She wanted to open her purse and show him the letter. They had just crossed Sixth Avenue when Combe had stopped under a bright hotel sign. The sign was neon, a horrible purple-violet: Lotus Hotel.
He nudged Kay into the lobby. More than ever he seemed to be afraid. He spoke in a hushed voice to the night clerk leaning on his counter, who gave him a key on a brass disc.
The clerk took them up in a tiny elevator that smelled like a rest room. Kay squeezed Combe’s arm and said in French, “You should ask him to get us some whiskey. I’m sure he can.”
Only later did he realize she’d called him tu.
It was about that time in the morning when Winnie got up without making a sound, leaving J.K.C.’s damp bed and slipping into the bathroom.
The room at the Lotus was as grimy as the daylight filtering through the curtains.
Kay had dropped into a chair, pushing her fur off her shoulders. She had mechanically kicked off her black suede shoes with the too-high heels. Now they were lying on the carpet.
She held a glass in her hand and was drinking slowly, staring into space. Her purse was open on her lap. There was a run, like a long scar, in one of her stockings.
“Pour me another, will you? It’ll be the last.”
Already she looked a bit tipsy. She drank this glass faster than usual, then sat for a moment, shut up within herself, far away from the room and the man who was waiting without knowing exactly what he was waiting for.
At last she stood up, her big toes showing through her flesh-colored stockings. She turned her head away for a fraction of a second, then, with a gesture so simple it might have been practiced, she took two steps toward him, spread her arms to enfold his shoulders, raised herself on her toes, and drew his mouth to hers.
The cleaning staff in the corridor had just plugged in their vacuum cleaners. Downstairs the night clerk was getting ready to go home.
2
THE SURPRISING thing was that he felt almost glad not to find her there beside him, though an hour, even a few minutes later, the thought would have struck him as incredible, almost monstrous. But the thought hadn’t been conscious, so he could deny, without being entirely dishonest, having committed this first betrayal.
When he woke up the room was dark, its darkness pierced by two shafts of reddish light. They were like wedges driven in through the curtains by the neon signs in the street.
He had stretched out his hand and touched nothing but the cold sheets.
Had he really been glad? Hadn’t he really believed that things would be easier if they had ended like that?
Apparently not—because when he saw the crack of light under the bathroom door, his heart registered the shock.
What happened next happened so easily and naturally that he could barely recall the sequence of events.
He had climbed out of bed, he remembered, because he wanted a cigarette. She must have heard his footsteps on the carpet. She had opened the bathroom door while she was still in the shower.
“Do you know what time it is?” she asked happily.
Strangely ashamed of his nakedness, he’d reached for his shorts. “No.”
“My sweet Frank, it is half-past seven in the evening.”
No one had ever called him that before, and the words made him feel lighter. It was a lightness that would stay with him for hours, and it made everything seem so easy that he had the wonderful impression he was juggling with life itself.
What had happened? It didn’t matter. Nothing would matter anymore.
He said, “I wonder how I’ll shave.”
And she said, more tenderly than sarcastically, “Just tell the bellboy to go out and get you a razor and some shaving cream. Do you want me to call him?”
She thought it was funny. She had woken up clearheaded, while he was still confused. This reality seemed so new that he wasn’t too sure that it was, in fact, real.
He remembered, now, the tone of her voice when she had said, with some satisfaction, “You’re not fat.”
He replied, as seriously as he could, “I’ve always played sports.”
And he almost flexed his muscles.
Strange, they’d gone to sleep in this room as the night ended and woken up again as the night began. He was almost afraid to leave it—frightened of forgetting some part of himself there that he might never be able to find again.
What was stranger still was that neither of them had thought of kissing. They both got dressed without embarrassment. She said thoughtfully, “I should buy another pair of stockings.”
She licked her finger and drew it down the run he’d noticed the night before.
He asked, almost awkwardly, “Can I borrow your comb?”
The street, which had been empty when they arrived, was noisy now, bustling, full of bars, restaurants, and shops that they hadn’t noticed before.
Everything seemed even more delicious because of this unlikely solitude, together with a feeling of relaxation they seemed to have stolen from the Broadway crowds.
“You haven’t forgotten anything?”
They were waiting for the elevator; the attendant wasn’t the clerk from last night but a young girl in uniform, sullen and unresponsive. An hour later, no doubt, the clerk would have been back at his post: he would have understood.
Downstairs, Combe went to turn in the key at the desk, while Kay, calm and poised, waited for him a few steps away, like a wife or longtime lover.
“You keeping the room?”
Without thinking he said yes. He spoke quickly and quietly, not just because of her, but out of a sort of superstition. He didn’t want to tempt fate by seeming, so early on, to guess the future.
What did he know about the future? They knew nothing about each other, even less than last night, perhaps. And yet had two beings, two human bodies, ever plunged into each other with such savagery, with such desperate fury?
He didn’t remember how they’d fallen asleep or when. At one point he woke up and it was broad daylight. He had seen her, a pained expression on her face, her body almost spread-eagled, one foot and one hand hanging down to the floor. She hadn’t even opened her eyes as he rearranged her in the bed.
Now they were outside, turning their backs on the Lotus’s purple neon sign, and Kay again took his arm as she had during their long walk through the night.
But now he resented her for having taken his arm the day before, for having taken the arm of a stranger so soon, so easily.
“Maybe we could grab something to eat?” she asked in a joking tone.
Joking because everything seemed like a joke to them, because they were being knocked around by the crowd as lightly as Ping-Pong balls.
“You want some dinner?”
She burst out laughing. “Shouldn’t we have breakfast first?”
He no longer knew who he was or how old he was. He no longer recognized the city he had stalked, bitterly and warily, for six months, and whose overwhelming lack of coherence suddenly filled him with wonder.
This time she led the way as if it were the most natural thing in the world. He asked meekly, “Where are we going?”
“To the cafeteria in Rockefeller Center.”
They had already reached the main building. Kay found her way easily through the vast corridors of gray marble, and for the first time he was jealous. It was ridiculous.
Anxiously, like a teenager, he asked, “Do you come here often?”
“Sometimes. When I’m in the neighborhood.”
“With who?”
“Idiot.”
So in one night, in less than one night, they had miraculously run through a cycle that lovers can take weeks or months to complete.
He was surprised to find himself eyeing the boy who took their order to make sure he didn’t know her, that she hadn’t come here a hundred times with other men. Would he make some sign of recognition to her?
Yet he wasn’t in love with her. He was sure he wasn’t. Already he felt irritation watching her
fumble in her purse for a cigarette, with her commonplace gestures, the way she brought the cigarette up to her lips, smudging it with her lipstick as she fished around for her lighter.
She would finish her cigarette, he knew, whether or not her food arrived. She’d light another—many others, probably— before deciding to swallow down the last drop of coffee in her cup. And she’d smoke another cigarette before leaving and put on some more lipstick. She’d pout slightly, with annoying seriousness, at the mirror she carried in her purse.
But he sat through it. He couldn’t imagine doing anything else. He waited, resigned to it, resigned to whatever else might come, and he caught sight of himself in a mirror, his smile at once tense and childish. That smile reminded him of high school, when he would torture himself with thoughts about whether or not some girl would go to bed with him.
He was forty-eight years old.
He hadn’t told her. They hadn’t talked about their ages. Would he tell her the truth? Would he say he was forty? Forty-two?
Who knew, anyway, if they’d still be together in an hour, in half an hour?
Was that why they were killing time, why they had been killing time since they’d met—because there was no reason to believe that they had any future together at all?
The street again, where they felt easiest with each other. Their moods brightened; they rediscovered the miraculous lightness they had stumbled on earlier by chance.
People were lining up in front of the movie theaters. Some of the velvet-covered doors guarded by men in uniforms must have led into nightclubs.
They didn’t go into any. They didn’t even think about it. They traced their way, zigzagging through the crowds, until Kay turned to him with a smile he knew at once.
Wasn’t that the smile that had started everything?
He wanted to say to her, as to a child, before she even opened her mouth, “Yes …”
Because he knew. And she understood that he knew. The proof was that she said, “Just one, all right?”
They didn’t bother looking around, and at the first corner they pushed open the door of a little bar. It was so intimate, so cozy, so made to order for lovers that it seemed to have been set down in their path on purpose. Kay said to him with a look: “See?”
Then, holding out her hand, she whispered, “Give me a nickel.”
Not understanding, he gave her the coin. He saw her, at one end of the bar, approach a huge, round-edged machine containing an automatic turntable and a stack of records.
She looked more serious than he’d ever seen her. Frowning, she read the titles of the records on the metal tabs and at last found what she was looking for; she pressed a button and came back and climbed onto her barstool.
“Two scotches.”
She waited, a vague smile on her lips, for the first notes, and at that moment he felt a second twinge of jealousy. Who had she been with, where and when had she first heard the piece she’d looked for so long?
He glowered stupidly at the incurious bartender.
“Just listen … don’t make that face, darling.”
The machine stood bathed in orange light, and out of it, very softly, almost like someone telling a secret, came one of those melodies that, whispered by a tenderly insinuating voice, would nurse thousands of romances for six months or a year.
She took his arm. She squeezed it. She smiled at him, and for the first time her smile showed her teeth, too white, almost frail in their whiteness.
He tried to say something.
“Hush,” she said.
A bit later, she said, “Give me another nickel, will you?”
To replay the same song, the one they would listen to seven or eight times that night, drinking whiskeys, saying almost nothing to each other.
“You’re not bored?”
No—he wasn’t at all bored, and yet something strange was happening. He wanted to be with her. He only felt good when she was beside him. He dreaded the moment of separation. At the same time, as in the cafeteria, or like the night in the diner or in the bar where they finally ended up, he felt an almost physical impatience.
The music finally got to him, too, with its almost hurrying gentleness, but still he wanted it over. He told himself, After this one, we go.
He resented Kay for interrupting their aimless and pointless wandering.
She asked, “What do you want to do?”
He didn’t know. He had no sense of time, of everyday life. He didn’t want to return to it, though he was plagued by an indefinable sense of uneasiness that prevented him from giving himself up to the moment.
“Would you mind walking around Greenwich Village?”
What did it matter? He was very happy, and he was very unhappy. Outside, she hesitated for an instant, and he knew why. It was amazing how they were aware of even the slightest nuance in each other’s mood.
She was wondering if they’d take a taxi. The question of money had never come up between them. She didn’t know whether he was rich or poor, and she had been startled, a moment earlier, by the size of the check for the whiskeys.
He raised his arm. A yellow cab stopped at the curb in front of them, and then, like thousands of other couples at the same instant, they were in the soft shadows of the car, with multicolored lights playing on the driver’s back.
He saw her taking off a glove. She slipped her bare hand into his, and they remained that way, motionless, silent, during the whole trip down to Washington Square. They were no longer in noisy, anonymous New York, but in a neighborhood that looked like any other small town in the world.
The sidewalks were empty, and there were not many shops. A couple appeared from a side street, the man awkwardly pushing a stroller.
“I’m glad you wanted to come downtown. I’ve been so happy here.”
He was frightened. He wondered if she was going to start talking about herself. Inevitably she would sometime, and then he’d have to do the same.
But not now. She was silent. She had a way of leaning gently against his arm, and there was another gesture he’d never known her to make before, that he’d never seen anyone make: as they walked she’d brush her cheek against his so fleetingly he was scarcely aware of it.
“Shall we turn left here?”
They were five minutes from his place, the room where, he suddenly remembered, he had left the light on.
He laughed to himself. She sensed it: already they could hide nothing from each other.
“What are you laughing at?”
He was going to tell her. Then he realized she’d want to see his place.
“It’s nothing. I don’t know what came over me.”
She stopped on the sidewalk in a street full of three- and four-story houses.
“Look,” she said. She stared at a house with a white facade and several windows lighted. “That’s where I lived with Jessie.”
Farther down the street, past a Chinese laundry, was a basement-level Italian restaurant with red-and-white-checked curtains.
“We used to have dinner there, the two of us.”
She counted the windows and added, “There, fourth floor, second and third windows from the right. It’s pretty small, you know—just one bedroom, the living room, and a bathroom.”
He felt hurt—as he’d expected.
Resenting her, he asked almost harshly, “What did you do when Enrico came to see your friend?”
“I slept on the sofa in the living room.”
“Every time?”
“What do you mean?”
Now he knew he was on to something. Kay hesitated a moment before replying. She’d answered a question with a question, which meant she felt embarrassed.
He was furious. Thinking of the paper-thin wall that separated him from Winnie and J.K.C., he said, “You know very well what I mean.”
“Let’s keep walking.”
The two of them alone in the deserted neighborhood. With the feeling that they had nothing else to say to each other.
>
“Shall we go in here?”
A little bar, another, one she must know, since it was on her street. What the hell. He said yes and immediately regretted it, since it didn’t have the intimacy of the bar they’d just left. The room was too big, it smelled of piss, the counter was filthy, the glasses scratched and clouded.
“Two scotches.”
Then she said, “Don’t worry. Give me a nickel.”
Here, too, was an enormous jukebox, but she searched in vain for their song. She chose something at random while a stranger drunkenly tried to start a conversation.
They finished their pale, lukewarm whiskeys.
“Let’s get out of here.”
On the street again, she said, “You know, I never slept with Ric.”
He almost sneered—now she was calling him Ric instead of Enrico. But what did it matter? Hadn’t she obviously slept with other men before?
“He tried, one night, I think. I’m not really sure.”
Didn’t she realize the best thing would be to shut up? Was she doing it on purpose? He wanted to take his arm back, to walk by himself, hands in his pockets, to light a cigarette or better still his pipe, something he hadn’t yet done in front of her.
“I want you to know, so you don’t start getting ideas. Ric is South American, you understand? One night … it was two months ago, well, in August … It was very hot. Have you been in New York during a heat wave? The apartment was like a furnace.”
They’d come back to Washington Square. They circled around it slowly, a void between them. Why was she still talking when he was pretending not to hear her?
Why, worst of all, was she bringing images he knew he’d never be able to erase from his mind? He wanted to order her to shut up. Didn’t women have any shame at all?
“All he had on were his pants … He looked good, you know.”
“And you?”
“What about me?”
“What were you wearing?”
“A nightgown, I suppose. I don’t remember … Yes, Jessie and I must have been wearing nightgowns.”
“But you were naked underneath.”
“Probably.”
Three Bedrooms in Manhattan Page 3