The Woman In The Fifth

by Douglas Kennedy

  When noon arrived, I found myself blinking into the sunlight and needing to take in extended lungfuls of air and staggering home without the usual croissants and remembering to set the clock for 7 p.m. that night, and falling into a vast empty sleep, and waking with a jolt, and thinking how strange my existence was now: an all-night non-job, a sortof girlfriend who would only see me every three days, and the realization that – even though this was allegedly my 'day off ' – I would be staying awake all night, as I couldn't suddenly break the sleep-by-day schedule I had been living since starting this idiotic, wretched job.

  So when I came to during the early evening, I hurried off to the Cinéma Grand Action on the rue des Écoles where a new print of Kubrick's Spartacus was being shown at 20h15. When it let out at 23h30 I kept thinking, Margit's apartment is just a five-minute walk from here. But I turned away and found a Mexican place off the boulevard Saint- Germain that did very authentic guacamole (or what I took to be authentic guacamole) and even better margaritas, and wonderful enchiladas washed down with Bohemia beer. The meal cost me fifty euros and I didn't give a damn, because I had just worked twelve hours, and this was my first night off in almost two months, and I was determined to throw financial caution to the wind tonight and get a little smashed and fall about Paris like a pinball. So when I finished my meal, I stopped in a tabac and bought a Cohiba Robusto and sauntered across the Seine, puffing happily on this absurdly expensive Cuban cigar and eventually reached Châtelet and a string of jazz clubs on the rue des Lombards. As it was almost one thirty in the morning, the guy on the door let me into Sunside without hitting me for the usual twenty-euro cover charge. I threw back a couple of whiskies and listened to a so-so local chanteuse – thin, big frizzy hair, a reedy voice that still somehow managed to swing with the Ellington and Strayhorne standards which she sang with her backing trio. When the set finished and the club emptied, I found myself on foot toward the Tenth arrondissement. It was well after two. This corner of Paris was deserted, bar a few entangled couples, and the street people who would once again be sleeping rough tonight, and the occasional drunk like myself. I followed the boulevard de Sébastopol most of the way home. As I got to Château d'Eau the smattering of Africans on the street looked at me as if I was a cop, taking a step back as I strode by. The rue de Paradis was shuttered – the Turkish workingmen's cafés long closed. Ditto the bobo restaurants. The occasional street lamp cast an oblong shaft of light on the pavement. There was no traffic, no ambient urban noise – just the percussive click of my heels punctuating the night . . . until I heard the tinny beat of shitty pop music up ahead, and saw that my local dingy bar was still open.

  The barmaid – the same Franco-Turkish one I had seen there before – smiled as I entered. Without me asking, she poured me a beer, set it in front of me, and then turned and retrieved two glasses and a bottle and poured out two shots each of a clear liquid. Reaching for a pitcher, she added a drop of water to both drinks. As the liquid went murky, she raised a glass to me and said, 'Serefe.'

  Turkish for 'cheers'.

  I raised my glass and clinked it against hers and, following her example, downed the shot in one go. As it traveled down my throat, all I could taste was its pastis-like flavor. But as soon as it hit my stomach, the alcoholic content kicked in: a one-hundred-and-ten-percent proof burn that made me grab the beer and drain it. The barmaid saw my discomfort and smiled.

  'Raki,' she said, pouring us two more shots. 'Dangerous.'

  Her name was Yanna. She was the wife of the owner, Nedim, who was back in Turkey helping bury some uncle.

  'You marry a Turk, you find out they are always burying some fucking uncle, or sitting in a corner with a bunch of their friends, conspiring against someone who dared to make some pathetic slight against their family, or—'

  'You're not Turkish?' I asked.

  'Supposedly. Both my parents came from Samsun, but they emigrated in the seventies and I was born here. So yes, I am French – but if you are born into a Turkish family, you are never really allowed to escape its clutches. Which is why I ended up marrying Nedim – a second cousin and a fool.'

  She clicked her glass against mine and threw back the raki. I followed suit and accepted the bottle of beer she handed me.

  'Raki is good for just one thing,' she said. 'Getting smashed.'

  'And every so often,' I said, 'we all need to get smashed.'

  'Tout à fait, monsieur. But I have a question. Omar – le cochon – tells me you are American.'

  'Absolutely.'

  'So why do you have to live in his proximity?'

  'Ever heard the expression, "a struggling artist"?'

  'I've never met an artist. In this work, the only people you meet are assholes.'

  'Artists can be assholes too.'

  'But they are probably interesting assholes.'

  Then, over three rakis – interrupted by the final orders of the two drunks semi-passed out in a corner – she gave me a rambling version of her life. Raised in this 'shitty arrondissement' when it was still primarily Turkish, always getting crap in school for being the child of immigrés, working in her father's little épicerie when she was seventeen, very strict parents, pushed into this arranged marriage with Nedim three years ago ('My twenty-first birthday present from my fucking parents').

  'It could be worse,' she said. 'At least it's a bar, and not a laverie.'

  But Nedim was a slob who expected her to play the traditional wife when it came to picking up after him. 'I am also duty-bound to spread my legs and fuck the idiot twice a week . . . a disgusting experience as the fool always burps just before coming . . .'

  We kept throwing the rakis back, and she kept lighting up cigarettes and coughing. Finally she told the two drunks to beat it. When they had both staggered out, she looked at the mess around her – the dirty glasses, the brimming ashtrays, the tables and counters that needed wiping down, the floor to be swept and mopped – and shuddered.

  'This,' she said, 'is the sum total of my life.'

  'I should go,' I said.

  'Not yet,' she said, standing up. She walked to the front door, locked it, then pulled down an inside set of shutters. She returned to where I was sitting, flashing me a drunken smile, took my hand and pulled me up from the chair, then placed the same hand under her short skirt and inside her petite culotte. As my index finger touched her slit, it became wet and she uttered a small groan before grabbing my head and shoving her tongue down my throat. I might have been drunk, but I was also cognizant of the fact that I was engaged in an insane activity. But my finger pushed deeper inside her. And her smoky, raki-coated mouth tasted . . . well, smoky and raki-coated. And the rational side of my brain was being trumped by the intoxicated moron with a hard penis. Before I knew it we were staggering into a dingy back room where there was a cot bed and a sink with rust stains (the small shitty details one notices while locked in a drunken carnal embrace), and she was unbuckling my jeans and I pulled down her panties and she kicked off her shoes, and we collapsed half-clothed on the cot, and I smelled damp from the grungy blanket covering the mattress, and the cot creaked under our combined weight, and when I hesitated from entering her she whispered, 'It is safe.' As soon as I was deep within her, she started doing mad, violent stuff like pulling my hair and lacerating my buttock with her nails, and pushing her free hand between us and aggressively rubbing her clitoris as I thrust into her. She must have woken two neighboring arrondissements as she came, then bit down hard on my tongue and wouldn't let go until I detonated inside of her.

  Immediately she stood up and said, 'I have to clean up now.'

  A minute or so later, after I had pulled up my jeans and spat blood into the sink (she had really done a number on my tongue), she hustled me out on to the street without a goodbye – just a fast guilty glance in either direction along the rue de Paradis to make certain no one she knew was about. The shutters came down. I walked a few steps along the street, then leaned against a wall, trying to fathom if
what had just happened in the last ten minutes had just happened. But my brain was still too addled from all the booze and the sheer madness of it all. The blood in my mouth was flowing freely now and my tongue suddenly hurt like hell. So I staggered home and went back to my room and ran the tap and gargled with salt water for around two minutes, and spat out the bloodied water, and stripped off my clothes, and took three extra-strength ibuprofen tablets and a Zopiclone. The chemicals did the trick, but when I jolted awake at two, I found that I couldn't speak.

  I discovered this because my wake-up call this morning wasn't my clock-radio; rather, several loud knocks on my door. As I staggered out of bed, my tongue touched the roof of my parched mouth and immediately recoiled in agony. I went to the little mirror hanging by the kitchen sink and opened my mouth. I shuddered when I saw what was inside. My tongue had taken on a general blue-black appearance and was grotesquely distended. The banging on the door increased. I opened it. Outside stood Omar – in a dirty T-shirt and a pair of cotton drawstring pants with fresh urine stains around the crotch. The first words out of his mouth were, 'You give me one thousand euros.'

  'What?' I said, sounding as if my mouth was filled with dental cotton wool. That's when I realized that speech was virtually impossible.

  'You give me one thousand euros today. Or else you are dead man.'

  'I don't understand,' I said, though the sentence came out all muffled and distorted. As in: jenecomprendpas.

  'Why you can't speak?'

  'Bad cold.'

  'Liar. She bit you, yes?'

  Now I was very awake and scared.

  'I don't know what you're talking about.'

  'I see you this morning. Very early. Leave bar.'

  'I wasn't in a bar . . .'

  'Bar closed. Shutters down. Shutters then open. She looks out, looks both ways. Coast clear. You come out. Shutters close. Got you.'

  'That wasn't me.'

  'Bullshit. I am coming down street. I see her open bar. When she gives nervous look, I duck into doorway. Hidden. I see you. Now I tell Nedim – when he comes back next week – that you fucked his wife. How you like that, American? Nedim will cut off your balls. Unless you pay me to keep my mouth closed.'

  I slammed the door in his face. He immediately began to pound on it.

  'You pay me one thousand euros by end of the week, or you are man who will lose his balls. You no fuck with me.'

  There are moments in life when you feel as if you are in freefall. This downward spiraling motion is underscored with the knowledge that you have stumbled into something so potentially dangerous and maniacal – all because you have engaged in that most commonplace of male displacement activities: thinking with your prick.

  I forced myself into the shower and into some clothes and out on to the street. Mr Beard glowered at me when I came into the café to collect my pay packet – did he already know what had happened as well? – but we exchanged no words, which was no bad thing just now, as any verbal utterances caused immense pain. My stomach was rumbling, I knew that solid food would also be a problem. So I hit upon a grim option: a chocolate milkshake at the McDonald's by the Gare de l'Est. It was raining as I entered its portals. At three on a wet afternoon, there were a handful of travelers grabbing fast-food provisions before catching a train. Largely, however, the people huddled at the plastic tables eating plastic food were those who lived on the streets. Or they were immigrants – a mélange of African and Middle Eastern faces – who saw this dump as nothing more than a cheap meal. Looking at my fellow diners, all I could feel was a curious solidarity with these people who lived in Paris and yet really lived outside of it; who had few opportunities here; who were quietly ignored or despised by everyone doing better than just 'getting by'. But in expressing camaraderie with my fellow outsiders, I knew I was playing the hypocrite. After all, I longed for the other side of the Parisian divide – a nice apartment, an intellectual (yet chic) cinephile girlfriend; dinners in good restaurants; drinks at the Flore (and not worrying about the exorbitant prices they charged); a little bit of literary fame and its attendant fringe benefits (invitations to salons du livre ; being asked to write the occasional reflective article for Libération or Lire; more women). Instead I was a self-marginalized loser – and currently a fearful one, as I wondered if Omar really would shop my ass to Yanna's husband.

  The catastrophist in me invented ten different ruinous scenarios, all of which centered around sexually transmitted diseases and grievous bodily harm being meted out by a gang of angry Turkish gentlemen.

  But once the thousand euros was handed over to Omar, then what? Paying a blackmailer does not guarantee the cessation of threats. From my extensive knowledge of film noir and dime-store mysteries, I knew that, au contraire, it usually signaled the start of an intensive campaign of menace. And Omar was stupid enough to think that he was smart enough to get me cornered and keep the hush-money game going for as long as I lived in fear of disclosure.

  Which meant that I couldn't give in to the slob in the first place. But how to cut him off at the pass?

  Margit would have an interesting answer to that question. But Margit was the last person to whom I could tell any of this . . . for obvious reasons. I lived in dread of seeing her in two days' time, as all sorts of questions would be raised about my distended tongue and the scratch marks on my ass from Yanna's exceptionally sharp nails.

  For the next forty-eight hours, time flowed like cement. Everything seemed interminably long, overshadowed by my fears of disclosure and disease. However, I did do something sensible: I took myself off to a walk-in medical clinic on the boulevard de Strasbourg. The doctor on duty was a thickset man in his mid-fifties with thinning hair and an indifferent seen-it-all countenance. He looked at my tongue and appeared impressed.

  'How did this occur?'

  I told him.

  'Ça arrive,' he said with a shrug, then explained that there was little he could do to cure a badly bitten tongue. 'Keep rinsing it in salted water to keep the wound clean. Otherwise it must heal on its own. Within a week the swelling will diminish. I would also suggest to your "petite amie" that she doesn't demonstrate her ardor in such an aggressive way the next time you make love.'

  'There isn't going to be a next time,' I said.

  Another indifferent shrug. 'Très bien, monsieur.'

  I then detailed my worry about having unprotected sex with Yanna.

  'She is French?' he asked.

  'Yes, but her husband is Turkish.'

  'But he lives here?'

  'Yes.'

  'Is she an intravenous drug user?'

  'I don't think so?'

  'Her husband?'

  'He's a drunk.'

  'Do you think she sleeps with other men? More specifically, Africans?'

  'She's a racist.'

  'In my experience, you can be a racist and still have sex with those you allegedly despise. Are you having unprotected sex with anyone else?'

  'Yes, but . . . I do not think there is any risk involved.'

  'A final question then,' the doctor asked. 'Might you have any cuts or wounds in or around your genitalia?'

  'Not to my knowledge. But if you wouldn't mind taking a look.'

  Another shrug – this time accompanied by a bored sigh. He reached behind him and grabbed a small bag from an easy-to-reach pile, opened it and began to pull on surgical gloves, while motioning me to stand up. I dropped my trousers and underwear. The doctor took my limp penis between his latexed fingers and then, using a small pen flashlight, peered around my testicles and crotch. The entire inspection only lasted around thirty seconds and should have been humiliating, but was carried out in such a dispassionate way that he might as well have been examining a turnip.