On June 30, slightly before midnight, Anis telephoned. Van was at home; she must have suspected as much.
“Well. I’m in Paris,” she said.
“Where in Paris?” asked Van eagerly.
“At home.”
She had a room in a university dorm in the Latin Quarter, she said, without elaborating. Van was careful not to reproach her in any way.
“That’s wonderful. Will I see you again?”
“Yes,” said Anis. “Now it’s possible. The room wasn’t in good condition. I’ve been sweating for ten days to make it look nice. It’s all done. I finished this morning.”
Ten days, and all that time, every time they talked, in addition to the sixty times where Van listened again to the messages on his answering machine, he had imagined her in Grenoble, in her garret room, or on her way to class, or in one of those cafés with their unforgettable mulled wine. This I know because he told me.
She was provoking him. He decided to risk everything: “I haven’t unsaddled my pony yet, I’ve just come in. I can be at your place in a quarter of an hour.”
“Your pony is like me, he can’t keep his eyes open,” said Anis. “So take his saddle off. It’s late. I’ve found work, and I have a very early start.”
Van said nothing for ten seconds.
“Call me back when you’ve got a few minutes,” he said finally, somewhat mechanically.
“And don’t you think,” said Anis, “that it doesn’t make much sense, now that I’m in Paris, for me to call you every day, morning and night?”
The next morning, July 1, and the day after, Van did not hear from her at all.
She called the studio on Saturday the third at ten. Van had figured that she would wait until then to send him a message that would be all the more affectionate if she could leave it on the machine. He let her begin talking, then he picked up.
They met early afternoon on the Pont Marie. It was her idea, because she didn’t know Paris well, and wanted to start with what she knew best.
“The most famous ice cream shop in Paris,” said Van, “is Berthillon. There, look.”
They ate pink and white sorbet, walked around the two islands, down onto the banks, on to the Square Vert-Galant; they wandered through Notre-Dame, rested their legs sitting side by side on a concrete bench outside the cathedral.
“I feel so good without my navy blue sweater,” said Van. “I was suffocating. I’ve thrown it out, I feel alive again.”
Anis acted as if she hadn’t heard.
“There’s a place where I’m dying to go,” she said. “Can’t you guess?”
“Every time I think I can guess what you’re thinking, I’m mistaken,” winced Van.
“Go on . . .”
“The bookstore?”
“The Good Novel?” Anis gave an open smile. “No, I’ve already been there. You lose.”
“I’ve been well aware of that for a long time, believe me. I won’t say another word.”
“These riverbanks, these bridges . . . can’t you guess? It’s fairly obvious, though. I would like to see the décor of your studio, after all.”
“Tomorrow,” said Ivan hastily, without knowing what had prompted him to answer like that.
When she entered Ivan’s studio that Sunday—it was three in the afternoon—Anis looked at the walls in silence, gravely. Only then did Van understand why, the day before, he had delayed the exam. Something decisive was at stake, that seemed patently clear to him, as did the naïveté of his painting, so he went to stare out of the bay window, incapable of doing anything other than count the terribly slow beats of his poor heart.
“I like it very much,” said Anis, from behind him.
I like you very much—Van knew perfectly well that this was the formula people used when they wanted to tell someone they didn’t love them; he had used it himself on more than one occasion.
But Anis was already asking to compare the work to the original.
She stayed all of five minutes, Van calculated, as he descended the stairway behind her. He had polished his lodgings until late at night, and prepared a tray of pastries like the ones in the childhood song (the lover is a pastry chef, who weeps with frustration at her hard heart, while he still “loves her like a cream puff”).
The weather was glorious. They walked as far as the Pont de la Concorde, along the rue Montmartre, the grands boulevards, the Madeleine. From the bridge, Anis looked at the Seine flowing, heavy and slow.
“Where is the Port des Invalides?” she asked.
“I can’t remember!” said Van. “That’s all in the past, for me. I never go over there. No, for me, the part of Paris that is interesting nowadays is the Latin Quarter.”
“By the way, do you know if the chapel of the Sorbonne is open on Sunday? This week it was closed. I thought that maybe, on Sunday . . .”
Van didn’t have a clue.
“Let’s go see,” he said. “The most direct way from here, for the Boulevard Saint-Michel, is to take the Bateau bus.”
The most direct, not exactly. But definitely the slowest. They waited for the Bateau bus in the sun, with the Breton scent of harbors, stagnant water rising.
“So you’ve been to see the bookstore?” asked Van.
“Fortunately the rue Dupuytren isn’t very long, and there’s only one store being remodeled. From outside, with that whitewash on the windows, you can’t tell what sort of shop is going to open. When do you lay your cards on the table?”
“When we open, the beginning of September. We’ll raise the banner, The Good Novel, at eight o’clock, and at ten we’ll open.”
He took a deep breath, then exhaled.
“If you like, I’ll show you around. Whenever you like.”
“I’m going to wait for the opening, like everybody else.”
“Francesca’s not there at all during the day. And even if she were, she would give you a friendly welcome. She’s a fairy godmother.”
“I see,” said Anis. “I’d rather wait.”
The Bateau bus was coming, white and shiny like a new toy, instantly recognizable among the filthy barges and old boats. It pulled alongside with the gentle touch of an engine remotely and expertly controlled.
The sun was setting. Light drifted on the water.
From the Port Saint-Michel, it took them ten minutes to get as far as the chapel of the Sorbonne, along sidewalks cluttered with slow-moving tourists, and when they got there, it was closed.
There was nothing posted on the door, no opening times, or any information.
“I wonder if it’s no longer used,” said Van.
“Would you like to see my room?” asked Anis. “It’s right nearby.”
“Why not? That way, I’ll know your address.”
When Anis laughed, she had a dimple on her left cheek, but not on her right.
“I’ll stay five minutes,” Van told her. “I’m like you, rooms . . . Life seems a bit narrow between four walls.”
Anis did not comment. Her room was at number 44, rue du Bol-en-Bois, on the fifth floor of a gray and blue glass building constructed in the seventies: a light room, that smelled of fresh paint, despite the fact that the glass door leading to the balcony was wide open.
Van went out onto the balcony at once, intrigued by the foliage he could see. There was a little garden. Anis followed him, and she leaned against the railing next to him.
“I’ve been incredibly lucky, no?” she said.
“You should have left Grenoble earlier, you see. You’re much better off here. With my perch overlooking a maple tree, and yours above the elms, you might think Paris is a park.”
He took note of the distance between his left elbow and her right one, which must have been about three feet. The last time he had found himself anywhere near that arm, on the concrete bench outside Notre Dame the evening before, the distance between them had seemed roughly the same.
Let’s stay positive, Van reasoned. If he looked closer, he could see that the distance between Anis and himself had decreased by a good millimeter in twenty-four hours. At the rate of one millimeter a day, he calculated that it would take a thousand days to reduce the three feet to nothing. He recalled a remarkable short story by Paulhan called Les coeurs changent. Albert and Rose like each other, they roll around in the bed right away, and then with the passage of time, they grow apart, and take years to get closer again. Van could remember the final sentence. Albert is trying to take Rose’s hand, and she protests, “My friend, what do you want from me?”
A thousand days, or slightly more than three years. Van thought he might try to arouse Anis’s jealousy, and he began talking in a great hurry about all the women who filled the streets of Paris. He pictured Sarah Green Pea, quicksilver, a spark of sex, or Marie Noir, heavy lava, volcanic.
“What are you thinking about?” asked Anis.
“About women, certain women who move quickly in matters of love,” said Van, trying to adopt a tone of despair and realizing he only sounded bitter.
“Men don’t like that sort of woman,” said Anis calmly. “Why don’t we go have some dinner? Aren’t you hungry? I haven’t eaten since yesterday.”
Van suggested the Centre Pompidou.
“It’s a bit far, but from the restaurant on the sixth floor you have one of the finest views on Paris, in my opinion, neither too high, nor too low.”
“I’m sure I can’t afford it,” said Anis.
“Well it’s my treat, obviously.”
She sighed.
“I would prefer not to. I’ve never known a boy to invite a girl without expecting a return on his investment.”
“There, now you’ve hurt my feelings. I have no intention of buying you.”
“Why should I believe you?”
“How can I prove to you that I am disinterested, other than to spoil you as often as you’ll let me? I have an idea. You let me invite you for coffee from time to time, let me send you a poem, a few flowers, and every time I give you something, that means I can think of you, and you can think of yourself, as being freer; and we’ll know that you are freer.”
“There must be a catch,” said Anis, dreamily.
“There isn’t one! I defy you to find one.” Van bristled. “I’m really being stupid. Probably you would prefer if I insisted that I am interested in you to the highest degree. It would be the truth, after all.”
They had dinner in a run-down Tibetan place on the rue des Fossés-Saint-Jacques. Anis chose it because she didn’t know anything about Himalayan cuisine.
“I don’t know anything about it either,” said Van, sitting down opposite her. “We are taking a considerable risk. What will we do if the only thing to drink here is tea with yak butter?”
“We’ll make like Tintin,” said Anis. “Either we’re adventurous or we aren’t. Let’s try it.”
They had some fairly ordinary Chinese beer, and stir-fried vegetables that were difficult to identify. Ivan talked a little bit about Asian cooking. He liked Thai cuisine.
“So,” he asked during a pause, “how’s work?”
“It’s okay,” said Anis.
Van counted mentally to three.
“What are you doing exactly?”
Anis looked him straight in the eye: “It’s just to make money.”
Van decided not to ask any more questions. Already he no longer discussed Anis’s desiderata, and he took no more initiative, and he wasn’t expecting anything more, since he didn’t know what to expect. For all that, he couldn’t be sure that this was what spiritual masters would qualify as pure love.
He walked home from the rue des Fossés-Saint-Jacques to the rue de l’Agent-Bailly. He must have reached his tenth mile of the day. He walked slowly, mulling over what Anis had said to him. How calmly she had said, Men don’t like women who rush things. How confident she was.
Van suddenly felt as if his ears had come unblocked. Those are the very words he chose to describe it to me. He stopped short. All that confidence had a hollow ring to it! It sounded more like a question: Do men not prefer women who don’t rush things? What an idiot he had been. Anis was expecting him to reassure her, to tell her that she did not fit in the usual categories, and that he wasn’t comparing her to anybody. But he hadn’t said a thing.
He took out his little cell phone and, walking on, he dialed her number. He got the answering machine. “I don’t like things always in a rush, either,” he thought. “I’m not in a hurry. My favorite short story by Jean Paulhan is called Les coeurs changent. It’s only one page long, but it makes you think. I’ll send it to you, and you’ll tell me what you think.
“That is, if you want me to,” he corrected. “You don’t have to talk to me about it, obviously.”