After Claude (4 page)

He took advantage of my physical disability and struck again. “If I presume to like anyone or anything, you go totally out of control. You demand every second of my attention. I am obliged to see nothing, admire nothing, and respond to nothing but you, you and your dazzling insights. I’m sick to death of this aggression that never ends. I want you out.”

I found my voice, cracked but usable. “Stop saying that. You’ll brainwash yourself. Out where?”

“I don’t care. It’s not my problem. You have friends, parents, let them help you.”

“I told you my parents are dead.”

“One day they’re dead, the next day they’re alive. Harriet, I’ve made up my mind. I hoped we could spend a pleasant evening, a normal evening, and then calmly discuss the separation.”

“Ha,” I screamed, as the trusting wife always does when she remembers the preposterous will she signed. “You’ve planned this all along. That’s what you’ve been doing, brooding out here, night after night, instead of facing me, like a man, in bed.”

The full measure of his treachery burst in me like a hurricane.

“Harriet, please be fair.”

Fair? How dare men ask you to be fair, before they throw you in the lion pit.

“There weren’t even any lions in the picture. They were too damn cheap to throw in a few hungry lions. What about the countless Jews who were consumed by lions? They don’t count?”

“You’re not going to pull your banana act on me, sweetheart. No matter how nuts you get, we’re going to have this settled. I want you out of this apartment. It’s my apartment. I took you in because I felt sorry for you. I found you wrecked on the stoop and brought you up here out of kindness. That was supposed to be for one night, remember?”

“Well, how do you think people get together in New York? Were we supposed to be introduced at Tricia Nixon’s wedding? Is that what’s bothering you?”

“What’s bothering me is that six months have passed and you’re still here, like a leech, a parasite, destroying my apartment and my life. How long must I pay for a single act of mercy?”

His distortions, the lies he was telling himself and me, filled me with a cold fury, because, as an American, my war against injustice knows no bounds.

“Mercy. So it was mercy that kept me pinned to your mattress until now? What an extraordinary display of mercy. How Christlike of you, Claude. Thanks to seeing your film biography this evening, I suddenly understand it all. But they didn’t go far enough. The schmuck who played you only kissed lepers; you, on the other hand, screwed one.”

“Stop screaming. It’s one in the morning.”

“You might have considered the hour before dropping your bomb, my little lamb of peace.”

“Enough, Harriet. You made your point. I was not trying to deny that I found you attractive.”

“Nonsense. You weren’t attracted to me. You were attracted to this corpse you found on your doorstep. You were performing a miracle, not a marathon, don’t belittle yourself.”

“I said you made your point, but whatever I was doing, you didn’t seem to object too much.” He had to throw in the self-congratulations, because like all Frenchmen, he thought he had the patent on sex.

“You begged me to stay here while you were breaking the world’s all-time mercy record.”

“I didn’t beg you, ever. This is getting us nowhere. Whatever made me hope you’d be reasonable?” he lamented. “I let you stay here because I was in and out of the city, and it seemed cruel to kick you out. Every time I’d had it up to here,” he drew a line on his forehead where his brain should have been, “I had to leave New York, and then I’d come back and foolishly get involved with you, but we always agreed that it was a temporary arrangement, and now it’s over, no matter how you exaggerate to serve your peculiar views.”

“Peculiar!” I stood up, wishing my wrath could be backed with some solid support, such as a machine gun.

“It’s only a word,” he said nervously and got up from the conference table, thinking perhaps that in the ten measly seconds it took him to get a beer, I would be packed and out of the apartment. His wish did not come true.

“Well? Do you just go around calling people peculiar? It seems very peculiar to me, and I use the word advisedly, that any time we leave this squalor, be it to see a lousy movie or one of your lousy friends, you become hysterical. It also seems to me that you feel very free to say anything you want about all the dirty Jews who are conspiring you out of being the Dalai Lama of television, but if I make one tiny observation about a movie that had Christ in it, we’re having a religious war. Now
that
I call peculiar, and I’d like to ask you if your idea of my role in this household is to be your captive, your echo, your one-woman harem, because if it is, Claude, I warn you, a person such as myself does not transform into an ignorant Arab just for the asking.”

“How could I have hoped she’d be sensible?” he muttered.

“You’ve been doing nothing but hope for the last couple of weeks. Did you perhaps find yourself hoping that I’d be hit by a bus?”

“You won’t believe me, but I don’t enjoy hurting you.”

“But it appears, Prince of Peace, you don’t enjoy any of the activities I thought you were enjoying.”

“Enough,” he yelled and leaped out of his chair. For a dreadful moment I thought he was going to resort to physical violence. I burst into tears.

“Oh, Harriet,” he put his hand on my shaking shoulders, “it’s not the end of the world, baby. Why are you reacting like this? It’s not as if we had planned to be together forever. You know my contract finishes in six months and I go back to France. So it’s ending sooner than you expected, that’s all.”

I reached up and grabbed his arm, clinging to it as though it were the overhanging branch between me and the fatal drop.

“Darling, is that what’s bothering you? Are you afraid that in six months we’ll be too attached to each other? That it will be too difficult then to make a clean break? Because if so, I assure you, in six months I will wave you off gladly, smilingly, like a happy native seeing the beloved explorer returning to his homeland, laden down with all the loot he can load into his canoe. Believe me, Claude, my object is not to be one of the treasures you steal,”

“What are you talking about?” The phony sympathy was out of his voice.

“I won’t feel you’re abandoning me when you leave me behind to return to your rightful place as head of the Communist Party and possibly even to marry a certified virgin of good family. Immense progress could be made in the next six months. Look at the marvelous changes already.” I tried desperately to think of one improvement in Claude, but I needed time to reflect. After all, life is not a quiz show.

He shook his arm free.

“No,” he said and began pacing the living room, holding his precious beer can. And then he mumbled, as if to himself, “My friends warned me. I have no one to blame but myself.”

“Your friends,” I snorted. Because let me tell you all about Claude’s wonderful friends, one day when you feel like being sick, all of whom are French and all of whom detest me, because instead of being an heiress, I am just an average American girl.

“So you’re letting that pack of snobs brainwash you?”

“How are they brainwashing me? Are they coming up here to tell me that I can’t find a clean dish in the filthy kitchen? That the bed hasn’t been made since you moved in here? That all my beautiful plants are dead?”

“They are not dead. Stop saying they’re dead. Plants are very sensitive to suggestions.” I rushed to a hanging window plant and stroked its brown leaves. “You’re alive, darling. Don’t listen to him. He should be as alive as you are.”

But instead of profiting from my sunny disposition, Claude threw up his hands in a parody of Gallic disdain and from between pursed lips muttered, “It’s too absurd.”

“You’re the one who’s being absurd, running away from the most authentic, probably the most meaningful relationship you will ever experience, because it wasn’t arranged by your mother.”

I tried to embrace him, but he paced through my arms as if they were shadows.

“Darling, we have so little time left and so much work to do. You have so much growing, so much expanding before you. How can you cheat yourself of such a rare, such a blessed opportunity, out of some old-fashioned notion of chivalry?”

“You win,” he said. I had the chilling impression that whatever I was winning, it was not Claude. He was back at his post near the door.

“With your permission, I’d like to go for a walk and think over all the good you’ve done for me.”

“A walk? Are you crazy? It’s a hundred degrees out there.”

I could not bear for him to leave the apartment. It’s hard to explain how a woman of my potentials found herself in such a position, but at that low point in my life, I suffered a kind of passionate concern for Claude, and I had never felt it more strongly than at the moment the suicidal maniac yanked open the door. We were both engulfed in a repulsive gush of steaming stale air. It emphasized the coolness of the living room. Claude closed the door, as if against a blizzard of pollution, and leaned against it.

“Please, come to bed,” I said.

“To bed, with you?” Claude screwed up his classic features as if he were playing games in front of a carnival mirror. “I’d rather sleep on a sewer than sleep with you!”

That business of sleeping on sewers happens to be a French tradition, so I didn’t take offense.

“It’s very late. We can continue the discussion tomorrow.”

“No more discussions, Harriet. Tomorrow is Friday, you’ll be out of the apartment by Monday morning.”

“Of course,” I said gently, “and now to bed.”

“Go to bed,” he said coldly.

“Not without you.”

“I’m telling you for the last time to get to bed.”

I obeyed the bully like a punished child. The bedroom was warm and sticky, which was why I fought for the single air conditioner to be in constant action. I threw my kimono on the bentwood rocker and, in the dark, crawled into the desolate bed. I lay there listening to Claude puttering around in the living room. He had been pulling that act night after night, waiting for me to fall asleep. Now I knew what he had been plotting. My body heaved with a childish dry sob. I felt an icy fury wail through me. I wanted Claude to come to me. I ESP’d him to come into the bedroom and need me, but Claude stubbornly brooded in the living room. I lit a Marlboro and disciplined my mind to empty itself of all unpleasant feelings toward Claude. It wasn’t easy, but this was not the time to react like a hysterical woman and think in terms of tired clichés, such as rejection. I meticulously reran Claude’s frenzied accusations through my total-recall memory. The machine faltered at the word boring and would not play on.

Boring? What boring? It is a fact that Frenchmen find everything except the sound of their own voices boring. If not for an inborn craving for flattery, French ears would have gone the way of fins, tails, and tonsils. Was that a clue? Had I, in my frank American fashion, neglected to lay on the adulation that Claude felt was his birthright?

I felt a wave of gratitude, but toward whom or what escaped me. After the initial blackout, my brain was again functioning. Was Claude out there sulking because he felt cheated of the endless declarations of gratitude that make a Frenchman feel alive? It so happens that gay and outgoing as I am in routine matters, in the privacy of bed, I am your silent, giving, inscrutable mystery guest. I am your bottomless pit of receptivity. Was the poor devil interpreting my modesty as indifference? I would force myself to be more demonstrative. Lucky Claude. Help was on the way.

I killed my last cigarette of the day and must have dozed off almost immediately. As soon as Claude slipped in beside me, I was electrically alert. Dawn was seeping through the burlap drapes.

“What time is it?” I whispered, since I never use blunt conversational tones in bed.

He wasn’t divulging classified information. He turned on his side and pretended to drop into a deep sleep. I nestled along his warm back. It stiffened. I blew a breath of soft air on his neck.

“Don’t,” he said in an agonized whisper.

Since it was already the next day, I decided I had coped enough for one night.

T
HAT NIGHT
I had my usual dreamless sleep. I hardly ever dream, which is probably a reflection of the fact that I live my life fully and consciously. I solve my problems while awake and, as a result, spend my sleeping hours resting, not receiving inane messages. My ex-best friend, Rhoda-Regina, who has squandered her last ten years of earnings on analysts, due to her incredible vanity regarding her dreams, used to give me a daily recounting of the marvels she had produced during the night.

How often I would tell her—”Rhoda,” I would say, “do yourself a favor. Go to bed with a real man and you won’t need to waste your time on nightmares.”

Naturally this sensible advice was resented, because Rhoda-Regina expected me to break into rapturous applause and shouts of Bravo, as if each of her dreams rated four stars.

Rhoda-Regina would stagger around her apartment for hours, stupefied, eyelids glued together, from the dissipation of her private orgy.

Ideally I like to begin my day with a stimulating quiz show. I turned on the set and got Concentration, which is a show that doesn’t require brains, but is nevertheless a pleasant warm-up for Sale of the Century, which immediately follows. The drama of my day begins to build as the stakes go up, the questions get tougher, and the opponents confront each other with polite envy and rage.

I couldn’t concentrate on Concentration and remembered, as if I had recorded the entire scene, Claude’s incredible breakdown of the previous evening.

“Claude,” I hollered. “Claude, are you here?”

No answer.

I untangled myself from the mess of crumpled sheets and dived into a bundle of rags piled high on the bentwood rocker. My Japanese kimono, looking more and more like a captured flag, bled and spat upon, was right on the top where I’d placed it. I tied it securely around my hips and went directly to the air conditioner. Sure enough, it wasn’t in operation.