875: When I finished . . .
Leaving Small’s Hotel, Chapter 1 concludes
WHEN I finished reading, my audience sat in awkward silence for a moment, until I said, “Please hold your applause until the author has completed the reading of all fifty episodes.”
They laughed at that and gave me a round of silent applause. Then Lou, the grumpy guy, turned to Jane, of the fun couple, and said, “Life is full of surprises, isn’t it?”
Her only answer was a smile.
Encouraged by her smile, Lou asked, “Can you imagine being someone else?”
“To tell you the truth,” she said, leaning closer to him and whispering, although he was the only person in the room who didn’t know her secret, “I’m pretending to be someone else right now.”
“Are you?” asked Lou, raising his eyebrows as he asked.
“Yes,” she said, nodding as she answered.
“Puts a little spice in the marriage to get away from ourselves now and then,” said Dick. “Run away to someplace away from it all and become a couple of people we don’t know.”
“Well, let me tell you something,” said Lou, glancing quickly from side to side as if checking to see that he wouldn’t be overheard. “You had me completely fooled.” The three of them laughed at this, but I saw Dick and Jane exchange a questioning glance, as if they wondered whether they ought to be laughing at a joke that might have been made at their expense.
Lou wandered over to the bar. Because Small’s no longer employed a bartender, a card on the bar said “Bartender temporarily out of order. Please serve yourself.” It was supposed to be amusing. Lou read the card, did not laugh, stepped behind the bar, and poured himself a cognac. He invited Dick and Jane to join him, but they declined, put their heads together for a moment, and then approached me, hesitantly, looking embarrassed, as if they felt that they ought to say something about my reading before they retired to their room, as if they felt that it would be both impolite and terribly obvious if they just ran from the lounge and dashed up the stairs to their room (where, I suspected, their thoughts had already preceded them and were tumbling amorously under the comforter). “Thank you,” they said, nearly simultaneously, and then again, for good measure, “Thank you,” before they turned and ran from the lounge and up the stairs to catch up to their thoughts.
THE WIND began to rattle the shutters, and a heavy rain began to fall. Albertine and I battened the hatches and took to our bed. On the edge of sleep, I urged my thoughts backward, back to my own back yard, where I lay supine, looking at the stars on a summer night, looking back in time as far as starlight could take me — and a drop of water fell on my forehead.
“What’s that?” asked Albertine.
Another drop.
“What’s what?” I asked.
“That sound.”
“Sound?” Splat. “You mean that sound?”
“The roof is leaking, isn’t it?” she said, and she sighed.
“There’s nothing we can do about it tonight,” I said, hoping that she would agree.
“Are you sure? Couldn’t you put a tarp over it or something?”
“The wind would blow it off the roof. In fact, the wind would probably blow me off the roof. You’d see me flying past the window, holding on to the tarp, headed for the open ocean.”
“Okay. Forget it.”
“Remember the night the library ceiling fell down?” I asked.
“I remember,” she said, “but I’m not going to get nostalgic about it.”
“Are you saying I’m getting nostalgic about it?”
“Yes. You’ve got that tone.”
“Tone? What tone?”
“That poignant tone that you use when you start exploring any memory older than a week and a half — any memory, good or bad. It really is a kind of homesickness, because you’re in love with the past, in love the way other people are in love with the places that they think of as home, and maybe that’s because the past really is your proper home. Maybe you don’t belong here. You shouldn’t be here now. You’d rather be there then.”
“I just wanted to make the point that problems come and go.”
“Lately, they come but they do not go. The roof is leaking, the boiler is — is — cantankerous, we’re completely broke — ”
“Actually, we’re broker than that. We — ”
“It’s not funny, Peter,” she said, and there was a weariness in her voice that made me feel that she was right. “Everything is falling apart, and we can’t afford to fix anything. The more things fall apart, the fewer guests we get — the fewer guests we get, the less money we have — the less money we have, the more we go into debt — the more we go into debt, the less we can afford to keep the place up — ”
“Okay, I get it. Enough.”
Silence.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry I brought you here. I’m sorry I got you into this.”
Silence.
“In the morning,” I said, “we’ll put the place on the market.”
I waited for her to say something, but she didn’t say a thing. In a while she began to breathe evenly, and when I turned toward her, I saw that she was contentedly asleep, and smiling. I moved closer to her, away from the leak, and I pulled the quilt over my head to hide myself from the dripping present.
[to be continued]
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