Three Bedrooms in Manhattan (11 page)

She remained silent.

“Answer me!”

“Why do you want to know? You're torturing yourself for nothing, believe me. It was so unimportant, Frank.”

“Which hotel?”

As if resigned to fate, she said: “The Lotus.”

He burst out laughing and dropped her arm.

“Oh, God, that takes the prize! Talk about coincidences! So, on our first night, or first morning, rather, since it was nearly day, when I brought you to the—”

“François!”

“Yes. You're right. I'm being stupid, aren't I? As you say, it's so unimportant.”

Then, after a few steps: “I'll bet he was married, your officer, that he talked to you about his wife.”

“And he showed me pictures of his children.”

Staring straight ahead, he saw the pictures of his own children on his wall, and still he dragged her on. They reached their little bar. He shoved her inside.

“You're sure, absolutely sure, that you haven't come here before with someone else? You'd better admit it now.”

“I've never been here with anyone but you.”

“Maybe, after all, for once you're telling the truth.”

She wasn't resentful. She was doing her best not to be upset. She held out her hand for a nickel. She didn't protest. As if performing a rite, she went to put on their record.

“Two scotches.”

He drank three or four. He pictured her in other bars with other men, dragging out the night, begging for a last drink, lighting a last cigarette, always the last. He pictured her waiting on the sidewalk for the man, walking awkwardly because her heels were too high and her feet hurt, taking his arm …

“Don't you want to go home?”

“No.”

He wasn't listening to the music. He seemed to be looking inside himself. Suddenly he paid the bill. Once again, he said: “Come on.”

“Where are we going?”

“To look for other memories. Which is to say we could go pretty much anywhere, couldn't we?”

The sight of a dance hall made him ask, “Do you dance?”

She misunderstood. She said, “Do you want to go dancing?”

“I only asked you if you dance.”

“Yes, François.”

“Where did you go those nights when you felt like dancing? Show me. Don't you understand that I want to know? And listen. If we run into a man … Are you listening to me? A man you've slept with. It's bound to happen one of these days, if it hasn't already. When it happens, I want you to do me a favor, tell me, ‘That one.'”

Without meaning to, he turned back toward her, noting that her face was flushed and her eyes glistening. But he didn't feel sorry for her, he was too unhappy for that.

“Tell me. Have we come across one?”

“Of course not.”

She was crying. She cried without crying, like a child hanging on to its mother's hand while being dragged through a crowd.

“Taxi!”

He shoved her in. “This should stir some memories,” he said. “Who was he, this taxicab lover of yours? Assuming there was just the one. It's quite the thing in New York, isn't it, sex in a taxi? Who was he?”

“I already told you, a friend of Jessie's. Of her husband, Ronald, I mean. We met him by accident.”

“Where?”

He needed to fix the images in his mind.

“In a little French restaurant on Forty-second Street.”

“And he bought you champagne. And then Jessie discreetly withdrew, like your sailor's friend. How discreet people can be! They understand right away. Let's get out here.”

It was the first time they had come back to the corner and the diner where they'd met.

“What do you want to do?”

“Nothing. Just a pilgrimage. And here?”

“What do you mean?”

“You know very well what I mean. It couldn't have been the first time you came here to eat at night. It's right near where you lived with your Jessie. I'm beginning to know both of you, and I'd be amazed if you hadn't struck up a conversation with someone. You have quite a knack for engaging men in conversation, don't you, Kay?”

He looked at her face, and it was drawn. He looked so hard that she didn't have the courage to reply. He tightened his grip on her arm, his fingers cruel as pincers.

“Come on.”

Night had fallen. They passed Jessie's building, and Kay stopped short, surprised to see a light on inside.

“François, look!”

“So what? Your girlfriend's back home? Unless it's Enrico. You'd like to go up, wouldn't you? Say it! You'd like to go up?” His voice was threatening. “What are you waiting for? Are you scared I'll go up with you and discover all the little secrets hidden away up there?”

But this time it was she who said, tearfully, “Come on.”

They walked on, once again along Fifth Avenue, heads down, in silence, blind to everything but the trouble and bitterness between them.

“I'm going to ask you a question, Kay.”

He seemed calmer, almost in control of himself. She whispered, waiting, even feeling a little hope, “I'm listening.”

“Promise me you'll answer honestly.”

“Of course.”

“Promise.”

“I swear.”

“How many men have there been your life?”

“What do you mean?”

Aggressive again, he pressed, “You didn't understand me?”

“It depends on what you mean by being in a woman's life.”

“How many men have you slept with?” He prompted her sardonically, “A hundred? A hundred and fifty? More?”

“A lot less.”

“Which means?”

“I don't know. Wait …”

She was searching her memory. Her lips moved as though she were reciting names or figures.

“Seventeen. No, eighteen …”

“You're sure you're not forgetting anyone?”

“I don't think so. Yes, that's all of them.”

“Including your husband?”

“Sorry. I didn't count him. That makes nineteen, darling. But if only you knew how unimportant it is …”

“Come on.”

They turned around. They were exhausted, heads and bodies empty. They said nothing—they didn't even try to think of things to say.

Washington Square … the deserted side streets of Greenwich Village … the basement-level laundry where the Chinese man ironed under a harsh light … the red-checked curtains of the Italian restaurant.

“Go on up.”

He walked behind her. He seemed so composed and so cold that she felt a shiver on the back of her neck. He opened the door.

He almost sounded like a judge: “You can go to bed.”

“And you?”

Him? What, in fact, was he going to do? He slid behind the curtain and pressed his forehead against the windowpane. He heard her moving around the room. He heard the sound of the bedsprings as she got into bed, but he stayed by the window for a long time wrapped in his solitude.

Finally he came to her, studied her, his face motionless.

He whispered, “You …”

And he repeated it, more and more loudly, until he was shouting at her in despair: “You! … You! … You! …”

His fist hung in space, and perhaps in another moment he might have controlled it.

“You! …”

His voice was hoarse. And he hit her in the face as hard as he could with his fist, once, twice, three times …

At last, completely spent, he collapsed on her, sobbing and begging for forgiveness.

Her voice was far away, and they could taste the salt of their tears on their lips, when she said, “My poor darling.”

T
HEY WOKE
up very early though they didn't realize it. They thought they must have slept for an eternity. Neither of them bothered to look at the clock.

Kay got up first to open the curtains, and she cried, “Look, François!”

For the first time since he'd lived here, he saw that the Jewish tailor wasn't sitting cross-legged on his table. He was sitting in a chair like anyone else, an old straw-bottomed chair he must have brought with him from the far reaches of Poland or the Ukraine. With his elbows on the table, he was dipping thick slices of bread into a flowered porcelain bowl and looking placidly in front of him.

Over his head, the electric bulb, which at night he pulled over to his work area with a metal wire, was still on.

He was eating slowly, studiously, and in front of his eyes was nothing but a wall hung with scissors and patterns on thick gray paper.

Kay said, “He's my friend. I have to find some way to make him happy.”

Because they both felt happy.

“Do you realize it's not even seven yet?”

Neither felt at all tired. They felt nothing but an immense and profound sense of well-being, which made them smile, from time to time, at the most trivial things.

Watching her put on her clothes while he poured boiling water over the coffee, he thought out loud, “There must have been somebody in your friend's apartment last night, since the light was on.”

“I'd be very surprised if Jessie had been able to come back.”

“You'd like to get your clothes, wouldn't you?”

She still didn't dare accept what she sensed was generosity.

“Listen,” he went on. “I'll go back there with you. I'll wait downstairs while you go up.”

“You think?”

He knew what was on her mind, that she might run into Enrico or even Ronald, Jessie's husband. “Let's go.”

And they went. It was so early in the morning that the street seemed different, unknown. No doubt they'd both been out that early before, but it was the first time they'd done it together. After their night wanderings along sidewalks and through bars, they felt washed clean by the morning freshness, with the messy city sprucing itself up for the new day.

“Look. There's a window open. Go on up. I'll wait here.”

“I'd rather you came with me, François. You don't mind, do you?”

They climbed the stairway, which was clean, unostentatious, very proper. There were doormats in front of nearly every apartment, and on the second floor a cleaning lady polished a brass doorknob so energetically it made her ample breasts quiver.

He knew Kay was a little frightened. She must have thought it was some kind of test. Yet everything seemed obvious to him, the building ordinary, sober, unmysterious.

She rang the bell, and her lips trembled as she glanced his way, squeezing his hand for reassurance.

No one answered the bell, which echoed in the emptiness inside.

“What time is it?”

“Nine.”

“Do you mind?”

She rang the bell of the next apartment. A man of about sixty in a quilted dressing gown, his scant gray hair forming a crown around his pink scalp, answered the door, a book in his hand. He bowed his head to peer over the rims of his glasses.

“Well! It's you, my little miss. I thought you'd come by sooner or later. Was Mr. Enrico able to reach you? He stopped by last night. He asked me if you'd left your new address. I take it you have some personal effects in the apartment he wishes to return.”

“Thank you, Mr. Bruce. I'm sorry to bother you. I wanted to be sure it was Mr. Enrico who had come back.”

“No news of your friend?”

How banal and familiar it all was!

When they were in the street again, she said, “I don't know why Enrico has a key. Or, actually, I think I do. At first, you see, when Jessie's husband got the job in Panama and she realized the climate didn't agree with her, she moved to a place in the Bronx. At the time she was working as a receptionist in a building on Madison Avenue. Once she met Enrico and made up her mind—because, whatever you may think, it was five months before anything happened between them—he insisted she come live here. He just paid the rent, you see? I don't know how they worked it out, but I wonder now if he hadn't rented the apartment in his name.”

“Why don't you phone him?”

“Who?”

“Enrico, my sweet. Since he has a key to the apartment and all your things are there, what could be more natural?”

He wanted it to seem quite natural. And it did, this morning.

“You really want me to?”

He squeezed her hand. “Please.”

He led her by the arm to the nearest drugstore. Only there did she remember that Jessie's lover never got to work before ten o'clock, so they waited quietly, so quietly that they could have been mistaken for a long-married couple.

Twice she returned unsuccessfully from the phone booth. The third time, he saw through the glass that she had made contact with her past again on the other end of the line, though she didn't take her eyes off him. She was smiling at him shyly and gratefully and asking for his forgiveness at the same time.

“He's coming. Do you mind? There was nothing else to do. He said he'd hop in a taxi and be here in ten minutes. He couldn't say much because there was somebody in his office. All I know is he got the key by messenger, in an envelope with Ronald's name on it.”

He wondered if she'd take his arm while they were waiting on the sidewalk for the South American, and she did, without a hint of strain. A taxi soon pulled up. She looked into his eyes again, as if making a promise, and her own eyes were very clear—she held his gaze so he could see how clear—while the pout on her lips asked him to be brave, or else indulgent.

He didn't need to be either. He felt so easy now that he had a hard time keeping a straight face.

This Enrico, this Ric around whom he had created such a world, was a little man of no particular consequence. Not bad-looking, true. But so average, so unprepossessing! He felt obliged, under the circumstances, to rush theatrically up to Kay, effusively clasping her hands.

“My poor Kay! That this should happen to us!”

Very simply, she introduced him: “My friend François Combe. You can talk freely, since he knows everything.”