“Maybe—but the prevailing rule in American life is, If you transgress, the punishment will follow.”
“As you well know,” she said.
“How do you know that?”
“It’s written all over you. You got caught at something. And the other great rule of American life is, Don’t get caught.”
“No,” I said, “the rule is, There is a price to everything.”
“What a sad way of looking at the world: thinking that pleasure must be punished.”
“Only illicit pleasure.”
“Most pleasures are best when they are illicit, n’est-ce pas?” she said, tracing a line down my face and kissing me. This time she responded when I kissed her back deeply. But then, a few moments later, she ended the embrace.
“Like I said . . .” she whispered.
“I know,” I said. “ ‘Not today.’ ”
“But three days from now—absolutely. Now you must go.”
“So soon?”
“I have things to do.”
“OK,” I said.
Ten minutes later I was on the street, walking quickly toward the metro, trying to sort through everything that had happened during the brief hour I had spent in Margit’s apartment. Questions, questions. “Not today.” But why? And also, what things did she have to do that made her turn me out of her apartment after sixty minutes? The story of her “arrangement” with the fat businessman strangely rankled—because it felt as if she was testing me, seeing what I would accept, and also letting me know (without much subtlety) that this “thing” (I couldn’t yet call it an affair, let alone a liaison) would be conducted according to her rules, her limits. And if I didn’t want it . . .
But the truth was, I did want it. As I descended into the Jussieu station, the letdown intensified. Three days was a long time from now.
While walking to work that night, all I could think was how I now had to spend the next six hours locked up in an airless room, and how I was tiring of the job, and wouldn’t mind taking a sixty-five-euro loss if it meant getting one day off each week.
But when I posited this idea to Mr. Beard the next afternoon, his reaction was not positive.
“I do not think the Boss would like that,” he said. “You are needed there every night.”
“But when I was first offered the job, Kamal said I could work just six nights.”
“Kamal is dead . . . and you are needed there all seven nights.”
“Couldn’t you get someone else to handle just one night of the week?”
“It will not be possible.”
“Would you at least ask the Boss?”
“I will ask him, but I know what he will say: It will not be possible.”
But the next afternoon, when I stopped by the café to pick up my wages envelope, Mr. Beard favored me with a scowly smile.
“I have spoken to the Boss. He is d’accord. ‘Every man needs a day of rest,’ he said. Yours will be Friday, but the Boss also wants you to work one evening shift: six PM to midnight, one day a week.”
“But that means doing a twelve-hour shift . . .”
“You will not lose any money that way.”
No, but if Margit will only see me at five PM every three days . . .
“Could I do six AM to twelve noon?”
“It will not be possible.”
“Ask him.”
When I returned the next day, Mr. Beard tossed me my envelope and said, “The Boss wants to know why you can’t do those extra hours.”
“Because I see a woman in the late afternoon.”
That caught him by surprise—even though he tried hard not to look shocked.
“I will tell him that,” he said, looking away from me.
And it was only three hours before I could see her again. With time to kill, I walked over to that little café near the Gare de l’Est where I ate steak-frites twice a week. The place was quiet. I sat down. The waiter approached me and took my order. I asked him if he had a newspaper I could read. He returned with Le Parisien. I opened it up and started flicking through its pages. I have to say that I liked the paper because it was full of the usual petty crimes and misdemeanors that inform the life of a city. Today’s criminal reports included: Two teenage thugs caught trashing a car in Clichy-sous-Bois. An insurance executive killed instantly when his car swerved in front of a truck on the autoroute to Versailles (and the postmortem showed that he was, booze-wise, way over the limit). A feud between two families in Bobigny that got so out of hand that one of the husbands smashed the windshield of his neighbor’s Renault Mégane. A desk clerk at a small hotel in the Sixteenth getting knocked down in a hit-and-run accident on the rue François Millet.
Hang on . . .
HOTEL CLERK LEFT PARALYZED BY
HIT-AND-RUN DRIVER
Philippe Brasseur, 43, the morning desk clerk at the Hôtel Sélect, rue François Millet, has been left paralyzed from the neck down after being struck by a car yesterday afternoon in front of the hotel. Eyewitnesses say that the vehicle—a Mercedes C-Class—had been double-parked near the hotel, and pulled out suddenly as M. Brasseur left the hotel. According to Mme Tring Ta-Sohn, who operates a traiteur asiatique opposite the Sélect, “The driver of the vehicle appeared to deliberately target the man.” Mme Tring Ta-Sohn also informed the police that the license plate of the Mercedes appeared to have been covered. According to the investigating officer, Inspector M. Guybet, this detail evidently indicated that this was a premeditated act. M. Brasseur remains in stable condition at the Hôpital de Saint-Cloud. The attending neurologist, Dr. G. Audret, said it was too early to tell whether the paralysis was permanent.
Good God. As much as I hated that bastard—and privately wanted to see him get some sort of comeuppance for his hideous behavior toward me—I still wouldn’t have wished that fate upon him. The man must have made some serious enemies over the years.
Four hours later I was recounting this tale to Margit. We were in bed, sprawled naked across each other and talking for the first time since I had arrived. When she’d opened her front door, she’d immediately pulled me down onto the bed, yanking down my jeans, hiking up her skirt. Once I was inside her, she became immoderate—her legs tight around me, her moans increasing in volume with each of my thrusts.
Afterward, she said, “Take off your clothes and stay awhile.”
I did as ordered while she went into the next room to retrieve two glasses. Then picking up the bottle of champagne I had brought (“I won’t say, ‘Again,’ . . . but you really must stop such extravagance”), she opened it, the cigarette ash falling off onto the sheets as the cork popped.
“More work for the maid,” I said.
“I am the maid. Just like you.”
“You’re beautiful,” I said, stroking her thigh.
“You’ve said that before.”
“It’s the truth.”
“You’re a liar,” she said with a laugh. “And you’re continuing to evade my question . . .”
“What question?”
“The question I posed to you last time.”
“Which was?”
“How badly did your wife damage you?”
“Badly,” I finally said. “But ultimately it was me who damaged myself.”
“You only say that because you believe her rhetoric . . . because, all of your life, you’ve been told you’re a bad boy.”
“Stop sounding like a shrink.”
“You have nothing to be guilty about.”
“Yes, I do,” I said, turning away.
“Did you kill anyone?” she asked.
“Don’t try to soft-pedal this . . .”
“It’s a legitimate question: Did you kill someone?”
“Of course I didn’t kill anyone.”
“Then what are you guilty about? Betraying your wife perhaps?”
“Maybe.”
“Or was it really all about getting found out?”
Silence. I turned away.
“We all want to get found out,” she said. “It’s sadly human . . . and sadly true. Just as we all can’t really cope with the guilt that—”
“Do you want to know about the sort of guilt I contend with, day in, day out? Well, listen to this . . .”
That’s when I told her about the hit-and-run accident involving the desk clerk at the Sélect.
“It hardly sounds like an accident,” Margit said when I finished recounting this story.
“That’s what’s nagging me, the fact that—”
“Now don’t tell me that, because you thought ill of the bastard, the wrath of the gods came down upon him?”
“Something like that, yes.”
“But he got what was coming to him. Somebody out there didn’t like the way he was behaving toward others, and decided to settle the score. And even though you had no bearing whatsoever on this person’s decision to run him down, you still feel guilt?”
“I wanted something bad to happen to him . . .”
“And that puts you at fault?”
“I have a fucked-up conscience.”
“Clearly,” she said, topping up my glass with champagne. “But I’m certain this self-loathing didn’t simply arrive one day, out of nowhere. Did your mother—?”
“Hey, I really don’t feel like talking about it . . .”
“Because she so disapproved of you?”
“Yeah, that—and because she was a deeply unhappy woman who told me repeatedly that I was the root cause of her problems.”
“Were you?”
“According to her, sure. I screwed things up completely for her . . .”
“How, exactly?”
“Before I showed up in her life, she was this big-deal journalist . . .”
“How ‘big deal’?”
“She was a court reporter . . .”
“A mere reporter?”
“For the Cleveland Plain Dealer.”
“Is that an important newspaper?”
“It is . . . if you live in Cleveland, Ohio.”
“So she was a self-important hack, covering trials . . .”
“Something like that. I arrived by accident. She was forty, a hard-bitten professional, someone who never married and lived for her work. But—and this I got from her later—she was starting to ‘feel her age’ . . . wondering if she’d end up alone in her early sixties; a dried-up spinster, living in some small apartment, on the way out at the paper, no one caring if she lived or died . . .”
“There was no husband in her life?”
“Not until she met Tom Ricks. Ex-army guy, built up a successful insurance business in the Cleveland area, divorced after the war, no kids, met my mom when she was covering an accident case in which he was testifying. She was lonely, he was lonely, they started seeing each other. It was ‘pretty agreeable at first,’ she later told me, especially as they both liked to drink . . .”
“And then she got pregnant?”
“Yeah, that’s exactly what happened. It was all a big accident, she ‘agonized’ over what to do, whether to keep it . . .”
“She told you all this?”
“Yeah—when I was around thirteen and we’d just had a fight about my refusal to do something stupid, like take the garbage out. ‘You know the biggest mistake of my life was not having you scraped out of my womb when I still had the chance.’ ”
“Charming,” she said, stubbing out her cigarette.
“Well, she was pretty drunk at the time. Anyway, she found herself up the spout, Dad convinced her to keep it and promised her he wouldn’t stop her working or anything. But then the pregnancy turned out to be a nightmare. She ended up confined in a hospital bed for around three months. As this was 1963, when maternity leave wasn’t exactly a progressive concept, the paper let her go. It was the biggest blow of her life. All the time I was growing up, she always referred to the Plain Dealer as ‘my paper’ . . . talking about it in such mournful tones you’d think it was a man who jilted her.”
“So you were vilified for being the person who ruined her life. Is she still alive?”
I shook my head. “The cigarettes got my father first—he died in ’87. Mom went in ’95—cigarettes and booze. Suicide on the installment plan. I’m pretty damn sure my mom started the slow process of killing herself the day the Plain Dealer let her go. And . . . could we drop this subject, please?”
“But it’s so illuminating—and it so explains why you feel such guilt about nothing.”
“Guilt has its own weird trajectory.”
“Which is why you weirdly blame yourself for that desk clerk getting run over?”
“I don’t blame myself . . . I just wish I hadn’t wished him ill.”
“Why spill tears over a shit? Anyway, don’t you think that those who damage others deserve to be damaged themselves?”
“Only if you buy into an Old Testament view of things.”
“Or if you do truly believe in retribution.”
“But you don’t believe in . . .?”
“Retribution? Of course I do. It’s a rather delicious concept, don’t you think?”
She was smiling at me.
“You’re joking, right?” I asked.
“Not really, no,” she said, then glanced at the watch on my wrist.
“Don’t tell me our ‘allotted time slot’ is over?” I said.
“Just about.”
“Great,” I said, then added, “And yeah, I know that sounds petulant, but . . .”
“See you in three days, Harry.”
“Same time?”
She stroked my hair.
“You’re learning,” she said.
Learning what? I wondered.
TWELVE
I WAS DETERMINED TO break out of my daily routine. So I made the point of exploring new quartiers on foot, and even forced myself to jog three times a week along the Canal Saint-Martin—my one small nod to the idea of getting back into shape. And twice a week, I declared a “movie-free” day and loitered in museums instead of the Cinémathèque.
But, for me, all these extracurricular activities were secondary to my twice-weekly rendezvous with Margit. It wasn’t just the sex. It was also the break from the quotidian—the sense that, for a couple of hours (if I was lucky), I would escape the banality of everything. No wonder we all respond to the idea of intimacy. It doesn’t just allow us to cling to someone else and believe that we are not alone in the world; it also lets us escape from life’s prosaic repetitiveness.
But with Margit, I always did still feel somewhat alone, as she continued to keep a certain distance from me. When I arrived for our fourth rendezvous, she led me to the sofa, opened my jeans, and proceeded to go down on me. But when I tried to touch her, she gently pushed my hand away with the comment I’d heard before, “Not today.”
Three days later, however, she was a different woman—sexually voracious and passionate, delighted to see me, full of chat and—dare I say it—almost loving. So much so that when eight o’clock arrived and she hinted that it was time for me to leave, I said, “Listen, I know I’m probably pushing things here—but this has been such a wonderful afternoon, why don’t we do something like go out to dinner or . . .”
“I have work. And so do you.”
“But I don’t have to be there until midnight, which gives us a couple of hours—”
She cut me off, asking, “You really just sit there all night, while the furs come and go?”
“That’s it.”
“And do you ever meet the people who employ you?”
“Just the grumpy bastard who runs the local Internet café and hands me my pay envelope every day.”
“The middleman?”
“Something like that.”
“Have you ever thought about what’s really going on in that building?”
“I told you, it’s a furrier’s.”
“And I know you’re lying to me.”
Silence. She said, “Don’t tell me you’re suddenly feelin
g guilty about not telling me the truth?”
“The truth is, I don’t know the truth. Sorry.”
“Why should you be sorry? All men lie.”
“No comment,” I said.
“Listen to your guilt. But let me guess: your ex-wife talked a great deal about the need for ‘trust’ in a marriage, and how without ‘complete honesty,’ there was ‘no real basis for intimacy.’ ”
Once again, I found myself tensing—and trying to rewind my memory in an attempt to remember when I told her all that about Susan. She preempted me by saying, “How did I know that? It was simply a supposition—and one based on my rudimentary knowledge of American morality in all its hypocritical finery.”
“Whereas the French way is . . .?”
“Compartmentalize. Accept the Cartesian logic of two separate universes within one life. Accept the contradictory tug between familial responsibility and the illusion of freedom. Accept that—as Dumas said—the chains of marriage are heavy and, as such, they often need to be carried by several people. But never allow the two realms to meet—and never admit anything. Whereas you, Harry, confessed everything . . . didn’t you?”
“Yes, I did. And yes, I was a fool to confess.”
“But you had to share the guilt.”
“I’d been caught . . .”
“Being caught and confessing are two different things. You know the story of the man who gets caught by his wife in bed with another woman. Immediately he jumps up, naked, and starts yelling, ‘It’s not me! It’s not me!’ ”
“I’m afraid I’ve never had much in the way of ‘sangfroid.’ ”
“No—you just feel uncomfortable about lying. You consider it reprehensible and morally wrong . . . even though it is the most common—and necessary—of human impulses.”
“You consider lying necessary?”
“Of course. How else do we navigate the absurdities of life without falsehoods? And do you know what the biggest falsehood is? ‘I love you.’ ”
“Didn’t you love your husband?”
She reached for her pack of cigarettes. I said, “You always do that when I ask you something awkward.”
“You are a very observant man. And yes, I did love my husband . . . sometimes.”
“Just sometimes?”
The Douglas Kennedy Collection #2 Page 48