“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, wh
en 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.”
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.
Three Bedrooms in Manhattan Page 5