Read Online Three Bedrooms in Manhattan by Georges Simenon - Free Book Online Page A

elevator.”
    â€œIt’s only four floors,” she said. She must have examined the building closely.
    She went up the stairs ahead of him. On the third floor she stepped aside to let him by.
    The first door to the left was J.K.C.’s. The next was Combe’s. But before going to it, he felt he had to stop. He needed to look at her for a long moment, to take her in his arms and to kiss her slowly, deeply, on the lips.
    â€œCome on.”
    The hallway was dim and smelled of poverty. The door was an ugly brown, and the walls were grimy with fingerprints. Slowly he took his key out of his pocket, and with a strained laugh, he said, “The last time I went out, I forgot to turn off the light. I noticed it from the street but I didn’t have the energy to go back upstairs.”
    He pushed open the door. The tiny entry was cluttered with suitcases and clothing.
    â€œCome in.”
    He was afraid to look at her. His hands were shaking.
    He didn’t say a thing. Either he pulled her or he pushed her, he didn’t know which, but in any case he’d brought her to his place. Ashamed, anxious, at last he had asked her to come into his life.
    The still-lighted lamp greeted them. The room was quiet, and the quietness was almost spectral. He had thought it would look sordid, but it was tragic, that was all, full of the tragedy of loneliness and abandonment.
    The unmade bed with a dent in the pillow shaped like his head; the rumpled sheets of his insomnia; the pajamas, the slippers, the limp clothes thrown over the chairs.
    And, on the table, next to an open book, what was left of a cold supper, the dreary meal of a lonely man.
    Suddenly he realized everything he’d escaped from. He stood in the entry, frozen, head bowed, afraid to move.
    He didn’t want to look. Still he saw her, and he knew that she, too, was measuring the depth of his solitude.
    He had thought she would be shocked and resentful.
    She was shocked, but not that much—shocked to find out that his solitude was even more hopeless than her own.
    What she noticed first were the pictures of the children, a boy and a girl.
    â€œYou, too,” she whispered.
    Everything happened desperately slowly. Every tenth of a second counted, the tiniest fractions of time during which so much of the past and so much of the future was in play.
    Combe looked away from his children’s faces. He saw them as unhappy blurs becoming ever more blurred, and he was ashamed. He wanted to say he was sorry, but he didn’t know for what or to whom.
    Slowly, Kay stubbed out her cigarette in an ashtray. She took off her fur coat and hat and stepped behind him to close the door, which he’d left open.
    Then, touching him lightly on the collar, she said, “Darling, take off your coat.”
    She helped him take it off and immediately hung it in its place in the closet.
    She turned to look at him again—human, very much at home. She smiled, and there was something secret, almost joyous in her smile. At last, wrapping her arms around him, she said, “You see, I knew.”

4
    T HEY SLEPT that night like two people stranded in a railway station or in a car broken down by the road. They slept in each other’s arms and, for the first time, they didn’t make love.
    â€œNot tonight,” she had begged in a whisper.
    He understood—at least he thought he understood. They were both exhausted, dazed, as if they had been on an immense journey.
    Had they actually arrived somewhere? They had gone to bed without tidying up the room. And, like people who go on feeling the pitch and roll of a ship for a few days after they return from a cruise, they still seemed to be walking, walking endlessly in the great city.
    For the first time they woke when other people do. Combe glanced up, and he saw Kay opening the door into the hallway. Perhaps the click of the lock had torn him from his sleep, and his first thought was an anxious one.
    But no.