Free Summer Lies by Bernhard Schlink

lovely with you.”
    “Yes.”
    “I like your laugh.”
    “Get going.”
11
    He would have liked a summer storm, but the sky was blue and the heat hung in the narrow street. As he got into the car he saw a Mercedes pull up outside the restaurant and an old couple get out. Renée came through the door, greeted them both, and helped them carry groceries into the house.
    He drove slowly in order to keep Renée in his rearview mirror for a little. He was suddenly overwhelmed with a powerful longing for another life, a life with winter in the city by the sea and summer in the village in the mountains, a life with its own unchanging, reliable rhythm, in which one always drove the same routes, slept in the same bed, met the same people.
    He wanted to walk in the same place he’d walked that morning, but didn’t find the spot. He stopped at another one, got out, couldn’t decide about walking again, but sat among the bushes, plucked a blade of grass, propped his arms on his knees, and put the grass between his teeth. Again he was looking out over slopes and low mountains into the plain. His longing wasn’t swirling around Renée or around Anne. It wasn’t about this woman or that, but about continuity and reliability in life itself.
    He fantasized about giving them all up, Renée, who didn’t want him anyway; Therese, who only liked the bits of him that were simple; Anne, who wanted to be conquered but not to conquer herself. But then he’d have nobody left.
    He’d tell Anne that evening what she wanted to hear. Why not? Yes, she’d always take what he said and make use of it later. But so what? What harm could it do him? What harm could anything do him? He felt invulnerable, untouchable, and laughed—it must be the champagne.
    It was too early to drive back to Cucuron and Anne. He stayed sitting and looked down at the plain. Sometimes a car passed, sometimes it honked. Sometimes he saw something flash down on the plain—the sunlight catching the window in a house or the windshield of a car.
    He dreamed about summer in the village in the mountains. He and Renée or Chantal or Marie or whatever she would be called would move up there in May and open up the restaurant, not for lunch but just for guests in the evening, two or three dishes, simple country cooking, local wines. A few tourists would come, a few foreign artists who’d bought old houses and renovated them, a few locals. Early in the morning he’d drive to the market for supplies, early in the afternoon they’d make love, in the late afternoon they’d go to the kitchen together and prepare the food. Mondays and Tuesdays they’d be closed. In October they’d close the restaurant, lock the shutters and the door, and drive back to the city. A gallery or a bookshop? Stationery? Tobacco? A shop just open in winter? How would that work? Did he even want to run a shop? Operate a restaurant? They were all empty dreams. Love in the early afternoon was what counted, no matter whether it was in a town by the sea or a river or in a village in the mountains or on the plain.
    He looked down at the plain and chewed his blade of grass.
12
    He reached Cucuron at seven, parked the car, didn’t find Anne outside the Bar de l’Étang, and went into the hotel. She was sitting in the loggia, a bottle of red wine on the table and two glasses, one full and one empty. How was she looking at him? He really didn’t want to know. He looked at the floor.
    “I don’t want to say much. I slept with Therese and I’m sorry and I hope you can forgive me and we can put it behind us, not today, I know, and not tomorrow, but soon, so that we can stay good to each other. I love you, Anne, and …”
    “Won’t you sit down?”
    He sat down, went on talking and kept looking at the floor. “I love you, and I don’t want to lose you. I hope I haven’t already lost you because of something so insignificant. I understand that it’s really significant to you, and because of that and