happiness, my happiness, my husband, my house, my children, my parents, look. It’s all there, spread out on this kitchen table, years of life in fading colors, I give them to you, I’ll abandon them for you, my love. But what about you, what are you offering? Tell me that.
Anna is afraid she will never “be able to do it.” Sometimes, in order to convince herself, she cites Jane Birkin, Romy Schneider, other women—often actresses—who had several significant men in their lives; what Anna actually says is “several lives,” as if each man counted as a life. She looks for role models, examples, who say, Yes, she has a right to this too. Because it is something she is owed.
But she has her doubts.
“You know,” she says one evening when they are in the car, “I worry so much about not being able to do it. I often just tell myself: Anna, don’t. Do it.”
Yves bursts out laughing. “Did you hear what you just said? You said, ‘Don’t do it.’ ”
Anna did hear herself. All her ambivalence is in those words. “Don’t. Do it” or “Don’t do it.” All down to a period and the subconscious.
HUGUES AND YVES
• • •
I DON’T KNOW if I have a best friend. Sometimes I can wake up and not know how old I am. I’ve set my clock ten minutes fast to make sure I leave on time, but I now take the extra ten minutes into account, which cancels them out. I’d like to write a book with the title
A Book Not Worth Reading
and have it published by a company called Minor Press in a collection known as Complete Obscurity, so that I can say: “I had a book not worth reading published in complete obscurity by a minor press.” I was once left by a woman, and I cut my mattress in two, so that I didn’t have to sleep on her side. I can never find my keys when I have to go out in a hurry. I like the pillow to be cool when I go to bed. I once knew a man called Deadman who introduced himself like this: “Deadman, like dead man without the gap.” I will go to hell. I’ve watched the image of the tsunami unleashing itself onto the Indonesian coast at least ten timeson television. I own sneakers, tennis shoes, climbing boots (worn only twice), lace-up walking boots, black moccasins, elegant black shoes, slippers, rubber-soled sandals, and yellow flippers. I know that my favorite film isn’t a very good film. I often wonder what would be different about the world if I didn’t exist.
Yves puts down Hugues Léger’s first book,
Definition
. A litany of sentences, almost a thousand of them, in which the writer sketches a self-portrait in disjointed fragments. The previous evening, Hugues killed himself, at home, with a bullet through the mouth. Anna is in Berlin for a few days, she probably does not yet know. Yves immediately wrote an obituary for
Libération
, and managed to arrange through a journalist friend for it to be published, even though a different article had already been approved for the page layout. In it he said this did not mean that Hugues’s last book,
Autolyze
, which deals with suicide, should be seen as “a will waiting to be unsealed”; it was not “the cathartic book his friends would have liked to see him write, the book that would open up the creative field he still needed to open. But
Autolyze
, his most accomplished book, could exist in its own right without the dim reflected light of his death, which he need not have foretold.”
The dinner Anna wanted would never happen, today’s lover would never meet yesterday’s. But Yves feels a blossoming friendliness toward Hugues, whose resolute death tries in vain to forbid friendship. He has reread his books, hoping to find in them the man Anna must have loved, and has identified a dark intelligence of life in his sentences. One he found particularly touching, violently so, was the closing sentence of
Definition:
“The best day of my life may already be behind me.” Beforemeeting Anna, Yves also thought the best day of his life was already
Anna is afraid she will never “be able to do it.” Sometimes, in order to convince herself, she cites Jane Birkin, Romy Schneider, other women—often actresses—who had several significant men in their lives; what Anna actually says is “several lives,” as if each man counted as a life. She looks for role models, examples, who say, Yes, she has a right to this too. Because it is something she is owed.
But she has her doubts.
“You know,” she says one evening when they are in the car, “I worry so much about not being able to do it. I often just tell myself: Anna, don’t. Do it.”
Yves bursts out laughing. “Did you hear what you just said? You said, ‘Don’t do it.’ ”
Anna did hear herself. All her ambivalence is in those words. “Don’t. Do it” or “Don’t do it.” All down to a period and the subconscious.
HUGUES AND YVES
• • •
I DON’T KNOW if I have a best friend. Sometimes I can wake up and not know how old I am. I’ve set my clock ten minutes fast to make sure I leave on time, but I now take the extra ten minutes into account, which cancels them out. I’d like to write a book with the title
A Book Not Worth Reading
and have it published by a company called Minor Press in a collection known as Complete Obscurity, so that I can say: “I had a book not worth reading published in complete obscurity by a minor press.” I was once left by a woman, and I cut my mattress in two, so that I didn’t have to sleep on her side. I can never find my keys when I have to go out in a hurry. I like the pillow to be cool when I go to bed. I once knew a man called Deadman who introduced himself like this: “Deadman, like dead man without the gap.” I will go to hell. I’ve watched the image of the tsunami unleashing itself onto the Indonesian coast at least ten timeson television. I own sneakers, tennis shoes, climbing boots (worn only twice), lace-up walking boots, black moccasins, elegant black shoes, slippers, rubber-soled sandals, and yellow flippers. I know that my favorite film isn’t a very good film. I often wonder what would be different about the world if I didn’t exist.
Yves puts down Hugues Léger’s first book,
Definition
. A litany of sentences, almost a thousand of them, in which the writer sketches a self-portrait in disjointed fragments. The previous evening, Hugues killed himself, at home, with a bullet through the mouth. Anna is in Berlin for a few days, she probably does not yet know. Yves immediately wrote an obituary for
Libération
, and managed to arrange through a journalist friend for it to be published, even though a different article had already been approved for the page layout. In it he said this did not mean that Hugues’s last book,
Autolyze
, which deals with suicide, should be seen as “a will waiting to be unsealed”; it was not “the cathartic book his friends would have liked to see him write, the book that would open up the creative field he still needed to open. But
Autolyze
, his most accomplished book, could exist in its own right without the dim reflected light of his death, which he need not have foretold.”
The dinner Anna wanted would never happen, today’s lover would never meet yesterday’s. But Yves feels a blossoming friendliness toward Hugues, whose resolute death tries in vain to forbid friendship. He has reread his books, hoping to find in them the man Anna must have loved, and has identified a dark intelligence of life in his sentences. One he found particularly touching, violently so, was the closing sentence of
Definition:
“The best day of my life may already be behind me.” Beforemeeting Anna, Yves also thought the best day of his life was already