“Go on up.”
He walked behind her. He seemed so composed and so cold that she felt a shiver on the back of her neck. He opened the door.
He almost sounded like a judge: “You can go to bed.”
“And you?”
Him? What, in fact, was he going to do? He slid behind the curtain and pressed his forehead against the windowpane. He heard her moving around the room. He heard the sound of the bedsprings as she got into bed, but he stayed by the window for a long time wrapped in his solitude.
Finally he came to her, studied her, his face motionless.
He whispered, “You …”
And he repeated it, more and more loudly, until he was shouting at her in despair: “You! … You! … You! …”
His fist hung in space, and perhaps in another moment he might have controlled it.
“You! …”
His voice was hoarse. And he hit her in the face as hard as he could with his fist, once, twice, three times …
At last, completely spent, he collapsed on her, sobbing and begging for forgiveness.
Her voice was far away, and they could taste the salt of their tears on their lips, when she said, “My poor darling.”
6
THEY WOKE up very early though they didn’t realize it. They thought they must have slept for an eternity. Neither of them bothered to look at the clock.
Kay got up first to open the curtains, and she cried, “Look, François!”
For the first time since he’d lived here, he saw that the Jewish tailor wasn’t sitting cross-legged on his table. He was sitting in a chair like anyone else, an old straw-bottomed chair he must have brought with him from the far reaches of Poland or the Ukraine. With his elbows on the table, he was dipping thick slices of bread into a flowered porcelain bowl and looking placidly in front of him.
Over his head, the electric bulb, which at night he pulled over to his work area with a metal wire, was still on.
He was eating slowly, studiously, and in front of his eyes was nothing but a wall hung with scissors and patterns on thick gray paper.
Kay said, “He’s my friend. I have to find some way to make him happy.”
Because they both felt happy.
“Do you realize it’s not even seven yet?”
Neither felt at all tired. They felt nothing but an immense and profound sense of well-being, which made them smile, from time to time, at the most trivial things.
Watching her put on her clothes while he poured boiling water over the coffee, he thought out loud, “There must have been somebody in your friend’s apartment last night, since the light was on.”
“I’d be very surprised if Jessie had been able to come back.”
“You’d like to get your clothes, wouldn’t you?”
She still didn’t dare accept what she sensed was generosity.
“Listen,” he went on. “I’ll go back there with you. I’ll wait downstairs while you go up.”
“You think?”
He knew what was on her mind, that she might run into Enrico or even Ronald, Jessie’s husband. “Let’s go.”
And they went. It was so early in the morning that the street seemed different, unknown. No doubt they’d both been out that early before, but it was the first time they’d done it together. After their night wanderings along sidewalks and through bars, they felt washed clean by the morning freshness, with the messy city sprucing itself up for the new day.
“Look. There’s a window open. Go on up. I’ll wait here.”
“I’d rather you came with me, François. You don’t mind, do you?”
They climbed the stairway, which was clean, unostentatious, very proper. There were doormats in front of nearly every apartment, and on the second floor a cleaning lady polished a brass doorknob so energetically it made her ample breasts quiver.
He knew Kay was a little frightened. She must have thought it was some kind of test. Yet everything seemed obvious to him, the building ordinary, sober, unmysterious.
She rang the bell, and her lips trembled as she glanced his way, squeezing his hand for reassurance.
No one answered the bell, which echoed in the emptiness inside.
“What time is it?”
“Nine.”
“Do you mind?”
She rang the bell of the next apartment. A man of about sixty in a quilted dressing gown, his scant gray hair forming a crown around his pink scalp, answered the door, a book in his hand. He bowed his head to peer over the rims of his glasses.
“Well! It’s you, my little miss. I thought you’d come by sooner or later. Was Mr. Enrico able to reach you? He stopped by last night. He asked me if you’d left your new address. I take it you have some personal effects in the apartment he wishes to return.”
“Thank you, Mr. Bruce. I’m sorry to bother you. I wanted to be sure it was Mr. Enrico who had come back.”
“No news of your friend?”
How banal and familiar it all was!
When they were in the street again, she said, “I don’t know why Enrico has a key. Or, actually, I think I do. At first, you see, when Jessie’s husband got the job in Panama and she realized the climate didn’t agree with her, she moved to a place in the Bronx. At the time she was working as a receptionist in a building on Madison Avenue. Once she met Enrico and made up her mind—because, whatever you may think, it was five months before anything happened between them—he insisted she come live here. He just paid the rent, you see? I don’t know how they worked it out, but I wonder now if he hadn’t rented the apartment in his name.”
“Why don’t you phone him?”
“Who?”
“Enrico, my sweet. Since he has a key to the apartment and all your things are there, what could be more natural?”
He wanted it to seem quite natural. And it did, this morning.
“You really want me to?”
He squeezed her hand. “Please.”
He led her by the arm to the nearest drugstore. Only there did she remember that Jessie’s lover never got to work before ten o’clock, so they waited quietly, so quietly that they could have been mistaken for a long-married couple.
Twice she returned unsuccessfully from the phone booth. The third time, he saw through the glass that she had made contact with her past again on the other end of the line, though she didn’t take her eyes off him. She was smiling at him shyly and gratefully and asking for his forgiveness at the same time.
“He’s coming. Do you mind? There was nothing else to do. He said he’d hop in a taxi and be here in ten minutes. He couldn’t say much because there was somebody in his office. All I know is he got the key by messenger, in an envelope with Ronald’s name on it.”
He wondered if she’d take his arm while they were waiting on the sidewalk for the South American, and she did, without a hint of strain. A taxi soon pulled up. She looked into his eyes again, as if making a promise, and her own eyes were very clear—she held his gaze so he could see how clear—while the pout on her lips asked him to be brave, or else indulgent.
He didn’t need to be either. He felt so easy now that he had a hard time keeping a straight face.
This Enrico, this Ric around whom he had created such a world, was a little man of no particular consequence. Not bad-looking, true. But so average, so unprepossessing! He felt obliged, under the circumstances, to rush theatrically up to Kay, effusively clasping her hands.
“My poor Kay! That this should happen to us!”
Very simply, she introduced him: “My friend François Combe. You can talk freely, since he knows everything.”
Combe noted that she used the familiar tu with Enrico.
“Let’s go on up. I have a meeting in fifteen minutes. I’ll tell the cab to wait.”
Enrico went up the stairs first. He was a small man, perfectly groomed. A cloud of cologne trailed behind him. Combe could tell that he had curled his dark, pomaded hair.
Enrico rooted around for the key in his
pocket, which was filled with them. Combe noted it with pleasure, since he hated men who carried too many keys. Finally Enrico found the one he was looking for—found it in a jacket pocket—after a long search during which his feet in their delicate leather shoes tapped feverishly on the floorboards.
“I was completely devastated when I came here and found nobody! Luckily I thought of ringing the bell of the nice old gentleman next door, who gave me the note she’d left for me.”
“For me, too.”
“I know. He told me. I didn’t know where to find you.”
He stole a glance at Combe, who grinned. Maybe Enrico was expecting some sort of an explanation from Kay, but all she gave him was a happy smile.
“Then yesterday I received the key, no note. I came in the evening.”
My God, how simple it all was! How utterly prosaic! The open window created a draft, and the door slammed shut behind them after they had slipped inside. It was an ordinary small apartment, like thousands of others in New York, with the same cozy nook in the living room, the same coffee table and side tables, the same ashtrays beside the armchairs, the same record player, the same tiny bookcase in a corner by the window.
It was here that Kay and Jessie …
Combe smiled without being aware of it, a smile that seemed to rise up out of his flesh. There may have been a trace of malice in his eyes, but not much of one, and he wondered, when the realization dawned, whether Kay was annoyed by it. What picture had he drawn of the life she had led here, of these men she tortured him with by always calling them by their first names?
One of them stood before him now, and he couldn’t help noticing that at ten o’clock in the morning he was wearing a pearl pin on his multicolored tie.
After closing the window, Kay went into the bedroom.
“Can you give me a hand, François?”
She used the familiar tu again, and he knew it was out of kindness. It was nice of her to emphasize the intimacy they shared.
She opened a battered trunk and glanced into a wardrobe.
She said, surprised, “Jessie didn’t take any of her things!”
Enrico said, lighting a cigarette, “I can explain. I had a letter from her this morning that she wrote from the Santa Clara.”
“She’s already at sea?”
“He made her take the first boat back with him. It didn’t turn out as badly as I thought. When he arrived, he knew exactly what was going on. I’ll let you read the letter. She had a steward send it, since he won’t let her out of his sight. He came here and said, ‘You’re alone?’
“‘As you can see for yourself.’
“‘He’s not going to show up, is he?’”
Enrico went on, holding his cigarette in the arch manner of an American woman: “You know Jessie. She didn’t say so in her letter, but she must have argued, gotten angry, made a scene …”
Combe looked at Kay, and they both smiled.
“It seems Ronald was very cool.”
So! Enrico called him by his first name, too.
“I wonder if he didn’t come to New York just for that, the moment he heard from whoever tipped him off. He went to the wardrobe while Jessie was screaming blue murder, took out my pajamas and dressing gown, and threw them on the bed.”
They were still there. A not quite brand-new floral-pattern dressing gown and cream-colored silk pajamas with a dark red monogram.
“While she was crying, he calmly went through her things. He only let her take what she had three years ago, when she came back from Panama. You know Jessie …”
It was the second time he’d used that little phrase. Combe, too, felt he was beginning to know Jessie. Not only Jessie but Kay, who’d become so understandable that he had to laugh at himself.
“You know Jessie. She just couldn’t give up her dresses and things, and she said, ‘I swear, Ronald, I bought these myself.’”
Did Enrico actually have a sense of humor?
“I wonder how she managed to write it all down in the letter. She says he doesn’t leave her alone for a minute, that he’s with her the whole time, watching what she does, looking at what she looks at, and yet she managed to write me six pages, some of them in pencil, telling me everything. There’s a note to you, too, Kay. She said to take whatever she left, if you like.”
“Thank you, Enrico, but I couldn’t.”
“The rent’s paid until the end of the month. I don’t know what I’ll do with all my stuff here, since I can’t really take them home. If you want me to leave you the key … Well, I will regardless, since I have to go now. I have a very important meeting this morning. I suppose that, now they’re at sea, Ronald will calm down a little.”
“Poor Jessie!”
Did Enrico feel guilty? He said, “I wonder what I could have done. I had no idea what was happening. That night my wife was having a dinner party, and I couldn’t even telephone. Good-bye, Kay. Just send the key to my office.”
Enrico wasn’t sure what to do about this man he scarcely knew, and he shook his hand with exaggerated warmth. Then he felt he had to say, almost as a mark of approval, “She’s Jessie’s best friend.”
“What’s the matter, François?”
“Nothing, darling.”
It was the first time he’d called her that without a hint of sarcasm.
Perhaps the realization that Enrico was so small made her seem smaller, too. He wasn’t disappointed, though. In fact, he felt an almost infinite gratitude toward her.
Enrico was gone, leaving behind a faint whiff of cologne, his pajamas, his dressing gown on the bed, and a pair of slippers on the floor of the armoire.
“Now do you see?” Kay whispered.
“Yes, love, I see.”
It was true. It was good that he’d come, since he had seen her at last, her and her crowd, all those Enricos and Ronalds, those sailors, those friends, all of them now shrunk down to their proper dimensions.
He didn’t love her any less. He loved her more tenderly. With less strain, less anger, less bitterness. He had almost lost his fear of her and of the future. Perhaps, if he lost all his fear, he would surrender entirely.
“Sit down,” she said to him. “You’re crowding the place.”
Did the bedroom she’d shared with Jessie seem smaller to her, too? It was bright and pleasant. The walls were painted a soft white, the cretonne spreads on the twin beds were imitation toile de Jouy, and the drapes, made of the same fabric, let the sun filter in.
He sat down obediently on the bed, next to the flower-print dressing gown.
“I was right, wasn’t I, not to want to take anything that belongs to Jessie? Look! Do you like this dress?”
It was a simple evening gown, quite pretty. She held it up in front of her like a salesgirl in a pricey shop.
“Have you worn it a lot?”
Would she take it the wrong way? No—and it wasn’t jealousy this time. He’d said it pleasantly, because he was grateful to her for flirting with him so innocently.
“Just twice. And nobody so much as touched me either time. Nobody even kissed me.”
“I believe you.”
“Really?”
“I believe you.”
“Here are the shoes that go with it. The gold’s a little too shiny for my taste. I wanted something more muted, but these were all I could afford. I’m not boring you, am I?”
“Absolutely not.”
“You sure?”
“Quite the opposite. Come give me a kiss.”
She hesitated, not for her sake, he knew, but out of an odd sort of respect. Then she leaned down and brushed his lips with hers.
“That’s my bed you’re sitting on, you know.”
“And Enrico?”
“He only spent a couple of nights a month here, sometimes less. Because of his wife, he had to pretend he was on business trips. And that was complicated, because she always wanted to know what hotel he was staying at, and she’d call him in the middle of the night.”
“I think she did, but she pretended not to. She wasn’t dumb. I don’t think she ever loved him, or she’d stopped loving him but was still jealous. If she’d confronted him, he would have divorced her and married Jessie.”
That little man with the pearl pin on his tie? It was good to be able to listen to all this now, to be able to automatically assign the proper weight to words as well as things.
“He often came in the evening. Every two or three days. He had to leave around eleven, and those nights I usually went to a movie to give them some privacy. I’ll show you the theater where I’d see the same movie two or three times because I didn’t dare take the subway anywhere else.”
“Don’t you want to put on that dress?”
“How did you know?”
She still held it in her hands. Quickly, with a movement he’d never seen her use before, she slipped out of her everyday black dress, and he felt as though he was looking at her in all her intimacy for the first time. Was it in fact the first time he’d seen her without clothes?
Strange: he hadn’t been that curious about her body. They’d been together and bruised each other savagely, and only last night they’d fallen as if into an abyss, and yet still he couldn’t have said what her body was like.
“Should I change slips, too?”
“Everything, darling.”
“Go lock the door.”
It was almost a game—and deeply pleasurable. This was the third room they’d been in together, and in each he’d discovered not only a new Kay but new reasons to love her, different ways of loving her.
He sat down on the edge of the bed again and watched her, naked, her skin very white with a trace of gold where the sunlight came in through the drapes. She was rummaging around in drawers of lingerie.
“I wonder what to do about my things at the dry cleaners. They’ll bring it here, but no one will be home. We should probably stop by. Do you mind?”
She hadn’t said, “I should stop by”; she had said, “We should stop by,” as though from now on they would never spend a second apart.
“Jessie has much prettier things than I do. Look at this.”
Three Bedrooms in Manhattan (New York Review Books Classics) Page 9
