Three Bedrooms in Manhattan Read Free

seedy hotel room. Not long afterward, they make love in Combe’s rented room, which seals Combe’s sense of destiny:
    For months now, Combe’s life had been going nowhere. But, until two days ago, he had at least been walking stubbornly in one direction.
    On this chilly October morning, he was a man who had cut all the threads, a man approaching fifty, without ties to anything—not to family, profession, country, himself, and definitely not to a home. His only connection was to a complete stranger, a woman sleeping in his room in a seedy hotel.
    The third room in Manhattan will be Kay Miller’s room, to which the lovers come as at the end of an arduous pilgrimage.
    Three Bedrooms is a departure for Simenon, in that his protagonist isn’t an ordinary bourgeois jolted out of his routine, stuporous life, but a “famous” man fleeing humiliation. (At this time, Simenon had been accused of wartime collaboration, charges which would later be dropped.) Where most of Simenon’s novellas are set in Europe, Three Bedrooms is pointedly set in several selected Manhattan bars, Greenwich Village, Rockefeller Center, on Fifth Avenue, and in a cheap hotel called the Lotus. These settings, deftly rendered, are cinematic backgrounds for the lovers’ escalating, if somewhat mysterious, relationship, which endures through Combe’s obsessive jealousy (a trait of Simenon’s) and Kay Miller’s distracting mannerisms (perhaps in emulation of the real-life Denyse, Kay Miller eats, drinks, and smokes cigarettes with exasperating slowness). The author is considerably challenged to make the reader feel the intensity of his lovers’ attraction for each other. Lacking overt drama, Three Bedrooms is perhaps best described as a memoirist work: it’s as if Simenon, master of irony, is overcome by wonder at what is happening to him, succumbing to romantic infatuation in jaded middle age. There is something very Gallic about Three Bedrooms , in the mode of the fated lovers of, for instance, Truffaut’s Jules et Jim . For here, for once, male skepticism is countered by female resiliency and good humor. The drift toward entropy and disaster is subverted. Though in the author’s own turbulent life his relationship with Denyse Ouimet would end tragically, as Denyse lapsed by degrees into psychosis, and their daughter Marie-Jo committed suicide, in Three Bedrooms all is new, yet to be discovered:
    Tomorrow would be a new day. Now it was dawn, and far off, you could hear the city coming to life.
    Why hurry? The day was theirs, and the days that would follow. The city no longer frightened them, not this one and not any other.
    â€”J OYCE C AROL O ATES

THREE BEDROOMS IN MANHATTAN

1
    HE WOKE up suddenly at 3:00 A.M., dead tired, got dressed, and almost went out without his tie, in slippers, coat collar turned up, like people who walk their dogs late at night or very early in the morning. Then, when he was in the courtyard of the building, where after two months he still couldn’t bring himself to feel at home, he glanced upward mechanically and realized that he’d forgotten to turn out his light, but he didn’t have the energy to climb back up the stairs.
    What were they doing, up there in J.K.C.’s apartment? Was Winnie vomiting yet? Probably. Moaning, at first softly, then more loudly, until at last she burst into an endless fit of tears.
    His footsteps resounded in the nearly empty streets of Greenwich Village, and he was still thinking about the couple who once more had made it impossible for him to sleep. He had never seen them. He didn’t even know what the initials J.K.C. stood for. He’d read them, painted in green, on his neighbor’s door.
    And he knew, after passing by one morning when the door was open, that the floor was black, probably varnished—a glistening black lacquer that was all the more striking in contrast to the red furniture inside.
    He knew a