The Woman in the Fifth (17 page)

'Precisely. Do you have a
ligne fixe
?'

'No.'

'So you live in a
chambre de bonne
?'

'You are a quick study.'

'If you don't have a
ligne fixe
, you are generally hard up. But everyone has a
portable
these days.'

'Except me.'

'And me.'

'A fellow Luddite?'

'I simply don't see the need to be contactable at all times. But if you do want to contact me . . .'

She reached into her purse, pulled out a card and handed it to me. It read:

Margit Kadar Traductrice 13 rue Linné 75005 Paris 01.43.44.55.21

'Mornings are bad for me,' she said. 'I sleep until the middle of the afternoon. Any time after five p.m. is good. Like you, I start work at midnight.'

'It's the best time of the day to write,
n'est-ce pas
?'

'You write, I translate. And you know what they say about translation: it's about rendering morning words into evening words.'

'I will call,' I said.

'I look forward to it.'

I leaned forward, wanting to kiss her again. But she put a hand up between us.

'
À bientôt
. . .' she said.

'
À bientôt
.'

And she turned and walked back inside.

I stood on the balcony alone for a long time, oblivious to the night air, the gusting wind, still lost in the strange and extraordinary encounter that had just taken place. I tried to remember a previous time in my life when I'd met a woman and was locked in a crazed embrace with her only a few minutes after first saying hello. I knew the answer to that question: this was a first for me. In the past, the sex always arrived a few dates afterward. I was never someone who could ever make a bold move. Too cautious, too circumspect. Until . . .

No, don't bring that up again. Not tonight. Not after what just transpired.

Montgomery suddenly walked on to the balcony.

'Hiding out here?'

'That's right.'

'We do like our guests to mingle, you know.'

'I was talking with someone out here,' I said, hating myself for being defensive. 'She just left.'

'I saw no one leave.'

'Do you watch every corner of the apartment?'

'Absolutely. Coming back inside?'

'I have to go.'

'So soon?'

'That's right.'

He noticed the card in my hand.

'Meet someone nice?' he asked.

I immediately slipped Margit's card into the pocket of my shirt.

'Maybe.'

'You must say goodbye to Madame before you go.'

That wasn't a request, but a directive.

'Lead the way.'

Madame was standing in front of one of her nude triptychs – with arms of war sprouting out of her vagina, only to be enveloped by Eden-like flora and fauna. It was beyond stupid. She was holding an empty glass and looked decidedly tipsy . . . not that I was one to talk.

'Mr Ricks must leave us,' Montgomery said.

'
Mais la nuit ne fait que commencer
,' she said, and started to giggle.

'I write at night, so . . .'

'Dedication to one's art. It is so admirable, isn't it, Montgomery?'

'So admirable,' he said tonelessly.

'Well, hon, I hope you had a fabulous time.'

'Yeah, fabulous,' I said.

'And remember: if you need company on a Sunday night, we're always here.'

'I'll remember that.'

'And I just can't wait to read that book of yours.'

'Nor can I.'

'Monty, he's so witty! We must have him back.'

'Yes, we must.'

'And hon,' she said, pulling me close to her, 'I can tell you're a real ladykiller, a total
dragueur
.'

'Not really.'

'Oh, please. You've got that
vulnerable-lonely-artist
thing going which women just love.'

As she said that, I could feel her fleshy fingers slide into mine.

'You lonely, hon?'

I gently disengaged my hand from hers. I said, 'Thank you again for a very interesting evening.'

'You've got someone, don't you?' she asked, sounding sour.

I thought of the card in my breast pocket.

'Yes,' I said. 'I think I do.'

L
ATER THAT NIGHT
, as I sat at my desk and tried to work, my brain kept replaying that scene on the balcony. Margit's face continued to fill my mind's eye. Six hours after our embrace, I could still discern the musky scent she wore, as it had adhered itself to my clothes, my hands, my face. Her taste was still in my mouth. Her low husky voice continued to reverberate in my ear.

I must have looked at her card a dozen times that night. I wrote down her phone number in a notebook and on a pad I kept on the desk, just in case the card was misplaced. I tried to grind my way through my new quota of one thousand words. I failed. I was too distracted, too smitten.

The hours dragged by. I was desperate to leave this room early and walk the streets and try to clear my head. But if I did leave here before the specified time . . .

Blah, blah, blah
. I knew all the old arguments, and knew that I'd play the good employee and stay put until 6 a.m. arrived. And then . . .

Then I would call her and tell her that I couldn't wait until 5 p.m. tomorrow; that I had to see her now. And I'd hop in a cab over to 13 rue Linné and . . .

Completely blow this affair before it has started.

A little detached cool is demanded here, mon pôte
.

So when I woke up at two that afternoon, I picked up my wages and ate
steak-frites
at a little café near the Gare de l'Est, and then took an extended mid-evening stroll along the Canal Saint-Martin, and caught a 21h30 screening of Chabrol's
La Femme infidèle
at the Brady (they were doing a mini-festival of his films), and walked to my job, thinking at length about Chabrol's complex morality tale. The story is an old one: a husband discovers his wife's infidelity. He confronts and kills her lover, at which point . . .

But here's where Chabrol pulls a very interesting rabbit out of the hat. Upon discovering that her husband has murdered her
amant
, the wife doesn't become hysterical and hyper-moralistic. Nor does she turn him over to the cops. Rather, the couple become collaborators in the crime – the notion being that, in any intimate relationship (especially one that has lasted many years), we are always complicit with the other person. And once the frontier of sexuality is crossed, we are, in some ways, hostages to fortune. You can compartmentalize, you can tell yourself that you know the person with whom you are sleeping is rational and playing on the same page as you . . . and then you discover one of life's great truisms: you can never really know the landscape of somebody else's mind.

But how desperate I was to cross that frontier with Margit.

Still . . . discipline, discipline.

So I didn't call her until the following afternoon – from a phone kiosk on the rue des Écoles. I inserted my France Telecom card. I dialed her number. One rings, two rings, three ring, four rings . . . oh shit, she's out . . . five rings, six . . .

'Hello?'

She sounded groggy, half-asleep.

'Margit, it's me . . . Harry.'

'I figured that.'

'Did I wake you?'

'I was just . . . dozing.'

'I can call back if . . .'

'No need to be solicitous. I expected you to call now . . . just as I expected you
not
to call yesterday.'

'And how did you figure that?'

'Because I knew, though you might be eager to see me again, you wouldn't want to seem too eager, so you'd wait a day or so before calling me. But not more than that, because that would indicate disinterest. The fact that you rang exactly at five p.m. . . . especially after I told you that I shouldn't be disturbed before that hour . . .'

'Shows how completely predictable men are?'

'Your statement,
monsieur
, not mine.'

'So do you want to see me or not?' I asked.

'American directness.
J'adore
. . .'

'I've posed a question.'

'Where are you exactly right now?'

'Near Jussieu.'

'My
métro
stop. How convenient. Give me thirty minutes. You have my address?'

'I do.'

'Here's the code: S877B. Second staircase, then third floor, right.
À plus tard
.'

Her place was a three-minute walk from the Jussieu
métro
. The area – seen in the half-light of a late-March afternoon – was a mixture of old apartment blocks and a clustered exercise in sixties concrete brutalism that turned out to be a branch of the University of Paris. For all my
flâneur
-ing around Paris, I had never ventured down this way (always stopping at the Grand Action cinema on the rue des Écoles, then turning left toward the river). So it was intriguing to happen upon the Jardin des Plantes. It was a surprisingly large and unexpectedly
sauvage
green space in the middle of the Fifth
arrondissement.
I wandered inside – following an inclining path up past tall trees and exotic flora until it reached a meadow-like area, slightly overgrown, with a stone cupola house in the midst of this Elysian field. Had I been a film director, out scouting a location for an urban update of
A Midsummer Night's Dream
, this would have won hands down. There was even a small hill – accessed by a winding path – the summit of which brought me into a pagodastyle viewing platform. The view from here wasn't wildly panoramic. Rather, it was a vista of rooftops and chimney pots and sloping windows. There was nothing monumental about this prospect. But seen in the declining afternoon light, it still looked monochromatic and painterly: an urban still life, and one which was, by and large, out of public view. Rooftops are romantic – not just because they are, metaphorically speaking, adjacent to the sky, but also because they are hidden away. Stand on a rooftop and you cannot help but have simultaneous thoughts about life's infinite possibilities and the omnipresent potentiality for self-destruction. Look to the heavens and you can think,
Everything is possible
. Look to the heavens and you can also think,
I am insignificant
. And then you can shuffle your way to the edge of the roof and look down and tell yourself,
Just two steps and my life would be over. And would that be such a horrendous thing?

No wonder the Romantics so venerated suicide. Seen as a response to life's fundamental despair, it was regarded as a grand final creative act: an acceptance of tragedy through the ultimate embrace of tragedy.

But why think such tragic thoughts when the prospect of sex was just ten minutes away? Ah, sex: the great antidote to all despair.

I walked down off the hill and out of the Jardin. I crossed the street and found a small grubby corner shop which sold just about everything – including champagne. The Arab guy behind the till said that he had one bottle on ice in the back. I bought it. When I asked if he sold condoms, he avoided my eyes as he said, 'There is a machine on the next street corner.'

I walked down to the machine. I inserted a two-euro coin. I pulled open the metallic drawer and withdrew a three-pack of Durex, presented in a plastic case. I checked my watch. It was 5.28.

13 rue Linné was an undistinguished building – early nineteenth century, of considerable width, with an imposing black door. There was a kebab place sharing its left flank; a reasonable-looking Italian restaurant its other side. The code pad was to one side of the door. I opened my notebook and punched the necessary combination of numbers and letters. There was the telltale click. I pushed open the door, feeling nervous.

As always, I was in a courtyard. But this courtyard was different from all the others I had entered in Paris: it was light and airy and leafy. Paved in cobblestones, it also looked clean and well maintained. There was no laundry hanging from the balconies – only flower boxes and trellises around which plants had been interwoven. There was no loud jungle music coming from open windows. Just absolute bourgeois silence. At the entrance to the first stairwell, there was a collection of professional plaques:

M. Claude Triffaux
Psychologue
2e étage, gauche

Mme B. Semler
Expert Comptable
1er étage, droite

M. François Maréchal
Kinésithérapeute
1er étage, gauche

I smiled at the thought of an accountant – a man who deals with the financial narrative of one's life (and the stressful business of paying taxes) – working across the hall from someone who dealt with trapped nerves and seized muscles and other physical manifestations of life's assorted vicissitudes.

The second stairwell was further along the courtyard. There were no plaques here, just a listing of apartments. I checked for
Kadar, Margit
, but didn't see it. This worried me. Had I missed the second stairwell? The address was right, as the code had worked. But why no name?

I walked up the three flights of stairs, noting that, unlike my own state-of-collapse building, the walls here were well painted, the stairs were made of polished wood and had a carpet running up the middle of them. When I reached the third floor, there were only two doors. The one to the left had a small nameplate by its bell:
Lieser
. The door to the right had nothing. I rang the bell, my hands now clammy, telling myself if some irate old lady answered, I'd do my dumb American act and apologize profusely and hightail it down the stairs.

But when the door opened, Margit was standing in its frame.

She was dressed in a simple black turtleneck that hugged her frame tightly and accented the fullness of her breasts. She also wore a loose peasant-style skirt made out of a muslin-like material: very feminine, very chic. Even in the harsh glow of the stairwell lights, her face seemed radiant . . . though the eyes expressed a sadness that would never leave her be. She favored me with a small smile.

'I meant to tell you that my name isn't listed on the chart downstairs.'

'Yeah, I did have a moment when I thought . . .'

She leaned forward and touched my lips with hers.

'You thought wrong.'

My hand went around her back, but she gently disengaged herself, saying, 'All in good time,
monsieur
. And only after we rid you of your nervousness.'

'Is it that obvious?'

'
Manifestement.
'

I followed her inside. The door closed behind me. The apartment was made up of two reasonable-sized rooms. The first was the bedroom – with a simple queen-sized bed. In a corner nook there was a bathtub (with a shower hose) and a sink. We didn't stop here, but continued down past a small door (the toilet, I surmised) and into a large living area. A kitchen had been fitted along the near wall of this room – the appliances and cabinets all dating from the midseventies. There was a large sofa covered in deep red velour fabric, a divan in a maroon paisley velour, and a venerable chocolate leather armchair. There were two large floor-to-ceiling windows at the far end. They overlooked the courtyard and seemed to benefit from afternoon light. To the right of the windows was a beautiful old roll-top desk, on top of which sat one of those bright red Olivetti typewriters which were so popular thirty years ago. There were bookshelves lining all the walls, crammed largely with old volumes in Hungarian and French, though I did spot a few novels in English by Hemingway and Greene and Dos Passos. On three of the shelves stood a massive collection of records – classical mainly, and quite comprehensive in their historical and stylistic range. Her taste was very catholic: everything from Tallis to Scarlatti to Schubert to Bruckner to Berg. There were no compact discs . . . only a turntable and an amplifier. There was no television, just a large, old Telefunken short-wave radio. And there were framed yellowing photographs of Budapest in the shadows and of (I presumed) assorted family members clustered neatly on all free wall space. But what struck me most about the place was its immaculateness and its sober good taste. Though she hadn't updated it for several decades, its subdued,
mitteleurop
style still lent it a certain consulting-room warmth. Freud would have been happy working out of such an apartment, I sensed. So too would an
immigré
writer . . . or an
immigré
translator.