Three Bedrooms in Manhattan (2 page)

Allowing even for self-aggrandizement, Georges Simenon was certainly the great best-seller in the French language of the twentieth century, and surely one of the great international best-sellers of all time. His books are said to have been translated into fifty-five languages, and to have sold as many as 200 million copies. Since Simenon wrote his early books under pseudonyms, no one seems to know precisely how many book-length titles he published, but the estimate of four hundred–plus seems plausible. There have been as many as sixty feature films and nearly three hundred television adaptations, predominantly in Europe and featuring Inspector Maigret. Though, unfortunately, relatively few of Simenon's titles are in print in the United States at present, his books continue to sell in Europe. By the time of his death in 1989, the income from Simenon's printed work had been long eclipsed by the income from subsidiary rights.

Despite his “difficult” personality, and charges of wartime collaboration with the Nazis, Simenon has been admired by a remarkable diversity of his fellow writers, among them Henry Miller, Thornton Wilder, Somerset Maugham, John Cowper Powys, Ian Fleming, Dashiell Hammett (“Simenon is the best author of the genre”). André Gide (the publisher's reader who had headed the Gallimard committee notable for having rejected Proust's
Swann's Way
, the first volume of
Remembrance of Things Past
, in 1912) made the extravagant claim that Simenon was perhaps the best French writer of the twentieth century, though, astonishingly, Gide believed that Simenon had “not really fulfilled his promise.”

Three Bedrooms in Manhattan
, originally published in France, in 1946, as
Trois chambres à Manhattan
, is both a typical and an atypical “simenon.” It belongs to that category of his work to which Simenon gave the generic name
dur
, or “hard,” to distinguish it from the Maigret novels. One of the most overtly autobiographical of Simenon's novels,
Three Bedrooms
is a fictionalized account of Simenon's impassioned love affair with Denyse Ouimet, whom he met in Manhattan in November 1945 (Simenon interviewed the strong-willed young woman, seventeen years his junior, for a secretarial position) and would marry in June 1950 in Reno, Nevada, after his divorce from his current wife. In
Three Bedrooms
, the wife of the forty-eight-year-old protagonist is reimagined as an adulteress who has humiliated her husband by having eloped with a much younger gigolo; the protagonist, a Frenchman named François Combe, is not a best-selling writer but a famous Parisian actor who has fled to Manhattan to escape his past. Though
Three Bedrooms
is constructed like most “simenons,” sparely and urgently written, impressionistically atmospheric, with a middle-aged protagonist approaching a crisis in his life, it is considerably different in tone. Though set in the “calm and brutal indifference” of Manhattan,
Three Bedrooms
evolves by quirky degrees into an unexpected romance.

Unlike the typical Simenon protagonist, François Combe manages to resist the downward spiral of mere contingency and seems to will himself to establish a permanent relationship with Kay Miller, whom he has very casually met in a Greenwich Village diner. Though Kay Miller exhibits mannerisms that annoy Combe, the two are drawn together and consummate their mutual attraction, after hours of compulsive walking on Manhattan streets, in a seedy hotel room. Not long afterward, they make love in Combe's rented room, which seals Combe's sense of destiny:

The third room in Manhattan will be Kay Miller's room, to which the lovers come as at the end of an arduous pilgrimage.

Three Bedrooms
is a departure for Simenon, in that his protagonist isn't an ordinary bourgeois jolted out of his routine, stuporous life, but a “famous” man fleeing humiliation. (At this time, Simenon had been accused of wartime collaboration, charges which would later be dropped.) Where most of Simenon's novellas are set in Europe,
Three Bedrooms
is pointedly set in several selected Manhattan bars, Greenwich Village, Rockefeller Center, on Fifth Avenue, and in a cheap hotel called the Lotus. These settings, deftly rendered, are cinematic backgrounds for the lovers' escalating, if somewhat mysterious, relationship, which endures through Combe's obsessive jealousy (a trait of Simenon's) and Kay Miller's distracting mannerisms (perhaps in emulation of the real-life Denyse, Kay Miller eats, drinks, and smokes cigarettes with exasperating slowness). The author is considerably challenged to make the reader feel the intensity of his lovers' attraction for each other. Lacking overt drama,
Three Bedrooms
is perhaps best described as a memoirist work: it's as if Simenon, master of irony, is overcome by wonder at what is happening to him, succumbing to romantic infatuation in jaded middle age. There is something very Gallic about
Three Bedrooms
, in the mode of the fated lovers of, for instance, Truffaut's
Jules et Jim
. For here, for once, male skepticism is countered by female resiliency and good humor. The drift toward entropy and disaster is subverted. Though in the author's own turbulent life his relationship with Denyse Ouimet would end tragically, as Denyse lapsed by degrees into psychosis, and their daughter Marie-Jo committed suicide, in
Three Bedrooms
all is new, yet to be discovered:

HE WOKE up suddenly at 3:00 A.M., dead tired, got dressed, and almost went out without his tie, in slippers, coat collar turned up, like people who walk their dogs late at night or very early in the morning. Then, when he was in the courtyard of the building, where after two months he still couldn't bring himself to feel at home, he glanced upward mechanically and realized that he'd forgotten to turn out his light, but he didn't have the energy to climb back up the stairs.

What were they doing, up there in J.K.C.'s apartment? Was Winnie vomiting yet? Probably. Moaning, at first softly, then more loudly, until at last she burst into an endless fit of tears.

His footsteps resounded in the nearly empty streets of Greenwich Village, and he was still thinking about the couple who once more had made it impossible for him to sleep. He had never seen them. He didn't even know what the initials J.K.C. stood for. He'd read them, painted in green, on his neighbor's door.

And he knew, after passing by one morning when the door was open, that the floor was black, probably varnished—a glistening black lacquer that was all the more striking in contrast to the red furniture inside.

He knew a lot about the two of them, but only in pieces he couldn't quite fit together. That J.K.C. was a painter. That Winnie lived in Boston.

What did she do? Why did she always come to New York on Friday nights, and only on Friday nights? Why didn't she ever stay the whole weekend? Well, of course there were jobs where people had different days off. She came by taxi, probably from the train station, just before eight. Always the same time, give or take a few minutes—that's what made him think she'd arrived by train.

At first her voice would be shrill and piercing. She had two voices. He could hear her, bustling about, speaking with the animation of someone who was just stopping by.

They ate dinner in the studio. Like clockwork the meal was delivered from an Italian restaurant in the neighborhood fifteen minutes before she arrived.

J.K.C. spoke little, his voice muffled. Despite the thinness of the walls, it was impossible to make out what he was saying, apart from a word or two on those nights when he called Boston.

And why did he never call before midnight, and often not until long after one?

“Hello … long distance?”

Then Combe knew that it would go on for hours. “Boston” he could recognize but not the name of the exchange. Then the name “Winnie” and a surname starting with a
p
, an
o
, an
l
. He never caught the last few letters.

Then the endless hushed whispering.

It drove Combe out of his mind, but less so than these Fridays. What did they drink with their dinner? Something strong—at least for Winnie, since her voice quickly turned throaty and deep.

How could she let herself lose control the way she did? He had never imagined passion of such violence, such unrestrained animality.

And J.K.C., faceless, remained calm, self-possessed, speaking in a level, almost patronizing voice.

After each new outburst she drank again; she shouted for something to drink. He pictured the studio in shambles, glasses shattered on the black floor.

This time he'd gone out without waiting for what always came next, the frantic comings and goings from the bathroom, the hiccupping, the vomiting, the tears. And, finally, that unending wail of a sick animal or a hysterical woman.

Why did he keep thinking about her? Why had he gone out? He had promised himself that one morning he'd be there in the hallway or on the stairs when she left. But every time, she managed to get up at seven sharp. She didn't need an alarm clock. She didn't bother to wake her friend. Combe never heard them talking in the morning.

Stray sounds from the bathroom, perhaps a kiss on the forehead for the man lying asleep, then she opened the door and slipped out. He imagined her searching briskly for a taxi to take her back to the station.

What did she look like in the morning? Could you make out the night's traces on her face, in her sagging shoulders, her hoarse voice?

That was the woman he wanted to see—not the one who got off the train, brimming with self-confidence, who then showed up at the studio as if she was just dropping in on some friends.

He wanted to see the woman at daybreak, when she went off alone, leaving the man asleep, selfish, stupefied, his damp forehead grazed by her lips.

He came to a corner that seemed vaguely familiar. A club was closing. The last customers were out on the sidewalk, waiting in vain for a taxi. On the corner two men who'd been drinking were finding it hard to say good-bye. They shook hands, pulled apart, then immediately turned back for a final confidence or renewed protestations of friendship.

Combe, too, looked like he'd been in a bar, not like someone who'd just gotten up.

But he hadn't been drinking. He was sober. He hadn't been out listening to jazz. He'd spent the night in the desert of his bed.

A subway station, black and metallic, stood in the middle of the intersection. At last a yellow cab pulled up to the sidewalk and a dozen nightclub patrons rushed in its direction. Not without difficulty, the cab drove off again, empty. Perhaps nobody was going the right way.

Two wide streets, almost deserted, with garlands of luminous globes running down the sidewalks.

On the corner, its high windows lit violently, aggressively, with boastful vulgarity, was a sort of long glass cage where people could be seen as dark smudges and where he went in just so as not to be alone.

Stools anchored to the floor along an endless counter made of something cold and plastic. Two sailors swayed drunkenly, and one of them shook his hand solemnly, saying something Combe failed to understand.

It wasn't on purpose that he sat down beside the woman. He realized it only when the white-coated black waiter was standing in front of him, impatient for his order.

The place smelled of fairgrounds, of lazy crowds, of nights when you stayed out because you couldn't go to bed, and it smelled like New York, of its calm and brutal indifference.

Picking at random, he ordered grilled sausages. Then he looked at his neighbor and she looked at him. She had just been served fried eggs, but she hadn't touched them. She lit a cigarette slowly and deliberately, leaving a trace of her lipstick on the paper.

“You're French?”

She asked the question in French, a French that at first he thought betrayed no accent.

“How'd you know?”

“I didn't. As soon as you came in, even before you said anything, I just thought you were French.”

She added, a hint of nostalgia in her smile, “Paris?”

“Yes.”

“Which part?”

Did she see his eyes dim slightly?

“I had a villa in Saint-Cloud … You've been there?”

She recited, as they do on the Paris riverboats, “Pont de Sèvre, Saint-Cloud, Point-du-Jour …”

Then, in a lower voice: “I lived in Paris for six years. Do you know the church in Auteuil? My apartment was next door, on the corner of rue Mirabeau, a few steps from the Molitor swimming pool.”

How many people were in this diner? Ten at most, set apart from one another by empty stools and by another emptiness, indefinable and hard to pierce, which perhaps emanated from each of them.

Two black men in white overcoats linked them together—nothing else. From time to time one of the two men would turn to a kind of trap and take out a plate of something hot, before sliding it down the counter to one of the customers.

Why, despite the blinding brightness, did everything look gray? It was as if the painfully sharp lights were helpless to dispel all the darkness the people had brought in from the night outside.

“You're not eating?” he said, since silence had fallen.