'Children?'
'A daughter, aged fifteen. She lives with her mother.'
'Are you in contact with her?'
'I wish . . .'
'She won't talk with you?'
I hesitated. Then: 'She told me she never wanted to speak with me again – but I do sense that her mother has convinced her to say this.'
He put his fingertips together, taking this in. Then:
'Do you smoke?'
'Not for five years.'
'Do you drink heavily?'
'I have been . . . recently.'
'Drugs?'
'I take sleeping pills. Non-prescription ones. But they haven't been working for the past few weeks. So . . .'
'Chronic insomnia?'
'Yes.'
He favored me with a small nod – a hint that he too knew the hell of unremitting sleeplessness. Then: 'It is evident what has happened to you: a general breakdown. The body can only take so much . . . tristesse. Eventually, it reacts against such traumatisme by shutting down or giving in to an intense viral attack. The flu you are suffering is more severe than normal because you are in such a troubled state.'
'What's the cure?'
'I can only treat the physiological disorders. And flu is one of those viruses that largely dictates its own narrative. I have prescribed several comprimés to deal with your aches, your fever, your dehydration, your nausea, your lack of sleep. But the virus will not leave your system until it is – shall we say – bored with you and wants to move on.'
'How long could that take?'
'Four, five days . . . at minimum.'
I shut my eyes. I couldn't afford four or five more days at this hotel.
'Even once it has gone, you will remain desperately weak for another few days. I would say you will be confined here for at least a week.'
He stood up.
'I will return in seventy-two hours to see what improvement you have made and if you have commenced a recovery.'
Do we ever really recover from the worst that life can throw us?'
'One last thing. A personal question, if I may be permitted. What brought you to Paris, alone, just after Christmas?'
'I ran away.'
He thought about this for a moment, then said, 'It often takes courage to run away.'
'No, you're wrong there,' I said. 'It takes no courage at all.'
Three
FIVE MINUTES AFTER the doctor left, the desk clerk came into the room. He was holding a piece of paper in one hand. With a flourish, he presented to me – as if it were a legal writ.
'La facture du médecin.' The doctor's bill.
'I'll settle it later.'
'He wants to be paid now.'
'He's coming back in three days. Can't he wait . . . ?'
'He should have been paid last night. But you were so ill, he decided to hold off until today.'
I looked at the bill. It was on hotel letterhead. It was also for an astonishing amount of money: two hundred and sixty-four euros.
'You are joking,' I said.
His face remained impassive.
'It is the cost of his services – and of the medicine.'
'The cost of his services? The bill's been written up on your stationery.'
'All medical bills are processed by us.'
'And the doctor charges one hundred euros per house-call?'
'The figure includes our administrative fee.'
'Which is what?'
He looked right at me.
'Fifty euros per visit.'
'That's robbery.'
'All hotels have administrative charges.'
'But not one hundred percent of the price.'
'It is our policy.'
'And you charged me one hundred percent markup on the prescriptions?'
'Tout à fait. I had to send Adnan to the pharmacy to get them. This took an hour. Naturally, as he was not dealing with hotel business, his time must be compensated for . . .'
'Not dealing with hotel business? I am a guest here. And don't tell me you're paying your night guy thirty-two euros an hour.'
He tried to conceal an amused smile. He failed.
'The wages of our employees are not divulged to . . .'
I crumpled up the bill and threw it on the floor.
'Well, I'm not paying it.'
'Then you can leave the hotel now.'
'You can't make me leave.'
'Au contraire, I can have you on the street in five minutes. There are two men in the basement – notre homme à tout faire and the chef – who would physically eject you from the hotel if I ordered them to do so.'
'I'll call the police.'
'Is that supposed to frighten me?' he asked. 'The fact is, the police would side with the hotel, once I told them that the reason we were evicting you is because you made sexual advances to the chef. And the chef would confirm this to the police – because he is ignorant and because he is a strict Muslim whom I caught dans une situation embarrassante with notre homme à tout faire two months ago. So now he will do anything I say, as he fears exposure.'
'You wouldn't dare . . .'
'Yes, I would. And the police wouldn't just arrest you for lewd conduct, they'd also check into your background, and find out why you left your country in such a hurry.'
'You know nothing about me,' I said, sounding nervous.
'Perhaps – but it is also clear that you are not in Paris for a mere holiday . . . that you ran away from something. The doctor told me you confessed that to him.'
'I did nothing illegal.'
'So you say.'
'You are a shit,' I said.
'That is an interpretation,' he said.
I shut my eyes. He held all the cards – and there was nothing I could do about it.
'Give me my bag,' I said.
He did as requested. I pulled out the wad of traveler's checks.
'It's two hundred and sixty-four euros, right?' I asked.
'In dollars, the total is three hundred and forty-five.'
I grabbed a pen and signed the necessary number of checks, and threw them on the floor.
'There,' I said. 'Get them yourself.'
'Avec plaisir, monsieur.'
He picked up the checks and said, 'I will return tomorrow to collect the payment for the room – that is, if you still want to stay.'
'As soon as I can stagger out of here, I will.'
'Très bien, monsieur. And by the way, thank you for pissing in the vase. Très classe.'
And he left.
I fell back against the pillows, exhausted, enraged. The latter emotion was something with which I'd had extensive personal contact over the past few weeks – an ominous sense that I was about to detonate at any moment. But rage turned inward transforms itself into something even more corrosive: self-loathing . . . and one which edges into depression. The doctor was right: I had broken down.
And when the flu finally moved on, what then? I would still be wiped out, beaten.
I reached back into my shoulder bag and pulled out the traveler's checks. I counted them. Four thousand, six hundred and fifty dollars. My entire net worth. Everything I had or owned in the world – as I was pretty damn sure that, thanks to the demonizing I'd been subjected to in the press, Susan's lawyers would convince the divorce judge that my wife should get it all: the house, the pension plans, the life insurance policies, the small stock portfolio we purchased together. We weren't rich – academics rarely are. And with a daughter to raise and an ex-husband permanently barred from teaching again, the court would rightfully feel that she deserved the few assets we once shared. I certainly wasn't going to fight that. Because I had no fight left in me – except when it came to somehow getting my daughter to talk to me again.
Four thousand, six hundred and fifty dollars. On the flight over here, stuffed into a narrow seat, I had done some quick calculations on the back of a cocktail napkin. At the time I had just over five thousand bucks. At the current, legal rate of exchange, it
would net me just over four thousand euros. Living very carefully, I estimated I could eke out three or four months in Paris – on the basis that I could find a cheap place to live as soon as I got there. But forty-eight hours after landing in Paris, I had already spent over four hundred dollars. As it looked as though I wouldn't be able to move from here for another few days, I could count on paying out another extortionate hundred bucks a night until I was fit enough to leave this dump.
My rage was damped down by fatigue. I wanted to go into the bathroom and strip off my sweat-sodden T-shirt and undershorts and stand under a shower. But I still couldn't make it off the bed. So I just lay there, staring blankly upward, until the world went blank again and I was back in the void.
Two soft knocks on the door. I stirred awake, everything blurred, vague. Another soft knock, followed by the door opening a crack, and a voice quietly saying, 'Monsieur . . . ?'
'Go away,' I said. 'I don't want anything to do with you.'
The door opened further. Behind it emerged a man in his early forties – with rust-colored skin and cropped black hair. He was dressed in a black suit and a white shirt.
'Monsieur, I just want to see if you needed anything.'
His French, though fluent, was marked with a strong accent.
'Sorry, sorry,' I said. 'I thought you were . . .'
'Monsieur Brasseur?'
'Who's Monsieur Brasseur?'
'The morning desk clerk.'
'So that's the bastard's name: Brasseur.'
A small smile from the man in the doorway.
'Nobody likes Monsieur Brasseur, except the hotel manager – because Brasseur is very talented at la provocation.'
'Are you the guy who helped me out of the cab yesterday?'
'Yes, I'm Adnan.'
'Thanks for that – and for getting me settled here.'
'You were very ill.'
'But you still didn't have to get me undressed and into bed, or call a doctor, or unpack everything. It was far too kind of you.'
He looked away, shyly.
'It's my job,' he said. 'How are you feeling tonight?' 'Very weak. Very grubby.'
He stepped fully into the room. As he approached me, I could see that his face had grooved lines around the eyes – the sort of creases that belonged on the face of a man twenty years his senior. His suit was tight, ill-fitting, badly worn – and there was a serious tobacco stain on both his right index and middle fingers.
'Do you think you can get out of bed?' he asked.
'Not without help.'
'Then I will help you. But first I will run you a bath. A long soak will do you good.'
I nodded weakly. He took charge of things. Without flinching at its contents, he picked up the vase and disappeared into the bathroom. I heard him flush the toilet and turn on the bath taps. He emerged back into the bedroom, took off his suit jacket, and hung it up in the armoire. Then he picked up my jeans and the shirt and socks that had been placed on the desk chair and stuffed them in the pillowcase.
'Any other dirty laundry?' he asked.
'Just what I am wearing.'
He returned to the bathroom. The water stopped running. Steam leaked out through the doorway. He emerged, his face glistening from the vapors, his right arm wet.
'It is hot, but not too hot.'
He came over to the bed and sat me upright and placed my feet on the floor and then lifted up my left arm and pulled it around his shoulder and hoisted me up. My legs felt as sturdy as matchsticks. But Adnan kept me vertical and walked me slowly into the bathroom.
'Do you need help with your clothes?' he asked.
'No, I can handle it.'
But when I took one of my hands off the sink, I immediately lost balance and felt my knees warping. Adnan straightened me up and quietly asked me to keep one hand on the sink while raising the other above me. I was able to keep my arm aloft long enough for him to pull my T-shirt off my arm and over my head. Then he asked me to switch arms and inched the rest of it off. With a quick yank, he pulled my boxer shorts to the floor. I stepped out of them and allowed Adnan to walk me the two steps to the bath. The water was seriously hot. So hot that I recoiled when my foot first touched its surface. But Adnan ignored my protestations and gently forced me into the tub. The initial shock of the water gave way to a strange sense of scalded calm.
'Do you need help washing yourself?'
'I'll try doing it myself.'
I managed to soap up my crotch, my chest and underarms, but couldn't find the energy to reach down to my feet. So Adnan took the soap and dealt with them. He also brought over the shower hose and doused my hair and lathered it up with shampoo. Then he found a can of shaving cream and a razor among the toiletries he'd earlier unpacked, and knelt down by the bathtub and started covering my face in foam.
'You don't have to do this,' I said, embarrassed by all the personal attention.
'You will feel better for it.'
He took great care when it came to dragging a razor across my face. After he finished, he brought over the shower hose and rinsed off all the foam and the shampoo from my hair. Then he filled the sink with hot water, submerged a cloth in it, retrieved it, and without squeezing out its excess water, placed it over my face.
'Now you will lie here, please, for a quarter of an hour,' Adnan said.
He left the bathroom. I opened my eyes and saw nothing but the textured white of the cloth. I closed them and tried to empty my head; to concentrate on nothing. I failed. But the bath water was balming, and it was good to be clean again. I heard occasional noises from the other room, but Adnan left me be for a long time. Then there was a soft knock at the bathroom door.
'Ready to get out?' he asked.
Once again, he had to help me up and wrapped me in one of the thin hotel bath towels before handing me two folded items of clothing.
'I found these in your things. A pajama bottom and a T-shirt.'
He helped dry me down, then got me dressed and led me back to a bed that had been remade with fresh sheets. They felt wonderfully cool as I slid between them. Adnan positioned the pillows so I could sit up against the headboard. He retrieved a tray that had been left on the desk. He carried it over with care. On it was a tureen, a bowl and a small baguette.
'This is a very mild bouillon,' he said, pouring some into the bowl. 'You must eat.'
He handed me the spoon.
'Do you need help?' he asked.
The Woman In The Fifth Page 3