The Reinvention of Love

the sound of her steps.
    I have watched her hurry up the aisle. She has seen me sitting in the pew. When she slides in beside me, we are looking only at each other.
    She is always impatient. As she manoeuvres herself into thepew she invariably bangs her knee on the upright at the end of the bench, or her elbow on the back of the neighbouring pew. It is this I adore – her regard for her comfort and safety swept aside by her need to get to me as quickly as possible.
    And what do I do as she tumbles along the bench? I sit perfectly still and wait for her to reach me. It is the most exquisite of pleasures.
    Adèle’s hair is out of place, and sometimes there are leaves stuck through it. Her face is red from her frantic journey. She breathes like a man after sport. When she puts out her hands to grab me, they are damp with perspiration.
    “Charlotte.”
    I love how she says my name, as though it is the last word she will ever utter. I love how she takes my face in her hands and kisses me with such abandon.
    But here I go too fast again. This is the trouble with love. It has its own momentum, skips ahead like a fast heartbeat. It is hard to slow the words down enough to properly examine the moment.
    When Adèle slides into the pew beside me, I forget about the rest of the church. Everything I was thinking about, everything I was looking at, is easily replaced by the joy of being next to my beloved. The world shrinks to her body, then to her face, then to her lips. I wouldn’t notice if the church was entirely full of people, or if the stained-glass Jesus was suddenly sitting on the other side of me.
    When I was a boy, standing on the top of that hill to watch Napoleon review his troops, I had this same feeling. When I am pulled through the early morning by a line of words, when I move further and faster along them, so that I forget myself completely, I have this feeling again. The feeling, when Adèle takes my face in her hands and kisses me, is one of surrender. No, it is more than that. It is wanting, with every part of myself, to give myself away, to spend myself, to be, finally, empty.

    When Adèle and I meet at the hotel, I invariably arrive first. I stand outside, preferring this to waiting in the lobby, where I will be regarded with suspicion by the proprietor.
    Adèle is rarely on time. It is always harder to escape from her life than she imagines it will be. One or other of the children has hurt himself and needs her maternal attentions. The person who has been pressed into looking after the children has not shown up at the correct hour. There is a shortage of cabs and she has to walk. When she is walking she trips over a piece of wood near the gutter and twists her ankle.
    Whatever keeps Adèle from arriving means that I often spend a long while loitering outside the Hôtel Saint-Paul.
    I walk up and down in front of the hotel. I stand against the wall, gazing fixedly at my shoes, much as the Virgin Mary does in her alcove in the church. If Adèle is taking an especially long time, I will cross the narrow street and wait there, where I have a good view of the front of the hotel, but I am not so obviously lurking.
    Adèle arrives eventually and we clutch on to each other in the street, stagger up the steps and into the lobby of the hotel. We are always desperate to get to our room and the whole business of signing the register with false names seems designed as a torture to test our resolve. It always takes an infuriatingly long time to do such a simple thing as sign our names in a book.
    Of course, everyone in the hotel employ knows why we’re there. No one is fooled by our pretence as man and wife. For honestly, what man and wife are so desperate to have each other in the middle of the afternoon?
    None come to my mind.
    These remembered afternoons in our room are a perfectbalance of the satisfactions of the flesh and the spirit and the mind. Because they are so perfect I feel inadequate describing them. There is nothing to hang on to, no sharp edges. Everything swims away from me. I cannot separate myself enough from this experience to capture it for someone else. I suppose this is what happiness is, a wholeness that cannot be pried apart. The more an experience can be fractured, perhaps, the more miserable the event.
    It is a lie to say that I remember my mouth on Adèle’s skin, or how she tasted, or how her body closed around my hand when I was inside her. The feelings of those moments are gone