“But you were naked underneath.”
“Probably.”
She still didn’t seem to understand. But she had enough presence of mind to stop in the middle of the square, turn, and say, “I forgot to show you Mrs. Roosevelt’s house. You know the one? That’s it, over there, on the corner. When he was in the White House, the President would sneak off to spend a few days or hours there, unknown to anyone, even the Secret Service.”
She came back to her subject. “That night …”
He almost twisted her wrist to shut her up.
“That night, I remember wanting to go into the bathroom to take a shower. Ric was restless, I don’t know why. Well, I think I do know, looking back. He said we were all idiots, that we’d be better off getting undressed and taking a shower together … You see?”
“And you did?” he said spitefully.
“I took a shower alone, and I locked the door. Ever since, I refused to go out with him unless Jessie came, too.”
“But you’d gone out with him alone before?”
“Why not?”
Then she asked, with all apparent innocence, “What are you thinking about?”
“Nothing. Everything.”
“Are you jealous of Ric?”
“No.”
“Listen. Have you ever been to the Number One bar?”
Suddenly he felt very tired. For a moment he was so sick of walking around the streets with her that he was ready to leave her at the first opportunity. What were they doing, clinging to each other as though they’d always been in love and were destined to love each other forever?
Enrico … Ric … the three of them in the shower. She was lying. He sensed it, he knew it. She couldn’t have resisted something like that.
She was lying, not on purpose but because she needed to, just like she needed to look at every man who went by, using her smile to win the homage of a bartender, a waiter, a taxi driver.
“Did you see the way he was looking at me?”
She had said that a little while before—about the taxi driver who had brought them to Greenwich Village, who’d probably barely noticed them, whose only thought was probably his tip.
Still, he followed her into a dimly lit room done in soft rose, where someone was casually playing the piano, letting his long pale fingers play over the keys, scattering notes that created an atmosphere thick with nostalgia.
She stopped in the doorway and said, “Leave your coat in the cloakroom.”
As though he didn’t know! She led the way. She was glowing. She crossed the room behind the maître d’, an excited smile on her lips.
She must have thought herself beautiful, but she wasn’t. What he really liked about her were the signs of wear and tear on her face, her eyelids with their tiny wrinkles like onionskin and occasional traces of purple, or at other times, the fatigue that dragged down the corners of her mouth.
“Two scotches.”
She had to speak to the maître d’, to practice on him what she imagined to be her powers of seduction. She was solemn as she asked him pointless questions, what numbers they’d missed in the floor show, what had become of a singer she’d seen there a few months back.
She lit a cigarette, of course, shrugged her fur off her shoulders, tilted her head back, sighed with pleasure.
“You’re not happy?”
He was in a bad mood. “Why would I be unhappy?” he replied.
“I don’t know. Right now I think you hate me.”
How sure she must be of herself to state the truth so simply, so bluntly! Sure of what? Because, after all, what kept him from leaving her? What kept him from just going home?
He didn’t find her seductive. She wasn’t beautiful. She wasn’t even young. And she’d obviously known more than enough men.
Was that what drew him to her and moved him so much?
“Will you excuse me for a minute?”
She glided over to the pianist. Her smile, once more, was that of a woman automatically bent on seduction, who would be outraged if the beggar she gave a few cents to on the street refused her a look of admiration.
She returned to the table, beaming, eyes sparkling with irony, and she was right, in a sense, since it was on his behalf— at least on their behalf—that she had tried to be charming.
The fingers running over the keyboard shifted cadences, and now it was the melody from the little bar that thrummed in the rose-tinted dimness. She listened to it, lips half parted, the smoke from her cigarette drifting up in front of her face like incense.
As soon as the melody ended, she made a small nervous gesture. Then she stood up, gathered her cigarettes, lighter, and gloves, and told him, “Pay the check. Let’s go.”
She turned to him as he fumbled in his pocket and said, “You always tip too much. Forty cents is plenty here.”
More than anything else, it was taking possession, taking it quietly, and without any argument. He said nothing. At the cloakroom, she said, “Leave a quarter.” And outside, “Let’s not bother taking a taxi.”
To where? Was she so sure they were going to stay together? She didn’t even know he’d kept their room at the Lotus, but he knew she was sure he had.
“Shall we take the subway?”
At least she’d asked for his opinion, and he replied, “Not right away. I’d rather walk for a bit.”
Like the night before, they were at the bottom of Fifth Avenue, and already he wanted to do everything the same again. He wanted to walk with her, to turn the same corners, maybe even to stop at that strange cellar where they had drunk whiskey together that first night.
She was tired, he knew. It was difficult for her to walk in her high heels. But the idea of revenge, of making her suffer a little, wasn’t displeasing. He wondered if she’d complain. It was a kind of test.
“Whatever you like.”
Were they going to talk things over now? He wanted to, and he was afraid to. He wasn’t in any more of a hurry to learn about Kay’s life than he was to talk about his own, above all to tell her who he was, since at heart it pained him to be taken for just anyone, even more to be loved as just anyone.
The night before, she hadn’t blinked when he told her his name. Perhaps she hadn’t heard it right. Perhaps she hadn’t connected the name of the man she had met in Manhattan at three in the morning with the name she had seen in big letters plastered on the walls of Paris.
They passed a Hungarian restaurant and she asked, “Have you ever been to Budapest?”
She wasn’t waiting for an answer. He answered that he had been to Budapest, but obviously it didn’t matter. He felt a confused hope that at last this was a chance to talk about himself; instead she talked about herself.
“What a lovely city! I think I was happier there than anywhere else. I was sixteen.”
He frowned because she was talking about being sixteen, and he was afraid another Enrico was about come up.
“I was living with my mother. I’ll show you a photo of her. She was the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen.”
He wondered if she was chattering like this just to shut him up. What kind of idea did she have about him? The wrong one, no doubt. And yet she still clung to his arm eagerly.
“My mother was a famous pianist. You must have heard her name—she played in all the large cities: Miller … Edna Miller. Miller’s my maiden name, since she never married. Do you find that shocking?”
“Me? No.”
He wanted to tell her that he was a great artist himself. He did, however, get married, which was why …
For a moment he closed his eyes. When he opened them, he saw himself as someone else might have, perhaps even more clearly, walking up Fifth Avenue with a woman clinging to his arm, a woman he didn’t know and with whom he was headed God knew where.
She interrupted herself. “Am I boring you?”
“Not at all.”
“Do you really want to hear about my childhood?”
Was he going to say
yes or no? He didn’t know anymore. What he did know was that when she spoke he felt a dull nagging pain in the left side of his chest.
Why? He had no idea. Because he wished his life had begun last night? Perhaps. But it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered now, because he had suddenly decided to stop resisting.
He listened. He walked. He looked at the luminous globes of the streetlights angling off into infinity, at the taxis sliding silently by, almost always with a man and a woman inside.
Hadn’t he burned with envy of all of those couples? Wanting a woman on his arm like Kay was now?
“Do you mind stopping here for a moment?”
It wasn’t a bar this time, but a pharmacy, and she smiled at him. He understood her smile; she wanted to buy a few toiletries. He understood that she had just realized, as he had, how it marked another step in their growing intimacy.
She let him pay and he was happy to, just as he was happy to hear the clerk call her “ma’am.”
“Now,” she decided, “we can go back.”
He couldn’t help asking, ironically, and he was sorry as soon as he did: “Without one last scotch?”
“No more scotch,” she replied seriously. “Tonight I’m more like that girl of sixteen. Do you mind?”
The night clerk remembered them. How could the fact of seeing the Lotus’s crass purple sign, those few letters over its door, give such pleasure? And it was a pleasure, too, to be greeted as old customers by the shabby, tired-out clerk. To return to the banality of the hotel room and to see two pillows waiting on the made-up bed.
“Why don’t you take off your coat and sit down?”
He obeyed. He was somehow touched, and maybe she was, too. He couldn’t tell anymore. There were moments when he hated her and moments, like this one, when he wanted to put his head on her shoulder and cry.
He was tired but he felt relaxed. He waited, smiling a little, and she caught the smile and understood it, too, since she came over and kissed him for the first time that day, not greedily like the night before, not desperately, but very slowly bringing her lips close to his, hesitating before they touched, then pressing them tenderly together.
He closed his eyes. When he reopened them, he saw that hers were closed, too, and he was grateful.
“Let go of me now. Stay there.”
She switched off the overhead light, leaving on only the tiny lamp with its silk shade on the night table. Then she went to the cupboard for the bottle of whiskey they had opened the night before.
“It’s not the same thing as going to a bar.”
Already he understood. She filled two glasses, measuring out the whiskey and water as carefully as if following a recipe. She set one glass before him, brushing his forehead with her hand as she did.
“Are you happy?”
Kicking off her shoes with a now familiar movement, she curled up in a big chair like a little girl.
Then she sighed, and in a voice he hadn’t heard her use before said, “I’m so happy!”
They were only a few feet apart, yet they both knew that neither would cross that space. They looked at each other, their eyes half closed, pleased to see in the other’s face the same soft, peaceful light.
Was she going to start talking again?
Her lips parted, but only to sing, to barely murmur the song that was now their song.
And the little tune was so completely transformed that tears came to his eyes, his chest filled with warmth.
She knew it. She knew everything. She held him to her with the song, with the serious note in her voice, though it cracked now and then, and deftly she drew out their pleasure in being just the two of them, alone together, separate from the rest of the world.
When at last she finished, there was a silence that filled with the sounds drifting in off the street.
They listened to them with astonishment. Then she asked again, much more softly this time: “Are you happy?”
Did he really say the words that came next, or did they simply echo inside him?
“I’ve never been happier in my life.”
3
IT WAS AN odd sensation. She was speaking. He was moved by what she was saying. But not for a moment did he lose his clarity of mind. He said to himself, She’s lying!
He was sure she was lying. Maybe she wasn’t making it all up, though he felt she was capable of that. But she was certainly lying by distorting, exaggerating, or leaving things out.
Two or three times she poured herself a drink. He stopped counting. He knew now that this was her hour and that the whiskey kept her going, and he pictured her on other nights, with other men, drinking to keep her spirits up, talking, endlessly talking, in that husky, alluring voice.
Did she tell them exactly the same things? Did she sound just as sincere?
What was most surprising was that he didn’t care. He didn’t hold it against her.
She told him about her husband, a Hungarian, Count Larski. She said she’d been married when she was nineteen. And already she told a lie, or half a lie, since she claimed she’d been a virgin. She went on about how brutal he’d been on their wedding night, forgetting that a little earlier she’d spoken about a romance she’d had at seventeen.
He was suffering, not because of the lies but because of the images they brought up. If he resented her for anything, it was for dirtying herself in his eyes with a shamelessness that bordered on insolence.
Was the whiskey making her talk like this? There were moments when he said to himself, coldly: She’s a three-o’clock woman, a woman who never wants to go to bed, who has to keep her emotions at fever pitch no matter how, who has to drink, smoke, and talk until she falls into a man’s arms out of sheer nervous exhaustion.
And yet he stayed. He hadn’t the slightest urge to run away. The more clear-sighted he became, the more he realized that Kay was indispensable to him, and he gave himself up to that fact.
That was it exactly. Gave himself up. He couldn’t tell at what moment the decision had been made, but it was decided. He wouldn’t struggle, no matter what he found out.
Why didn’t she shut up? It would have been so simple. He would have put his arms around her. He would have whispered, “We’re starting all over again—none of that matters.”
Starting all over again from zero. The two of them. Two lives from zero.
From time to time she would break off, “You’re not listening.”
“Yes, I am.”
“You’re listening, but you’re thinking about something else at the same time.”
He was thinking about himself, her, everything. He was himself and someone watching himself. He loved her and still he judged her without mercy.
She said: “We lived in Berlin for two years. My husband was an attaché at the Hungarian embassy. It was there, or more exactly in Swansee, by the lake, that my daughter was born. Her name is Michelle. Do you like the name Michelle?”
She didn’t wait for an answer.
“Poor Michelle! She’s with one of her aunts, a sister of Larski’s who never married and who lives in a huge castle a hundred kilometers from Buda.”
He didn’t like the huge romantic castle, which may or may not in fact have existed. He asked himself, How many men has she told this story to?
He scowled and she noticed.
“Is the story of my life boring you?”
“Not at all.”
It was probably all necessary, like the last cigarette he was anxiously waiting for her to stub out. He felt happy, but happy only for what lay ahead. He wanted to be done once and for all with the past and the present.
“Then he was appointed first secretary in Paris, and we had to live at the embassy because the ambassador was a widower and he needed a woman there for the receptions.”
She was lying. When she spoke to him the first time about Paris, in the diner, she said she’d lived by the Auteuil church in the rue Mirabeau. Hungary had never had an embassy in the rue Mirabeau.
She
went on, “Jean was quite a man, one of the most intelligent I’d ever met …”
And he was jealous. He resented her for dragging up yet another name.
“He was a great lord in his own country. You don’t know Hungary—”
“Yes, I do.”
She swept aside the objection by impatiently flicking the ash off her cigarette.
“You can’t. You’re too French. I’m Viennese and have Hungarian blood in my veins on my grandmother’s side, but even I couldn’t. When I say a great lord, I don’t mean a great lord like in the Middle Ages. I’ve seen him horsewhip his servants. One day when our driver nearly turned us over in the Black Forest, he knocked him down and beat him senseless. He said to me calmly, ‘I’m sorry I don’t have a revolver on me. That lout might have killed you.’”
And still he lacked the nerve to tell her to shut up.
It seemed to him that this chatter demeaned them both, that she was demeaning herself by talking just as he was by listening.
“I was pregnant at the time, which explains his anger and brutality. He was so jealous that even a month before I gave birth, when no man would think of looking at me, he kept his eye on me day and night. I wasn’t allowed to go out alone. He locked me in my rooms. He locked up all my shoes and clothes in one room and carried the key around with him.”
She didn’t understand that it was all wrong, that it was even worse for her to explain. “We lived in Paris for three years.”
Yesterday, she had said six years. Who was she with the rest of the time?
“The ambassador, who died last year, was one of our greatest statesmen, an old man of eighty-four. He was like a father to me, since he’d been a widower for thirty years and had no children.”
You’re lying, he thought.
Because it was impossible. At least with her. The ambassador could have been ninety, he could have been a hundred, but she wouldn’t have rested until she’d made him pay her homage.
“Often, at night, he’d ask me to read to him. It was one of the few pleasures he had left.”
He barely kept himself from shouting, “Where were his hands while you were reading to him?” Because it was obvious to him, and it hurt.
Three Bedrooms in Manhattan (New York Review Books Classics) Page 4
