Three Bedrooms in Manhattan by Georges Simenon Page B

you’re going to the studio. Come back whenever you want. I’ll be here.”
    She knew he was frightened. She was so sure of it that words weren’t enough to persuade him of her promise. She held him in her arms.
    â€œGo on, François, hinaus !” It was a word from the first language she’d ever spoken. “Off you go. And don’t expect to find a big lunch when you come home.”
    They were both thinking of Fouquet’s, but they hid the thought.
    â€œTake an overcoat. This one … and a black hat. Yes!”
    She pushed him toward the door. She hadn’t had time to wash her face or comb her hair.
    He knew she wanted to be alone, and he wasn’t sure if he was angry or grateful.
    â€œI’ll give you two hours. All right, three.” And she closed the door behind him.
    But she opened it again immediately, pale and embarrassed. “François!”
    He came back up a few steps.
    â€œI’m sorry I have to ask. But could you give me a few dollars—for lunch?”
    He hadn’t thought of it, and he blushed. He hadn’t expected this … in the hallway, by the banister, across from the door with the letters J.K.C. painted in green.
    He’d never felt more embarrassed in his life. He took his wallet out and hunted for the bills—he didn’t want to look like he was counting them, it didn’t matter to him—and blushed again, handing her some ones, twos, fives, he didn’t want to know.
    â€œI’m sorry.”
    He knew. Of course. And it made his throat tighten. He wanted to go back into the apartment and tell her everything he was feeling. But he didn’t dare, because of this question of the money.
    â€œDo you mind if I buy a pair of stockings?”
    Then he understood, or thought he did—she’d asked in order to restore his self-confidence, to make him feel like a man again.
    â€œI’m sorry I didn’t think of it before.”
    â€œYou know, I may get my things back.”
    Now she was smiling. It had to be done with a smile, like their smile that morning.
    â€œGo on. I’m not going to blow it all at the track.”
    He looked at her. She still wasn’t wearing makeup, still had no idea how she looked in the too-long dressing gown and the slippers that kept falling off her feet.
    He stood a few steps below her.
    He came back up.
    That was their first real kiss of the day, their first real kiss ever perhaps, and it happened there, in the hallway, in a sort of no-man’s-land, in front of anonymous doors. They were both so conscious of all it implied that they went on, dragged it out, sweetly, tenderly, not wanting it to end. Only the sound of a door shutting made their lips part.
    â€œGo,” she said.
    And feeling like a new man, he went.

5
    L AUGIER , a French playwright who’d been in New York for two years, had helped him get radio work. And he’d played a Frenchman in a comedy on Broadway, but the show, which they’d staged in Boston first, had only run for three weeks.
    He wasn’t bitter that morning. He walked to Washington Square and took the Fifth Avenue bus. He stood on the platform, enjoying the spectacle of the street, and for a while he felt good.
    The avenue was sunlit. The gray stones of the buildings had a golden hue, so that they seemed at times almost transparent, and the sky high above was all blue except for the occasional fluffy cloud like the ones around saints in religious paintings.
    The radio studio was on Sixty-sixth Street, and when he got off the bus he still thought he was happy. But he felt vaguely uneasy, felt a trace of anxiety, a lack of balance that was almost a sense of foreboding.
    What was he afraid of?
    The thought crossed his mind that Kay might not be there when he got back. He shrugged. He was early for his appointment, so he stood at the window of an art gallery and watched himself shrug.
    Why did his mood become darker the farther