The Woman in the Fifth Read Online Free PDF

shows – in which housewives tried to spell out scrambled words and win drycleaning for a year. Reality shows – in which faded actors coped with working on a real-life farm. Talk shows – in which glossy celebrities talked to glossy celebrities, and every so often girls in skimpy clothes would come out and sit on some aging rock star's lap. . . .
     
I clicked off the television. I picked up Pariscope and studied the cinema listings, thinking about all the movies I could be sitting through right now. I dozed. A knock on the door, followed by a quiet voice saying, ' Monsieur? '
     
Adnan already? I glanced at my watch. Five fifteen p.m. How had the day disappeared like that?
     
He came into the room, carrying a tray.
     
'You are feeling better today, monsieur ?'
     
'A little, yes.'
     
'I have your clean laundry downstairs. And if you are able to try something a little more substantial than soup and a baguette . . . I could make you an omelet, perhaps?'
     
'That would be very kind of you.'
     
'Your French – it is very good.'
     
'It's passable.'
     
'You are being modest,' he said.
     
'No – I am being accurate. It needs improvement.'
     
'It will get it here. Have you lived in Paris before?'
     
'Just spent a week here some years ago.'
     
'You picked up such fluent French in just a week?'
     
'Hardly,' I said, with a small laugh. 'I've been taking classes for the past five years back home in the States.'
     
'Then you must have known you would be coming here.'
     
'I think it was more of a dream . . . a life in Paris . . .'
     
'A life in Paris is not a dream,' he said quietly.
     
But it had been my dream for years; that absurd dream which so many of my compatriots embrace: being a writer in Paris. Escaping the day-to-day routine of teaching at a nowhere college to live in some small, but pleasant atelier near the Seine . . . within walking distance of a dozen cinemas. Working on my novel in the mornings, then ducking out to a 2 p.m. screening of Louis Malle's Ascenseur pour l'échafaud before picking up Megan at the bilingual school in which we'd enrolled her.
     
Yes, Susan and Megan always played a part in this Paris fantasia. And for years – as we took language classes together at the college and even devoted an hour a day to speaking to each other in French – my wife encouraged this dream. But – and there was always a but – we first had to get a new kitchen for our slightly tumbledown house. Then the house required rewiring. Then Susan wanted to wait until we both received tenured positions at the college. But once my tenure came through, she felt we had to find the 'right time' to take a sabbatical, and the 'appropriate moment' to take Megan out of her local school without damaging her 'educational and social development'. Susan was always obsessive about 'getting the timing just right' on 'major life decisions'. The problem was, things never went exactly according to Susan's plan. There was always something holding her back from making the jump. After five years of 'maybe in eighteen months' time', she stopped auditing the language classes and also ended our nightly conversations in French – two events that dovetailed with her withdrawal from me. I kept taking the classes, kept telling myself that, one day, I would get to live and write in Paris. Just as I also kept reassuring myself that Susan's distancing act was just a temporary thing – especially as she would never acknowledge that she had pulled away from me, and kept insisting that nothing was wrong.
     
But everything was wrong. And everything went from bad to catastrophic. And Paris didn't turn into a fantasia, but . . .
     
'Coming here was a way out for me,' I told Adnan.
     
'From what?'
     
'Problems.'
     
'Bad problems?'
     
'Yes.'
     
'I'm sorry,' he said.
     
Then he excused himself. He arrived back with the omelet and a basket of bread fifteen minutes later. As I ate, he said, 'I will ring the doctor tonight to confirm that he