And, on the table, next to an open book, what was left of a cold supper, the dreary meal of a lonely man.
Suddenly he realized everything he’d escaped from. He stood in the entry, frozen, head bowed, afraid to move.
He didn’t want to look. Still he saw her, and he knew that she, too, was measuring the depth of his solitude.
He had thought she would be shocked and resentful.
She was shocked, but not that much—shocked to find out that his solitude was even more hopeless than her own.
What she noticed first were the pictures of the children, a boy and a girl.
“You, too,” she whispered.
Everything happened desperately slowly. Every tenth of a second counted, the tiniest fractions of time during which so much of the past and so much of the future was in play.
Combe looked away from his children’s faces. He saw them as unhappy blurs becoming ever more blurred, and he was ashamed. He wanted to say he was sorry, but he didn’t know for what or to whom.
Slowly, Kay stubbed out her cigarette in an ashtray. She took off her fur coat and hat and stepped behind him to close the door, which he’d left open.
Then, touching him lightly on the collar, she said, “Darling, take off your coat.”
She helped him take it off and immediately hung it in its place in the closet.
She turned to look at him again—human, very much at home. She smiled, and there was something secret, almost joyous in her smile. At last, wrapping her arms around him, she said, “You see, I knew.”
4
THEY SLEPT that night like two people stranded in a railway station or in a car broken down by the road. They slept in each other’s arms and, for the first time, they didn’t make love.
“Not tonight,” she had begged in a whisper.
He understood—at least he thought he understood. They were both exhausted, dazed, as if they had been on an immense journey.
Had they actually arrived somewhere? They had gone to bed without tidying up the room. And, like people who go on feeling the pitch and roll of a ship for a few days after they return from a cruise, they still seemed to be walking, walking endlessly in the great city.
For the first time they woke when other people do. Combe glanced up, and he saw Kay opening the door into the hallway. Perhaps the click of the lock had torn him from his sleep, and his first thought was an anxious one.
But no. He saw her from the back, her hair silky and tangled. She was wrapped in one of his dressing gowns, with the hem trailing on the ground behind her.
“What are you looking for?”
She wasn’t startled. She turned casually enough toward the bed, and the best thing was that she didn’t try to smile.
“The milk. Doesn’t it come every morning?”
“I don’t like milk.”
“Oh.”
Before she joined him, she stepped into the kitchenette. The kettle on the hot plate was singing.
“What do you have in the morning—tea or coffee?”
It moved him to hear her voice in this room where he’d never had a visitor. Just before, he had been a little upset that she hadn’t come to kiss him. Now he understood that it was better that way, with her puttering around, opening closets, bringing him a navy blue silk dressing gown.
“You want this one?”
She was wearing a pair of men’s bedroom slippers, with the heels dragging on the floor behind her.
“What do you usually eat for breakfast?”
He relaxed, at peace. “That depends. Usually, when I’m hungry, I go to the drugstore.”
“I found some tea and a can of coffee. Since you’re French, I took a chance and made coffee.”
“I’ll go get bread and butter.”
He felt very young. He wanted to go out, but it wasn’t like yesterday, when he’d left the Lotus and then stopped within a hundred yards.
Now she was here, in his apartment. He was usually fastidious about the way he looked, perhaps a bit too much so, yet he almost went out unshaven, in his slippers, the way people did in Montmartre or Montparnasse or in working-class neighborhoods.
There was a hint of spring in the fall morning. He surprised himself by humming in the shower while Kay made the bed and hummed along.
It was as if an enormous weight had been lifted from his shoulders, the weight of years that had bent his back without his even knowing.
“Aren’t you going to kiss me?”
And she offered him her lips as he left. He paused for a moment on the landing. He turned, opening the door again.
“Kay!”
She was standing where she had been, still looking at him from her side of the door.
“What?”
“I’m happy.”
“Me, too. Go on …”
He wasn’t going to think about it. It was too new. Even the street was too new, or rather, it was the same street, but full of new things he’d never noticed before.
The drugstore, for example, where he’d often eaten breakfast alone while reading the paper. Now he saw it surrounded by a haze of happy irony mixed with self-pity.
He stopped, touched by the sight of an organ-grinder on the sidewalk; it was the first one he’d seen in New York, he could swear, the first one he’d seen since he was a child.
At the Italian grocery, it was new buying for two instead of one. He ordered little things he had never bought before. He wanted to fill the refrigerator.
He took the bread, butter, milk, and eggs with him and had the rest delivered. On his way out he remembered something.
“Leave a quart of milk at my door every morning.”
From below, he saw Kay at the window, and she waved to him. She met him at the top of the stairs and took the bags.
“Damn! I forgot something.”
“What?”
“Flowers. Yesterday morning I was going to get some for the apartment.”
“But isn’t it better this way?”
“Why?”
“Because …”
She groped for the words, serious and smiling at the same time, with none of the embarrassment they had felt earlier that morning.
“ … well, this way it feels less new, doesn’t it? It’s like it’s been longer.”
Then she added quickly, because otherwise it might have been too much, “You know what I was looking at out the window? There’s an old Jewish tailor across the street. Have you ever noticed him?”
He vaguely remembered seeing an old man sitting cross-legged on a table, who spent the whole day sewing. He had a long, dirty beard. His fingers were dirty from handling fabric.
“When I was living in Vienna with my mother … I told you she was a famous concert pianist? Yes … But before that, things were hard. When I was little, we were poor. We lived in a single room … Oh, not as nice as this, since there was no kitchen, no refrigerator, no bathroom. There wasn’t even running water, and we had to wash in a sink at the end of the hallway—I can’t tell you how cold it was in winter.
“What was I saying? Oh, yes … When I was sick and had to stay home from school, I used to look out the window all day, and right across the street was an old Jewish tailor who looked so much like that one that for a moment I thought he was the same man.”
Combe said lightly, “Maybe he is.”
“Idiot! He’d be a hundred at least. But don’t you think it’s a funny coincidence? I’m going to be in a good mood all day.”
“You needed something to put you in a good mood?”
“No … But I feel like a little girl again. I even feel like making fun of you. I made fun of everyone, you know, when I was young.”
“What have I done for you to make fun of me?”
“Can I ask you something?”
“Go ahead.”
“Why are there at least eight dressing gowns in your closet? I know I probably shouldn’t ask. But it’s pretty unusual for a man—”
“For a man who has so
many dressing gowns to live in a place like this, that’s what you mean? There’s a simple answer really. I’m an actor.”
Why was he embarrassed he’d said it, and why had he avoided her eyes? All day the two of them were circumspect. They sat at the table with the breakfast leftovers on it. The limit of their vision was the window across the street where the tailor with his rabbinical beard sat sewing.
It was the first time they weren’t surrounded by a crowd, the first time, in a way, that they were really face-to-face, just the two of them, without a jukebox or whiskey to fuel their intimacy.
Kay wasn’t wearing lipstick. Her face looked softer, and there was a touch of shyness or fear in it. The change was so striking that her eternal cigarette didn’t quite fit.
“Are you disappointed?”
“That you’re an actor? Why should I be disappointed?”
But she seemed sad. And he knew why without having to talk. They both knew.
If an actor his age was living in Greenwich Village like this …
“It’s a lot more complicated than you think,” he sighed.
“I wasn’t thinking anything, darling.”
“I was well-known in Paris. You could say I was famous.”
“I have to admit, I don’t remember your last name. You told me once, that first night, remember? I was embarrassed and I didn’t want to ask again.”
“François Combe. I used to play at the Théâtre de la Madeleine, at the Michodière, at the Gymnase. I’ve toured all over Europe and in South America. I’ve also starred in a number of movies. Only eight months ago, I was offered a contract—”
She forced herself not to show pity, not to wound him.
“It’s not what you think,” he went on hastily. “I could go back anytime I want.”
She poured him a fresh cup of coffee. Her gesture was so natural he was surprised. The unexpected intimacy seemed miraculous.
“It’s very simple and very silly. I might as well tell you. Everyone in Paris knows about it, and it was all over the papers. My wife was an actress, too, a famous actress. Marie Clairois.”
“I know that name.”
She was sorry she’d said it, but it was too late. She recognized his wife’s name but not his.
“She’s not so much younger than I am,” he went on. “She’s past forty. We’ve been married seventeen years. Our oldest child will soon be sixteen.”
He said it without passion, glancing at the photographs on the wall. He stood up, started pacing the room, and continued.
“Last winter, my wife announced suddenly that she was leaving me for a young actor, just out of school, who had been engaged by the Comédie Française. He was twenty-one years old. It was night, at our house in Saint-Cloud. I had it built myself, because I’ve always liked houses. I have bourgeois tastes, you know.
“I had just come home from the theater. She arrived home after me. She joined me in my study, and while she was announcing her decision to me, calmly, gently, affectionately, even tenderly, I had no doubt the boy was waiting for her in the taxi.
“I’m telling you—”
He cleared his throat.
“I was stunned—so shocked that I asked her to think it over. Now I can see how ridiculous my response was. I said, ‘Go to bed, my dear. We’ll talk this over tomorrow, once you’ve slept on it.’
“And she said, ‘François, I’m leaving now. Don’t you understand that?’
“What was there to understand? That it was so urgent it couldn’t wait until morning?
“In fact, I didn’t understand. I might today. But that night I lost my temper. I must have said some pretty awful things.
“But she kept saying, always calmly, always with that almost maternal gentleness, ‘I’m so sorry, so sorry, François, that you can’t understand!’”
Silence surrounded them, a silence so fine it didn’t upset or embarrass them. Combe lit his pipe—a gesture he’d used in several of his roles.
“I don’t know if you’ve seen Marie onstage or in a movie. She still plays young women, and she gets away with it. She has a very sweet, soft face, a little sad, with big eyes that are so innocent, like a fawn looking helplessly and reproachfully at the bad man who’s just shot it. That was the kind of role she played in real life, too. It was the role she was playing that night.
“All the papers wrote about it, some in veiled terms, while others included every detail. The boy left the Comédie-Française to debut with my wife in a new play. The theater sued him for breach of contract.”
“And your children?”
“My son’s in England. He’d been at Eton for two years and I thought it best for him to stay there. My daughter’s living with my mother in the country, near Poitiers. I could have stayed. I did for two months.”
“You loved her?”
He looked at her without understanding. For the first time, all of a sudden, words meant different things to them.
“I was offered the lead in a big movie she was going to be in, too, and I knew she’d end up getting her lover a part in it as well. In our business, we were destined to be thrown together all the time, you see?
“For example. Since we lived in Saint-Cloud and drove home together at night, we’d often meet up at Fouquet’s, in the Champs-Élysées.”
“I know the place.”
“Like most actors, I never used to eat before a performance, but I would have a pretty big supper afterward. I had my table at Fouquet’s, and they always knew just what I wanted. Well, a few days after my wife left me, she turned up there, and she wasn’t alone. She came to shake my hand so simply, so unself-consciously, that the two of us, I mean the three of us, seemed to be playing a scene in a comedy.
“‘Good evening, François.’
“The boy held out his hand, too. He stammered, ‘Good evening, Monsieur Combe.’
“They were expecting me, I realized, to invite them to my table. I was caught. I can still see it. Some fifty people were watching us, including a couple of reporters.
“Then I announced, without thinking about what it meant: ‘I think I’ll be leaving Paris soon.’
“‘Where are you going?’ my wife asked.
“‘I’ve been offered a contract in Hollywood. Now that there’s nothing to keep me here … ’
“Was she being cynical, or thoughtless? No. I don’t think she was ever cynical. She believed me. She knew that I’d had an offer from Hollywood four years earlier and had turned it down, partly because of her, since there was nothing in it for her, and partly because of the children, who were too young to be separated from their father.
“She said to me, ‘I’m very happy for you, François. I always knew everything would work out.’
“So. I’d kept them standing in front of my table until that moment. I asked them to sit down, I still ask myself why.
“‘What can I offer you?’
“‘You know very well that I don’t eat supper, François. I’ll have some juice.’
“‘And you?’
“The fool thought he had to order the same thing, so he didn’t order a drink, which was what he really needed.
“‘Two juices, please.’
“And I kept eating, with the two of them sitting there.
“‘Any news from Pierrot?’ my wife asked, pulling her compact out of her bag. Pierrot is my son’s nickname.
“‘I had a letter three days ago. He’s still very happy there.’
“‘That’s good,’ my wife said.
“So you see, Kay—”
Why just then did she say: “Couldn’t you call me Katherine?”
He reached out for her fingers as he paced by, squeezing them.
“You see, Katherine, all through supper my wife sat there casting little glances at that young fool, as if to say, ‘See how easy it is? There’s no reason to be frightened.’”
“You still love her, don’t you?”
He circled the room twice, frowning. He kept staring at
the old Jewish tailor across the way, and then he stopped in front of her. He fell silent for an instant, as he did onstage before a particularly dramatic line. Steeling his expression and with the sunlight in his eyes, he said: “No!”
He wanted no emotion. He himself didn’t feel any. And Kay shouldn’t, either—that was the most important thing. He began talking again immediately, quickly, in a sharp voice.
“I left and I came to the United States. A friend, one of our best directors, once told me, ‘You can always go to Hollywood. A man like you doesn’t have to wait for a contract. Go over there. See So-and-so and So-and-so. Tell them I sent you.’
“I went and I was welcomed with open arms. Everyone was very polite. Do you see? Very polite, but no one offered me a thing.
“‘If we decide to make such-and-such a film and there’s a part for you, we’ll be in touch.’
“Or, ‘Maybe in a few months, when we set the schedule for our next production … ’
“And that’s it, Kay. You can see how stupid it all is.”
“I asked you to call me Katherine.”
“Forgive me. I’ll get used to it. Some of my best friends are in Hollywood. They were wonderful. Everyone wanted to help. But I was just a deadweight in their busy lives.
“I didn’t want to bother them any more. I preferred to be in New York. Besides, you can sign a contract just as easily here as in California.
“At first I lived in a grand hotel on Park Avenue. Then in a more modest hotel. Later I found this room. And then I was all alone. I was all alone, and that’s the whole story.
“Now you know why I have so many dressing gowns, so many suits, so many shoes.”
He pressed his forehead against the windowpane. His voice faltered toward the end. He knew she was going to come up to him slowly and silently.
He was waiting without moving for the touch of her hand on his shoulder. He kept staring across the street at the bearded tailor, who was smoking an enormous porcelain pipe.
She whispered, “Are you still very unhappy?”
He shook his head, but he wasn’t going to turn around.
“Are you sure you don’t love her anymore?”
Three Bedrooms in Manhattan (New York Review Books Classics) Page 6
