The Woman in the Fifth

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 Cinematheque. I ate dinner at the usual collection of cheap traiteurs and cafes 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 p.m. 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-haped 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 toys, 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 re-emphasize 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 Janacek.’

‘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 Bartok,’ I said. ‘Bela Bartok.’

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

The Woman in the Fifth

‘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 selfesteem.’

‘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 Bartok as the musical accompaniment.’

‘There’s a first for everything.’

‘Did you blow your businessman to Bartok?’

‘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 lefthand 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 as regards 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 …’

‘Maybe — but the prevailing rule in American life is, If you transgress, the punishment will follow.’

‘As you well know,’ she said.

‘How do you know that?’

‘It’s written all over you. You got caught at something. And the other great rule of American life is, Don’t get caught.’

‘No,’ I said, ‘the rule is, There is a price to everything.’

‘What a sad way of looking at the world: thinking that pleasure must be punished.’

‘Only illicit pleasure.’

‘Most pleasures are best when they are illicit, n’est-ce pas?’ she said, tracing a line down my face and kissing me. This time she responded when I kissed her back deeply. But then, a few moments later, she ended the embrace.

‘Like I said …’ she whispered.

‘I know,’ I said. ‘”Not today.”’

‘But three days from now — absolutely. Now you must go.’

‘So soon?’

‘I have things to do.’

‘OK,’ I said.

Ten minutes later I was on the street, walking quickly toward the metro, trying to sort through everything that had happened during the brief hour I had spent in Margit’s apartment. Questions, questions. ‘Not today.’ But why? And also, what things did she have to do that made her turn me out of her apartment after sixty minutes? The story of her ‘arrangement’ with the fat businessman strangely rankled — because it felt as if she was testing me, seeing what I would accept, and also letting me know (without much subtlety) that this ‘thing’ (I couldn’t yet call it an affair, let alone a liaison) would be conducted according to her rules, her limits. And if I didn’t want it …

But the truth was, I did want it. As I descended into the Jussieu station, the letdown intensified. Three days was a long time from now.

While walking to work that night, all I could think was how I now had to spend the next six hours locked up in an airless room, and how I was tiring of the job, and wouldn’t mind taking a sixty-five-euro loss if it meant getting one day off each week.

But when I posited this idea to Mr Beard the next afternoon, his reaction was not positive.

‘I do not think the Boss would like that,’ he said. ‘You are needed there every night.’

‘But when I was first offered the job, Kamal said I could work just six nights.’

‘Kamal is dead … and you are needed there all seven nights.’

‘Couldn’t you get someone else to handle just one night of the week?’

‘It will not be possible.’

‘Would you at least ask the Boss?’

‘I will ask him, but I know what he will say: It will not be possible.’

But the next afternoon, when I stopped by the cafe to pick up my wages envelope, Mr Beard favored me with a scowly smile.

‘I have spoken to the Boss. He is d’accord. “Every man needs a day of rest,” he said. Yours will be Friday, but the Boss also wants you to work one evening shift: six p.m. to midnight, one day a week.’

‘But that means doing a twelve-hour shift …’

‘You will not lose any money that way.’

No, but if Margit will only see me at five p.m. every three days …

‘Could I do six a.m. to twelve noon?’

‘It will not be possible.’

‘Ask him.’

When I returned the next day, Mr Beard tossed me my envelope and said, ‘The Boss wants to know why you can’t do those extra hours.’

‘Because I see a woman in the late afternoon.’

That caught him by surprise — even though he tried hard not to look shocked.

‘I will tell him that,’ he said, looking away from me.

And it was only three hours before I could see her again. With time to kill, I walked over to that little cafe near the Gare de l’Est where I ate steak-frites twice a week. The place was quiet. I sat down. The waiter approached me and took my order. I asked him if he had a newspaper I could read. He returned with Le Parisien. I opened it up and started flicking through its pages. I have to say that I liked the paper because it was full of the usual petty crimes and misdemeanors that inform the life of a city. Today’s criminal reports included: Two teenage thugs caught trashing a car in Clichy-sous-Bois. An insurance executive killed instantly when his car swerved in front of a truck on the autoroute to Versailles (and the post-mortem showed that he was, booze-wise, way over the limit). A feud between two families in Bobigny which got so out of hand that one of the husbands smashed the windshield of his neighbor’s Renault Megane. A desk clerk at a small hotel in the Sixteenth getting knocked down in a hit-and-run accident on the rue Francois Millet.

Hang on …

Hotel Clerk Left Paralysed By

Hit-and-Run Driver

Philippe Brasseur, 43, the morning desk clerk at the Hotel Select, rue Francois Millet, has been left paralysed from the neck down after being struck by a car yesterday afternoon in front of the hotel. Eyewitnesses say that the vehicle — a Mercedes C-Class — had been double-parked near the hotel, and pulled out suddenly as M. Brasseur left the hotel. According to Mme Tring Ta-Sohn, who operates a traiteur asiatique opposite the Select, ‘The driver of the vehicle appeared to deliberately target the man.’ Mme Tring Ta-Sohn also informed the police that the license plate of the Mercedes appeared to have been covered. According to the investigating officer, Inspector M. Guybet, this detail evidently indicated that this was a premeditated act. M. Brasseur remains in a stable condition at the Hopital de Saint-Cloud. The attending neurologist, Dr G. Audret, said it was too early to tell whether the paralysis was permanent.

Good God. As much as I hated that bastard — and privately wanted to see him get some sort of comeuppance for his hideous behavior toward me — I still wouldn’t have wished that fate upon him. The man must have made some serious enemies over the years.

Four hours later I was recounting this tale to Margit. We were in bed, sprawled naked across each other and talking for the first time since I had arrived. When she’d opened her front door, she’d immediately pulled me down on to the bed, yanking down my jeans, hiking up her skirt. Once I was inside her, she became immoderate — her legs tight around me, her moans increasing in volume with each of my thrusts.

Afterward, she said, ‘Take off your clothes and stay awhile.’

I did as ordered while she went into the next room to retrieve two glasses. Then picking up the bottle of champagne I had brought (‘I won’t say, “Again,” … but you really must stop such extravagance’), she opened it, the cigarette ash falling off on to the sheets as the cork popped.

‘More work for the maid,’ I said.

‘I am the maid. Just like you.’

‘You’re beautiful,’ I said, stroking her thigh.

‘You’ve said that before.’

‘It’s the truth.’

‘You’re a liar,’ she said with a laugh. ‘And you’re continuing to evade my question …’

‘What question?’

‘The question I posed to you last time.’

‘Which was?’

‘How badly did your wife damage you?’

‘Badly,’ I finally said. ‘But ultimately it was me who damaged myself.’

‘You only say that because you believe her rhetoric … because, all of your life, you’ve been told you’re a bad boy.’

‘Stop sounding like a shrink.’

‘You have nothing to be guilty about.’

‘Yes, I do,’ I said, turning away.

‘Did you kill anyone?’ she asked.

‘Don’t try to soft-pedal this …’

‘It’s a legitimate question: Did you kill someone?’

‘Of course I didn’t kill anyone.’

‘Then what are you guilty about? Betraying your wife perhaps?’

‘Maybe.’

‘Or was it really all about getting found out?’ Silence. I turned away.

‘We all want to get found out,’ she said. ‘It’s sadly human … and sadly true. Just as we all can’t really cope with the guilt that—’

‘Do you want to know about the sort of guilt I contend with, day in, day out? Well, listen to this …’

That’s when I told her about the hit-and-run accident involving the desk clerk at the Select.

‘It hardly sounds like an accident,’ Margit said when I finished recounting this story.

‘That’s what’s nagging me, the fact that—’

‘Now don’t tell me that, because you thought ill of the bastard, the wrath of the gods came down upon him?’

‘Something like that, yes.’

‘But he got what was coming to him. Somebody out there didn’t like the way he was behaving toward others, and decided to settle the score. And even though you had no bearing whatsoever on this person’s decision to run him down, you still feel guilt?’

‘I wanted something bad to happen to him …’

‘And that puts you at fault?’

‘I have a fucked-up conscience.’

‘Clearly,’ she said, topping up my glass with champagne. ‘But I’m certain this self-loathing didn’t simply arrive one day, out of nowhere. Did your mother—?’

‘Hey, I really don’t feel like talking about it …’

‘Because she so disapproved of you?’

‘Yeah, that — and because she was a deeply unhappy woman who told me repeatedly that I was the root cause of her problems.’

‘Were you?’

‘According to her, sure. I screwed things up completely for her …’

‘How, exactly?’

‘Before I showed up in her life, she was this big-deal journalist …’

‘How “big deal”?’

‘She was a court reporter …’

‘A mere reporter?’

‘For the Cleveland Plain Dealer.’

‘Is that an important newspaper?’

‘It is … if you live in Cleveland, Ohio.’

‘So she was a self-important hack, covering trials …’

‘Something like that. I arrived by accident. She was forty, a hard-bitten professional, someone who never married and lived for her work. But — and this I got from her later — she was starting to “feel her age” … wondering if she’d end up alone in her early sixties; a dried-up spinster, living in some small apartment, on the way out at the paper, no one caring if she lived or died …’

‘There was no husband in her life?’

‘Not until she met Tom Ricks. Ex-army guy, built up a successful insurance business in the Cleveland area, divorced after the war, no kids, met my mom when she was covering an accident case in which he was testifying. She was lonely, he was lonely, they started seeing each other. It was “pretty agreeable at first”, she later told me, especially as they both liked to drink …’

‘And then she got pregnant?’

‘Yeah, that’s exactly what happened. It was all a big accident, she “agonized” over what to do, whether to keep it …’

‘She told you all this?’

‘Yeah — when I was around thirteen and we’d just had a fight about my refusal to do something stupid, like take the garbage out. “You know the biggest mistake of my life was not having you scraped out of my womb when I still had the chance.”’

‘Charming,’ she said, stubbing out her cigarette.

‘Well, she was pretty drunk at the time. Anyway, she found herself up the spout, Dad convinced her to keep it and promised her he wouldn’t stop her working or anything. But then the pregnancy turned out to be a nightmare. She ended up confined in a hospital bed for around three months. As this was 1963, when maternity leave wasn’t exactly a progressive concept, the paper let her go. It was the biggest blow of her life. All the time I was growing up, she always referred to the Plain Dealer as “my paper” … talking about it in such mournful tones you’d think it was a man who jilted her.’

‘So you were vilified for being the person who ruined her life. Is she still alive?’

I shook my head. ‘The cigarettes got my father first — he died in ‘87. Mom went in ‘95 — cigarettes and booze. Suicide on the installment plan. I’m pretty damn sure my mom started the slow process of killing herself the day the Plain Dealer let her go. And … could we drop this subject, please?’

‘But it’s so illuminating — and it so explains why you feel such guilt about nothing.’

‘Guilt has its own weird trajectory.’

‘Which is why you weirdly blame yourself for that desk clerk getting run over?’

‘I don’t blame myself … I just wish I hadn’t wished him ill.’

‘Why spill tears over a shit? Anyway, don’t you think that those who damage others deserve to be damaged themselves?’ ‘Only if you buy into an Old Testament view of things.’

‘Or if you do truly believe in retribution.’

‘But you don’t believe in … ?’

‘Retribution? Of course I do. It’s a rather delicious concept, don’t you think?’

She was smiling at me.

‘You’re joking, right?’ I asked.

‘Not really, no,’ she said, then glanced at the watch on my wrist.

‘Don’t tell me our “allotted time slot” is over?’ I said.

‘Just about.’

‘Great,’ I said, then added, ‘And yeah, I know that sounds petulant, but …’

‘See you in three days, Harry.’

‘Same time?’

She stroked my hair.

‘You’re learning,’ she said.

Learning what? I wondered.