The Woman in the Fifth (8 page)

Sezer said something in Turkish to Mr Tough Guy. He shrugged his shoulders in bemusement, then hissed something back.

'My colleague informs me that he didn't touch the television,' Sezer said.

'He's lying,' I suddenly said in English.

Sezer looked at me and smiled.

'Out of respect for your safety I won't translate that,' he said back in perfect English. 'And don't expect me to speak your language again, American.'

'You're a crook,' I said, sticking to my native tongue.

'
Tant pis
,' he said, then continued on in French. 'But now Omar is upset. Because I told him that you sold the television to buy the new toilet seat. And he is such an ignorant peasant that he believed such stupidity. My advice to you is: buy him a new television.'

'No way,' I said, returning to French.

'Then don't be surprised if he comes home drunk again tonight and tries to break down your door. He is a complete
sauvage
.'

'I'll take my chances.'

'Ah, a tough character. But not so tough that you couldn't stop crying last night.'

I tried not to look embarrassed. I failed.

'I don't know what you're talking about,' I said.

'Yes, you do,' he said. 'Omar heard you. He said you cried for almost a half-hour. The only reason he didn't come looking for you this morning to demand his television money is because the idiot felt sorry for you. But, trust me, by tonight he will be in a rage again. Omar lives in a perpetual rage. Just like you.'

With that last line, Sezer had trained his gaze on me. It was like having a white-hot light shined in your eyes. I blinked and turned away.

'So why were you crying, American?' he asked.

I said nothing.

'Homesick?' he asked.

After a moment, I nodded. He took his gaze off me and returned it to the window. And said, 'We are all homesick here.'

L
A VIE PARISIENNE
.

Or, to be more specific about it:
ma vie parisienne.

For my first weeks on the rue de Paradis, it generally went like this:

I would get up most mornings around eight. While making coffee I would turn on France Musique (or France Bavarde, as I referred to it, since the announcers seemed less interested in playing music than in endlessly discussing the music they were about to broadcast). Then I'd throw on some clothes and go downstairs to the
boulangerie
on the nearby rue des Petites Écuries and buy a baguette for sixty centimes before heading down to the market on the rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis. While there, I'd shop carefully. Six slices of
jambon
, six slices of Emmenthal, four tomatoes, a half-dozen eggs, 200 grams of haricots verts (I quickly learned how to calculate metrically), 400 grams of some sort of cheap white fish, 200 grams of the cheapest cut of steak that didn't look overtly rancid, three liters of
vin rouge
, a half-liter of milk, three liters of some generic bottled water, and I'd have enough food to live on for three days. And the cost of this shopping expedition would never be more than thirty euros . . . which meant that I could feed myself for around sixty euros a week.

On the days that I bought food, I'd be back in the apartment by twelve thirty. Then I would open my laptop and let it warm up while making another coffee and telling myself that it was just a matter of five hundred words. As in: two typed pages. As in: the daily quota I had set myself for writing my novel.

Two pages, six days a week, would equal twelve pages. As long as I kept up this output without fail, I'd have a book within twelve months. And no, I didn't want to consider the fact that I only had enough money to cover a pretty basic existence for the three months of rent I had paid. I just wanted to think about achieving the daily quota. Five hundred words . . . the length of many an email I used to bang out in less than twenty minutes. . . .

Five hundred words. It was nothing, really.

Until you started trying to turn that five hundred words into fiction, day in, day out.

My novel . . . my
first
novel . . . the novel I told myself twenty years ago that I would write. It was going to be an
Augie March
for our times; a large, sprawling, picaresque
Bildungsroman
about growing up awkward in New Jersey, and surviving the domestic warfare of my parents and the dismal conformism of sixties suburbia.

For months – during the worst of the nightmare into which I had been landed – I kept myself alive with the idea that, once I negotiated an escape route out of hell, I'd find a quiet place in which to get it all down on paper, and finally demonstrate to the world that I was the serious writer I always knew myself to be.
I'll show the bastards
is a statement uttered by someone who has suffered a setback . . . or, more typically, has hit bottom. But as a resident of the latter category, I also knew that, rather than being some EST-style rallying cry, it was a howl from the last-chance saloon.

Five hundred words
. That was the quotidian task, and one which I knew I could fulfill . . . because I had nothing else to do with my time.

Nothing except go to the cinema. The majority of my free time outside my
chambre
was spent haunting all those darkened rooms around town which cater to film junkies like myself. The geography of Paris was, for me, defined by its cinemas. Every Monday I'd spend sixteen euros on a
carte orange hebdomadaire
– a weekly travel card, which gave me access to all
métros
and buses within the Paris city limits. The card let me whizz around town at will – all the travels outside my
quartier
largely pertaining to my cinema habit. Once the five hundred words were down on the computer, I'd be free to leave the room and begin the movie-going day. The Fifth was my preferred terrain, as there were over fifteen cinemas in a square mile. Most of them specialized in old stuff. At the Action Écoles, there was always a director's festival in progress: Hitchcock this week, Kurosawa the next, alternating with a season of Anthony Mann Westerns. Down the road at Le Reflet Medicis, I spent a very happy three days watching every Ealing Comedy ever made, finding myself in floods of tears at the end of
Whisky Galore
. . . more an indication of my fragile state than of the film's emotional headiness. A few streets away, at the Accatone, they were always showing one of Pasolini's stranger explorations of the
out-there
frontiers of human behavior. I could make it from the Accatone to Le Quartier Latin in about three minutes for a Buñuel season. I could stroll over into the Sixth to nose around the film noir rarities at the Action Christine. Or, best of all, I could jump the
métro
to Bercy and hide out at the Cinémathèque until midnight.

Every day, I'd spend at least six hours at the movies. But before heading out on this daily movie marathon, I'd check my email.

The Internet café was located on the rue des Petites Écuries. It was a small storefront operation. There were a dozen computers positioned on unvarnished wooden cubicles, fronted by grubby orange plastic chairs. Behind this was a small bar which served coffee and booze. It cost one euro fifty an hour to check email and surf the Net. There was always a bearded guy in his thirties behind the bar. He looked Turkish, but spoke good French – though our conversations were always limited to a few basic pleasantries and the exchange of money for an Internet password or a coffee. Whenever I showed up, he was always on his cellphone, deep in some rapid-fire conversation – a conversation which turned into a low whisper as I bought my password and settled down in front of a computer. I could always see him studying me as I logged on – and wondered if he could gauge my disappointment as I opened my AOL mailbox and found no news from my daughter.

I'd been writing Megan twice a week since arriving in Paris. In my emails I asked her to please try to understand that I never meant to hurt her; that she remained the most important person in my life. Even if she now hated me for what had happened, I would never cease to love her and hoped that communication could be somehow re-established.

At first, my emails all followed a similar line of argument.

After three weeks, I switched tactics – writing to her about my life in Paris, about the room in which I was living, the way I passed my day, the movies I saw – and always ending with a simple statement:

I will write again next week. Always know that you are in my thoughts every hour of the day – and that I miss you terribly. Love . . . Dad

When no answer was forthcoming, I wondered if she was being blocked from writing to me by her mother – as I also knew that, by telling Megan details of my life in Paris, I was probably passing them on to my ex-wife as well. But I didn't care if she learned about my diminished circumstances. What further harm could she do to someone who'd lost everything?

But then, at the start of my sixth week in Paris, I opened my AOL account and saw – amid the usual detritus sent to me from loansharks and penis-extension hucksters – an email marked: [email protected].

I hit the
Read
button nervously, preparing myself for a '
Never write to me again
' letter . . . given that, the one time I called her after everything blew up, she told me that, as far as she was concerned, I was dead. But now I read:

Dear Dad

Thanks for all your emails. Paris sounds cool. School is still hard – and I'm still getting a lot of crap from people in my class about what you did. And I still find it hard to understand how you could have done that with one of your students. Mom told me I was to tell her if you made contact with me – but I've been reading all your emails at school. Keep writing me – and I'll make sure Mom doesn't know we're in contact.

Your daughter

Megan

PS I'm still angry at you . . . but I miss you too.

I put my face in my hands after reading this – and found myself sobbing.
Your daughter
. That said it all. After nearly three months of thinking that I had lost Megan forever, here was the response I had been hoping for.
I'm still angry at you . . . but I miss you too.

Hitting the
Reply
button, I wrote:

Dear Megan

It was wonderful hearing from you. You're right to be angry with me. I'm angry with me. I did something stupid – but by the time I realized I had made a terrible mistake, things started to spin out of my control and I found myself unable to stop bad things from happening. However, you do need to know that people took my mistake and used it for their own aims. I am not trying to make excuses for what I did. I accept responsibility – and will always feel terrible for hurting you. I am simply so pleased that we are now back in contact with each other – and promise to keep writing you every day.

I'm sure that, very soon, things will get easier at school . . . and that you will be able to put so much of this behind you. I appreciate how difficult it is not telling your mother that we're in touch. In time, I hope that your mom and I will be able to be on friendly terms with each other – because I'm sure that's what you want too. Always know that I think the world of you and am here for you whenever you need me. Meanwhile I promise to write you every day.

Love

Dad

I read through the email several times before sending it, wanting to double-check that it was devoid of self-pity, that it didn't come across as a self-justification, and that – most of all – it communicated to my daughter how much I loved and missed her.

As I stood up to leave, the man behind the desk looked up from his newspaper and said, 'Bad news?'

This threw me – and made me realize he'd been studying me while I was reading Megan's email.

'Not at all.'

'Then why are you crying?'

'Because it's good news.'

'I hope there will be some more for you tomorrow.'

There was no further word from Megan for the next few days – even though I emailed her every afternoon, keeping the tone anecdotal, filling her in on life in my
quartier
. After three days, I received the following:

Dear Dad

Thanks for the last couple of emails. I was on a school trip to Cleveland . . . b-o-r-i-n-g . . . and only got back yesterday. I went into your office at home last night, and found an old map of Paris, and looked up where you are.
Rue de Paradis
– I like the name.

I had to be very careful about going into your office, as Mom told me it was off-limits, and Gardner hasn't taken it over yet . . .

Gardner
. As in:
Gardner Robson
. The man who helped engineer my catastrophe and had also taken my wife away from me. The very sight of his name on the computer screen made me grip the sides of the plastic chair and try to control the rage that I still felt.

'
Gardner hasn't taken it over yet . . .
'

Why not take over my office when he's taken over everything else?

I read on:

I find Gardner very hard to live with. You know he used to be in the Air Force and he keeps telling me that he likes things 'ship shape'. If I leave a jacket on the staircase when I come home from school, or if I've forgotten to make my bed, that's not 'ship shape'. He can be all right as long as you do things his way, and Mom seems totally
in lurve
with him . . . but I'm still not totally sold on him as a stepdad. I keep thinking it would be cool to visit you in Paris, but I know that Mom would never let me . . . and, anyway, I'm still trying to sort out how I feel about what you've done. Mom said you wanted to end the marriage . . .

She said
what
? Given that she had taken up with Robson well before my scandal hit the front pages – and given that I begged her repeatedly for a second chance – how dare she twist the truth and then feed our daughter this lie . . . a lie which Megan understandably interpreted as, in part, a rejection of herself.