We sat there for a while in silence. I was trying to think of the right words with which to begin to broach the subject of his buying the hotel as a way out of the world he had come to hate, as a cave in which to hide from it. The broaching would have to be subtle, it seemed to me, and I couldn’t quite think of the right opening; in fact, all I could think of was reasons for not buying the place, and as the reasons mounted I succeeded in convincing myself that Lou never would buy it, that no one would.
When he said, after a while, “You know, you’ve got a great life here,” I didn’t hear the wistful longing in it. I thought he was joking.
“Yeah,” I said, with a sneer, befogged by the thought of the thousand things wrong with Small’s. “A great life. You bet.”
“I detect sarcasm,” he said.
“It’s just that life here has become a nightmare — ”
“Are you kidding?” he asked, almost shouting. “A nightmare?” He pushed his face close to mine. “You’re not kidding, are you? Of course not — you can’t see it. You can’t see how good it is because you’re right on top of it. Look.” He put his hand on the back of my head and turned me like a ventriloquist’s dummy, so that I looked out across the bay, and then he turned my head around, with a firm, insistent grip, forcing me to twist around, to shift my position on the dock, to turn around until I had swept the entire panorama of the island, the hotel, and come back to the bay again. I couldn’t actually see anything, because of the fog, but I got the point. “Life is a cruel joke, Peter,” he said, “and there isn’t any way to go through it without getting your hands dirty. Every pleasure you experience comes at the expense of someone else, so the only happy people are the ones who ignore the suffering and misery they cause — the secret to happiness is self-deception. All of us, when we go out after some pleasure, know, somewhere, deep in our minds or deep in our hearts, that we’re going to be taking this pleasure at the expense of someone else. But out here, you’re as close to harmless as you can get. Here a guy could be almost inoffensive, almost benign, almost nothing, and I think that has become my ideal — to pass through this world the rest of my days as not a presence, as a hole, not a hill, to be nothing. I think I could do it here. I could come close to it here.”
“All this could be yours,” I said.
“Okay,” he said. “I’ll take it.”
“Of course, the roof leaks — ”
“Yeah,” he said, chuckling, as if the leaking roof were one of the most endearing qualities of Small’s Hotel, something we should have been touting in our flyer.
“ — and no exterminator could ever get rid of the weird wildlife out there — ” I gesticulated in the direction of the far side of the island, where the cats were wailing and the frogs were croaking.
“True,” he said, still chuckling.
“ — the boiler is about to give up the ghost — ”
“Peter.”
“ — any day now the town will announce the first annual Tour de Small’s 24-Hour Jet-Ski Race — ”
“Really?”
“Probably not — I made that up.”
“Too bad. The Demolition Man would have enjoyed the challenge.”
“There’s no talking you out of this, is there?”
“I’ve already tried. Believe me. Listen, I know everything that’s wrong with it. I’ve been here for almost fifty days now. I love it. All the rest of them, too. They love it here, you know? They love the tinkering and banging around on the roof — they love this place because of all the things that are wrong with it, the little worries that push their big worries way out into the fog somewhere. This is going to be our place to get away from the world, our asylum.”
“I think you should know that a woman is threatening to sue us because every time she recalls Small’s Hotel she gets a sinking feeling.”
He snorted. “Ah, don’t worry about that,” he said. “If the Demolition Man can’t get rid of her, I’ll settle with her. Maybe I’ll invite her out to talk it over. Maybe that’s all she wants. You know, most people just want somebody to pay attention to them — just like me, and just like you, when you get right down to it. We make our little noises, and we’d like to think that there’s somebody listening to us, somebody who wants to listen to us, wants to listen to us enough to go to the trouble of tuning in.”
[to be continued]
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