His name is Weisz, like vice, and he is that, a wicked indulgence and something that grips me. I’ve never had such big hands on my body. We sit together in his office and he plays me his records and then he puts his hands on my body.

I am in love with him, I am in love with his shirt, with the way that it sits just so lightly on his torso, his collar that sits away just so from his neck. I’ve never actually wanted to rip someone’s clothes off before. He has a wife at home so I have to be careful or she’ll be wondering why all the buttons on his shirt popped off at the same time.

Desire makes us others to ourselves, the maestro says, and he is right, I am not myself when I desire Max, I am myself-with-Max, quite another person from myself when I’m without him.

Florence is practising the piano and I want to go out. I don’t want to go out with her but I want to go out and if I want to go out I have to run it past her. It’s an antisocial act, a marriage-betraying act, simply to leave. So I sit here behind her, watching her back, waiting for a pause.

When did I first notice that she really isn’t any good? Her Satie. She plays it very badly. Her grace notes are graceless. Instead of adding a promising, mysterious touch of dissonance, of something happening of which we would have remained unaware without the visit of the note next door, the mystery vanishes. All these years I’ve listened, it’s blurred together with the ideal performance of Satie, one I heard on the radio once, or at the beginning of a film. That must be why I found her interpretation beautiful: it wasn’t hers alone I was hearing. Or perhaps it was a potential performance I loved, one I’ve never yet heard, the one she might give some day. The evening passes and I do not go out.

What is she thinking, as she lies there beside me, under the brown duvet we bought at the BHV because it had to be brown, does she think I am happy with the way my life is going, does she think it is all grace notes, no dissonance?

Florence is reading Willa Cather. What is she thinking, as she lies there, what is she thinking. Florence on the couch, her eyes closed, her personality off. The way she looks lying there. Like at night, in the bed beside me. So tame, on her side, gently snoring. And then she turns over and she’s suddenly in another key.

I will spend the rest of my life trying to know her.

Max went with me to see the maestro today, at the faculté de droit. He spoke before, I don’t know, a couple hundred people, mostly students training to be analysts, but also scholars in other fields, and even, I heard, some actors. He’s a man of science who speaks like a mystic. Every word has its weight, as if he were dropping iron plumbs into a sea to anchor his thoughts. He delivers his speech like he’s performing Molière at the Comédie-Française. It is often hard to follow. Today he talked about jouissance, and love, and the Other, and I stroked the inside of Max’s wrist with my finger, afraid to outright hold his hand, and then the maestro said there is no woman, and that it is the instinct of the mother that prevails in her, not her own sexual pleasure, which turns around the phallus, and that man cannot enjoy woman’s body because he is too busy enjoying his own enjoyment, and while I have known men like that, indeed sex with Henry has sometimes felt like that, it has not always been so, and I wrote it all down and put a question mark next to it and Max shrugged and I wanted to talk to him about it afterward but afterward he took me back to his office and I forgot all about the maestro and whether or not there are women with their own sexual desires because I was inside my desire, and soon Max was too.

I looked for Max in his office today at the usual time and he wasn’t there. I saw him at Lacan and we sat apart and we didn’t speak. He sat with another young woman, blonde hair, blue dress. Is he testing me? Lacan spoke about Plato, The Symposium, a text I’d heard about but never been taught, it seemed to hold an almost mystical significance for him, and for the other students. He was talking about the way that love serves as a border between two people, it is something they share, but also a delusion, and then he lost me. It made me wonder about Max, and about Henry. With Max we are forging something new, a new country, outside the bonds of a state-sanctioned relationship, but also engaged in something very old, the adulterous liaison, both of us escaping the official containers of our marriages, which are sometimes too small for all that we are, and feel ourselves to be. As for Henry, our love is the place where all the things we know about each other live, our histories, our common past, our hopes for ourselves, our shared projects. The border between us is composed of the stories we tell ourselves about what we are doing and hope to do. It is an illusion, not a delusion, and the container is as necessary as the overflow.

[...] But Max is there, strong shoulders, clean scent of soap, soft facial hair on my neck, his mouth, I seek it out, our exchanges, I know things, he talks to me, tells me things he says he’s told no one else, not even his wife, she doesn’t know anything about his childhood, she wouldn’t understand, he says, the arduous trip to Mexico, the hot sun and the stinging insects, the desert, the mystery of the Spanish language, the French school they sent him to, the priests, their hands and their robes, a local girl he loved, her parents who refused to let their daughter marry a Jew, his escape to Paris, the life he’d wanted to build here among books and intellectuals, the small chambre de bonne where he lived on eggs and ersatz coffee, the window through which he looked at Paris, his wife knows none of this, she is from here, good Catholic family, big family, wants kids, can’t have them, she blames it on him, they fight, she doesn’t know about the baby with the Mexican girl, the woman in the neighbourhood who took care of it, the girl’s stomach pains, Valentina was her name, Valentina’s blood, Valentina in the hospital, the guilt, Paris so soon after, he is talking in my ear now, he is telling me what he likes, he is calling me his little girl, I take his mane of hair in my hand, I hold his head back, away from me, I eye him down, I hold him there, I am in control, I am the one he talks to, I am the one—

I thought what I had with Henry was the sustaining love, and with Max just pleasure, self-abandon, time out of time. I was wrong on both counts. But everything I feel or have felt for both of them is this eros, this thing I want to make more of. More of it, more of us, all of us. This child that is the knowledge of beauty and of its shadows, to sustain us through the alienation of desire, the inevitable confrontation with danger and disease, and with the end.

[...] It really feels like things might be changing, like we might actually have a chance at changing the law. (The more he sits there, rigid, the angrier I get. It seems to me, with Henry sitting beside me, still angry that I dared to buy a paper he doesn’t like, that it is men like him who might actually be the problem: officially supportive, but inwardly seething.) I also haven’t forgotten the jokes he made about the three hundred and forty-three women who signed the manifesto saying they’d had abortions but no doubt about it if I got pregnant he’d waste no time finding out what we’d have to do to get rid of it. There is so much he shuts himself off to, because it threatens the way he understands the world; but even Max, who is worldly enough not to confuse ego and politics, is blinkered, doesn’t understand what women are telling him, the body of work we are founding. He doesn’t see that his revolution is incomplete as long as he and men like him are the ones writing it. (I brought this up at our meeting last week and we had to stay an hour later than usual, everyone had something to say about it. I came home late and Henry wouldn’t speak to me, lord knows where he thought I was. Some of the girls were talking about joining Halimi’s group Choisir, if I thought I could pay the dues without Henry finding out I would.)

One of the girls takes me aside later, as we’re putting our coats back on. Just don’t lose track of us when you have your baby, OK? Your friend too. Don’t lose yourselves in your little lives and forget that you still have to fight. Her eyes are round, her eye make-up smudged. I don’t remember her saying very much during the meeting. She’s holding my hand.

On the way home I think about my feelings of envy for Claude. I want a baby, but do I really want to be in her place? In her chic suburb with her asshole husband? Still, I do, I envy her. She’s secure enough to do it, in spite of her asshole husband, she is her own supporting wall. That is what I envy. It’s not that she has a perfect life or marriage, it’s that she feels sufficient unto herself. She says she’s going to keep studying, no matter what Jibé thinks, that even if it takes her longer she’ll finish her degree, she’ll do her internships, she’ll be a therapist. She’ll keep coming to our group. The answer is never the husband, she tells me, the group is the answer.

I think maybe I chose wrong, that I followed the heat of those early days into a marriage too quickly, without being sure we wanted the same things. Henry doesn’t want a baby. He is still a baby himself, he says. And I know I can’t argue with that. He goes off to the club with Jibé in Jibé’s hot little two-seater, I know all about it, it’s the source of much frustration for Claude, how are they supposed to get around with a baby when there’s nowhere to put it? He just laughs at her and says he’ll buy her a station wagon, and then she smacks him in the face, because he wants to turn her into a maman, in her unwieldy family vehicle, while he gets to zip around town, a single guy to all appearances, zip to work she says, zip to the club, unzip whatever it is he’s unzipping, zip home again, zip zip zip. He is so modern.