Three Bedrooms in Manhattan by Georges Simenon

and silently.
    He was waiting without moving for the touch of her hand on his shoulder. He kept staring across the street at the bearded tailor, who was smoking an enormous porcelain pipe.
    She whispered, “Are you still very unhappy?”
    He shook his head, but he wasn’t going to turn around.
    â€œAre you sure you don’t love her anymore?”
    And he lost his temper. He turned now, eyes full of fury.
    â€œYou idiot! Don’t you get it?”
    Because she had to understand. It was too important, more important than anything in the world. If she couldn’t understand, who would?
    Always this compulsion to blame everything on whatever was handy, to blame it all on a woman.
    He paced feverishly. He hated her so much he refused to look at her.
    â€œCan’t you see that doesn’t matter? What matters is me! Me! Me!” He almost screamed. “Me, all alone, if that’s what you want to hear. Me, naked and all alone, living here, yes, for six months! If you don’t see that, you … you …”
    And he nearly shouted, “You aren’t worthy of being here!”
    But he caught himself. He fell silent, furious, scowling, like a child after a temper tantrum.
    He wondered what Kay was thinking, what expression she was wearing, but he refused to look, staring at anything but her, at the stains on his wall. He shoved his hands in his pockets.
    Why wasn’t she helping? Why couldn’t she say the right thing? Did she think it all came down to stupid sentimentality, did she really think that his drama was just the vulgar drama of someone whose wife had cheated on him?
    He hated her. He detested her. Yes, he detested her. He tilted his chin to the left. When he was small, his mother used to say she could tell when he was up to no good because he cocked his head to the left.
    He stole a glance. And he saw that she was smiling and crying at the same time. In her face, where he could make out the tracks of two tears, he read such joy and tenderness that he didn’t know what to do. He didn’t know how to look.
    â€œCome here, François.”
    Calling him that—she was too smart not to realize how dangerous that was right now. Was she so sure of herself?
    â€œCome here.”
    She spoke to him like a stubborn child.
    â€œCome on.”
    Reluctantly, he obeyed.
    She should have been ridiculous, in her dressing gown that swept the floor and those big men’s slippers, without makeup, her hair in a mess.
    But she wasn’t, and he moved toward her, still looking surly.
    â€œCome.”
    She took his head in her hands. She pushed it against her shoulder, pressing his cheek to hers. She held it there, almost by force, as if to fill him, bit by bit, with her heat and her presence.
    He kept one eye open. Inside was a block of anger he meant to keep intact.
    â€œYou weren’t as alone as I was,” she said. She said it softly. He wouldn’t have heard the words if her lips hadn’t been by his ear.
    He stiffened; she must have felt him stiffen. But she was sure of herself, sure at least that the admission of their loneliness would make them indispensable to each other from now on.
    â€œI have to tell you something, too.”
    It was only a whisper, and stranger still, a whisper in broad daylight, in a sunlit room with no soft music in the background, nothing to help you escape yourself. A whisper in front of a window framing a shabby old Jewish tailor.
    â€œI know I’m going to hurt you, because you’re jealous. I’m glad you’re jealous. But I have to tell you anyhow. When we met …”
    And she didn’t say “the day before yesterday,” for which he was grateful, because he didn’t want to think about how short a time they’d known each other.
    She said, “When we met”—and she said it even more softly, so that what she was confiding to him now seemed to vibrate within his