Three Bedrooms in Manhattan Read Free Page B

pulled up to the sidewalk and a dozen nightclub patrons rushed in its direction. Not without difficulty, the cab drove off again, empty. Perhaps nobody was going the right way.
    Two wide streets, almost deserted, with garlands of luminous globes running down the sidewalks.
    On the corner, its high windows lit violently, aggressively, with boastful vulgarity, was a sort of long glass cage where people could be seen as dark smudges and where he went in just so as not to be alone.
    Stools anchored to the floor along an endless counter made of something cold and plastic. Two sailors swayed drunkenly, and one of them shook his hand solemnly, saying something Combe failed to understand.
    It wasn’t on purpose that he sat down beside the woman. He realized it only when the white-coated black waiter was standing in front of him, impatient for his order.
    The place smelled of fairgrounds, of lazy crowds, of nights when you stayed out because you couldn’t go to bed, and it smelled like New York, of its calm and brutal indifference.
    Picking at random, he ordered grilled sausages. Then he looked at his neighbor and she looked at him. She had just been served fried eggs, but she hadn’t touched them. She lit a cigarette slowly and deliberately, leaving a trace of her lipstick on the paper.
    â€œYou’re French?”
    She asked the question in French, a French that at first he thought betrayed no accent.
    â€œHow’d you know?”
    â€œI didn’t. As soon as you came in, even before you said anything, I just thought you were French.”
    She added, a hint of nostalgia in her smile, “Paris?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œWhich part?”
    Did she see his eyes dim slightly?
    â€œI had a villa in Saint-Cloud … You’ve been there?”
    She recited, as they do on the Paris riverboats, “Pont de Sèvre, Saint-Cloud, Point-du-Jour …”
    Then, in a lower voice: “I lived in Paris for six years. Do you know the church in Auteuil? My apartment was next door, on the corner of rue Mirabeau, a few steps from the Molitor swimming pool.”
    How many people were in this diner? Ten at most, set apart from one another by empty stools and by another emptiness, indefinable and hard to pierce, which perhaps emanated from each of them.
    Two black men in white overcoats linked them together—nothing else. From time to time one of the two men would turn to a kind of trap and take out a plate of something hot, before sliding it down the counter to one of the customers.
    Why, despite the blinding brightness, did everything look gray? It was as if the painfully sharp lights were helpless to dispel all the darkness the people had brought in from the night outside.
    â€œYou’re not eating?” he said, since silence had fallen.
    â€œI’m in no hurry.”
    She smoked like American women—the same gestures, the same pouting lips you saw on magazine covers and in movies. She struck the same poses, too, shrugging her fur coat off her shoulders to reveal her black silk dress, crossing her long legs in their sheer stockings.
    He didn’t need to turn to check her out. A mirror ran the length of the diner, and they could see themselves sitting side by side. The image was unflattering, almost distorted.
    â€œYou’re not eating, either,” she said. “Have you been in New York long?”
    â€œAbout six months.”
    What made him introduce himself just then? His vanity, of course—he was sure he was going to regret it.
    â€œFrançois Combe.” His voice as he said it wasn’t nearly casual enough.
    She must have heard him. She didn’t seem surprised. And yet she’d lived in France.
    â€œWhen were you in Paris?”
    â€œLet’s see … The last time was three years ago. I passed through on my way from Switzerland, but didn’t stay long.”
    Immediately, she added, “You’ve been to Switzerland?”
    Without