The Reinvention of Love

shrewd one. I know the man well enough to sense that he suspects something. We have not been as careful as we thought. The arrogance that snares all lovers has caught us up. He is testing me with his question.
    “I’d be honoured,” I say, with as much aplomb as I can muster. But he is not fooled. He turns away, and he is not fooled.
    We manage a moment in the upstairs hallway after Adèle has put the children to bed.
    I put my hands in her hair. She buries her face in my neck.
    “I love your perfume,” she says.
    “I love you,” I say.
    Downstairs I hear Victor bellow like a cow being slaughtered. He can be so loud, so coarse. I slide my hands down to Adèle’s breasts and give them a squeeze. She backs up against the wall and we press our bodies together.
    “Leave him,” I whisper. “Come away with me. I can’t bear that we aren’t together.”
    Adèle looks confused. We are, in fact, only a fraction of an inch apart.
    “That we aren’t always together,” I say.
    This is our sticking point. Even from his vile plays, Victor makes money. The Hugos are rich. Adèle has four children. I am a penniless critic, an unsuccessful poet.
    But the depth of love that I offer Adèle is considerable, and so we sway together in the upstairs hallway of my best friend’s house, until little Adèle calls out in her sleep and the balance shifts away from me and back towards her family.
    “Tomorrow,” she says. “We will walk out tomorrow. I will leave the children with my sister.” She kisses me, urgent and sweet, and then goes in to calm her youngest daughter.
    Victor is still in the kitchen when I go downstairs. Theo and Luc have disappeared.
    “Charles,” he says. “Come and sit with me.”
    I do as he says, declining his offer of another glass of wine. The house is quiet now. I can hear the chatter of insects through the open window. A breeze carries the scent of roses into the room. I suddenly feel overwhelmed with hopelessness. Adèle will never leave her family. She will tire of me. I will always be lonely and alone.
    “I heard you were in a duel this morning,” says Victor.
    “Yes.” I wish I had thought to mention this to Adèle.
    “Did you challenge?”
    “No. It was a trifling matter,” I say. “An ongoing quarrel between me and the senior editor at the
Globe
.”
    “Ah.” Victor spreads out his hands on the table, already bored by my troubles. “What do you think of
Hernani
?” The people who oppose his romantic play are getting under his skin, despite his noisy bravado.
    “I have only seen it in rehearsal,” I say, honestly. “And a play can’t be properly judged from a rehearsal. The actors are always holding back.”
    “Will you go this week?” asks Victor. “Will you tell me truly what you think of it?”
    “I will.”
    Victor clasps me to him as fiercely and as passionately as I had clasped Adèle to me in the upstairs hallway.
    “You are such a friend to me, Charles,” he says. “I don’t know what I’d do without you.”
    Adèle surprises me at the gate. She is wearing white and looks ghostly among the dark trunks of the plane trees.
    Every moment that I am in her company is glorious. I forget my despair in the kitchen. We love each other. It will end happily. How could it be otherwise?
    “My darling,” she says, “Victor told me that you were in a duel. Were you nearly killed?” She is all shivery with the danger of it.
    “The first shot grazed my temple,” I say, “and the second burned off the buttons on my waistcoat.” The lie is delicious and we both savour it for a full moment.
    In fact, both of Pierre’s shots were wildly off their mark. One of my shots hit a tree. The other couldn’t even be found. Bernard had brought bread and cheese and jam, and when the rain stopped we all had a picnic under the trees before returning to the office.
    “You must not die,” says Adèle. “I couldn’t live without you.”
    “I won’t die,” I say, and I mean it.
    She kisses me, a different kiss from the one she gave me in the house. This one has a note of desperation to it. This is the kiss for a lover who has almost met his mortal end. It has a mixture of surrender and commitment that I find intoxicating. The insects offer their applause. It strikes me that this is what I have always wanted, from myself, and from another. I want to give myself entirely. I want to pledge myself completely. I want a moment such as this one, a moment from which I might never