The Woman in the Fifth

Twelve

I WAS DETERMINED to break out of my daily routine. So I made the point of exploring new quartiers on foot, and even forced myself to jog three times a week along the Canal Saint-Martin — my one small nod to the idea of getting back into shape. And twice a week, I declared a ‘movie-free’ day and loitered in museums instead of the Cinematheque.

But, for me, all these extracurricular activities were secondary to my twice-weekly rendezvous with Margit. It wasn’t just the sex. It was also the break from the quotidian — the sense that, for a couple of hours (if I was lucky), I would escape the banality of everything. No wonder we all respond to the idea of intimacy. It doesn’t just allow us to cling to someone else and believe that we are not alone in the world; it also lets us escape from life’s prosaic repetitiveness.

But with Margit, I always did still feel somewhat alone, as she continued to keep a certain distance from me. When I arrived for our fourth rendezvous, she led me to the sofa, opened my jeans and proceeded to go down on me. But when I tried to touch her, she gently pushed my hand away with the comment I’d heard before, ‘Not today.’

Three days later, however, she was a different woman — sexually voracious and passionate, delighted to see me, full of chat and — dare I say it — almost loving. So much so that when eight o’clock arrived and she hinted that it was time for me to leave, I said, ‘Listen, I know I’m probably pushing things here — but this has been such a wonderful afternoon, why don’t we do something like go out to dinner or …’

‘I have work. And so do you.’

‘But I don’t have to be there until midnight which gives us a couple of hours—’

She cut me off, asking, ‘You really just sit there all night, while the furs come and go?’

‘That’s it.’

‘And do you ever meet the people who employ you?’

‘Just the grumpy bastard who runs the local Internet cafe and hands me my pay envelope every day.’

‘The middleman?’

‘Something like that.’

‘Have you ever thought what’s really going on in that building?’

‘I told you, it’s a furrier’s.’

‘And I know you’re lying to me.’

Silence. She said, ‘Don’t tell me you’re suddenly feeling guilty about not telling me the truth?’

‘The truth is, I don’t know the truth. Sorry.’

‘Why should you be sorry? All men lie.’

‘No comment,’ I said.

‘Listen to your guilt. But let me guess: your ex-wife talked a great deal about the need for “trust” in a marriage, and how without “complete honesty”, there was “no real basis for intimacy”.’

Once again, I found myself tensing — and trying to rewind my memory in an attempt to remember when I told her all that about Susan. She pre-empted me by saying, ‘How did I know that? It was simply a supposition — and one based on my rudimentary knowledge of American morality in all its hypocritical finery.’

‘Whereas the French way is … ?’

‘Compartmentalize. Accept the Cartesian logic of two separate universes within one life. Accept the contradictory tug between familial responsibility and the illusion of freedom. Accept that — as Dumas said — the chains of marriage are heavy and, as such, they often need to be carried by several people. But never allow the two realms to meet — and never admit anything. Whereas you, Harry, confessed everything … didn’t you?’

‘Yes, I did. And yes, I was a fool to confess.’

‘But you had to share the guilt.’

‘I’d been caught …’

‘Being caught and confessing are two different things.

You know the story of the man who gets caught by his wife in bed with another woman. Immediately he jumps up, naked, and starts yelling, “It’s not me! It’s not me!”’

‘I’m afraid I’ve never had much in the way of “sangfroid”.’

‘No — you just feel uncomfortable about lying. You consider it reprehensible and morally wrong … even though it is the most common — and necessary — of human impulses.’

‘You consider lying necessary?’

‘Of course. How else do we navigate the absurdities of life without falsehoods? And do you know what the biggest falsehood is? “I love you.”’

‘Didn’t you love your husband?’

She reached for her pack of cigarettes. I said, ‘You always do that when I ask you something awkward.’

‘You are a very observant man. And yes, I did love my husband … sometimes.’

‘Just sometimes?’

‘Now please don’t tell me that you can love somebody all the time?’

‘There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for my daughter.’

‘Even though she won’t speak with you now?’

‘Did I tell you that?’

‘Harry, you always sound so shocked when I infer something about your life. But it’s not as if I have psychic powers. It’s just …’

‘My story is so banal and obvious?’

‘All lives are extraordinary. All lives are simultaneously banal and obvious. From what you’ve told me so far, it’s not hard to deduce certain things about you and your situation from a few hints you’ve dropped here and there. But as you don’t want to talk about it …’

‘Any more than you want to talk about what happened to your daughter …’

‘My daughter died.’

‘How?’

‘Do you really want to hear this story?’ she asked.

‘Yes, I do.’

She turned her gaze away from me, focusing her eyes on the window near her bed. After several long drags on her cigarette, she began talking.

‘On June 22, 1980, Zoltan took our daughter Judit — who was just seven — for a walk in the Jardin du Luxembourg. I remember telling him, as he left this apartment, that I was planning to have dinner ready in an hour, and wouldn’t it be easier if they spent time across the road in the Jardin des Plantes. But Judit was very insistent about riding the carousel in the Luxembourg, and Zoltan — who so adored Judit he would give in to anything she asked — told me, “We’ll take a taxi there and back. Anyway, it’s midsummer’s night, so why don’t you come with us? We can splurge and go to a restaurant, and maybe even take Judit to see Fantasia afterward.” But I had already started cooking a spaghetti sauce, and I was rather inflexible back then about changing our domestic schedule once it had been planned for the evening. So I insisted that they come back within an hour, no more. Zoltan told me I was being rigid, “comme d’habitude“. I lashed back, saying that somebody had to be disciplined around here, in order to keep everything afloat. That’s when he called me a bitch, and Judit got upset and asked why we had to fight all the time, and Zoltan said it was because I needed to control everything, and I told my husband that the only thing that was keeping me in this marriage was our little girl, because he was such a complete waste of time. Judit started to cry, and Zoltan yelled that he was sick of this marriage, and he grabbed Judit and told me that they would eat elsewhere tonight, and as far as he was concerned, I could drown in my fucking spaghetti sauce, and the door slammed behind them, and …’

She fell silent. Then, ‘Hours went by. Three, four, five hours. I figured that, after they had gotten something to eat, they’d gone to the movie. But the cinema was only ten minutes from our apartment by foot. When eleven p.m. arrived, I was worried. By midnight, I was scared. By one a.m., totally panicked — and I started inventing scenarios in my head, telling myself that, in a fit of anger, he’d decided to check them into a hotel for the night … and that he wasn’t letting me know their whereabouts to punish me for being such a bitch. But I knew that Zoltan would never do something so extreme. He mightn’t have had much in the way of ambition, but he still didn’t have a mean streak … something I always loved about him, even thought I was often so stupidly critical about so much to do with him. It’s terrible, isn’t it, how we lash out at the most important people in our lives — often against our better judgment, but just because we are frustrated in our own lives and …’

She broke off again. Another long drag on her cigarette.

‘The police arrived just before two. When I heard the voices on the stairs, I realized immediately that …’

Silence.

‘The police were very quiet, very solicitous. They told me there had been an accident, and would I please accompany them to the Hopital de la Pitie-Salpetriere. I became immediately hysterical and demanded to know what had happened. “Un accident, madame,” one of them said, also explaining that they weren’t able to discuss the circumstances of the incident or the condition of my husband and daughter. As the gendarme told me this, his colleague put his hand on my shoulder, as if to steady me. That’s when I knew they were dead.

‘I remember feeling as if I had walked into an empty elevator shaft — a long freefall. My legs buckled, but I somehow managed to make it into the bathroom and empty my stomach in the toilet. At that moment I wanted to stick my head into the vomit-filled water and not pull it out again. Death seemed like the only option. One of the policemen came into the bathroom and stood over me as I was sick. I sensed he knew I might do something selfdestructive — and once, when I dipped my head in the bowl, he gripped my shoulder and said, “You must somehow stay strong.”

‘I finished getting sick. The policeman helped me up. I remember flushing the toilet and going to the sink and filling it with cold water and plunging my head into it and the policeman getting a towel and wrapping it around my head, and shouting something to his colleague, and being helped into my coat and down the stairs, and into the back of their car.

‘At the hospital, they brought me into this small room. We waited almost a quarter of an hour for the “officials” to arrive — but I didn’t care. I knew that the longer “they” stayed away, the longer I wouldn’t have to face …’

She stopped in mid-sentence to light up another cigarette.

‘I must have gone through six cigarettes in that fifteen minutes. Then the door swung open and two men walked in. They were both middle-aged, chubby, grim-faced. One of them wore a white coat, the other a suit. A doctor and a police inspector. The doctor pulled up a chair beside me. The cop hovered by the door, watching me with dark, middle-of-the-night eyes. The doctor forced himself to make eye contact with me. When he started to say, “Madame, I regret to inform you …” I lost the fight I had been waging ever since the police had knocked on my apartment door. I must have cried for at least ten minutes — howling like some wounded animal. The doctor tried to take me by the hands to steady me, but I pushed him away. He offered something to calm me down. I screamed that nothing would deaden the pain. Eventually the doctor started explaining. “Hit-and-run … killed while crossing a street … they were on a zebra crossing when the driver struck them both … your husband killed instantly, your daughter died just fifteen minutes ago … we tried everything we could to save her, but her neck was broken, her other internal injuries too severe …”

‘The police inspector then began to speak, telling me that a passer-by had taken down the number of the car — a black Jaguar — and that they expected to trace the vehicle and apprehend the driver within the next twenty-four hours. “We are treating this as accidental manslaughter … but I must ask you: Did your husband have any enemies who might have wanted him … ?” I started screaming again, telling him that Zoltan had been a wonderful dreamy layabout with no ambition whatsoever, so why would anyone want him dead? “Tres bien, madame,” the inspector said. “I am sorry to have posed such a difficult question at this time.”

‘”I want to see them,” I started screaming. But they refused, informing me that their injuries were too severe. My screaming intensified. “I don’t care what they look like, I will see them.” But they still said no, the doctor telling me it would be too traumatic … that Zoltan’s skull had been crushed by the wheels of the car and Judit had been dragged for several meters by the car and her face …

‘That’s when I went crazy — kicking the desk, overturning the chairs, clawing at my face with my nails, and then trying to smash my head against the walls. I remember the policeman and the inspector attempting to hold me down, and me fighting against them, and the doctor running out of the room, and returning with a nurse, and me now shrieking that I wanted to die, and someone forcing my jacket off me and a needle penetrating my arm and the world going dark and …

‘When I came back into consciousness, I was strapped down to a bed in the hospital’s psycho wing. The nurse on duty said that I had been sedated for the past two days. She also told me the police wanted to speak with me. A few hours later, the inspector showed up. By this point, one of the doctors on call had decided I was calm enough to be freed from my restraints, so I was sitting up in bed, still being fed intravenously, as I refused all offers of food. The inspector was all business.

‘”Madame, we have apprehended the driver …” he said. The man’s name was Henri Dupre. He was an executive with a big pharmaceutical company and lived in Saint-Germain-en-Laye. They were certain that he was very drunk when he killed my husband and daughter — because when they arrested him the next morning at his house, the blood test showed he was still way over the limit … which meant that when he had struck them, he must have been completely bourre. Smashed beyond reason.

‘The inspector also said that one of our neighbors had identified the bodies, and that they had been released to a mortician who had reconstructed their faces, and if I wanted to view them now …

‘But I told the inspector that I didn’t want to see them dead. Because I couldn’t face …’

Silence.

‘We didn’t have many friends in Paris. But my businessman lover, Monsieur Corty, did come and see me. I was still being sedated, still under “suicide watch”, but I could nonetheless tell that he was shocked by my appearance. His kindness was extraordinary. He spoke in a very quiet voice and told me that he would be taking care of all funeral expenses, and that he had spoken with the mortician and that he could hold off for a week or so with the burial until I was well enough to leave hospital.

‘But I said that I didn’t want to be present at the funeral … that I couldn’t bear the sight of their bodies … that they should burn them straight away. I didn’t care what they did with the ashes, because they were just fucking ashes and had no meaning now that my daughter and husband were dead. Monsieur Corty tried to reason with me, but I would hear none of it. “Burn them now,” I hissed, and eventually Monsieur Corty nodded quietly and said that, with regret, he would carry out my wishes.

‘A few days later, I was discharged from hospital. Monsieur Corty sent a car for me. I went home to an empty apartment — yet one in which everything seemed completely frozen in that moment in time just before they died. The spaghetti sauce I had been making was coagulated in the pot on top of the stove. Judit’s drawing books and dolls were scattered in front of the fireplace. Zoltan’s reading glasses were still balanced on the arm of the easy chair where he always sat. So too was the book he was reading: a Hungarian translation of Moravia’s Contempt. Do you know the novel?’

‘Of course,’ I said. ‘It was filmed by Godard.’

‘We saw it when our marriage was in a happier place. When things started to go wrong, Zoltan became obsessed with both the film and the novel. Because he identified with the central character. Like Moravia’s protagonist, he had lost the respect of his wife. Until he was dead — and every moment of every day was spent mourning him and my wonderful daughter.’

‘You felt guilt?’

‘Of course. Especially when, a few days after being released from the hospital, I was called into the commissariat de police of the Sixth arrondissement. The inspector needed to formally interview me for the dossier of the case. That’s when I found out that the same bystander who managed to get the vehicle’s registration number had also seen Zoltan and Judit right before the accident. Zoltan had seen a taxi on the far side of the road, and ran across with Judit to hail it. Halfway there …’

‘Surely you didn’t blame yourself for …’

‘Of course I fucking blamed myself. If it hadn’t been for me insisting that they rush home for dinner …’

‘That’s absurd, and you know it.’

‘Don’t tell me what’s absurd. Had I been more flexible about things, about my stupid spaghetti sauce …’

Another silence, only this time I didn’t dare fill it. Finally she said, ‘It’s time you left.’

‘OK.’

‘You think me rigid, don’t you?’

‘I didn’t say that.’

‘No — but I know you hate the fact I shoo you out of here after a few hours and insist that I only see you every three days.’

‘It’s OK, Margit.’

‘Liar. It’s not OK. You tolerate it, but you don’t like it.’

‘Well … if this is the way it has to be …’

‘Stop being so reasonable … especially when I know it’s an act.’

‘Everyone acts in relationships … especially ones as strange as this one.’

‘There! You said it. A strange relationship. So if you find it so strange, why don’t you abandon it? Tell me I’m a rigid, controlling bitch and …’

‘What happens after I leave here?’

‘I work.’

‘Bullshit.’

‘Believe what you want.’

‘So what are you translating right now?’

‘That’s my business.’

‘In other words, nothing.’

‘What I do after you leave is my business.’

‘Is there another guy?’

‘You think me that energetic?’

‘No, just completely cryptic.’

‘Do yourself a favor, Harry. Walk out of here now and don’t come back.’

‘Why the melodrama?’

‘Because it won’t end well. It never does with me.’

‘Maybe that’s because you’ve never been able to get over—’

‘Don’t play the psychiatrist here. You know nothing about me. Nothing.’

‘I know … what you just told me … that terrible story …’

‘What? It “touched your heart”. Or maybe it brought out your long-dormant protective instincts which you didn’t extend to your wife and daughter—’

‘That was a shitty thing to say.’

‘So leave and don’t come back.’

‘That was the point of that comment, right? See if you could really alienate me and make me never want to come back here. But maybe if you stopped blaming yourself—’

‘That’s it!’ she said, standing up. ‘Get dressed and get out.’

But I grabbed her and violently yanked her back on to the bed. When she struggled, I pinned both her arms down and climbed on top of her legs.

‘Now you can answer two questions for me.’

‘Fuck you,’ she said.

‘That scar on your throat …’

She spat in my face. I ignored that and increased my pressure on her hands and legs.

‘That scar on your throat. Tell me …’

‘A botched suicide. Happy now?’

I let her arms go. They lay motionless on the bed.

‘Did you try to kill yourself right after you were released from hospital?’

‘Two days later. In the apartment where I fucked Monsieur Corty.’

‘He asked you to fuck him forty-eight hours after … ?’

‘No. I proposed the idea. He was hesitant, telling me there was no need to rush things. But I insisted. After he’d given me his usual two-minute in-and-out, I excused myself and went into the kitchen and grabbed a bread knife and …’

‘You really wanted to punish him, didn’t you?’

‘Absolutely — even though he was always so good to me. Or as good as anyone could be to a whore.’

‘But the very fact you did it when he was in the next room …’

‘No, it wasn’t a cry for help. If you cut your throat the right way, you die on the spot. I botched it … and Monsieur Corty somehow managed to stop the bleeding and call an ambulance and …’

‘You lived.’

‘Unfortunately … yes.’

‘And Monsieur Corty?’

‘He visited me twice in the hospital, then sent me a check for ten thousand francs — a small fortune back then — with a short note, wishing me well in the future. I never heard from him again.’

‘And the driver of the car?’

‘He was a man with many connections — so he managed to keep everything out of the papers, and the magistrate investigating the case somehow decided to drop the charges from manslaughter to something punishable by a slap on the wrist and a fine. His people offered me compensation. Fifty thousand francs. I refused the offer — until my lawyer reasoned with me and said that I would be spiting myself if I didn’t take his money … especially as he could get it increased by fifty percent. Which he did.’

‘So you accepted the payment?’

‘Seventy-five thousand francs for the lives of the two people who meant most to me in the world.’

‘And the driver just vanished from view?’

‘Not exactly. The world sometimes works in strange ways. Three weeks after the accident, there was an attempted burglary at the home of Henri Dupre. It was the middle of the night, Dupre surprised the burglar, there was a tussle and Dupre was stabbed in the heart. Fatally.’

‘And you felt avenged?’

‘It counted for something, I suppose — especially as Dupre showed little remorse for the murder of my family. His lawyers did all the dirty work for him — but I never even received a card apologizing for the terrible thing he had done. All I received was a check.’

‘So revenge has its virtues?’

‘The standard moral line on revenge is that it leaves you feeling hollow. What bullshit. Everyone wants the wrongs against them redressed. Everyone wants to “get even”. Everyone wants what you Americans call “payback”. And why not? Had Dupre not been killed, I would have lived my life thinking that he’d gotten away with it. That burglar did me a huge favor: he ended a life that was worth ending. And I was grateful to him.’

‘But did it in any way balm the wound?’

‘Hardly. You might come to terms with the loss of a husband — no matter how much you miss him — but you never get over the death of a child. Never. Dupre’s death didn’t mollify my grief — but it did give me some grim satisfaction. And I’m certain that shocks you.’

‘Part of me wants to say, “Yes, I am appalled …”’

‘And the other part?’

‘Understands exactly why you felt that way.’

‘Because you too want revenge?’

‘I haven’t suffered anything like you have.’

‘True, no one died. But you did suffer the death of your marriage, your career. And your child will not speak with you …’

‘As you reminded me earlier.’

‘As you remind yourself every hour of every day. Because that’s how guilt works.’

I stood up and started to get dressed.

‘Leaving so soon?’ Margit asked, sounding amused.

‘Well, it is close to the “witching hour”, isn’t it?’

‘True — but unusually you’re the one leaving without a shove for a change. Now why might that be?’

I said nothing.

‘Answer this question honestly, Monsieur Ricks. The person — I presume it is a man — who did you harm … Wouldn’t you want harm to befall him?’

‘Absolutely. But I’d never perpetrate it on him.’

‘You’re far too ethical,’ she said.

‘Hardly,’ I said, then added, ‘Three days from now?’

‘You are a fool to be pursuing this.’

‘Yes, I am.’

‘Three days then,’ she said, reaching for her cigarettes.

Later that night, as I sat at my desk in my windowless office, Margit’s story continued to rattle around my head. The sheer terrible randomness of it all — the way life can come completely asunder in a moment — nagged at me all night. It also explained plenty about Margit’s emotional reticence and the way she kept a certain distance from me. The longer I dwelled on it, the more I realized just how haunted she was by this appalling calamity, and how the grief would only end with her own death. Margit was right: there are certain tragedies from which we never recover. We may eventually adjust to the sense of loss that pervades every waking hour of the day. We may accept the desperate sadness that colors all perception. We may even learn to live with the loss. But that doesn’t mean we will ever fully cauterize the wound or shut away the pain in some steel-tight box and consider it vanquished.

I finally got back to work, cranking out the usual thousand words. But when 6 a.m. finally showed up, I couldn’t break free of my confinement, as this was the first night when I agreed to a twelve-hour marathon in exchange for a day off. The extra six hours dragged by. I forced myself to write another thousand words. I read another fifty pages of Simenon’s La Neige etait sale, gripped by his account of France under German occupation. Eventually I found myself pacing the room and actually doing situps on the concrete floor in an attempt to keep blood circulating and my brain awake. There were a few callers in daylight. Their images were clearer on camera. They were all men of seemingly Turkish origin, and they all kept their heads turned downward as they uttered the necessary password into the speakerphone. Who, I often wondered, was Monsieur Monde? Someone you don’t need to know.

When noon arrived, I found myself blinking into the sunlight and needing to take in extended lungfuls of air and staggering home without the usual croissants and remembering to set the clock for 7 p.m. that night, and falling into a vast empty sleep, and waking with a jolt, and thinking how strange my existence was now: an all-night non-job, a sortof girlfriend who would only see me every three days, and the realization that — even though this was allegedly my ‘day off ‘ — I would be staying awake all night, as I couldn’t suddenly break the sleep-by-day schedule I had been living since starting this idiotic, wretched job.

So when I came to during the early evening, I hurried off to the Cinema Grand Action on the rue des Ecoles where a new print of Kubrick’s Spartacus was being shown at 20h15. When it let out at 23h30 I kept thinking, Margit’s apartment is just a five-minute walk from here. But I turned away and found a Mexican place off the boulevard Saint-Germain that did very authentic guacamole (or what I took to be authentic guacamole) and even better margaritas, and wonderful enchiladas washed down with Bohemia beer. The meal cost me fifty euros and I didn’t give a damn, because I had just worked twelve hours, and this was my first night off in almost two months, and I was determined to throw financial caution to the wind tonight and get a little smashed and fall about Paris like a pinball. So when I finished my meal, I stopped in a tabac and bought a Cohiba Robusto and sauntered across the Seine, puffing happily on this absurdly expensive Cuban cigar and eventually reached Chatelet and a string of jazz clubs on the rue des Lombards. As it was almost one thirty in the morning, the guy on the door let me into Sunside without hitting me for the usual twenty-euro cover charge. I threw back a couple of whiskies and listened to a so-so local chanteuse — thin, big frizzy hair, a reedy voice that still somehow managed to swing with the Ellington and Strayhorne standards which she sang with her backing trio. When the set finished and the club emptied, I found myself on foot toward the Tenth arrondissement. It was well after two. This corner of Paris was deserted, bar a few entangled couples, and the street people who would once again be sleeping rough tonight, and the occasional drunk like myself. I followed the boulevard de Sebastopol most of the way home. As I got to Chateau d’Eau the smattering of Africans on the street looked at me as if I was a cop, taking a step back as I strode by. The rue de Paradis was shuttered — the Turkish workingmen’s cafes long closed. Ditto the bobo restaurants. The occasional street lamp cast an oblong shaft of light on the pavement. There was no traffic, no ambient urban noise — just the percussive click of my heels punctuating the night … until I heard the tinny beat of shitty pop music up ahead, and saw that my local dingy bar was still open.

The barmaid — the same Franco-Turkish one I had seen there before — smiled as I entered. Without me asking, she poured me a beer, set it in front of me, and then turned and retrieved two glasses and a bottle and poured out two shots each of a clear liquid. Reaching for a pitcher, she added a drop of water to both drinks. As the liquid went murky, she raised a glass to me and said, ‘Serefe.’

Turkish for ‘cheers’.

I raised my glass and clinked it against hers and, following her example, downed the shot in one go. As it traveled down my throat, all I could taste was its pastis-like flavor. But as soon as it hit my stomach, the alcoholic content kicked in: a one-hundred-and-ten-percent proof burn that made me grab the beer and drain it. The barmaid saw my discomfort and smiled.

‘Raki,’ she said, pouring us two more shots. ‘Dangerous.’

Her name was Yanna. She was the wife of the owner, Nedim, who was back in Turkey helping bury some uncle.

‘You marry a Turk, you find out they are always burying some fucking uncle, or sitting in a corner with a bunch of their friends, conspiring against someone who dared to make some pathetic slight against their family, or—’

‘You’re not Turkish?’ I asked.

‘Supposedly. Both my parents came from Samsun, but they emigrated in the seventies and I was born here. So yes, I am French — but if you are born into a Turkish family, you are never really allowed to escape its clutches. Which is why I ended up marrying Nedim — a second cousin and a fool.’

She clicked her glass against mine and threw back the raki. I followed suit and accepted the bottle of beer she handed me.

‘Raki is good for just one thing,’ she said. ‘Getting smashed.’

‘And every so often,’ I said, ‘we all need to get smashed.’

‘Tout a fait, monsieur. But I have a question. Omar — le cochon — tells me you are American.’

‘Absolutely.’

‘So why do you have to live in his proximity?’

‘Ever heard the expression, “a struggling artist”?’

‘I’ve never met an artist. In this work, the only people you meet are assholes.’

‘Artists can be assholes too.’

‘But they are probably interesting assholes.’

Then, over three rakis — interrupted by the final orders of the two drunks semi-passed out in a corner — she gave me a rambling version of her life. Raised in this ‘shitty arrondissement‘ when it was still primarily Turkish, always getting crap in school for being the child of immigres, working in her father’s little epicerie when she was seventeen, very strict parents, pushed into this arranged marriage with Nedim three years ago (‘My twenty-first birthday present from my fucking parents’).

‘It could be worse,’ she said. ‘At least it’s a bar, and not a laverie.’

But Nedim was a slob who expected her to play the traditional wife when it came to picking up after him. ‘I am also duty-bound to spread my legs and fuck the idiot twice a week … a disgusting experience as the fool always burps just before coming …’

We kept throwing the rakis back, and she kept lighting up cigarettes and coughing. Finally she told the two drunks to beat it. When they had both staggered out, she looked at the mess around her — the dirty glasses, the brimming ashtrays, the tables and counters that needed wiping down, the floor to be swept and mopped — and shuddered.

‘This,’ she said, ‘is the sum total of my life.’

‘I should go,’ I said.

‘Not yet,’ she said, standing up. She walked to the front door, locked it, then pulled down an inside set of shutters. She returned to where I was sitting, flashing me a drunken smile, took my hand and pulled me up from the chair, then placed the same hand under her short skirt and inside her petite culotte. As my index finger touched her slit, it became wet and she uttered a small groan before grabbing my head and shoving her tongue down my throat. I might have been drunk, but I was also cognizant of the fact that I was engaged in an insane activity. But my finger pushed deeper inside her. And her smoky, raki-coated mouth tasted … well, smoky and raki-coated. And the rational side of my brain was being trumped by the intoxicated moron with a hard penis. Before I knew it we were staggering into a dingy back room where there was a cot bed and a sink with rust stains (the small shitty details one notices while locked in a drunken carnal embrace), and she was unbuckling my jeans and I pulled down her panties and she kicked off her shoes, and we collapsed half-clothed on the cot, and I smelled damp from the grungy blanket covering the mattress, and the cot creaked under our combined weight, and when I hesitated from entering her she whispered, ‘It is safe.’ As soon as I was deep within her, she started doing mad, violent stuff like pulling my hair and lacerating my buttock with her nails, and pushing her free hand between us and aggressively rubbing her clitoris as I thrust into her. She must have woken two neighboring arrondissements as she came, then bit down hard on my tongue and wouldn’t let go until I detonated inside of her.

Immediately she stood up and said, ‘I have to clean up now.’

A minute or so later, after I had pulled up my jeans and spat blood into the sink (she had really done a number on my tongue), she hustled me out on to the street without a goodbye — just a fast guilty glance in either direction along the rue de Paradis to make certain no one she knew was about. The shutters came down. I walked a few steps along the street, then leaned against a wall, trying to fathom if what had just happened in the last ten minutes had just happened. But my brain was still too addled from all the booze and the sheer madness of it all. The blood in my mouth was flowing freely now and my tongue suddenly hurt like hell. So I staggered home and went back to my room and ran the tap and gargled with salt water for around two minutes, and spat out the bloodied water, and stripped off my clothes, and took three extra-strength ibuprofen tablets and a Zopiclone. The chemicals did the trick, but when I jolted awake at two, I found that I couldn’t speak.

I discovered this because my wake-up call this morning wasn’t my clock-radio; rather, several loud knocks on my door. As I staggered out of bed, my tongue touched the roof of my parched mouth and immediately recoiled in agony. I went to the little mirror hanging by the kitchen sink and opened my mouth. I shuddered when I saw what was inside. My tongue had taken on a general blue-black appearance and was grotesquely distended. The banging on the door increased. I opened it. Outside stood Omar — in a dirty T-shirt and a pair of cotton drawstring pants with fresh urine stains around the crotch. The first words out of his mouth were, ‘You give me one thousand euros.’

‘What?’ I said, sounding as if my mouth was filled with dental cotton wool. That’s when I realized that speech was virtually impossible.

‘You give me one thousand euros today. Or else you are dead man.’

‘I don’t understand,’ I said, though the sentence came out all muffled and distorted. As in: jenecomprendpas.

‘Why you can’t speak?’

‘Bad cold.’

‘Liar. She bit you, yes?’

Now I was very awake and scared.

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘I see you this morning. Very early. Leave bar.’

‘I wasn’t in a bar …’

‘Bar closed. Shutters down. Shutters then open. She looks out, looks both ways. Coast clear. You come out. Shutters close. Got you.’

‘That wasn’t me.’

‘Bullshit. I am coming down street. I see her open bar. When she gives nervous look, I duck into doorway. Hidden. I see you. Now I tell Nedim — when he comes back next week — that you fucked his wife. How you like that, American? Nedim will cut off your balls. Unless you pay me to keep my mouth closed.’

I slammed the door in his face. He immediately began to pound on it.

‘You pay me one thousand euros by end of the week, or you are man who will lose his balls. You no fuck with me.’

There are moments in life when you feel as if you are in freefall. This downward spiraling motion is underscored with the knowledge that you have stumbled into something so potentially dangerous and maniacal — all because you have engaged in that most commonplace of male displacement activities: thinking with your prick.

I forced myself into the shower and into some clothes and out on to the street. Mr Beard glowered at me when I came into the cafe to collect my pay packet — did he already know what had happened as well? — but we exchanged no words, which was no bad thing just now, as any verbal utterances caused immense pain. My stomach was rumbling, I knew that solid food would also be a problem. So I hit upon a grim option: a chocolate milkshake at the McDonald’s by the Gare de l’Est. It was raining as I entered its portals. At three on a wet afternoon, there were a handful of travelers grabbing fast-food provisions before catching a train. Largely, however, the people huddled at the plastic tables eating plastic food were those who lived on the streets. Or they were immigrants — a melange of African and Middle Eastern faces — who saw this dump as nothing more than a cheap meal. Looking at my fellow diners, all I could feel was a curious solidarity with these people who lived in Paris and yet really lived outside of it; who had few opportunities here; who were quietly ignored or despised by everyone doing better than just ‘getting by’. But in expressing camaraderie with my fellow outsiders, I knew I was playing the hypocrite. After all, I longed for the other side of the Parisian divide — a nice apartment, an intellectual (yet chic) cinephile girlfriend; dinners in good restaurants; drinks at the Flore (and not worrying about the exorbitant prices they charged); a little bit of literary fame and its attendant fringe benefits (invitations to salons du livre ; being asked to write the occasional reflective article for Liberation or Lire; more women). Instead I was a self-marginalized loser — and currently a fearful one, as I wondered if Omar really would shop my ass to Yanna’s husband.

The catastrophist in me invented ten different ruinous scenarios, all of which centered around sexually transmitted diseases and grievous bodily harm being meted out by a gang of angry Turkish gentlemen.

But once the thousand euros was handed over to Omar, then what? Paying a blackmailer does not guarantee the cessation of threats. From my extensive knowledge of film noir and dime-store mysteries, I knew that, au contraire, it usually signaled the start of an intensive campaign of menace. And Omar was stupid enough to think that he was smart enough to get me cornered and keep the hush-money game going for as long as I lived in fear of disclosure.

Which meant that I couldn’t give in to the slob in the first place. But how to cut him off at the pass?

Margit would have an interesting answer to that question. But Margit was the last person to whom I could tell any of this … for obvious reasons. I lived in dread of seeing her in two days’ time, as all sorts of questions would be raised about my distended tongue and the scratch marks on my ass from Yanna’s exceptionally sharp nails.

For the next forty-eight hours, time flowed like cement. Everything seemed interminably long, overshadowed by my fears of disclosure and disease. However, I did do something sensible: I took myself off to a walk-in medical clinic on the boulevard de Strasbourg. The doctor on duty was a thickset man in his mid-fifties with thinning hair and an indifferent seen-it-all countenance. He looked at my tongue and appeared impressed.

‘How did this occur?’

I told him.

‘Ca arrive,’ he said with a shrug, then explained that there was little he could do to cure a badly bitten tongue. ‘Keep rinsing it in salted water to keep the wound clean. Otherwise it must heal on its own. Within a week the swelling will diminish. I would also suggest to your “petite amie” that she doesn’t demonstrate her ardor in such an aggressive way the next time you make love.’

‘There isn’t going to be a next time,’ I said.

Another indifferent shrug. ‘Tres bien, monsieur.’

I then detailed my worry about having unprotected sex with Yanna.

‘She is French?’ he asked.

‘Yes, but her husband is Turkish.’

‘But he lives here?’

‘Yes.’

‘Is she an intravenous drug user?’

‘I don’t think so?’

‘Her husband?’

‘He’s a drunk.’

‘Do you think she sleeps with other men? More specifically, Africans?’

‘She’s a racist.’

‘In my experience, you can be a racist and still have sex with those you allegedly despise. Are you having unprotected sex with anyone else?’

‘Yes, but … I do not think there is any risk involved.’

‘A final question then,’ the doctor asked. ‘Might you have any cuts or wounds in or around your genitalia?’

‘Not to my knowledge. But if you wouldn’t mind taking a look.’

Another shrug — this time accompanied by a bored sigh. He reached behind him and grabbed a small bag from an easy-to-reach pile, opened it and began to pull on surgical gloves, while motioning me to stand up. I dropped my trousers and underwear. The doctor took my limp penis between his latexed fingers and then, using a small pen flashlight, peered around my testicles and crotch. The entire inspection only lasted around thirty seconds and should have been humiliating, but was carried out in such a dispassionate way that he might as well have been examining a turnip.

‘Generally, female-to-male HIV transmission needs some sort of open wound or sore in order to enter the immune system. Yes, it allegedly can swim up the urethra, but you would have to be profoundly unlucky.’

‘I can be profoundly unlucky, Doctor.’

‘The odds are still very small … Still, if you want to be absolutely certain, we can do a blood test now and also screen you for other STDs. And then we can do another in six months’ time — to give you the complete “all-clear”.’

‘I’d like the test.’

‘Tres bien, monsieur …’

Ten minutes later, I was out on the street, a small card in my pocket with a number to ring tomorrow to get the results of the test. I knew that, privately, the doctor regarded me as a man suffering nothing more than a surfeit of guilt. Just as I also knew that when I saw Margit later that afternoon, I would have to make a clean breast of everything. There are certain things about which you can lie. And others …

Forty-five minutes later I was walking obsessively around the Jardin des Plantes, trying to work out how I’d tell Margit what had happened, terrified about how she’d react, and cursing myself for, yet again, detonating a relationship thanks to sexual transgression — a relationship I definitely didn’t want to lose. Do we ever learn anything from our mistakes? Not when it comes to sex. That’s the one arena of bad behavior in which we are recidivists, over and over again.

As I mounted the stairs to Margit’s apartment, I told myself, As long as you’re prepared for the worst, there’s really nothing to fear. But I couldn’t embrace such advice. I was guilty — guilty of so much.

I knocked on the door. A minute went by. She opened it. She was wearing a black dressing gown and smoking a cigarette.

‘Hi there,’ I said, leaning forward to kiss her and wondering if she could hear the blurriness of my speech. She accepted the kiss. I stepped inside. She led me by the hand past the bedroom and into her front room. I sat down in an armchair. Without saying anything she went to the little table where she kept a few bottles of booze and poured me a whisky. She handed it to me. I sipped it and flinched, the alcohol burning my wounded tongue. She sat down opposite me. She smiled. Then she said, ‘So who have you been fucking, Harry?’