After Claude Read Online Free PDF

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    “Peculiar!” I stood up, wishing my wrath could be backed with some solid support, such as a machine gun.
    “It’s only a word,” he said nervously and got up from the conference table, thinking perhaps that in the ten measly seconds it took him to get a beer, I would be packed and out of the apartment. His wish did not come true.
    “Well? Do you just go around calling people peculiar? It seems very peculiar to me, and I use the word advisedly, that any time we leave this squalor, be it to see a lousy movie or one of your lousy friends, you become hysterical. It also seems to me that you feel very free to say anything you want about all the dirty Jews who are conspiring you out of being the Dalai Lama of television, but if I make one tiny observation about a movie that had Christ in it, we’re having a religious war. Now
that
I call peculiar, and I’d like to ask you if your idea of my role in this household is to be your captive, your echo, your one-woman harem, because if it is, Claude, I warn you, a person such as myself does not transform into an ignorant Arab just for the asking.”
    “How could I have hoped she’d be sensible?” he muttered.
    “You’ve been doing nothing but hope for the last couple of weeks. Did you perhaps find yourself hoping that I’d be hit by a bus?”
    “You won’t believe me, but I don’t enjoy hurting you.”
    “But it appears, Prince of Peace, you don’t enjoy any of the activities I thought you were enjoying.”
    “Enough,” he yelled and leaped out of his chair. For a dreadful moment I thought he was going to resort to physical violence. I burst into tears.
    “Oh, Harriet,” he put his hand on my shaking shoulders, “it’s not the end of the world, baby. Why are you reacting like this? It’s not as if we had planned to be together forever. You know my contract finishes in six months and I go back to France. So it’s ending sooner than you expected, that’s all.”
    I reached up and grabbed his arm, clinging to it as though it were the overhanging branch between me and the fatal drop.
    “Darling, is that what’s bothering you? Are you afraid that in six months we’ll be too attached to each other? That it will be too difficult then to make a clean break? Because if so, I assure you, in six months I will wave you off gladly, smilingly, like a happy native seeing the beloved explorer returning to his homeland, laden down with all the loot he can load into his canoe. Believe me, Claude, my object is not to be one of the treasures you steal,”
    “What are you talking about?” The phony sympathy was out of his voice.
    “I won’t feel you’re abandoning me when you leave me behind to return to your rightful place as head of the Communist Party and possibly even to marry a certified virgin of good family. Immense progress could be made in the next six months. Look at the marvelous changes already.” I tried desperately to think of one improvement in Claude, but I needed time to reflect. After all, life is not a quiz show.
    He shook his arm free.
    “No,” he said and began pacing the living room, holding his precious beer can. And then he mumbled, as if to himself, “My friends warned me. I have no one to blame but myself.”
    “Your friends,” I snorted. Because let me tell you all about Claude’s wonderful friends, one day when you feel like being sick, all of whom are French and all of whom detest me, because instead of being an heiress, I am just an average American girl.
    “So you’re letting that pack of snobs brainwash you?”
    “How are they brainwashing me? Are they coming up here to tell me that I can’t find a clean dish in the filthy kitchen? That the bed hasn’t been made since you moved in here? That all my beautiful plants are dead?”
    “They are not dead. Stop saying they’re dead. Plants are very sensitive to suggestions.” I rushed to a hanging window plant and stroked its brown leaves. “You’re alive, darling.