Three Bedrooms in Manhattan (6 page)

That was it exactly. Gave himself up. He couldn't tell at what moment the decision had been made, but it was decided. He wouldn't struggle, no matter what he found out.

Why didn't she shut up? It would have been so simple. He would have put his arms around her. He would have whispered, “We're starting all over again—none of that matters.”

Starting all over again from zero. The two of them. Two lives from zero.

From time to time she would break off, “You're not listening.”

“Yes, I am.”

“You're listening, but you're thinking about something else at the same time.”

He was thinking about himself, her, everything. He was himself and someone watching himself. He loved her and still he judged her without mercy.

She said: “We lived in Berlin for two years. My husband was an attaché at the Hungarian embassy. It was there, or more exactly in Swansee, by the lake, that my daughter was born. Her name is Michelle. Do you like the name Michelle?”

She didn't wait for an answer.

“Poor Michelle! She's with one of her aunts, a sister of Larski's who never married and who lives in a huge castle a hundred kilometers from Buda.”

He didn't like the huge romantic castle, which may or may not in fact have existed. He asked himself,
How many men has she told this story to?

He scowled and she noticed.

“Is the story of my life boring you?”

“Not at all.”

It was probably all necessary, like the last cigarette he was anxiously waiting for her to stub out. He felt happy, but happy only for what lay ahead. He wanted to be done once and for all with the past and the present.

“Then he was appointed first secretary in Paris, and we had to live at the embassy because the ambassador was a widower and he needed a woman there for the receptions.”

She was lying. When she spoke to him the first time about Paris, in the diner, she said she'd lived by the Auteuil church in the rue Mirabeau. Hungary had never had an embassy in the rue Mirabeau.

She went on, “Jean was quite a man, one of the most intelligent I'd ever met …”

And he was jealous. He resented her for dragging up yet another name.

“He was a great lord in his own country. You don't know Hungary—”

“Yes, I do.”

She swept aside the objection by impatiently flicking the ash off her cigarette.

“You can't. You're too French. I'm Viennese and have Hungarian blood in my veins on my grandmother's side, but even I couldn't. When I say a great lord, I don't mean a great lord like in the Middle Ages. I've seen him horsewhip his servants. One day when our driver nearly turned us over in the Black Forest, he knocked him down and beat him senseless. He said to me calmly, ‘I'm sorry I don't have a revolver on me. That lout might have killed you.'”

And still he lacked the nerve to tell her to shut up.

It seemed to him that this chatter demeaned them both, that she was demeaning herself by talking just as he was by listening.

“I was pregnant at the time, which explains his anger and brutality. He was so jealous that even a month before I gave birth, when no man would think of looking at me, he kept his eye on me day and night. I wasn't allowed to go out alone. He locked me in my rooms. He locked up all my shoes and clothes in one room and carried the key around with him.”

She didn't understand that it was all wrong, that it was even worse for her to explain. “We lived in Paris for three years.”

Yesterday, she had said six years. Who was she with the rest of the time?

“The ambassador, who died last year, was one of our greatest statesmen, an old man of eighty-four. He was like a father to me, since he'd been a widower for thirty years and had no children.”

You're lying
, he thought.

Because it was impossible. At least with her. The ambassador could have been ninety, he could have been a hundred, but she wouldn't have rested until she'd made him pay her homage.

“Often, at night, he'd ask me to read to him. It was one of the few pleasures he had left.”

He barely kept himself from shouting, “Where were his hands while you were reading to him?” Because it was obvious to him, and it hurt.

Hurry up
, he thought.
Get it all out so the whole rotten business can be forgotten.

“Because of that, my husband claimed that the Paris air was bad for me, and we moved to a villa in Nogent. His mood got gloomier and gloomier, and he got more and more jealous. In the end, I couldn't stand it any more and ran away.”

All by yourself? Come on! If she had run away like that on her own, would she have left her daughter behind? If she had asked for a divorce, would she be where she was now?

He clenched his fists. He wanted to hit her, to avenge them both, him and the husband he utterly detested.

“Is that when you went to Switzerland?” he asked, barely disguising his sarcasm.

But she understood. He knew she did, since she replied curtly, without going into details: “Not right away. First I lived on the Riviera and in Italy for a year.”

She didn't say who she had spent the year with, and didn't claim to have lived alone.

He hated her. He wanted to twist her arm back, forcing her to her knees so she would have to beg him to forgive her.

It was unbelievably ironic, this woman curled up in her chair declaring, with a kind of monstrous candor, “There—I've told you my whole life story!”

But what about the rest, everything she hadn't said, everything she didn't want him to know? Didn't she realize that out of her whole story what stuck in his craw to the point of causing him physical pain was that she let herself be felt up by the old ambassador?

He rose mechanically and said, “Come to bed.”

And, as he had expected, she whispered, “Can I finish my cigarette?”

He snatched it out of her fingers and crushed it with his shoe on the rug.

“Come to bed.”

She was smiling, he knew, when she turned her head. She knew she'd won. To think she'd tell stories like that just to put him in the state she could see he was in!

I'm not going to touch her tonight
, he promised himself.
That way maybe she'll understand
.

Understand what? It was absurd. But then, wasn't this whole thing absurd and meaningless? What were they doing, the two of them, in a room at the Lotus, above a purple neon sign designed to attract straying couples?

He watched her take her clothes off, and he remained cold. Yes, he could remain cold to her. She wasn't beautiful or irresistible, as she thought she was. Her body, like her face, was marked by life.

And now, thinking about her, he felt himself carried away by anger, by a need to wipe out everything, to consume everything, to possess everything. Furiously, with an animus that fixed his pupils in a terrifying stare, he grabbed her, threw her down, and thrust into her as though wanting to exorcise his obsession once and for all.

She watched him, bewildered with fear, and when the spasm was spent she cried, not like Winnie on the other side of the wall, but like a child. Like a child she stammered, “You hurt me.”

Like a child, she fell asleep almost immediately. And that night, unlike the previous one, there was no look of pain on her face. This time she lay calm. She slept, her lower lip slightly protruding, her arms stretched limply on the blanket, her hair in a tangled auburn mass against the stark whiteness of the pillow.

He didn't sleep, didn't even try. Dawn wasn't far off, and when its first cold gleam touched the window, he slid behind the curtains to cool his forehead against the glass.

No one was in the street. The trash cans gave it a look of banal intimacy. Across the way, on the same story, a man was shaving at a mirror hooked to his window frame. For an instant their eyes met.

What would they say to each other? They were about the same age. The man across the way was balding and had thick, worried-looking eyebrows. Was there someone behind him in the room, a woman still asleep in the bed?

A man up so early must be leaving for work. What did he do? What path was his life following?

For months now, Combe's life had been going nowhere. But, until two days ago, he had at least been walking stubbornly in one direction.

On this chilly October morning, he was a man who had cut all the threads, a man approaching fifty, without ties to anything—not to family, profession, country, himself, and definitely not to a home. His only connection was to a complete stranger, a woman sleeping in his room in a seedy hotel.

A light was on in the window across the way, and it made him think of the light that was still burning at his own place. Perhaps it was just an excuse, a pretext.

Wouldn't he, sooner or later, have to go home? Kay would sleep all day; he was beginning to know her. He'd leave a note on the bedside table telling her he'd be back soon.

He would go to Greenwich Village and straighten up his room. Maybe he'd find a way to clean it.

He dressed silently in the bathroom, with the door closed behind him, and his mind was already working. Not only would he clean his room from top to bottom, he'd also go out and buy flowers. And he'd buy a cheap cretonne bedspread, brightly colored, to put over his gray blanket. Then he'd order in a cold supper from the Italian restaurant that served J.K.C. and Winnie every week.

He would need to call the radio station, since he had a broadcast scheduled for the next day. He should have called already.

Tired though he was, he was suddenly full of determination. He looked forward to the prospect of a brisk walk alone, hearing his footsteps echo on the empty sidewalks, breathing in the crisp morning air.

Kay slept. He watched her, her lower lip still protruding, and he smiled, almost condescendingly. Yes, she had found a place in his life. What point was there, right now, in measuring the importance of that place?

If he hadn't been afraid of waking her, he would have kissed her gently on the forehead.

“I'll be back soon,” he wrote on a blank page in his notebook. He tore it out and slipped it under her cigarette case.

And that made him smile, too. He knew she'd find it there.

In the hallway he filled his pipe. Before lighting it, he pressed the elevator button.

The night clerk was off already; one of the girls in uniform was running the car. He went out without stopping at the desk and paused at the curb to fill his lungs.

“Finally,” he almost sighed.

He nearly wondered if he'd ever come back.

He took a few steps, stopped, then walked a little farther.

Suddenly he felt anxious, like a man who has forgotten something but can't remember what.

He stopped again at the corner of Broadway, where the extinguished lights and too-wide sidewalks sent a chill through him.

What would he do if the room was empty when he returned?

The thought had barely struck him, and already it hurt. It put him in such confusion, such a state of panic, that he turned around quickly to make sure no one was leaving the hotel.

A few seconds later at the entrance to the Lotus, he knocked out his still-lit pipe against his heel.

“Eighth floor, please,” he told the girl who had just brought him down in the elevator.

And he only relaxed when he saw Kay still asleep. Nothing in their room had changed.

He didn't know if she'd seen him leave or come back. It was a moment of such deep and mixed emotion that he would never dare to tell her about it. She appeared to be asleep as he got undressed and slipped back under the covers.

Still apparently asleep, she sought out his body with her own.

She didn't open her eyes. Her eyelids fluttered a bit but didn't open, and they made him think of a great bird beating its wings but somehow unable to take flight.

Her voice was heavy and distant but without reproach or sadness as she said, “You tried to run away, didn't you?”

And he almost responded, which would have ruined everything. Luckily she continued in the same voice, though fainter now, “You couldn't.”

Then she was asleep. Maybe she hadn't really woken up, and it was only from the bottom of some deep dream that she had been aware of the drama that had just taken place.

Much later, when they woke up, she didn't say a thing.

Already it felt as though they'd lived through a thousand similar mornings. It seemed impossible that this was only the second time they'd woken up together, naked and intimate, as if they'd been lovers forever.

Even the room at the Lotus seemed familiar. They were surprised how much they liked it.

“I'll run to the bathroom first.”

Then she had the remarkable insight to say, “Why don't you ever smoke your pipe? You can, you know. I don't mind. In Hungary there are a lot of women who smoke pipes.”

That morning they seemed newly minted. Their eyes shone with a pure, almost childlike happiness. They were playing at life.

“When I think that because of Ronald I'll probably never get my things back again! I have two trunks full of clothes there, and now I can't even change stockings.”

She laughed. How wonderful to feel so light waking up, to stand at the threshold of a new day with no constraints, a day you could fill up with whatever you felt like.

The sun was out, a bright, sparkling sun. They went to a diner for breakfast. Already that was one of their habits.

“You feel like taking a walk in Central Park?”

He didn't want to be jealous; their day had only just begun. But each time she proposed doing something, whenever she mentioned some place or other, he couldn't help asking himself,
Who was she with before?

Who had she gone to Central Park with? What memories was she trying to relive?

That morning she looked young. And probably because she also felt young she said, very seriously, as they walked together, “You know, I'm already quite old. I'm thirty-two. Soon I'll be thirty-three.”