The Woman in the Fifth

Ten

LATER THAT NIGHT, as I sat at my desk and tried to work, my brain kept replaying that scene on the balcony. Margit’s face continued to fill my mind’s eye. Six hours after our embrace, I could still discern the musky scent she wore, as it had adhered itself to my clothes, my hands, my face. Her taste was still in my mouth. Her low husky voice continued to reverberate in my ear.

I must have looked at her card a dozen times that night. I wrote down her phone number in a notebook and on a pad I kept on the desk, just in case the card was misplaced. I tried to grind my way through my new quota of one thousand words. I failed. I was too distracted, too smitten.

The hours dragged by. I was desperate to leave this room early and walk the streets and try to clear my head. But if I did leave here before the specified time …

Blah, blah, blah. I knew all the old arguments, and knew that I’d play the good employee and stay put until 6 a.m. arrived. And then …

Then I would call her and tell her that I couldn’t wait until 5 p.m. tomorrow; that I had to see her now. And I’d hop in a cab over to 13 rue Linne and …

Completely blow this affair before it has started.

A little detached cool is demanded here, mon pote.

So when I woke up at two that afternoon, I picked up my wages and ate steak-frites at a little cafe near the Gare de l’Est, and then took an extended mid-evening stroll along the Canal Saint-Martin, and caught a 21h30 screening of Chabrol’s La Femme infidele at the Brady (they were doing a mini-festival of his films), and walked to my job, thinking at length about Chabrol’s complex morality tale. The story is an old one: a husband discovers his wife’s infidelity. He confronts and kills her lover, at which point …

But here’s where Chabrol pulls a very interesting rabbit out of the hat. Upon discovering that her husband has murdered her amant, the wife doesn’t become hysterical and hyper-moralistic. Nor does she turn him over to the cops. Rather, the couple become collaborators in the crime — the notion being that, in any intimate relationship (especially one that has lasted many years), we are always complicit with the other person. And once the frontier of sexuality is crossed, we are, in some ways, hostages to fortune. You can compartmentalize, you can tell yourself that you know the person with whom you are sleeping is rational and playing on the same page as you … and then you discover one of life’s great truisms: you can never really know the landscape of somebody else’s mind.

But how desperate I was to cross that frontier with Margit.

Still … discipline, discipline.

So I didn’t call her until the following afternoon — from a phone kiosk on the rue des Ecoles. I inserted my France Telecom card. I dialed her number. One rings, two rings, three ring, four rings … oh shit, she’s out … five rings, six …

‘Hello?’

She sounded groggy, half-asleep.

‘Margit, it’s me … Harry.’

‘I figured that.’

‘Did I wake you?’

‘I was just … dozing.’

‘I can call back if …’

‘No need to be solicitous. I expected you to call now … just as I expected you not to call yesterday.’

‘And how did you figure that?’

‘Because I knew, though you might be eager to see me again, you wouldn’t want to seem too eager, so you’d wait a day or so before calling me. But not more than that, because that would indicate disinterest. The fact that you rang exactly at five p.m… . especially after I told you that I shouldn’t be disturbed before that hour …’

‘Shows how completely predictable men are?’

‘Your statement, monsieur, not mine.’

‘So do you want to see me or not?’ I asked.

‘American directness. J’adore …’

‘I’ve posed a question.’

‘Where are you exactly right now?’

‘Near Jussieu.’

‘My metro stop. How convenient. Give me thirty minutes. You have my address?’

‘I do.’

‘Here’s the code: S877B. Second staircase, then third floor, right. A plus tard.’

Her place was a three-minute walk from the Jussieu metro. The area — seen in the half-light of a late-March afternoon — was a mixture of old apartment blocks and a clustered exercise in sixties concrete brutalism that turned out to be a branch of the University of Paris. For all my flaneur-ing around Paris, I had never ventured down this way (always stopping at the Grand Action cinema on the rue des Ecoles, then turning left toward the river). So it was intriguing to happen upon the Jardin des Plantes. It was a surprisingly large and unexpectedly sauvage green space in the middle of the Fifth arrondissement. I wandered inside — following an inclining path up past tall trees and exotic flora until it reached a meadow-like area, slightly overgrown, with a stone cupola house in the midst of this Elysian field. Had I been a film director, out scouting a location for an urban update of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, this would have won hands down. There was even a small hill — accessed by a winding path — the summit of which brought me into a pagodastyle viewing platform. The view from here wasn’t wildly panoramic. Rather, it was a vista of rooftops and chimney pots and sloping windows. There was nothing monumental about this prospect. But seen in the declining afternoon light, it still looked monochromatic and painterly: an urban still life, and one which was, by and large, out of public view. Rooftops are romantic — not just because they are, metaphorically speaking, adjacent to the sky, but also because they are hidden away. Stand on a rooftop and you cannot help but have simultaneous thoughts about life’s infinite possibilities and the omnipresent potentiality for self-destruction. Look to the heavens and you can think, Everything is possible. Look to the heavens and you can also think, I am insignificant. And then you can shuffle your way to the edge of the roof and look down and tell yourself, Just two steps and my life would be over. And would that be such a horrendous thing?

No wonder the Romantics so venerated suicide. Seen as a response to life’s fundamental despair, it was regarded as a grand final creative act: an acceptance of tragedy through the ultimate embrace of tragedy.

But why think such tragic thoughts when the prospect of sex was just ten minutes away? Ah, sex: the great antidote to all despair.

I walked down off the hill and out of the Jardin. I crossed the street and found a small grubby corner shop which sold just about everything — including champagne. The Arab guy behind the till said that he had one bottle on ice in the back. I bought it. When I asked if he sold condoms, he avoided my eyes as he said, ‘There is a machine on the next street corner.’

I walked down to the machine. I inserted a two-euro coin. I pulled open the metallic drawer and withdrew a three-pack of Durex, presented in a plastic case. I checked my watch. It was 5.28.

13 rue Linne was an undistinguished building — early nineteenth century, of considerable width, with an imposing black door. There was a kebab place sharing its left flank; a reasonable-looking Italian restaurant its other side. The code pad was to one side of the door. I opened my notebook and punched the necessary combination of numbers and letters. There was the telltale click. I pushed open the door, feeling nervous.

As always, I was in a courtyard. But this courtyard was different from all the others I had entered in Paris: it was light and airy and leafy. Paved in cobblestones, it also looked clean and well maintained. There was no laundry hanging from the balconies — only flower boxes and trellises around which plants had been interwoven. There was no loud jungle music coming from open windows. Just absolute bourgeois silence. At the entrance to the first stairwell, there was a collection of professional plaques:

M. Claude Triffaux

Psychologue

2e etage, gauche

Mme B. Semler

Expert Comptable

1er etage, droite

M. Francois Marechal

Kinesitherapeute

1er etage, gauche

I smiled at the thought of an accountant — a man who deals with the financial narrative of one’s life (and the stressful business of paying taxes) — working across the hall from someone who dealt with trapped nerves and seized muscles and other physical manifestations of life’s assorted vicissitudes.

The second stairwell was further along the courtyard. There were no plaques here, just a listing of apartments. I checked for Kadar, Margit, but didn’t see it. This worried me. Had I missed the second stairwell? The address was right, as the code had worked. But why no name?

I walked up the three flights of stairs, noting that, unlike my own state-of-collapse building, the walls here were well painted, the stairs were made of polished wood and had a carpet running up the middle of them. When I reached the third floor, there were only two doors. The one to the left had a small nameplate by its bell: Lieser. The door to the right had nothing. I rang the bell, my hands now clammy, telling myself if some irate old lady answered, I’d do my dumb American act and apologize profusely and hightail it down the stairs.

But when the door opened, Margit was standing in its frame.

She was dressed in a simple black turtleneck that hugged her frame tightly and accented the fullness of her breasts. She also wore a loose peasant-style skirt made out of a muslin-like material: very feminine, very chic. Even in the harsh glow of the stairwell lights, her face seemed radiant … though the eyes expressed a sadness that would never leave her be. She favored me with a small smile.

‘I meant to tell you that my name isn’t listed on the chart downstairs.’

‘Yeah, I did have a moment when I thought …’

She leaned forward and touched my lips with hers.

‘You thought wrong.’

My hand went around her back, but she gently disengaged herself, saying, ‘All in good time, monsieur. And only after we rid you of your nervousness.’

‘Is it that obvious?’

‘Manifestement.’

I followed her inside. The door closed behind me. The apartment was made up of two reasonable-sized rooms. The first was the bedroom — with a simple queen-sized bed. In a corner nook there was a bathtub (with a shower hose) and a sink. We didn’t stop here, but continued down past a small door (the toilet, I surmised) and into a large living area. A kitchen had been fitted along the near wall of this room — the appliances and cabinets all dating from the midseventies. There was a large sofa covered in deep red velour fabric, a divan in a maroon paisley velour, and a venerable chocolate leather armchair. There were two large floor-to-ceiling windows at the far end. They overlooked the courtyard and seemed to benefit from afternoon light. To the right of the windows was a beautiful old roll-top desk, on top of which sat one of those bright red Olivetti typewriters which were so popular thirty years ago. There were bookshelves lining all the walls, crammed largely with old volumes in Hungarian and French, though I did spot a few novels in English by Hemingway and Greene and Dos Passos. On three of the shelves stood a massive collection of records — classical mainly, and quite comprehensive in their historical and stylistic range. Her taste was very catholic: everything from Tallis to Scarlatti to Schubert to Bruckner to Berg. There were no compact discs … only a turntable and an amplifier. There was no television, just a large, old Telefunken short-wave radio. And there were framed yellowing photographs of Budapest in the shadows and of (I presumed) assorted family members clustered neatly on all free wall space. But what struck me most about the place was its immaculateness and its sober good taste. Though she hadn’t updated it for several decades, its subdued, mitteleurop style still lent it a certain consulting-room warmth. Freud would have been happy working out of such an apartment, I sensed. So too would an immigre writer … or an immigre translator.

‘This is a lovely place,’ I said.

‘If you don’t mind things being a little on the old-fashioned side. There are times when I think I should update it, move into the modern world. But that’s impossible for me.’

‘Because of your Luddite tendencies?’

‘Perhaps.’

‘You actually work on an old manual typewriter?’

‘I cannot deal with computers.’

‘Or with CDs?’

‘My father had a fantastic collection of records, which was sent on after my mother and I left for Paris.’

‘Your dad didn’t come with you?’

‘He died before we left Hungary.’

‘A sudden death?’

‘That is correct,’ she said in a voice that hinted I shouldn’t press further. ‘Anyway, he was a music fanatic, so he had this huge collection. When we left Budapest, we traveled with just a small suitcase each. Later on, when we had immigre status here, we had to apply to the Hungarian government to get certain personal effects shipped here. Among the things that arrived from our old apartment was Papa’s record collection. Over the years, I added to it myself — but then, when the compact disc arrived, I thought, I have all the music I will ever need, so why switch over? ‘

‘You mean, you don’t like that consumerist frisson called shopping?’

‘Shopping is an act of despair.’

‘That’s extreme.’

She lit up a cigarette.

‘But true. It’s what people do with their time now. It’s the great cultural activity of this epoch — and it speaks volumes about the complete emptiness of modern life.’

I laughed … a little nervously.

‘Well, I certainly need a drink after that homily,’ I said. ‘And in “an act of total despair”, I bought you this.’

I handed her the brown paper bag. She pulled the bottle out of the bag.

‘I don’t know if it’s a good champagne …’ I said.

‘It will do just fine. Did you get it at the shop three doors up from here?’

‘How did you know … ?’

‘Because it’s my local place. I even remember when Mustapha, the owner, opened it in the early seventies. He’d just arrived from Bone in Algeria …’

‘Camus’ birthplace.’

‘Chapeau,’ she said. ‘Anyway, when he was new in Paris and had just opened the shop, he was timid and eager to please, and was also subjected to a lot of brusqueness, as the idea of a commercant from the Maghreb in this corner of Paris offended many of the long-term residents of the quartier. Now, three decades later, he’s fully assimilated — and subjects everyone who comes into his shop to the same sort of brusqueness he once received.’

She found two glasses in the kitchen, then placed the bottle down on a countertop and undid the foil and gently levered the cork out of the bottle. There was the decisive pop and she filled the two glasses.

‘That was very professional.’

‘I could say something very banal like …’

‘”… if there’s one thing you learn after three decades in Paris, it’s how to open a bottle of champagne”?’

She smiled and handed me a glass. I downed it quickly.

‘Precisely.’

‘But you would never indulge in banalities like that,’ I said.

‘It would offend my Hungarian sense of the sardonic.’

‘Whereas Americans like me …’

‘You toss back half a glass of champagne in one go.’

‘Are you saying I’m uncouth?’

‘My, my, you’re a mind reader.’

She had her face up against mine. I kissed her.

‘Flattery,’ I said, ‘will get you …’

‘Everywhere.’

Now she returned the kiss, then removed the champagne glass from my hand and set it down alongside her own on the kitchen counter. Then turning back to me, she pulled me toward her. I didn’t resist and we were instantly all over each other. Within moments, we had collapsed on the sofa, and she was pulling down my jeans. My hands were everywhere. So were hers. Her mouth didn’t leave mine, and it felt as if we were both trying to devour each other. The idea of using a condom went south. I was suddenly inside her, and responding to her ferocious ardor. Her nails dug into the back of my skull, but I didn’t care. This was pure abandon — and we were both lost within it.

Afterward I lay sprawled across her, half-clothed, completely spent. Beneath me, Margit also looked shellshocked and depleted, her eyes closed, her arms loosely around me. Several silent minutes went by. Then she opened one eye and looked at me and said, ‘Not bad.’

We eventually staggered up from the sofa, and she suggested we take the champagne and get into bed. So I picked up the bottle and the two glasses and followed her to the bedroom. As we took off our clothes I said, ‘Now this is a first for me: taking off my clothes after sex.’

‘Who says the sex is finished for the afternoon?’

‘I’m certainly not proposing that,’ I said, sliding between the stiff white sheets.

‘Good,’ she said.

I watched her finish undressing. She said, ‘Please don’t stare at me like that.’

‘But why? You’re beautiful.’

‘Oh, please. My hips are too wide, my thighs are now fatty, and …’

‘You’re beautiful.’

‘And you are in a post-coital stupor, where all aesthetic discernment goes out the window.’

‘I’ll say it again: you’re beautiful.’

She smiled and crawled in beside me.

‘I appreciate your myopia.’

‘And you say I’m hard on myself.’

‘After fifty, all women think: C’est foutu. It’s finished.’

‘You barely look forty.’

‘You know exactly how old I am.’

‘Yes, I know your deep, dark secret.’

‘That is not my deep, dark secret,’ she said.

‘Then what is?’

‘If it’s a deep, dark secret …’

‘Point taken.’

Pause. I ran my fingers up and down her back, then kissed the nape of her neck.

‘Do you really have a deep, dark secret?’ I asked.

She laughed. And said, ‘My God, you are terribly literal.’

‘All right, I’ll shut up.’

‘And kiss me while you’re at it.’

We made love again. Slowly, without rush at first … but eventually it built up into the same crazed zeal that marked our first encounter on the sofa. She was still remarkably passionate, and threw herself into lovemaking with ravenous intemperance. I had never been with anyone like her — and could only hope that my own ardor came close to the level that she reached.

When we were finished, there was another long span of silence. Then she got up and returned a few moments later with her cigarettes and an ashtray. I refilled our glasses of champagne. As she lit up her cigarette, she said, ‘Living in Paris must have corrupted you.’

‘Why do you say that?’

‘Because you don’t criticize me for smoking. I mean, what sort of American are you, not playing the Health Fascist and telling me how passive smoking is rotting your lungs?’

‘Not all of us are that anal.’

‘Well, any of the Americans I have met …’

‘Have you ever been to the States?’

‘No, but …’

‘Let me guess. You’ve met the occasional anally retentive American at Madame’s salon?’

‘I go there very infrequently.’

‘So it was my lucky night then.’

‘You could say that.’

‘Why do you go there if you so dislike it?’

‘I don’t dislike it. Madame is absurd — and someone who thinks that her life is her ongoing work of art … whereas the truth is that she is a dilettante who had five minutes of fame back in the sixties as an artist’s muse, and briefly married a rich man …’

‘Does that explain the big apartment?’

‘Of course. The husband’s name was Jacques Javelle. He was a big-deal film producer back then — largely soft-porn junk, but it made him briefly rich. He married Lorraine when she was this sexy, flower-girl mannequin, and continued seeing his two long-standing mistresses. But Madame’s strange American morality wouldn’t put up with such sexual compartmentalization and she exploded the marriage. She came out of the divorce with the apartment and nothing more. Her looks began to diminish and she did not adapt well to the changing times. So what did she do? Reinvent herself as a curator of people. She found her little niche in Paris, the salon brings in an income, and for a few hours every Sunday night, she can pretend she is important. Et voila — the story of Madame L’Herbert and her salon. Twice a year I find it amusing, nothing more. Occasionally it is good to go out and meet people.’

‘You don’t have a lot of friends in Paris?’

‘Not really … and no, that doesn’t bother me. Since I lost my daughter and husband …’

‘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 Select on rue Francois 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-a-sept … which was so lovely that it nearly became a cinq-a-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.