can’t imagine what it would be like to be together without having children in front of you, it just sounds like a big blank. What are you going to do, travel? To see what? What would you be moving toward? What else would you be living for? Sex? Companionship? Being? Without the forward straining what is there to give you urgency? Just an inevitable end to everything? I’m talking too much, I don’t know why it’s irking me the way it is that she doesn’t want children, who cares, what is it to me? Plenty of my friends and patients don’t want them and it doesn’t put me in this state.

It occurs to me that maybe I’m the one who doesn’t want them.

Love isn’t about straining toward something, she says. Other people try to move you forward. And then I never think I love anyone enough to want to tie myself to them for all eternity, Clémentine says. It never feels like enough. But at the same time once I commit I have trouble leaving. Or at least I’ve had trouble in the past. I worry I might marry the wrong person merely because I couldn’t leave them.

Sunday night and I’m in the kitchen, washing the dishes that have piled up for far too many days. The wine glasses have reached the point where it looks like I’ve had a party. The biggest items are the last to do, the heavy pot I made pasta in, the wooden cutting board I sliced the cherry tomatoes on. No more room left in the drying rack so I leave things on the counter. The Brita’s empty again. All I do with my days, it seems, is drink water, piss, and refill the fucking Brita. I’m still thinking about my conversation with Clémentine. About the point of love, where we want it to take us, what we want from it. Everyone I’ve loved, I’ve loved with obsessive focus. I need an object, any object. If they resist, or try to leave me, I dazzle them with the power, the never-before-encountered power of my love. They have never seen love like that before, been loved like that before. It is irresistible to them to be loved in such a way. I point everything I’ve got at them, I shoot it all, until, one day, it’s over. I can’t stand to be around them.

It feels like Clémentine is helping me confront these things more than Esther.

While we wait in a long queue, my bakery friend gestures at the walls. Des petites annonces, he says, thoughtfully. That’s what’s missing. You used to have loads of little notes tacked up on the walls of the bakery, people selling things, or offering their services. Tutors, he says. Learn Spanish! Learn Greek! I wonder when they stopped having notes like that on the walls of bakeries. It’s probably the internet’s fault.

But on the internet you can learn Greek, I say, because I can see the line is going to take a while longer. They have apps for that.

Oh, apps! I don’t want to learn Greek from a bot. That owl! I want to learn it from a young Greek student who’s trying to make ends meet while he does his masters. Or an old Greek woman who’s lost her husband. A real person, with a story. Maybe I will just move to Greece.

I think about my bakery friend that afternoon, as I tidy up the house. How quickly he’s become a fixture in my life, a part of the day I look forward to, though I don’t even know his name, and now that we’ve established this familiarity it feels weird to acknowledge we don’t know something as fundamental as each other’s names. I don’t know if he has a family, children, what he does for a living, who he eats all that tahini with. He emerged from the city, is of the city. I don’t even know where he lives.

His friendship, and Clémentine’s, are experiments. I need to live more in the present, to take things as they come instead of asking what they are, what is their nature, what is their name.

I move very quickly at the beginnings of things. I can’t stand the beginnings of things. Their eyes looking at me, the thoughts behind these eyes that I don’t know yet, the uncrossable distance, how they move unfamiliarly through my personal space. Whenever I started sleeping with someone new, I coped with this by converting them very quickly from a stranger into a beloved. This is where things tended to get complicated. Because they’re strange and foreign. And in the mad rush to cover that up, I formed attachments to people who weren’t going to stick around. I have to learn to tolerate the time when they’re a stranger. When they leave the house and I don’t know where they’re going or what they’re doing. It’s terrifying to accept the essential otherness of the people we care for.

But what is even more terrifying is admitting to yourself that in spite of the bridge you think you’ve crossed – in spite of the fact that time, and you, and their commitment to you, have converted them from a stranger into the person you know the best in the world – in spite of all that – they are still irrevocably Other.

[...] Anyway it was the summer after we finished lycée and I went away with her family for the summer holidays, and her dad was there, staying at the house with us, and he swam with us, and drank with us, and smoked with us, and one day when I was washing my swimsuit in the laundry room he came up behind me and put his hand between my legs. And I liked it, Clémentine says, and I started sleeping with him, and I liked that too, I liked the hair on his chest, I liked how big he was, I liked hearing him talk about when he was young and having it be such a different time, he worked in cinema and he had loads of friends and I was so flattered that he would pay attention to me. When we got back to Paris I broke up with Céline and kept seeing Marc. I was so unused to seeing someone who had money, he paid for these splashy dinners and bought me the art books I wanted and anything else I wanted too. I started university and was still living with my parents but I stayed at Marc’s place most nights. We had a big fight when they found out. They ordered me to leave him and I said I wouldn’t. Céline refused to see her father and I felt terrible, fighting with my parents I could handle but not causing a rift between Céline and Marc, I could understand why she didn’t want to see me but I didn’t want to drive them apart. Still, something in me couldn’t leave him. I know it doesn’t make sense because he was so much older and it might look like he was taking advantage of me, but he needed me, I swear, I was the one taking care of him. Her voice cracks a little.

Something Clem said has stuck with me for weeks now and I don’t know what to do with it; something like whether psychoanalysis ought to be socially transformative to justify its existence. I’d always assumed it was its own justification, that its capacity for change was baked in. Isn’t there necessarily potential for society if we work with people one at a time? The collective is comprised of individuals, after all. Or have I just been kidding myself, is it all just voyeurism?

Since I’ve been married, I find all women beautiful.

Their languid air, their purposeful movements, the turn of a bare arm as it reaches palm-up, the curve of a bare neck as the head tilts back and the blood rushes through. Any arm. Any neck. Even the old women. Oh the old ones! With the laugh lines round their eyes and the wink at the corner of their mouths, the amusement that could spill out bell-like from them at any moment. Even the chubby ones. Oh the chubby ones! Who know how to take their pleasure from this ancient world.

Since I’ve been married, I find all women beautiful.

Someone said that in a film, and my god, it’s so true. Getting married is the surest way to turn every woman who crosses your path into Helen of Troy. They were always there, all around me. I just didn’t notice.

And now it’s too late. The gong has sounded. Ask not for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for my sex life.

I’m not that interested in cinema, personally; I prefer to stay home and read. But Florence loves it and she talks to me from time to time about Rohmer, Rivette, Varda. She took me to see Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet, and I didn’t care for it, except for the fact that the actress in it looked just like Florence, dark hair, pale oval face, watchful expression. So I go with her to the movies, to make her happy. And we saw Love in the Afternoon and I thought my heart would explode.

She hasn’t caught on. I’m not stupid enough to tell her.

She had a book about him lying around, and I picked it up out of curiosity, wanting to know more about the master of unstructured structure. Quite the eccentric. Lived in a one-room apartment in the southern suburbs of Paris for most of his life. Wore the same grey flannel suit every day. Saved his fingernail clippings, and, according to someone who may have been his enemy, his urine. Walked to and from his job in Montmartre. (I like to think of him composing as he went, the Gnossiennes as the sound of Paris, which can be moved through at the walker’s own speed.) Gave his compositions odd titles like Three Pieces in the Form of a Pear and Dried-Up Embryos. Commanded the player not to play andante or adagio but to Ask!, to play Deep in Thought, to Make Demands on Yourself. To play With Great Benevolence, or Without Pride. At one point the musician – or the music? – is Quite Lost, and at the very end the instruction is to Bury the Sound.

She recently took it into her head that she wanted to become a psychoanalyst. The idea just came to her one morning, she said, looking out the window at Belleville, the people walking down the street, so many different kinds of people in this small neighborhood in Paris. It was as if Belleville, or the apartment itself, had inspired this desire in her. I just want to understand people, she told me. This was a shock; I had assumed she wouldn’t work. When we met, on a beach in ’67 (my god, her small tight ass with the bikini falling off!), she had recently graduated from the Sorbonne with a degree in literature. What else was she going to do with that, besides be a wife and mother? But in the years after she and her friends had graduated, they became progressively more political. They turned out to be a bunch of troublemakers, going back to the university they’d graduated from – mind you, they had graduated at this point – and filling up the amphitheatres talking about freedom and Mao, which, I’m sorry, if you ask me is a bit of a contradiction in terms. Next thing you know she’s on the barricades, and throwing paving stones, and sympathising with the workers (Stalinists! I told her), reading Freud and all his children. But she was irritated with the men leading the movement, who were perfectly happy, she said, to make revolution by day and come home to a cooked dinner at night. And who cooks it? she asked. Their wives! Where is their liberation? When you were born, she likes to remind me, women couldn’t vote. Your mother couldn’t vote. My mother couldn’t vote. She came home a few months ago and informed me she’d signed up for a masters at one of the new post-’68 universities. I told her she wouldn’t be able to do that and be a mother, but she’s convinced she’ll make it work. I can take a break when the degree is over, she says, and when the baby is ready to start school I can go back and start my doctorate. She has it all figured out. But what about the second one? I ask. What second one? she says. But I know her. She’ll want a second one.

I feel a swell of something I can’t put words to when he comes in to help me make dinner, and awkwardly peels the potatoes with his long fingers, which are more accustomed to turning pages, or holding a pen, or a cigarette. Those fingers, I remember how I fell in love with them that summer, licking the salty taste off of them when we fell into bed after a day on the beach, enjoying the sensation of my tongue against their flat sides, along the ridges of the nails. He cut himself so often when we first got married. Have you never peeled a vegetable? I used to rib him. He’s getting better, at least he no longer takes off half the flesh with the skin. Next I’ll teach him to score and salt the duck fat, on our way to lessons in roasting a chicken. Honestly, you’d think he’d never given a thought to how the food got from the butcher to his plate. His mother did everything for him. Not to judge her, and she’s had her share of hardship, but the only way to make a better world is to bring up our sons as feminists. We make all the people, we should be able to make better ones.