Douglas Kennedy: Woman in the Fifth

‘You don’t have to do this,’ I said, embarrassed by all the personal attention.

‘You will feel better for it.’

He took great care when it came to dragging a razor across my face. After he finished, he brought over the shower hose and rinsed off all the foam and the shampoo from my hair. Then he filled the sink with hot water, submerged a cloth in it, retrieved it, and without squeezing out its excess water, placed it over my face.

‘Now you will lie here, please, for a quarter of an hour,’ Adnan said.

He left the bathroom. I opened my eyes and saw nothing but the textured white of the cloth. I closed them and tried to empty my head; to concentrate on nothing. I failed. But the bath water was balming, and it was good to be clean again. I heard occasional noises from the other room, but Adnan left me be for a long time. Then there was a soft knock at the bathroom door.

‘Ready to get out?’ he asked.

Once again, he had to help me up and wrapped me in one of the thin hotel bath towels before handing me two folded items of clothing.

‘I found these in your things. A pajama bottom and a T-shirt.’

He helped dry me down, then got me dressed and led me back to a bed that had been remade with fresh sheets. They felt wonderfully cool as I slid between them. Adnan positioned the pillows so I could sit up against the headboard. He retrieved a tray that had been left on the desk. He carried it over with care. On it was a tureen, a bowl and a small baguette.

‘This is a very mild bouillon ,’ he said, pouring some into the bowl. ‘You must eat.’

He handed me the spoon.

‘Do you need help?’ he asked.

I was able to feed myself — and the thin bouillon was restorative. I even managed to eat most of the baguette — my hunger overcoming the general lie-there-and-die listlessness I felt.

‘You are being far too nice to me,’ I said.

A small shy nod.

‘My job,’ he said and excused himself. When he returned some minutes later, he was carrying another tray — with a teapot and a cup.

‘I have made you an infusion of verveine ,’ he said. ‘It will help you sleep. But you must first take all your medicines.’

He gathered up the necessary pills and a glass of water. I swallowed them, one by one. Then I drank some of the herbal tea.

‘Are you on duty tomorrow night?’ I asked.

‘I start at five,’ he said.

‘That’s good news. No one has been this nice to me since …’

I put my hand over my face, hating myself for that self-pitying remark — and trying to suppress the sob that was wailing up. I caught it just before it reached my larynx — and took a deep steadying breath. When I removed my hands from my eyes, I saw Adnan watching me.

‘Sorry …’ I muttered.

‘For what?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know … Everything, I guess.’

‘You are alone here in Paris?’

I nodded.

‘It is hard,’ he said. ‘I know.’

‘Where are you from?’ I asked.

‘Turkey. A small village around a hundred kilometers from Ankara.’

‘How many years in Paris?’

‘Four.’

‘Do you like it here?’ I asked.

‘No.’

Silence.

‘You must rest,’ he said.

He reached over to the desk and picked up a remote control, which he pointed at the small television that had been bracketed to the wall.

‘If you are lonely or bored, there is always this,’ he said, placing the remote in my hand.

I stared up at the television. Four pretty people were sitting around a table, laughing and talking. Behind them a studio audience was seated on bleachers, laughing whenever one of the guests made a funny comment — or breaking into loud applause when the fast-talking presenter encouraged them to cheer.

‘I will come back and check on you later,’ Adnan said.

I clicked off the television, suddenly drowsy. I looked at the boxes of medicine again. One of them read, Zopiclone . The name rang some sort of distant bell … something my doctor back in the States might have once recommended when I was going through one of my insomnia jags. Whatever the drug was, it was certainly creeping up on me quickly, blurring the edges of things, damping down all anxieties, diminishing the florescent glow of the room’s blue chandelier, sending me into …

Morning . Or perhaps a moment just before morning. Gray dawn light was seeping into the room. As I stirred, I could sense that I was marginally better. I was able to put my feet on the floor and take slow, old-man steps into the bathroom. I peed. I splashed a little water on my face. I fell back into the blue room. I crawled into bed.

Monsieur Brasseur arrived with breakfast at nine. He knocked twice sharply on the door, then waltzed in without warning, placing the tray on the bed. No hello, no comment allez-vous, monsieur ? Just one question: ‘Will you be staying another night?’

‘Yes.’

He retrieved my bag. I signed another hundred dollars’ worth of traveler’s checks. He picked them up and left. I didn’t see him for the rest of the day.

I managed to eat the stale croissant and the milky coffee. I turned on the television. I channel-surfed. The hotel only had the five French channels. Morning television here was as banal and inane as in the States. Game shows — in which housewives tried to spell out scrambled words and win drycleaning for a year. Reality shows — in which faded actors coped with working on a real-life farm. Talk shows — in which glossy celebrities talked to glossy celebrities, and every so often girls in skimpy clothes would come out and sit on some aging rock star’s lap… .

I clicked off the television. I picked up Pariscope and studied the cinema listings, thinking about all the movies I could be sitting through right now. I dozed. A knock on the door, followed by a quiet voice saying, ‘ Monsieur? ’

Adnan already? I glanced at my watch. Five fifteen p.m. How had the day disappeared like that?

He came into the room, carrying a tray.

‘You are feeling better today, monsieur ?’

‘A little, yes.’

‘I have your clean laundry downstairs. And if you are able to try something a little more substantial than soup and a baguette … I could make you an omelet, perhaps?’

‘That would be very kind of you.’

‘Your French — it is very good.’

‘It’s passable.’

‘You are being modest,’ he said.

‘No — I am being accurate. It needs improvement.’

‘It will get it here. Have you lived in Paris before?’

‘Just spent a week here some years ago.’

‘You picked up such fluent French in just a week?’

‘Hardly,’ I said, with a small laugh. ‘I’ve been taking classes for the past five years back home in the States.’

‘Then you must have known you would be coming here.’

‘I think it was more of a dream … a life in Paris …’

‘A life in Paris is not a dream,’ he said quietly.

But it had been my dream for years; that absurd dream which so many of my compatriots embrace: being a writer in Paris. Escaping the day-to-day routine of teaching at a nowhere college to live in some small, but pleasant atelier near the Seine … within walking distance of a dozen cinemas. Working on my novel in the mornings, then ducking out to a 2 p.m. screening of Louis Malle’s Ascenseur pour l’echafaud before picking up Megan at the bilingual school in which we’d enrolled her.

Yes, Susan and Megan always played a part in this Paris fantasia. And for years — as we took language classes together at the college and even devoted an hour a day to speaking to each other in French — my wife encouraged this dream. But — and there was always a but — we first had to get a new kitchen for our slightly tumbledown house. Then the house required rewiring. Then Susan wanted to wait until we both received tenured positions at the college. But once my tenure came through, she felt we had to find the ‘right time’ to take a sabbatical, and the ‘appropriate moment’ to take Megan out of her local school without damaging her ‘educational and social development’. Susan was always obsessive about ‘getting the timing just right’ on ‘major life decisions’. The problem was, things never went exactly according to Susan’s plan. There was always something holding her back from making the jump. After five years of ‘maybe in eighteen months’ time’, she stopped auditing the language classes and also ended our nightly conversations in French — two events that dovetailed with her withdrawal from me. I kept taking the classes, kept telling myself that, one day, I would get to live and write in Paris. Just as I also kept reassuring myself that Susan’s distancing act was just a temporary thing — especially as she would never acknowledge that she had pulled away from me, and kept insisting that nothing was wrong.