Suspended Sentences Read Online Free PDF

his Rolleiflex. At the end of the meal, he had put it on the table and told me it was over, that he didn’t want to use it anymore. He was giving it to me. I told him that was a real shame.
    “You have to know when to quit.”
    He had drunk more than usual. During the meal, he had emptieda bottle of whiskey, but you could hardly tell: just a slight fog around the eyes and his speech was slower.
    “If I keep at it, it will only give you more work for your catalogue. Don’t you think that’s enough as it is?”
    I had walked with him to a hotel on Boulevard Raspail, where he’d taken a room. He didn’t want to go back to the studio. “That girl,” as he put it, might be waiting at the door; she was really wasting her time with “a guy like him.”
    She was sitting there, in front of me, on the sofa. It was already 7 P.M. and daylight was fading.
    “Do you think he’ll come today?” she asked.
    I was sure he wouldn’t. He would go dine alone somewhere in the neighborhood, then head back to his hotel room on Boulevard Raspail. Then again, he might call at any moment for me to meet him at a restaurant. And if I told him Nicole was here, how would he react? He’d immediately assume she’d pick up the extension. And then he’d pretend to be calling from Brussels or Geneva and would even agree to talk to her. He’d tell her his stay there might last for quite a while.
    But the telephone didn’t ring. We sat opposite each other in the silence.
    “Can I wait for him some more?”
    “As long as you like.”
    The room was sinking into shadow and I got up to put on the light. When she saw me reach for the switch, she said, “No … Please, no lights.”
    I went to sit on the sofa. I felt as if she’d forgotten my presence. Then she looked up at me:
    “I live with someone who’s very jealous and who’s liable to come rap at the door if he sees the lights on.”
    I remained silent. I didn’t dare suggest that I could simply answer the door and tell this potential visitor that there was no one else at the studio.
    As if she had read my thoughts, she said:
    “He’d probably just barge past you to see if I’m here … He might even punch you out.”
    “Is he your husband?”
    “Yes.”
    She told me that Jansen had taken her to a neighborhood restaurant one evening. Her husband had spotted them by chance. He’d stormed up to their table and backhanded her across the face. Two slaps that had made the corners of her mouth bleed. Then he’d run off before Jansen could intervene. He had waited for them outside. He walked a good distance behind them, following them down the street, bordered by trees and endless walls, that cuts through the Montparnasse cemetery. She had gone into the studio with Jansen and her husband had stood planted for almost an hour in front of the door.
    Since that misadventure, she figured, Jansen was having second thoughts about seeing her. Given how calm and cavalier he tended to be, I could easily imagine his discomfort that evening.
    She explained that her husband was ten years older than she. He was a mime and performed in what they used to call “Left Bank” clubs. I saw him two or three times after that, prowling around Rue Froidevaux in the afternoon to catch Nicole leaving the studio. He gave me an insolent stare. Dark and fairly tall, with a romantic allure. One day I went up to him.
    “Are you waiting for someone?”
    “I’m waiting for Nicole.”
    Theatrical, slightly nasal voice. In his bearing and his gaze, he played on his slight resemblance to the actor Gérard Philippe. He was wearing a kind of black frock coat and a very long, unknotted scarf.
    I’d said, “Which Nicole? There are so many Nicoles.”
    He had given me a disdainful look, then made an about-face toward Place Denfert-Rochereau, with an affected gait as if he were walking offstage, scarf floating in the breeze.
    She looked at her wristwatch in the semidarkness.
    “It’s okay now, you can turn on the