Three Bedrooms in Manhattan (18 page)

Go where? She could hear just as well from the bathroom.

She lay back down on her side in the bed. Her hair fanning over the pillow was the same color as Kay's.

“Hello.”

His throat was tight.

“Is that you, François?”

“Of course, my love.”

“What's the matter?”

“Nothing. Why?”

“I don't know. Your voice sounds funny.”

“I just woke up.”

He was ashamed of lying—not just of lying to Kay, but of lying to her in the presence of this other woman who was watching him from the bed.

June had offered to leave the room—couldn't she at least show some tact and turn around? She was watching him out of one eye, and he couldn't help staring back.

“I have good news, darling. I'm leaving tomorrow, or rather this morning, by plane. I'll be in New York tonight … Hello?”

“Yes.”

“That's all you have to say? What's wrong, François? You're hiding something from me. You've been out with Laugier, haven't you?”

“Yes.”

“I'll bet you were drinking.”

“Yes.”

“I was sure that was it, my poor darling. Why didn't you say so? I'll see you tomorrow. Tonight.”

“Yes.”

“The embassy got me a seat on the plane. I don't know exactly when the flight's due in, but you can find out. I'm flying Pan American. Make sure you've got that, since two airlines fly the same route and the planes don't get in at the same time.”

“Yes.”

There were so many things he wanted to tell her! He had such wonderful news to tell her, and there he was, hypnotized by this watching eye!

“Did you get my letter?”

“This morning.”

“There weren't too many spelling mistakes? Did you read it through to the end? I don't think I'll go to bed tonight. It's not that it will take so long to pack. You know, I got out for an hour this afternoon and bought you a present. But I can tell you're sleepy. Did you really have that much to drink?”

“I think so.”

“Was Laugier very unpleasant?”

“I don't remember, darling. I was thinking about you the whole time.”

He couldn't go on. He was in a hurry to hang up.

“See you tonight, François.”

“Yes, tonight.”

He had wanted to tell her. He tried, as hard as he could, but he'd failed.

He should have said, straight out: “Listen, Kay, there's somebody in the room. Now you know why I …”

He'd tell her when she got back. He didn't want to cheat on her. He wasn't going to allow anything so cheap to come between them.

“Go right back to sleep.”

“Good night, Kay.”

He put the phone down slowly. For a long moment he stood in the middle of the room, his arms at his sides, staring at the floor.

“Did she guess?”

“I don't know.”

“Will you tell her?”

He raised his head and looked her in the eyes. “Yes,” he said calmly.

She lay for a moment on her back, her breasts showing, then she straightened her hair, lifted her legs out of bed, and began pulling on her stockings.

He didn't try to stop her. He wasn't going to ask her to stay. He started dressing, too.

She said, without bitterness, “I'll go alone. You don't have to see me home.”

“I'll come with you.”

“You'd better not. She might call again.”

“You think?”

“If she suspects something, she will.”

“Please forgive me.”

“What for?”

“Nothing. For letting you go alone like this.”

“It's my fault.”

She smiled at him. When she was ready, and had lit a cigarette, she came over to him and kissed him lightly on the forehead. Her fingers sought his and squeezed them as she whispered, “Good luck.”

Afterward he sat down in a chair, half dressed, and waited the rest of the night.

Kay didn't call. The first sign of the new day was the light going on in the Jewish tailor's shop.

Had Combe been wrong? Was it always going to be like this—as he struggled to discover new depths of love?

His face didn't move at all. He was so tired, weary in body and spirit. He didn't seem to be thinking anything.

But he was sure—completely sure—that it was only tonight that he had truly and totally begun to love Kay. At least tonight was when at last he knew it.

That was why, when dawn dimmed the light from his bedside table, he was ashamed of what had happened.

S
HE WOULDN'T
understand. She couldn't understand. It was impossible for her to know, for instance, that for the whole hour he'd been waiting at La Guardia airport he'd been wondering, without any romantic exaggeration, but just because he knew what state his nerves were in, if he'd be able to withstand the shock.

Everything he'd done that day, everything he was right now, would be so radically new to her that, in a way, he'd have to train her all over again to know who he was. And the agonizing question was whether their feelings would still be in tune. Would she be able to follow him as far as he had gone?

That was why, since morning, he'd done none of the things he had promised himself for days he would do before she returned. He hadn't even bothered to change the pillowcase where June's head had lain—hadn't even checked to see if she'd left lipstick stains on it.

What was the point? He was beyond all that! It was all in the past!

And he hadn't ordered in from the Italian place. He had no idea what there was to eat or drink in the refrigerator.

What had he actually done that day? She'd be hard-pressed to guess. It was still raining, sometimes lightly, sometimes heavily, and he'd dragged a chair to the window, opened the drapes, and sat down. The sky was dull, cruel, the light pitiless, painful to look at.

It was what he needed. Stained by eight continuous days of rain, the brick walls of the houses across the street had turned a sickly color. There was something heartbreakingly dreary about their curtained windows.

Was he actually looking at them? Later, he was astonished to he realize he hadn't paid attention even for a moment to their talismanic little tailor.

He was very tired. The thought of going to bed for a few hours crossed his mind, but he stayed where he was, his collar open, his legs stretched out, smoking pipe after pipe and tapping the ashes out on the floor.

He didn't move until, around noon, he abruptly got up, went to the phone, and, for the first time, called long-distance and gave the operator a number in Hollywood.

“Hello … That you, Ulstein?”

Ulstein wasn't a friend. He did have friends in Hollywood, directors, French actors and actresses, but he didn't feel like calling them today.

“This is Combe … Yes, François Combe … What? No, I'm calling from New York … Yes, I know that if you had something for me you would've written or cabled me … That's not why I'm calling … Hello? Operator, please keep the line open …”

Ulstein was an awful man he'd met in Paris, not at Fouquet's, but on the sidewalk outside, where you'd see him walking around just to make people think he'd been inside.

“Do you remember our last conversation out there? You told me that if I was willing to play smaller parts or, not to beat around the bush, minor parts, you'd be able to find me work … What?”

Combe smiled bitterly, since he could tell Ulstein was about to start talking big.

“Give me numbers, Ulstein…I'm not talking about my career. How much a week? … Yes, for any part at all … Damn it, that's none of your business! Just answer my question!”

The unmade bed to the one side, the gray rectangle of the window to the other. Raw white and cold gray. His voice was insistent.

“How much? Six hundred dollars? … In a good week? … Fine, five hundred. Are you positive? You're prepared to sign, say, a six-month contract at that rate? … No, I can't give you an answer now. Tomorrow, probably … No, no. I'll call you.”

Kay didn't know about that. Maybe she expected to come back to an apartment filled with flowers; she didn't know that he'd considered it and shrugged the idea off in disgust.

Was he right to wonder if they'd still feel the same way?

He was going too fast. He knew that he'd traveled, in almost no time at all, a long, steep path that men can take years to complete, often their whole lives, if they reach the end at all.

He heard church bells when he left the house; he started walking, his hands in the pockets of his beige trench coat.

And Kay couldn't know that it was now eight at night and he'd been walking since noon, except for the fifteen minutes it took to eat a hot dog at a lunch counter. He hadn't eaten at their diner. Why bother?

He walked across Greenwich Village toward the docks and the Brooklyn Bridge, and for the first time crossed the immense structure on foot.

It was cold and drizzling. The sky hung low with heavy gray clouds. The East River was covered with angry white crests of waves, the tugs sounded shrill whistles, and ugly flat-bottomed brown ferryboats carried passengers back and forth on unchanging routes, like trams.

Would she believe him if he told her he had walked all the way to the airport, stopping at most a couple of times in a bar along the way, the shoulders of his trench coat soaked, his hands in his pocket, his hat dripping wet, like someone in a mystery story?

He hadn't played the jukebox. He didn't need to.

And everything he'd seen on his pilgrimage through this gray world, the little dark men bustling about under electric lamps, the stores, the movie theaters with their garlands of light, the butcher shops, the bakeries with their disgusting pastries, the coin-operated machines that played music or let you knock metal balls into little holes, everything the whole great city could invent to help a lonely man kill time, he could look at all that now without revulsion or panic.

She would be there. She was going to be there.

That one last worry, which he dragged past block after block of buildings, brick cubes with iron staircases outside in case of fire, where the question was not how people had the strength to go on living there—that was easy enough—but how they had the strength to die there.

Trams went by, filled with ghastly, secretive faces. And children, little dark figures in the grayness on the way home from school, strained, too, for happiness.

Everything in the shops depressed him. The wood-and-wax mannequins in their hallucinatory poses, holding out their too-pink hands in pathetic beckoning gestures.

Kay didn't know about any of this. She didn't know anything. Not that he'd walked around for exactly an hour and a half in the airport, among other people who were also waiting, some huddled and anxious, others happy or indifferent or self-satisfied, not that he'd wondered if at the last minute he'd be able to hold out.

He kept thinking about the moment when he would see her again. He wondered if she'd be the same, if she would look anything like the Kay he loved.

The whole thing was even subtler than that, even deeper. He'd sworn to himself that the moment he laid eyes on her, he'd say, “It's all over, Kay.”

He knew she wouldn't understand. It was almost a play on words. What was over was the walking, the chasing and hounding each other. The running after each other, the turning away and turning back—that was over.

He'd made up his mind, which was why his trip here had been so purposeful and so painful.

Because despite everything there was still the possibility that she wouldn't be able to follow him, that she wasn't at his level yet. And he couldn't wait.

It was over. That summed it up. He felt as though he'd run the whole cycle, looped the loop, fulfilled his destiny, or at least that fate had caught him.

In the all-night diner, when they were still total strangers, everything had already been decided.

Instead of asking why, instead of groping in the dark, resisting and rebelling, he said, with humility and without shame, “I accept.”

He accepted everything. All their love and whatever was going to happen. Kay as she was, had been, and would be.

Could she really have understood that when she saw him waiting there, with so many others, behind the gray barrier of the airport?

She rushed toward him, trembling. She kissed him, unaware that he wasn't interested in kisses. She exclaimed, “At last, François!” Then, like a woman, “You're soaking wet.”

She wondered why he was staring at her so hard, looking like a sleepwalker, why he was dragging her through the crowd, pushing through almost savagely.

She almost asked, “Aren't you glad I'm back?” Then she remembered her suitcase. “We'll have to wait for my luggage, François.”

“I'll have it delivered.”

“But I might need some of my things.”

“Too bad,” he said. He gave their address at the ticket window.

“It would have been easy by taxi. I brought you something from Mexico, you know.”

“Come on.”

“Of course, François.”

In her eyes he glimpsed fear, also submission.

“Anywhere around Washington Square,” he told the driver.

“But …”

He didn't ask her if she was tired or if she'd eaten. He didn't notice she was wearing a new dress under her coat.

She took his hand, but he didn't respond. Instead he acted stiff, which took her aback.

“François?”

“What?”

“You haven't really kissed me yet.”

Because he couldn't kiss her here and now—that wouldn't mean anything. He did try, but it struck her as grudging. She was afraid.

“Listen, François.”

“Yes.”

“Last night …”

He waited. He knew what she was going to say.