The Woman In The Fifth Read online

  After everything arrived, I spent the rest of the afternoon putting my room together. The outside toilet was another matter. It was an old crapper – with a fractured black plastic seat – located in a tiny closet, with unpainted walls and a bare lightbulb strung overhead. The bowl was caked with fecal matter, the seat crisscrossed with dried urine stains. It was impossible to stay more than a minute inside this cell without wanting to retch. So I hit the street, finding a hardware shop further down the rue du Faubourg Poissonnière. Within five minutes I had brought a toilet seat, a toilet brush and an industrial bleach super fort which the guy in the shop assured me would not just burn away all the residue stains, but would also remove two layers of epidermis if it came in contact with any exposed skin. So he insisted that I spend an extra two euros on a pair of rubber gloves as well.

  Half an hour later, not only was a new seat installed, but the nuclear-powered bleach had also done its chemical magic. The bowl was virtually white again. Then I scoured down the toilet floor. After that was finished, I dashed out again to the rue du Faubourg Poissonnière and found an electronics shop. After a bit of haggling, the owner agreed to part with an old-model Sony boom box for fifty euros. I also picked up a baguette, some ham and cheese, and a litre of cheap red wine, and returned home. I hung the lampshades in my room and the toilet. Then, for the rest of the evening, I cleaned every inch of the chambre de bonne, while blaring the local jazz station on my newly acquired stereo. Halfway through my purge of every bit of grime from the room, I wondered, Aren't you just being a little manic? But I pushed aside such self-reflection and kept cleaning. By midnight the place was spotless, my laptop was set up on the desk, and I was making lists of things I still needed to buy. I felt my forehead. The fever was still there, but seemed low-lying. I took a shower – the hot water sputtering out in weak bursts. I dried off, I climbed into the narrow bed. I passed out.

  Until Omar started taking a shit, and then banged on my door and came spilling into the room.

  'You change everything,' he said, looking around.

  'You know, it's kind of late.'

  'This nice now,' he said.

  'Thank you.'

  'You sell my television to buy all this?'

  'Like I told you, Omar, Monsieur Sezer has the television.'

  'How you know my name?' he demanded, suddenly fixing me with a drunk/paranoid stare.

  'Adnan told me—'

  'You turn Adnan over to the police—'

  'That's not what happened,' I said, trying to stay calm.

  'You want his room, you call the police, they catch him in the métro. And then you sell my television.'

  He shouted this last line, then looked bemused – as if he was a spectator at this event, suddenly surprised to hear himself yelling.

  'Look,' I said, trying to sound even-tempered, reasonable. 'I was a hotel guest just until this morning. As you must have heard, I was sick for the past week. I didn't even know where Adnan lived until he told me about a chambre de bonne down the corridor from his own—'

  'So that's when you decide to take it from him.'

  'My name's Harry, by the way,' I said, hoping this change of conversational tack might throw him. He ignored my extended hand.

  'Sezer has television?' he asked.

  'That's what I said.'

  'I kill Sezer.'

  He burped. Loudly. He fished out a cigarette and lit it. I silently groaned. I hate cigarette smoke. But it didn't strike me as the right moment to ask him not to light up in my little room. He took a half-drag on his cigarette, the smoke leaking out of his nostrils.

  'You American?' he asked.

  'That's right.'

  'So fuck you.'

  He smiled as he said this – a crapulous smile, his eyes gauging my reaction. I remained impassive.

  'Adnan a dead man. When they send him back to Turkey, he dies . . . in prison. Four years ago, he kills a man. A man who fucks his wife. Then he finds out the man does not fuck his wife. But the man still dead. Bad. Very bad. That's why he come to Paris.'

  Adnan – a killer on the run? It didn't seem possible. But, then again, nothing about this set-up seemed possible . . . and yet, it was the reality into which I had slipped.

  The cigarette fell from Omar's lips on to my just-cleaned floor. He ground it out with his shoe. Then, with another loud, aromatic burp, he abruptly left, reeling into his adjoining room. Immediately, my housekeeping instincts took over. I opened the window to air out the smoke. I picked up the cigarette butt and used kitchen paper to clean up the flattened ash on the linoleum. Then I went outside to use the toilet and found Omar's large unflushed turd greeting me in the bowl.

  I pulled the chain – and felt myself tensing up into a serious rage. But I forced myself to pee and get back into my room before the rage transformed into something dangerous. When I was inside, I turned on the stereo and boomed jazz – in the angry hope that it might disturb Omar. But there were no bangs on the wall, no shouts of 'Turn that crap down'. There were just the edgy dissonances of Ornette Coleman, penetrating the Parisian night. Eventually, his grating riffs became too much for me, and I snapped off the radio and sat in the half-darkness of my room. I stared out at all the minor scenic adjustments I had made . . . and considered the energy I'd expended to try to set up house in a place which could never be anything more than a grungy cell. That's when I started to cry. I had wept here and there over the past few weeks. But this was different. This was pure grief . . . for what I had lost, for what I had been reduced to. For a good fifteen minutes, I couldn't stop the deluge. I lay prostrate on the bed, clutching on to a pillow, as all the accumulated anger and anguish came flooding out. When I finally subsided, I felt drained and wrung out . . . but not purged. This kind of grief doesn't go away after a good cry . . . as much as I wished it would.

  Still, the cessation of my sobs did force me to pull off my T-shirt and jockey shorts and stand under the sputtering shower head for a few minutes, towel myself down, then drop a Zopiclone and finally surrender to chemical sleep.

  I didn't wake up until noon, my head fogged in, my mouth dry. When I went outside to use the toilet, I found the seat crisscrossed with urine. Omar, in true dog style, had marked his territory.

  After brushing my teeth in the kitchen sink, I dressed, scooped up several invoices from yesteday and went downstairs and rang the bell for Sezer Confection. Mr Tough Guy answered the door, the usual scowl on his face.

  'I want to speak with your boss,' I said.

  The door shut. Two minutes later it opened again. He motioned for me to follow him. Comme d'habitude, Sezer was sitting at the table, the cellphone on the desk, his gaze never leaving the window as I walked in.

  'Tell me,' he said.

  'I replaced the seat and hung up a lampshade in the toilet on my floor.'

  'Congratulations.'

  'The seat, the brush and the lampshade cost me nineteen euros.'

  'You expect reimbursement?'

  'Yes,' I said, putting the receipts on his desk. He looked at them, gathered them together, then crumpled them up into a ball and tossed it on to the floor.

  'I don't think so,' he said.

  'The toilet seat was broken, there was a bare lightbulb—'

  'No other tenants complained.'

  'Omar, that pig, would happily eat out of the toilet . . .'

  'You do not like your neighbor?'

  'I don't like the fact that he woke me in the middle of last night, demanding his television, which you took away.'

  'No, I didn't.'

  'All right, Joe Smoothie here took it away.'

  Sezer said something in Turkish to Mr Tough Guy. He shrugged his shoulders in bemusement, then hissed something back.

  'My colleague informs me that he didn't touch the television,' Sezer said.

  'He's lying,' I suddenly said in English.

  Sezer looked at me and smiled.

  'Out of respect for your safety I won't translate that,' he said back
in perfect English. 'And don't expect me to speak your language again, American.'

  'You're a crook,' I said, sticking to my native tongue.

  'Tant pis,' he said, then continued on in French. 'But now Omar is upset. Because I told him that you sold the television to buy the new toilet seat. And he is such an ignorant peasant that he believed such stupidity. My advice to you is: buy him a new television.'

  'No way,' I said, returning to French.

  'Then don't be surprised if he comes home drunk again tonight and tries to break down your door. He is a complete sauvage.'

  'I'll take my chances.'

  'Ah, a tough character. But not so tough that you couldn't stop crying last night.'

  I tried not to look embarrassed. I failed.

  'I don't know what you're talking about,' I said.

  'Yes, you do,' he said. 'Omar heard you. He said you cried for almost a half-hour. The only reason he didn't come looking for you this morning to demand his television money is because the idiot felt sorry for you. But, trust me, by tonight he will be in a rage again. Omar lives in a perpetual rage. Just like you.'

  With that last line, Sezer had trained his gaze on me. It was like having a white-hot light shined in your eyes. I blinked and turned away.

  'So why were you crying, American?' he asked.

  I said nothing.

  'Homesick?' he asked.

  After a moment, I nodded. He took his gaze off me and returned it to the window. And said, 'We are all homesick here.'

  Six

  LA VIE PARISIENNE.

  Or, to be more specific about it: ma vie parisienne.

  For my first weeks on the rue de Paradis, it generally went like this:

  I would get up most mornings around eight. While making coffee I would turn on France Musique (or France Bavarde, as I referred to it, since the announcers seemed less interested in playing music than in endlessly discussing the music they were about to broadcast). Then I'd throw on some clothes and go downstairs to the boulangerie on the nearby rue des Petites Écuries and buy a baguette for sixty centimes before heading down to the market on the rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis. While there, I'd shop carefully. Six slices of jambon, six slices of Emmenthal, four tomatoes, a half-dozen eggs, 200 grams of haricots verts (I quickly learned how to calculate metrically), 400 grams of some sort of cheap white fish, 200 grams of the cheapest cut of steak that didn't look overtly rancid, three liters of vin rouge, a half-liter of milk, three liters of some generic bottled water, and I'd have enough food to live on for three days. And the cost of this shopping expedition would never be more than thirty euros . . . which meant that I could feed myself for around sixty euros a week.

  On the days that I bought food, I'd be back in the apartment by twelve thirty. Then I would open my laptop and let it warm up while making another coffee and telling myself that it was just a matter of five hundred words. As in: two typed pages. As in: the daily quota I had set myself for writing my novel.

  Two pages, six days a week, would equal twelve pages. As long as I kept up this output without fail, I'd have a book within twelve months. And no, I didn't want to consider the fact that I only had enough money to cover a pretty basic existence for the three months of rent I had paid. I just wanted to think about achieving the daily quota. Five hundred words . . . the length of many an email I used to bang out in less than twenty minutes. . . .

  Five hundred words. It was nothing, really.

  Until you started trying to turn that five hundred words into fiction, day in, day out.

  My novel . . . my first novel . . . the novel I told myself twenty years ago that I would write. It was going to be an Augie March for our times; a large, sprawling, picaresque Bildungsroman about growing up awkward in New Jersey, and surviving the domestic warfare of my parents and the dismal conformism of sixties suburbia.

  For months – during the worst of the nightmare into which I had been landed – I kept myself alive with the idea that, once I negotiated an escape route out of hell, I'd find a quiet place in which to get it all down on paper, and finally demonstrate to the world that I was the serious writer I always knew myself to be. I'll show the bastards is a statement uttered by someone who has suffered a setback . . . or, more typically, has hit bottom. But as a resident of the latter category, I also knew that, rather than being some EST-style rallying cry, it was a howl from the last-chance saloon.

  Five hundred words. That was the quotidian task, and one which I knew I could fulfill . . . because I had nothing else to do with my time.

  Nothing except go to the cinema. The majority of my free time outside my chambre was spent haunting all those darkened rooms around town which cater to film junkies like myself. The geography of Paris was, for me, defined by its cinemas. Every Monday I'd spend sixteen euros on a carte orange hebdomadaire – a weekly travel card, which gave me access to all métros and buses within the Paris city limits. The card let me whizz around town at will – all the travels outside my quartier largely pertaining to my cinema habit. Once the five hundred words were down on the computer, I'd be free to leave the room and begin the movie-going day. The Fifth was my preferred terrain, as there were over fifteen cinemas in a square mile. Most of them specialized in old stuff. At the Action Écoles, there was always a director's festival in progress: Hitchcock this week, Kurosawa the next, alternating with a season of Anthony Mann Westerns. Down the road at Le Reflet Medicis, I spent a very happy three days watching every Ealing Comedy ever made, finding myself in floods of tears at the end of Whisky Galore . . . more an indication of my fragile state than of the film's emotional headiness. A few streets away, at the Accatone, they were always showing one of Pasolini's stranger explorations of the out-there frontiers of human behavior. I could make it from the Accatone to Le Quartier Latin in about three minutes for a Buñuel season. I could stroll over into the Sixth to nose around the film noir rarities at the Action Christine. Or, best of all, I could jump the métro to Bercy and hide out at the Cinémathèque until midnight.

  Every day, I'd spend at least six hours at the movies. But before heading out on this daily movie marathon, I'd check my email.

  The Internet café was located on the rue des Petites Écuries. It was a small storefront operation. There were a dozen computers positioned on unvarnished wooden cubicles, fronted by grubby orange plastic chairs. Behind this was a small bar which served coffee and booze. It cost one euro fifty an hour to check email and surf the Net. There was always a bearded guy in his thirties behind the bar. He looked Turkish, but spoke good French – though our conversations were always limited to a few basic pleasantries and the exchange of money for an Internet password or a coffee. Whenever I showed up, he was always on his cellphone, deep in some rapid-fire conversation – a conversation which turned into a low whisper as I bought my password and settled down in front of a computer. I could always see him studying me as I logged on – and wondered if he could gauge my disappointment as I opened my AOL mailbox and found no news from my daughter.

  I'd been writing Megan twice a week since arriving in Paris. In my emails I asked her to please try to understand that I never meant to hurt her; that she remained the most important person in my life. Even if she now hated me for what had happened, I would never cease to love her and hoped that communication could be somehow re-established.