He sat in the rocking chair in the living room and looked out the window. An inner courtyard with a tree, fire escapes, clotheslines, and garbage cans. He couldn’t distinguish from which apartments the noises came: hammering, the clatter of pots and pans, a saxophone, children’s voices, and women chatting loudly across the courtyard. Françoise didn’t return. The shadows climbed up the walls. Around six Jill woke up, this time without screaming. When she fell asleep again he rinsed his clothes and hung them up to dry. Twilight was coming on. The sky over the neighboring houses and the World Trade Center turned red.
Françoise came home carrying a large brown shopping bag. “How’s Jill?”
“She’s asleep.”
“Still? She usually wakes up around six.”
“She did. I made some tea for her and gave it to her in her bottle.”
She looked at him skeptically. “I’m sorry I’m so late. I had to drop by Benton’s.”
“So you really… Where are they? How much time do I have to come out with my hands raised?” He stood up.
“No!” she called out. The shopping bag fell and burst open as she threw herself in front of the door to the bedroom. “Don’t do anything to her, don’t! I didn’t say anything about you! There’s an article about you in the Times, wait, I’ll show it to you.” She thrust out her left hand at him as if she were fending him off, bent down, pulled the newspaper from the ruins of the shopping bag, and began leafing through it. “I found it. Here.”
“I know the article.” So she really believed he was capable of doing something to Jill.
She straightened up. “Next week my vacation is over, and in any case I wanted to go to Townsend, and after reading the article…”
“Did you speak to Benton?”
“Yes, he’s pretty annoyed. He didn’t want that article in the paper. The painters in the stairwell called an ambulance and the police; then the reporters came, nosed around, and the man you pushed down the stairs gave them your name. After he came to, he didn’t know what he was doing. It’s turned into a circus, Joe said, a regular circus.”
“Joe is Benton?”
“Yes. Do you know that the other one, the one who fell into the elevator shaft, broke both his legs?”
“How should I know that? I didn’t have time to stop and look.”
“Why did you do it?” she asked anxiously. He had become strange to her. Someone who lashes out indiscriminately, and before whom she had better watch her step.
“What did he tell you? Bulnakov-Benton-Joe; soon I’ll be calling the bastard sweetie and honey.”
“He said you’re no longer satisfied with the money you got in Cucuron, that you want more and are trying to blackmail him.”
“And what would I blackmail him with?”
“You found out that we… that he… that you weren’t dealing with the Russians in Provence, and you threatened to tell the Russians, and they’d be angry.”
“He says I came to him with this idiotic blackmail? And what was I supposed to have got from him in Cucuron?” Georg was really angry. “How stupid do you think I am? You know yourself that it’s bullshit-what’s this song and dance about? God, I’m fed up with your lies, fed up, fed up!” And with every fed up he gave her a slap in the face. He clenched his fists. She shielded herself with her arm. They stood opposite each other. Eye to eye, her terrified look and his enraged one. He took a deep breath. “It’s over, I won’t do anything more to you. Does Benton come here sometimes? Are you still having an affair with him?”
“That’s over. Anyone who comes here calls me up ahead of time in case the child’s asleep. You needn’t worry. And I certainly haven’t breathed a word to anyone. I don’t want to lose my babysitter, either.” She looked and sounded different from one minute to the next. At first fearful, then conspiratorially serious, and with her last words cheerful, with a wink. “Oh look at this mess!” she said, picking up the burst bag. Milk was leaking onto the floor. “Will you help me with supper?”
Later, when they went to bed, he was unyielding. He took the bed next to Jill, while Françoise slept in the living room on the couch. He locked the door; he would hear Jill if she woke up, and if he didn’t, Françoise could knock and wake him up. He did hear Jill when she woke up in the night, even before Françoise did, and went into the other room and woke Françoise up. She gave Jill her breast, and he fell asleep. She took off her nightgown and slipped beside him under the blanket.
39
ALREADY BY THE NEXT DAY living together had become oddly routine. It reminded Georg of their last days together in Cucuron.
“What were you thinking, when from one day to the next you didn’t come back? Without a word?” Georg saw the pale blue morning sky through the venetian blind. Françoise lay exhausted and satisfied beside him, her head on his arm.
“Joe sent me to New York and told me to stay here.”
“But what were you thinking, I mean about me, about us?”
The strain of her concentrating was visible. She didn’t understand his question, but wanted to do the right thing: not disappoint him, but satisfy him with the proper answer.
“Don’t think so much,” he said. “Just tell me what happened.”
“It was my job. And Jill was on the way, and you were beginning to act crazy. I couldn’t risk my job, because I soon would have to provide for Jill and couldn’t rely on you anymore. You’ve always been… you always want more, and keep doing things that ruin what you have. In Provence, at any rate, you ruined everything with your pride and stubbornness. You just had to quarrel with Joe. In life you have to be content with what you’ve got.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“You see? You don’t understand.”
“Aren’t you getting any support for Jill?”
“No, I don’t know who the father is.”
“Benton or your ex… Might she be mine?”
She raised herself on her elbow and looked down at him.
“That’s sweet. Sometimes I wished it. How you were in my mind when I was walking along Madison Avenue and a man ran in front of me who was wearing your aftershave, and I ached with longing.”
“And later, when Benton came back to New York, he told you that he had finally got the better of me, bought me out?”
“Yes.”
“Do you want to know what really happened?”
“Not now. Jill will be waking up in a minute.” She pushed the blanket away and kissed his chest.
Georg spent most of the day alone with Jill. Fran, as he now called her, was finishing her new translation at NYU. He called Helen, who had been given an appointment at Townsend Enterprises. He played with Jill, fed and bathed her. He read around in Fran’s books and systematically went through her closets, the boxes under her bed, and her desk. He found out that she was thirty years old, came from Baltimore, had gone to Williams College and Columbia, and had been married for six years to a David Kramer. In a drawer he found a photo of himself; he was lying in the hammock in front of the house in Cucuron, with Dopey on his stomach. When Fran came home at six, dinner was on the table.
The following days passed the same way. Evenings and mornings, when they had slept together and Fran was purring with satisfaction, Georg got occasional answers to occasional questions. She had hung up the picture of the cathedral in Cucuron because when she had been a student, she had lived across the street from the cathedral and had been happy and wanted something to remember New York by. Yes, Townsend Enterprises was owned by Joe Benton. He had gotten around in the world, first as an Orthodox priest, then with the U.S. Marines, and then in an ashram in California. When he became a private detective, at first he had worked under his own name. But as his commissions got riskier and his clientele more well known, he had to assume disguises. Fran had worked for him for four years, and had become his lover in the second year. The commission for Gorgefield Aircraft was the biggest she could remember; it brought Joe thirty million. She was sorry it had cost Maurin his life, she said. But Georg had the impression that she didn’t care, and that she was somehow making him responsible for the attack on him and the death of his cats. Joe had connections to official authorities. “One hand washes the other, you know. Sometimes he needs the officials, and sometimes they’re happy to have a problem disposed of unofficially. CIA? No idea whether it’s the CIA or one of its offshoots.”