Three Bedrooms in Manhattan (7 page)

Her daughter, he calculated, must be about twelve, and he paid attention now to the little girls playing in the park.

“I'm forty-eight,” he confessed. “Well, not quite. I will be in a month.”

“Men don't age.”

Was this the moment to open up about himself? He hoped so, but he was scared, too.

What would happen when they finally had to look reality in the face?

Up to now they had been outside of real life, but the time would come when they would have to go back, whether they liked it or not.

Did she know what he was thinking? Her naked hand found his, as in the taxi, and gave a gentle squeeze, as if to say, “Not yet.”

He had made up his mind to take her to his place, and he was afraid. Leaving the Lotus, he'd paid the bill for the room. She had noticed, but she hadn't said a word.

That might mean a lot of things. Maybe this would be their last walk together—at least their last before they reentered reality.

Maybe that was why she had suggested this stroll, arm in arm, in Central Park, in the warm fall sun—to provide them with one last radiant memory.

She began humming their song, the tune from the little bar. They both had the same thought. Night began to fall and it cooled down. The shadows on the path grew darker. They looked at each other without speaking; they knew what they wanted to do. They headed toward Sixth Avenue.

They didn't take a taxi. They walked. It was their fate, and they were afraid to do anything else. Most of the time they'd been together—and it seemed a long time now—they'd spent on sidewalks, walking, jostled by crowds they barely noticed.

The time was coming when they would have to stop walking and still they kept putting it off.

“Listen …”

At times she moved with a kind of childish joy. When that happened, he thought that fate must be on their side. They walked into the little bar, and the jukebox was playing their song. A sailor, elbows on the bar, was staring intently at nothing.

Kay squeezed Combe's arm and glanced feelingly at the man who'd picked their song to accompany his sadness.

“Give me a nickel,” she whispered.

She played the song three times in a row. The sailor turned his head and smiled sadly. Gulping his drink down, he staggered out, bumping into the door frame on the way.

“Poor man!” she said.

He almost wasn't jealous, but he was, a bit. He had to talk, he wanted to more and more, and yet he didn't dare.

Was she deliberately refusing to help?

Again she was drinking, but he didn't mind. Mechanically he drank with her. He was very sad and he was very happy, feeling an emotion so keen that he teared up when he heard a phrase from their song or just looked around their bar, drowned in muted light.

That night, they walked. For a long time they wandered through the crowds on Broadway and went into bar after bar without ever finding the atmosphere of their favorite spot.

They'd go in, order drinks. Invariably, Kay lit a cigarette. She'd touch his elbow, saying, “Look.”

And she'd point to an unhappy couple lost in thought, or a lone woman getting drunk.

She seemed to be seeking out the despair of others, as if she wanted to rub against it, to wear it down before it could pierce her.

“Let's go.”

They looked at each other and smiled. They had uttered these words so many times, though in fact they had only been together two days and two nights.

“Funny, isn't it?”

He didn't have to ask her what was funny. They were thinking the same thing, two people who didn't know each other and who had come together by a miracle in the great city, and who now clung desperately to each other, as if already they felt a chilly solitude settling in.

Soon … later
, Combe thought.

On Twenty-fourth Street there was a little Chinese shop with a sign over it advertising baby turtles for sale.

“Buy me one, will you?”

They put it into a little cardboard box, and Kay carried it carefully, forcing out a laugh. She was probably thinking that it was the only pledge of love between them.

“Listen, Kay …”

She put a finger to her lips.

“I need to tell you …”

“Hush! Let's get something to eat.”

They lingered amid the city. They did it deliberately. It was in a crowd that they felt happiest.

She ate as she had the first night, but her slowness no longer bothered him.

“There are so many other things to tell you! I know what you think about me. But you're wrong, Frank, you're wrong.”

It was two in the morning, later perhaps, and they were walking back down Fifth Avenue, a distance they'd already covered twice.

“Where are you taking me?”

No sooner had she said it than she changed her mind. “No, don't tell.”

He didn't know what he was going to do, what he was hoping for. He stared straight ahead as he walked. For once, she kept silent, too.

And gradually, this silent nighttime walk took on the solemn aspect of a wedding march. Both knew that from now on they'd cling to each other even harder, not as lovers, but as two creatures who'd been alone and at last, after a long time, had found someone to walk with.

They were hardly man and woman. They were two beings who needed each other.

Their legs weak, they reached the peaceful environs of Washington Square. He knew Kay was surprised, wondering if he wasn't leading her back to their starting point, the diner where they'd met, or perhaps to Jessie's house, which she'd pointed out to him the night before.

He smiled to himself a little bitterly. He was afraid, very afraid, of what he was about to do.

They hadn't said they loved each other. Were they both superstitious about that word? Ashamed of it?

Combe recognized his street, and the door he'd passed through two nights earlier as he was running away, at wits' end, from his neighbors' commotion.

Tonight he was more composed. He walked with his head up. He felt like he'd done something that mattered.

But then he wanted to stop, to turn around, to plunge back into their unreal vagabond life.

He pictured, like a haven, the sidewalk in front of the Lotus, the purple neon sign, the shabby night clerk. It was all so easy!

“Here,” he said at last, and he stopped in front of his stoop.

The moment was definitive, like opening the doors of a church, and she knew it.

She went into the little courtyard bravely and looked around without surprise.

“Funny,” she said, straining to sound lighthearted. “We were neighbors, and yet it took all that time for us to meet.”

They went into the foyer. There were the mailboxes with the doorbells underneath and nameplates over most of them.

Combe's name wasn't there. He saw she'd noticed.

“Come on. There's no elevator.”

“It's only four floors,” she said. She must have examined the building closely.

She went up the stairs ahead of him. On the third floor she stepped aside to let him by.

The first door to the left was J.K.C.'s. The next was Combe's. But before going to it, he felt he had to stop. He needed to look at her for a long moment, to take her in his arms and to kiss her slowly, deeply, on the lips.

“Come on.”

The hallway was dim and smelled of poverty. The door was an ugly brown, and the walls were grimy with fingerprints. Slowly he took his key out of his pocket, and with a strained laugh, he said, “The last time I went out, I forgot to turn off the light. I noticed it from the street but I didn't have the energy to go back upstairs.”

He pushed open the door. The tiny entry was cluttered with suitcases and clothing.

“Come in.”

He was afraid to look at her. His hands were shaking.

He didn't say a thing. Either he pulled her or he pushed her, he didn't know which, but in any case he'd brought her to his place. Ashamed, anxious, at last he had asked her to come into his life.

The still-lighted lamp greeted them. The room was quiet, and the quietness was almost spectral. He had thought it would look sordid, but it was tragic, that was all, full of the tragedy of loneliness and abandonment.

The unmade bed with a dent in the pillow shaped like his head; the rumpled sheets of his insomnia; the pajamas, the slippers, the limp clothes thrown over the chairs.

And, on the table, next to an open book, what was left of a cold supper, the dreary meal of a lonely man.

Suddenly he realized everything he'd escaped from. He stood in the entry, frozen, head bowed, afraid to move.

He didn't want to look. Still he saw her, and he knew that she, too, was measuring the depth of his solitude.

He had thought she would be shocked and resentful.

She was shocked, but not that much—shocked to find out that his solitude was even more hopeless than her own.

What she noticed first were the pictures of the children, a boy and a girl.

“You, too,” she whispered.

Everything happened desperately slowly. Every tenth of a second counted, the tiniest fractions of time during which so much of the past and so much of the future was in play.

Combe looked away from his children's faces. He saw them as unhappy blurs becoming ever more blurred, and he was ashamed. He wanted to say he was sorry, but he didn't know for what or to whom.

Slowly, Kay stubbed out her cigarette in an ashtray. She took off her fur coat and hat and stepped behind him to close the door, which he'd left open.

Then, touching him lightly on the collar, she said, “Darling, take off your coat.”

She helped him take it off and immediately hung it in its place in the closet.

She turned to look at him again—human, very much at home. She smiled, and there was something secret, almost joyous in her smile. At last, wrapping her arms around him, she said, “You see, I knew.”

T
HEY SLEPT
that night like two people stranded in a railway station or in a car broken down by the road. They slept in each other's arms and, for the first time, they didn't make love.

“Not tonight,” she had begged in a whisper.

He understood—at least he thought he understood. They were both exhausted, dazed, as if they had been on an immense journey.

Had they actually arrived somewhere? They had gone to bed without tidying up the room. And, like people who go on feeling the pitch and roll of a ship for a few days after they return from a cruise, they still seemed to be walking, walking endlessly in the great city.

For the first time they woke when other people do. Combe glanced up, and he saw Kay opening the door into the hallway. Perhaps the click of the lock had torn him from his sleep, and his first thought was an anxious one.

But no. He saw her from the back, her hair silky and tangled. She was wrapped in one of his dressing gowns, with the hem trailing on the ground behind her.

“What are you looking for?”

She wasn't startled. She turned casually enough toward the bed, and the best thing was that she didn't try to smile.

“The milk. Doesn't it come every morning?”

“I don't like milk.”

“Oh.”

Before she joined him, she stepped into the kitchenette. The kettle on the hot plate was singing.

“What do you have in the morning—tea or coffee?”

It moved him to hear her voice in this room where he'd never had a visitor. Just before, he had been a little upset that she hadn't come to kiss him. Now he understood that it was better that way, with her puttering around, opening closets, bringing him a navy blue silk dressing gown.

“You want this one?”

She was wearing a pair of men's bedroom slippers, with the heels dragging on the floor behind her.

“What do you usually eat for breakfast?”

He relaxed, at peace. “That depends. Usually, when I'm hungry, I go to the drugstore.”

“I found some tea and a can of coffee. Since you're French, I took a chance and made coffee.”

“I'll go get bread and butter.”

He felt very young. He wanted to go out, but it wasn't like yesterday, when he'd left the Lotus and then stopped within a hundred yards.

Now she was here, in his apartment. He was usually fastidious about the way he looked, perhaps a bit too much so, yet he almost went out unshaven, in his slippers, the way people did in Montmartre or Montparnasse or in working-class neighborhoods.

There was a hint of spring in the fall morning. He surprised himself by humming in the shower while Kay made the bed and hummed along.

It was as if an enormous weight had been lifted from his shoulders, the weight of years that had bent his back without his even knowing.

“Aren't you going to kiss me?”

And she offered him her lips as he left. He paused for a moment on the landing. He turned, opening the door again.

“Kay!”

She was standing where she had been, still looking at him from her side of the door.

“What?”

“I'm happy.”

“Me, too. Go on …”

He wasn't going to think about it. It was too new. Even the street was too new, or rather, it was the same street, but full of new things he'd never noticed before.

The drugstore, for example, where he'd often eaten breakfast alone while reading the paper. Now he saw it surrounded by a haze of happy irony mixed with self-pity.

He stopped, touched by the sight of an organ-grinder on the sidewalk; it was the first one he'd seen in New York, he could swear, the first one he'd seen since he was a child.

At the Italian grocery, it was new buying for two instead of one. He ordered little things he had never bought before. He wanted to fill the refrigerator.

He took the bread, butter, milk, and eggs with him and had the rest delivered. On his way out he remembered something.

“Leave a quart of milk at my door every morning.”