The Reinvention of Love

reviews are becoming even more popular,” I say. “I get so many letters about them that it’s hard to respond to all my admirers.”
    Mother’s eyes glaze over with boredom.
    I try shorthand.
    “I’m very popular,” I say. “More than ever.”
    “Did you notice whether the baker on the corner has that nice bread I like in the window?” asks Mother. “He doesn’t make it every day, and I’m never sure which day he does make it.”
    I spend a moment separating the meat from the bone on the chop.
    “Tuesday?” says Mother. “Or is it Wednesday? What day is it today, Sainte-Beuve?”
    “Thursday.”
    “Oh, perhaps it’s Thursday then.”
    “It is Thursday.”
    “The bread, the bread. Perhaps he makes it only on Thursdays.”
    It is a great shame that my father is dead, that he died before I knew him. I have to believe that he was possessed of a brain, and that my intellect comes from him. There is nothing remotely intellectual about Mother. Nobody was ever so obsessed with the trivial and the meaningless as Mother. And yet she is all I have. I stab at my potatoes. There seem to be bits of dirt onmy lunch, as though the food was dropped and then hastily shoved back onto the plate. Perhaps the housekeeper is losing her eyesight as well as her hearing.
    I look over at Mother. She’s finished her food already and is picking at something on the tablecloth. She is a much better eater than I am, altogether more robust. I suddenly feel like weeping and have to dab at my eyes with my napkin.
    Luckily, the housekeeper usually comes in to clear when I am having my emotional moment, and I am distracted from my feelings by her rough handling of the crockery and silver.
    After the meal is over, I sit with Mother in the sunny front room on the second floor and we have coffee. If Mother can be stopped from commenting on what objects the sun is shining on, or how sore her feet get in winter, or whether Madame Lamarche will recover from her illness, she will sometimes ask after my health, or express concern that I am not dressing warmly enough for the weather, or tell me that someone has told her that it seems I am clever. In these moments everything is forgiven and redeemed, and there is suddenly the desire to do this whole performance over again the very next day.
    Sometimes, when I am shrugging on my coat in the foyer and I look back up the stairs, I see Mother standing on the landing, watching me go. She doesn’t wave or call out, and I don’t either. I simply put on my coat and hat, collect my gloves and umbrella, and step out into the Paris afternoon. But it is in these moments that I feel we are most aligned, that Father’s early death shipwrecked us both and we cling to this little raft of habit to stay afloat. It is not the vessel either of us hoped or expected to make our voyage on, and yet here we are and there is the desire, in both of us, to make the best of it.

ADÈLE AND I WALK THROUGH the Montparnasse cemetery. This is not one of our regular haunts, but today there is not enough time to journey to the church, or the hotel, and Victor has taken the children to the Jardin du Luxembourg, so we cannot risk a visit to the orchard.
    The cemetery is close to our houses on Notre-Dame-des-Champs. It is where I myself will be buried. Mother has already reserved our spaces. Adèle and I walk along the paths between the rows of raised stone tombs, and the thought of my dead self makes me greedy for life.
    I grab my beloved, but she twists away.
    “Someone might see,” she says. There are indeed other people in the cemetery, and because the graves block their presence they are apt to pop up suddenly in front of us on the path.
    “Passion must have no regrets,” I say.
    “Passion is nothing
but
regrets,” says Adèle.
    In the beginning I had fantasized about seducing Adèle. I had thought that, with my clever words and my sensitive nature, I would slowly persuade her to yield to me. My attentions would ripen her like a fruit and she would drop easily into my hands. But really, from the beginning, Adèle has controlled the tempo of our love. She is not a ripe fruit. She is not easily swayed by my words. If she does not want my touch while we walk through the cemetery, then she will not have it.
    But I am a better man only in my mind. My body simply longs for her, and it is the stronger force.
    “We will be dead soon,” I say. “Encased in stone, like all these good people.” I wave my hand over the