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

anxiously waiting for her to stub out. He felt happy, but happy only for what lay ahead. He wanted to be done once and for all with the past and the present.
    â€œThen he was appointed first secretary in Paris, and we had to live at the embassy because the ambassador was a widower and he needed a woman there for the receptions.”
    She was lying. When she spoke to him the first time about Paris, in the diner, she said she’d lived by the Auteuil church in the rue Mirabeau. Hungary had never had an embassy in the rue Mirabeau.
    She went on, “Jean was quite a man, one of the most intelligent I’d ever met …”
    And he was jealous. He resented her for dragging up yet another name.
    â€œHe was a great lord in his own country. You don’t know Hungary—”
    â€œYes, I do.”
    She swept aside the objection by impatiently flicking the ash off her cigarette.
    â€œYou can’t. You’re too French. I’m Viennese and have Hungarian blood in my veins on my grandmother’s side, but even I couldn’t. When I say a great lord, I don’t mean a great lord like in the Middle Ages. I’ve seen him horsewhip his servants. One day when our driver nearly turned us over in the Black Forest, he knocked him down and beat him senseless. He said to me calmly, ‘I’m sorry I don’t have a revolver on me. That lout might have killed you.’”
    And still he lacked the nerve to tell her to shut up.
    It seemed to him that this chatter demeaned them both, that she was demeaning herself by talking just as he was by listening.
    â€œI was pregnant at the time, which explains his anger and brutality. He was so jealous that even a month before I gave birth, when no man would think of looking at me, he kept his eye on me day and night. I wasn’t allowed to go out alone. He locked me in my rooms. He locked up all my shoes and clothes in one room and carried the key around with him.”
    She didn’t understand that it was all wrong, that it was even worse for her to explain. “We lived in Paris for three years.”
    Yesterday, she had said six years. Who was she with the rest of the time?
    â€œThe ambassador, who died last year, was one of our greatest statesmen, an old man of eighty-four. He was like a father to me, since he’d been a widower for thirty years and had no children.”
    You’re lying , he thought.
    Because it was impossible. At least with her. The ambassador could have been ninety, he could have been a hundred, but she wouldn’t have rested until she’d made him pay her homage.
    â€œOften, at night, he’d ask me to read to him. It was one of the few pleasures he had left.”
    He barely kept himself from shouting, “Where were his hands while you were reading to him?” Because it was obvious to him, and it hurt.
    Hurry up , he thought. Get it all out so the whole rotten business can be forgotten.
    â€œBecause of that, my husband claimed that the Paris air was bad for me, and we moved to a villa in Nogent. His mood got gloomier and gloomier, and he got more and more jealous. In the end, I couldn’t stand it any more and ran away.”
    All by yourself? Come on! If she had run away like that on her own, would she have left her daughter behind? If she had asked for a divorce, would she be where she was now?
    He clenched his fists. He wanted to hit her, to avenge them both, him and the husband he utterly detested.
    â€œIs that when you went to Switzerland?” he asked, barely disguising his sarcasm.
    But she understood. He knew she did, since she replied curtly, without going into details: “Not right away. First I lived on the Riviera and in Italy for a year.”
    She didn’t say who she had spent the year with, and didn’t claim to have lived alone.
    He hated her. He wanted to twist her arm back, forcing her to her knees so she would have to beg him to forgive her.
    It was unbelievably