct tape, and threw her in the bathtub. Then, slowly, with a razor, he slashed her, really deeply, almost cutting her into pieces. All the blood drained out of her, “two or three hours,” the pathologist reckoned. So that they knew what he was capable of, he made all his girls file through the bathroom, one after another, forcing them to touch the blood-soaked woman who was still gasping for breath, her eyes bulging with fear and pain. She eventually died. A colleague has to defend this man, and the young lawyer is haunted by the case. Just by describing it again, she relives the nightmare that words still cannot drive away.