Three Bedrooms in Manhattan by Georges Simenon Read Free Book Online

perhaps even more clearly, walking up Fifth Avenue with a woman clinging to his arm, a woman he didn’t know and with whom he was headed God knew where.
    She interrupted herself. “Am I boring you?”
    â€œNot at all.”
    â€œDo you really want to hear about my childhood?”
    Was he going to say yes or no? He didn’t know anymore. What he did know was that when she spoke he felt a dull nagging pain in the left side of his chest.
    Why? He had no idea. Because he wished his life had begun last night? Perhaps. But it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered now, because he had suddenly decided to stop resisting.
    He listened. He walked. He looked at the luminous globes of the streetlights angling off into infinity, at the taxis sliding silently by, almost always with a man and a woman inside.
    Hadn’t he burned with envy of all of those couples? Wanting a woman on his arm like Kay was now?
    â€œDo you mind stopping here for a moment?”
    It wasn’t a bar this time, but a pharmacy, and she smiled at him. He understood her smile; she wanted to buy a few toiletries. He understood that she had just realized, as he had, how it marked another step in their growing intimacy.
    She let him pay and he was happy to, just as he was happy to hear the clerk call her “ma’am.”
    â€œNow,” she decided, “we can go back.”
    He couldn’t help asking, ironically, and he was sorry as soon as he did: “Without one last scotch?”
    â€œNo more scotch,” she replied seriously. “Tonight I’m more like that girl of sixteen. Do you mind?”
    The night clerk remembered them. How could the fact of seeing the Lotus’s crass purple sign, those few letters over its door, give such pleasure? And it was a pleasure, too, to be greeted as old customers by the shabby, tired-out clerk. To return to the banality of the hotel room and to see two pillows waiting on the made-up bed.
    â€œWhy don’t you take off your coat and sit down?”
    He obeyed. He was somehow touched, and maybe she was, too. He couldn’t tell anymore. There were moments when he hated her and moments, like this one, when he wanted to put his head on her shoulder and cry.
    He was tired but he felt relaxed. He waited, smiling a little, and she caught the smile and understood it, too, since she came over and kissed him for the first time that day, not greedily like the night before, not desperately, but very slowly bringing her lips close to his, hesitating before they touched, then pressing them tenderly together.
    He closed his eyes. When he reopened them, he saw that hers were closed, too, and he was grateful.
    â€œLet go of me now. Stay there.”
    She switched off the overhead light, leaving on only the tiny lamp with its silk shade on the night table. Then she went to the cupboard for the bottle of whiskey they had opened the night before.
    â€œIt’s not the same thing as going to a bar.”
    Already he understood. She filled two glasses, measuring out the whiskey and water as carefully as if following a recipe. She set one glass before him, brushing his forehead with her hand as she did.
    â€œAre you happy?”
    Kicking off her shoes with a now familiar movement, she curled up in a big chair like a little girl.
    Then she sighed, and in a voice he hadn’t heard her use before said, “I’m so happy!”
    They were only a few feet apart, yet they both knew that neither would cross that space. They looked at each other, their eyes half closed, pleased to see in the other’s face the same soft, peaceful light.
    Was she going to start talking again?
    Her lips parted, but only to sing, to barely murmur the song that was now their song.
    And the little tune was so completely transformed that tears came to his eyes, his chest filled with warmth.
    She knew it. She knew everything. She held him to her with the song, with the serious note in her voice, though it