After Claude Read Online Free

with murder in her heart.

2
    D URING my six months of drudgery with Claude, we shared his top-floor apartment in a brownstone on Morton Street. It was a terrific floor-through apartment with two huge rooms, a separate kitchen, beamed ceilings, real plank floors, a skylight, and a fireplace that worked. Talk about the Jewish Conspiracy. I’d like to meet one Frenchman living in anything but splendor anywhere in the world. The lease on the apartment was held by French Television, C.I.A. agents please note.
    Claude was supposedly covering news and producing documentaries on the American way of life, for instant viewing in France, in order to make the inhabitants of that cemetery even more smug about their beautifully preserved plots and monuments. Claude’s reports were like riot commercials. Student riots, antiwar riots, gay-liberation riots, convention riots, prison riots, ghetto riots; in short, Democracy at work. The only faces he ever filmed were covered with blood or gas masks. His documentaries tore off the masks, so you got the backs of people’s heads describing how they became junkies, prostitutes, criminals, old, sick, and crazy. It was a genuine treat to watch one of Claude’s specials; rush home, lock all the doors and windows, check out the closets and under the beds, and commence sewing the family jewels into the old fur coat.
    To Claude’s prejudiced eyes, everything and everyone American was revolting, with the possible exception of migratory workers and Hopi Indians, and you can imagine how they hung around us in droves. This business of Claude being so madly in love with the so-called underprivileged is a joke I’d like to clear up. He made innumerable Communist speeches about injustice and corruption, but when it came down to real life, all he actually cared about were titles and tits. His voice would go hushed and worshipful when he spoke of anyone who came from a family, in quotes, as if the rest of us had emerged fully formed from garbage pails. All these real people from real families were French, naturally, because for some mysterious reason, when it came to Americans, he made no distinctions between inspired intellectuals and the bums blocking their doorways.
    I met Claude the freezing February night of Rhoda-Regina’s convenient nervous breakdown. Rhoda-Regina is my ex-best friend and current enemy. I had been crashing in her garden apartment following my return to America after five enriching years abroad. Claude found me huddled on the bottom step of the stoop, after R.-R., in a unique display of American hospitality, had flung all my belongings onto the street. As a matter of fact, I met all my neighbors that famous night, because when a mad woman is screaming and throwing things and is finally bundled off to Bellevue, New Yorkers will gather around and gawk. Only Claude, being a foreigner, offered to help and whisked me up to his top-floor apartment to be a combination concubine-drudge. I have since realized that he hoped I was a victim of rape, or at least a junkie, two of his favorite American specimens.

    I went up the stairs behind Claude, tiptoeing like a thief, out of consideration for R.-R., who was long out of the hospital but subject to relapses at the sound of my voice or footsteps. It is ironic how my behavior is determined by the insanity that surrounds me.
    We got safely into the apartment, and for a moment I thought we had wandered into the prison laundry as depicted in
The Big House.
The drenching heat had solidified into vapor, and I blindly fumbled for the overhead-light switch. Claude would sooner have seen me dead than leave the air conditioner operating in his absence, which meant that by the time we cooled the oven under the roof, we were both too wasted for it to matter.
    “Whew,” I gasped, “they’ve overloaded the boilers. This tub is about to explode. Off with your shoes, man, be ready to abandon ship.”
    Claude’s heavy-lidded eyes were fixed on me in hate