After Claude Read Online Free PDF Page B

Don’t listen to him. He should be as alive as you are.”
    But instead of profiting from my sunny disposition, Claude threw up his hands in a parody of Gallic disdain and from between pursed lips muttered, “It’s too absurd.”
    “You’re the one who’s being absurd, running away from the most authentic, probably the most meaningful relationship you will ever experience, because it wasn’t arranged by your mother.”
    I tried to embrace him, but he paced through my arms as if they were shadows.
    “Darling, we have so little time left and so much work to do. You have so much growing, so much expanding before you. How can you cheat yourself of such a rare, such a blessed opportunity, out of some old-fashioned notion of chivalry?”
    “You win,” he said. I had the chilling impression that whatever I was winning, it was not Claude. He was back at his post near the door.
    “With your permission, I’d like to go for a walk and think over all the good you’ve done for me.”
    “A walk? Are you crazy? It’s a hundred degrees out there.”
    I could not bear for him to leave the apartment. It’s hard to explain how a woman of my potentials found herself in such a position, but at that low point in my life, I suffered a kind of passionate concern for Claude, and I had never felt it more strongly than at the moment the suicidal maniac yanked open the door. We were both engulfed in a repulsive gush of steaming stale air. It emphasized the coolness of the living room. Claude closed the door, as if against a blizzard of pollution, and leaned against it.
    “Please, come to bed,” I said.
    “To bed, with you?” Claude screwed up his classic features as if he were playing games in front of a carnival mirror. “I’d rather sleep on a sewer than sleep with you!”
    That business of sleeping on sewers happens to be a French tradition, so I didn’t take offense.
    “It’s very late. We can continue the discussion tomorrow.”
    “No more discussions, Harriet. Tomorrow is Friday, you’ll be out of the apartment by Monday morning.”
    “Of course,” I said gently, “and now to bed.”
    “Go to bed,” he said coldly.
    “Not without you.”
    “I’m telling you for the last time to get to bed.”
    I obeyed the bully like a punished child. The bedroom was warm and sticky, which was why I fought for the single air conditioner to be in constant action. I threw my kimono on the bentwood rocker and, in the dark, crawled into the desolate bed. I lay there listening to Claude puttering around in the living room. He had been pulling that act night after night, waiting for me to fall asleep. Now I knew what he had been plotting. My body heaved with a childish dry sob. I felt an icy fury wail through me. I wanted Claude to come to me. I ESP’d him to come into the bedroom and need me, but Claude stubbornly brooded in the living room. I lit a Marlboro and disciplined my mind to empty itself of all unpleasant feelings toward Claude. It wasn’t easy, but this was not the time to react like a hysterical woman and think in terms of tired clichés, such as rejection. I meticulously reran Claude’s frenzied accusations through my total-recall memory. The machine faltered at the word boring and would not play on.
    Boring? What boring? It is a fact that Frenchmen find everything except the sound of their own voices boring. If not for an inborn craving for flattery, French ears would have gone the way of fins, tails, and tonsils. Was that a clue? Had I, in my frank American fashion, neglected to lay on the adulation that Claude felt was his birthright?
    I felt a wave of gratitude, but toward whom or what escaped me. After the initial blackout, my brain was again functioning. Was Claude out there sulking because he felt cheated of the endless declarations of gratitude that make a Frenchman feel alive? It so happens that gay and outgoing as I am in routine matters, in the privacy of bed, I am your silent, giving, inscrutable mystery