The Douglas Kennedy Collection #2

by Douglas Kennedy

  “You lost your husband as well?”

  A nod. Then: “Since then I have largely kept to myself. I like it that way. There is much to be said for solitude.”

  “It has its virtues, sure.”

  “If you are a novelist, you must appreciate it.”

  “I have no choice but to deal with being alone. Anyway, writing fills the hours when I do my job.”

  “So what—besides writing—do you do all night?”

  “I sit in a room, and make certain that no one is trying to break into the place, and also let in the staff who do all the shipping of furs.”

  “I never knew that furriers ran a twenty-four-hour operation.”

  “This one does.”

  “I see,” she said. “And how did you get the job?”

  I told her a bit about arriving in Paris, and the horrendous experience in the hotel, and the day clerk who was such a bastard, and Adnan’s kindness, and him getting controlled, and all the other strange happenstantial events that led me to rent his chambre de bonne and find my current employment.

  “It’s all rather picaresque,” she said. “A run-in with a classic Parisian connard—Monsieur . . . what was his name again?”

  “Monsieur Brasseur at the Hotel Sélect on rue François Millet in the Sixteenth. If you know anyone you hate, send them there.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind. But you do have fantastic material, n’est-ce pas? Getting milked by a horrid hotel desk clerk and then ending up in a chambre in le quartier turc. I’m certain, during all those years that you were practicing your French in . . . where was it that you lived . . .?”

  “Eaton, Ohio.”

  “Never heard of it. Then again, never having set foot in your country . . .”

  “Even if you’re an American, you’ve probably never heard of Eaton, Ohio . . . unless you happen to have heard of Crewe College, which is the sole reason to know about Eaton, Ohio, though it’s not exactly a big-deal college to begin with.”

  “But it’s where everything went wrong in your life, yes?”

  I nodded.

  “But that’s another conversation, isn’t it?” she asked.

  “Maybe not. It’s something I’d rather not talk about.”

  “Then don’t,” she said and leaned forward and kissed me deeply.

  Then she stubbed out her cigarette and drained her glass and said, “And now, I must ask you to leave.”

  “What?” I said.

  “I have things I must do.”

  “But it’s not even . . .” I checked my watch. “. . . eight o’clock.”

  “And we’ve had a lovely cinq-à-sept . . . which was so lovely that it nearly became a cinq-à-huit.”

  “But I thought we’d spend the evening together.”

  “That cannot be.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because, as I said, I have things to do.”

  “I see.”

  “You sound like a little boy who’s just been told that he has to leave his tree house.”

  “Thanks for that,” I said, sounding hurt.

  She took my face in her hands.

  “Harry, do not take this badly. You simply have to accept that I am busy now. But I do want us to have another afternoon together.”

  “When?”

  “Say three days.”

  “That long?”

  She put a finger to my lips.

  “You should know better,” she whispered.

  “I just want to see you before then, that’s all.”

  “And you will—in three days.”

  “But . . .”

  Her index finger again touched my lips.

  “Don’t overplay your hand.”

  “OK.”

  She leaned forward and kissed me.

  “Three days,” she said.

  “What time?”

  “The same time.”

  “I’ll miss you until then,” I said.

  “Good,” she said.

  ELEVEN

  THE NEXT THREE days were difficult. I went about my daily routine. I woke at two. I picked up my wages. I killed time at the Cinémathèque. I ate dinner at the usual collection of cheap traiteurs and cafés that I patronized. I went to work. I wrote. Dawn arrived. I picked up my croissants and returned home.

  So far so normal. The difference now was that every waking hour of every day was spent thinking about Margit. I replayed our afternoon together, minute by minute, over and over again: a continual film loop that kept running in the cinema inside my head and wouldn’t pause between showings. I could still taste the saltiness of her skin, still feel her nails as they dug into me as she came, still relive the moment when she threw her legs around me to take me deeper, still remember the long deep silence afterward when we lay sprawled across each other and I kept thinking how my ex-wife told me repeatedly what a bad lover I was, and pushed me away for months, and how I always tried to get her to talk about what I was doing that was wrong, and how she always shied away from what she called “the mechanics,” and how, when I discovered that she was involved with the dean of the faculty, I knew I had lost her completely, and . . .

  Stop. You’re doing what you always do. You’re harping back to the unpleasant in an attempt to block out the happiness you feel . . .

  Happiness? I’m being forcibly kept away from my daughter—so how could I be at all happy?

  Anyway, this isn’t happiness. This is infatuation.

  But in my more rhapsodic moments, it also felt a bit like love.

  Listen to you, the lovesick teenager, head over heels after an afternoon of passion.

  Yes—and I’m counting down the minutes until I see her again.

  That’s because you are desperate.

  She’s beautiful.

  She’s pushing sixty.

  She’s beautiful.

  Have a cup of coffee and sober up.

  She’s beautiful.

  Have three cups of coffee . . .

  I kept telling myself that I should brace myself for a disappointment . . . that, when I arrived at her place again, she’d show me the door, announcing that she’d changed her mind about continuing with our little adventure. It was all too good to be true.

  When the third day finally arrived, I showed up in her quartier a good hour before our 5:00 PM rendezvous. Again I killed time in the Jardin des Plantes, then stopped in the same grocery store and bought a bottle of champagne. I loitered for three minutes outside her front door until it was exactly the hour in question. I punched in her code. I ascended the second escalier. Outside her front door I was hit by a huge wave of nervousness. I rang her bell. Once. No answer for at least thirty seconds. I was about to ring it again when I heard footsteps behind the door, then the sound of locks being unbolted.

  The door opened. She was dressed in a black turtleneck and black pants, a cigarette between her fingers, a small smile on her lips. She looked radiant.

  “You are a very prompt lover,” she said.

  I stepped forward to take her in my arms. But one of her hands came up in traffic-cop style and touched my chest, while her lips lightly touched mine.

  “Du calme, monsieur,” she said. “All in good time.”

  She took me by the hand and led me to the sofa. Music was playing on her stereo: chamber music, modern, slightly astringent. She relieved me of the champagne I had brought.

  “You don’t have to do this every time you come here,” she said. “An inexpensive bottle of Bordeaux will do.”

  “You mean, you don’t want huge bouquets of roses and stuffed cuddly animals and magnums of Chanel No. 5?”

  She laughed and said, “I once had a lover like that. A businessman. He used to send me mortifying presents: heart-shaped bouquets and earrings that looked like a Louis XIV chandelier . . .”

  “He must have been mad about you.”

  “He was infatuated, that’s all. Men really do have a little-boy streak. When they want something—you—they’ll shower you with t
oys, in the hope that you will be sufficiently flattered.”

  “So the way to your heart is to be mean and ascetic. Instead of diamonds, a box of paper clips, perhaps?”

  She stood up to fetch two glasses.

  “I am glad to see your sense of irony is up and running this afternoon.”

  “By which you mean, it wasn’t up and running when I last saw you?”

  “I like you when you’re funny, that’s all.”

  “And not when I’m . . .”

  “Earnest. Or a little too eager.”

  “You certainly put your cards on the table,” I said.

  She opened the champagne and poured two glasses.

  “That’s one way of looking at it.”

  I was going to say something slightly petulant like, I stuck to the rules and haven’t called you once in three days. But I knew that would simply reemphasize my earnestness. So instead I changed tack, asking, “The music you’re playing . . .?”

  “You’re a cultured man. Have a guess.”

  “Twentieth century?” I asked.

  “Very good,” she said, handing me the champagne.

  “Slight hint of Gypsy edginess,” I said, sipping the champagne.

  “Yes, I hear that too,” she said, sitting down beside me.

  “Which means the composer is definitely Eastern European.”

  “You’re good at this,” she said, stroking my thigh with her hand.

  “Could be Janácek.”

  “That is a possibility,” she said, letting her hand lightly brush the top of my crotch, making me instantly hard.

  “But . . . no, he’s Czech, you’re Hungarian . . .”

  She leaned forward and touched my neck with her lips.

  “But that doesn’t mean I listen exclusively to Hungarian music.”

  “But . . .”

  Her hand was back on my crotch, unbuttoning my jeans.

  “It’s Bartók,” I said. “Béla Bartók.”

  “Bravo,” she said, reaching into my jeans with her hand. “And do you know what piece it is?”

  “One of the String Quartets?”

  “Thank you for that blinding glimpse of the obvious,” she said, pulling my penis out of my pants. “Which one?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, my body tightening as she began to run her finger up and down my erection.

  “Have a guess.”

  “The Third, the slow movement?”

  “How did you know that?”

  “I didn’t. It was just . . .”

  I didn’t finish the sentence as her mouth closed over my penis, and began to move up and down, her hand accompanying the movement of her lips. When I was close to climax, I uttered something about wanting to be inside her, but this just increased the rhythm of her sucking. I didn’t so much come as explode. Margit sat up and downed her glass of champagne in one go, then lit a cigarette.

  “Feeling better?” she asked.

  “Just a bit,” I said, reaching for her. She took my hand, but resisted my attempts to pull her down toward me. So I sat up and kissed her deeply. But when I began to slip my hand up the back of her top, she whispered, “Not today.”

  She disengaged from me and took a drag of her cigarette.

  “Have I done something wrong?” I asked.

  A small laugh.

  “Your ex-wife must have played havoc with your self-esteem.”

  “That’s beside the point.”

  “No, it’s not. All I’m telling you is, I don’t want to be made love to today, and your immediate reaction is to think that you’ve been ‘bad.’ Which leads me to conclude—”

  “I was just wondering why—”

  “I can give you a blow job but want nothing in return?”

  “Well, if you want to put it in such a blunt way . . .”

  “You see, you act as if I’m rejecting you . . . whereas all I’m saying is—”

  “I’ll shut up.”

  “Good,” she said, topping up my glass.

  “I have to tell you . . . that’s the first time I’ve ever had a blow job with Bartók as the musical accompaniment.”

  “There’s a first for everything.”

  “Did you blow your businessman to Bartók?”

  “You are a jealous man, aren’t you?”

  “It was just a question.”

  “And I will give you an answer. As our affair went on while I was still married, we always met at a little apartment he kept near his office. His fuck pad.”

  “And all the gifts . . . did he send them here?”

  “Yes. He did.”

  “Your husband didn’t get upset about that?”

  “You do ask many questions.”

  She stubbed out her cigarette, then reached for the packet, fished out another one, and lit it up.

  “No,” she said. “My husband wasn’t suspicious. Because he was fully aware of the affair from the moment it started.”

  “I don’t understand . . .”

  “Then I will explain it to you. It was 1975. Due to budget cutbacks, my husband, Zoltan, had just lost his job as a monitor of Hungarian radio broadcasts for some international airwaves watchdog group that was funded by the CIA. Our daughter, Judit, was just two years old. I was getting very little work as a translator, so we were dangerously low on money. Then, out of nowhere, a job dropped into my life—translating desperately boring technical documents for a French company that was exporting Hungarian-made dental supplies.”

  “I never knew Communist Hungary specialized in that.”

  “Nor did I before I got this job. Anyway, I did the translation and was then called out to the company’s offices—in some modern area near Boulogne—to explain a few technical points to the company’s director. His name was Monsieur Corty: fiftyish, potbellied, puff-faced, sad eyes . . . archetypal. I could see him noticing me with care as soon as I came into his office. We spent half an hour going through the documents. He then proposed lunch. I hadn’t eaten in a restaurant for a very long time, so I thought, Why not? He took me to a very nice place. He ordered an excellent bottle of wine. He asked about my husband and my daughter, and found out how hard up we were. Then he started talking: about how he was married to an impossible woman; how she had so pushed him away that he found it difficult ‘performing’ for her; how she had ridiculed him for that and essentially ended that part of their lives, and how he couldn’t leave her—that traditional French Catholic thing of keeping the family together to maintain social respectability—but was looking for someone with whom he could have ‘an arrangement.’ He also said that he found me very attractive, he could see that I was intelligent, and liked the fact that I was married . . . which meant that I had responsibilities of my own. And he offered me three hundred francs a week—a small fortune to us back then—if I would meet him twice a week for two hours in the afternoon.”

  “You weren’t shocked by this offer?”

  “Of course not. It was made so graciously. Anyway, I told him I would have to think about it, and that night I went home and after we got Judit to bed, I sat down with Zoltan and explained what had transpired that afternoon. The next day I called Monsieur Corty and I told him that, yes, our arrangement would be acceptable—but the price would have to be four hundred francs per week. He agreed on the spot.”

  “Your husband didn’t mind?”

  “I know what you are thinking: How could he have agreed to let me whore for a fat middle-aged man? But his attitude, like mine, was very pragmatic. We were virtually penniless. The money he was offering was—to us—vast. And to me, it was just sex. Actually, the sex never lasted more than a few minutes—he was very fast. But what Monsieur Corty wanted more than anything was a bit of tendresse. Someone he could talk to for a few hours each week. So I would go to the drab functional little studio near his office that he had organized for our liaison. I would undress, he would take off his suit jacket and trousers, his shirt, but he’d remain clothed in his underwear. He would pull out
his penis and I would spread my legs and—”

  “I think I know how the act works,” I said.

  “Am I making you uncomfortable?”

  “It’s just more information than I need.”

  “Don’t tell me you’re a puritan, Harry.”

  “Hardly, but . . .”

  “Surely the writer in you appreciates that, in storytelling, the significant detail is everything. And so, the very fact that Monsieur Corty would never make love naked with me, and that sex was merely a mechanical act for him, surely must tell you that—”

  “It was a sad, sordid little arrangement?”

  “It wasn’t sordid and it wasn’t sad. It was what he wanted it to be.”

  “How long did it last?”

  “Three years.”

  “Good God.”

  “It was a very lucrative three years for us. The money allowed us to buy this apartment . . .”

  “Where did your daughter sleep?”

  “There’s another room—a very small room . . .”

  “Where exactly . . .?”

  “Over there,” she said, pointing to a door on the left-hand wall, near one of the French windows.

  “I hadn’t noticed . . .”

  “Never overlook the significant detail.”

  I wanted to ask, What do you use the room for now? but I held myself in check.

  “What ended the affair?”

  “Circumstances,” she said.

  “Your husband must have been a remarkably tolerant man.”

  “He was as complex as anyone else. He had some great strengths, some profound weaknesses. I loved him madly and often hated him . . . and I think it was the same for him with regard to me. And he was no saint when it came to other women . . .”

  “He had mistresses?”

  “Un jardin secret . . . avec beaucoup de fleurs.”

  “And you didn’t object?”

  “He was discreet, he never flaunted the fact to me, he never made me feel in any way less important to him. On the contrary, I think his many lovers kept him with me . . .”

  I shook my head. She said, “You are amused by all this.”

  “Absolutely—because I could never imagine an American couple agreeing to this sort of arrangement . . .”

  “I am certain there are many who do . . . but, of course, never breathe a word to anyone outside of their marriage . . .”