Three Bedrooms in Manhattan by Georges Simenon

ironic, this woman curled up in her chair declaring, with a kind of monstrous candor, “There—I’ve told you my whole life story!”
    But what about the rest, everything she hadn’t said, everything she didn’t want him to know? Didn’t she realize that out of her whole story what stuck in his craw to the point of causing him physical pain was that she let herself be felt up by the old ambassador?
    He rose mechanically and said, “Come to bed.”
    And, as he had expected, she whispered, “Can I finish my cigarette?”
    He snatched it out of her fingers and crushed it with his shoe on the rug.
    â€œCome to bed.”
    She was smiling, he knew, when she turned her head. She knew she’d won. To think she’d tell stories like that just to put him in the state she could see he was in!
    I’m not going to touch her tonight , he promised himself. That way maybe she’ll understand .
    Understand what? It was absurd. But then, wasn’t this whole thing absurd and meaningless? What were they doing, the two of them, in a room at the Lotus, above a purple neon sign designed to attract straying couples?
    He watched her take her clothes off, and he remained cold. Yes, he could remain cold to her. She wasn’t beautiful or irresistible, as she thought she was. Her body, like her face, was marked by life.
    And now, thinking about her, he felt himself carried away by anger, by a need to wipe out everything, to consume everything, to possess everything. Furiously, with an animus that fixed his pupils in a terrifying stare, he grabbed her, threw her down, and thrust into her as though wanting to exorcise his obsession once and for all.
    She watched him, bewildered with fear, and when the spasm was spent she cried, not like Winnie on the other side of the wall, but like a child. Like a child she stammered, “You hurt me.”
    Like a child, she fell asleep almost immediately. And that night, unlike the previous one, there was no look of pain on her face. This time she lay calm. She slept, her lower lip slightly protruding, her arms stretched limply on the blanket, her hair in a tangled auburn mass against the stark whiteness of the pillow.
    He didn’t sleep, didn’t even try. Dawn wasn’t far off, and when its first cold gleam touched the window, he slid behind the curtains to cool his forehead against the glass.
    No one was in the street. The trash cans gave it a look of banal intimacy. Across the way, on the same story, a man was shaving at a mirror hooked to his window frame. For an instant their eyes met.
    What would they say to each other? They were about the same age. The man across the way was balding and had thick, worried-looking eyebrows. Was there someone behind him in the room, a woman still asleep in the bed?
    A man up so early must be leaving for work. What did he do? What path was his life following?
    For months now, Combe’s life had been going nowhere. But, until two days ago, he had at least been walking stubbornly in one direction.
    On this chilly October morning, he was a man who had cut all the threads, a man approaching fifty, without ties to anything—not to family, profession, country, himself, and definitely not to a home. His only connection was to a complete stranger, a woman sleeping in his room in a seedy hotel.
    A light was on in the window across the way, and it made him think of the light that was still burning at his own place. Perhaps it was just an excuse, a pretext.
    Wouldn’t he, sooner or later, have to go home? Kay would sleep all day; he was beginning to know her. He’d leave a note on the bedside table telling her he’d be back soon.
    He would go to Greenwich Village and straighten up his room. Maybe he’d find a way to clean it.
    He dressed silently in the bathroom, with the door closed behind him, and his mind was already working. Not only would he clean his room from top to bottom, he’d also go