Chapter 3
September 13
Masters of the Arts
One of the two is almost always a prevailing tendency of every author: it is either not to say some things which certainly should be said, or to say many things which did not need to be said.
Friedrich von Schlegel, Aphorisms from the Lyceum
MORNING CREPT IN like a guilty drunk. I resisted dragging myself out of bed, though I am ordinarily an early riser. I lay under the covers longer than I have in years, brooding. In the numb moments after waking, I felt, for the first time, the burden of our indebtedness as fully as Albertine must have felt it, without the hope that I usually managed to summon to counter the facts. I felt all the weight of it, as I knew she did, and it seemed that if I did drag myself out of bed I would have to spend the day trudging under a double burden: pulling the weight of all the years the hotel had been operating at a loss and pushing the weight of the likelihood that we would never manage to turn it around. Might as well stay in bed. If it hadn’t been for Albertine, I would have.
“Are you sleeping in?” she asked.
“No,” I said, suddenly ashamed of myself for having wanted to. “I’m getting up.”
I got up and began pulling my clothes on quickly, shivering in the cold.
“Do you know what day this is?” I asked.
“Yes,” said Al. “I do.”
It was the fifteenth anniversary of our purchase of Small’s. Only nine years remained on the mortgage, but it was not the mortgage it had been when we first bought the hotel. We had refinanced it so many times for repairs and renovations that the payments had become a burden. I knew that Albertine was worried about making the payment due at the end of the month. I knew because she had told me so.
Dressed, I walked around to her side of the bed and kissed her and said, “Sometime in the night, I became convinced that you’re right. We should go.”
“Thank you,” she said, and after she had said it I realized, from the sinking sensation in my chest, that I had been hoping she would say that she had changed her mind, that she wanted to stay, that she had found some error in the books, that we were doing much better than she had thought, that . . . but none of that was true; all of that was wishful thinking.
I DIDN’T GO down to the kitchen to get a cup of coffee, as I usually do before beginning my day’s work on my personal history, because I didn’t want to run into Lou. Instead, I went directly to my workroom, turned the computer on, and sat at the keyboard. I didn’t slip into the past, as I usually do. Instead, I wrote this:
Albertine watched Peter pull the bedroom door shut and fuss with the bent latch until he had it closed tight. Then she opened the drawer of her bedside table and took from it Manhattan magazine, which she had begun to read in secret because
That didn’t feel right, didn’t sound right, so I went back to the beginning and tried again:
I watched him pull the bedroom door shut and fuss with the latch the way he does every morning until he gets the door closed tight, and then when I knew he wouldn’t be coming back into the room I opened the drawer of my bedside table — feeling very sneaky and disloyal — and got my copy of Manhattan magazine, which I’ve begun reading in secret because I know that when I read it a smile comes across my face and betrays my feelings completely. Everything I feel about leaving the hotel is there, written all over my face, when I open that magazine.
Days pass, sometimes a week, during which I do not leave this island. I remember — shortly after we moved here — being shocked to realize for the first time that a whole day had passed without my leaving the island, and there was something splendid about it then, but now, there are times when I feel imprisoned. Manhattan. My heart grows light with the thought of it. It is another place. It will be another life. It will not be this life.
That was as far as I could take it, or as far as I cared to take it. Writing it, even that little bit of it, left me feeling guilty, because I felt that it was probably very close to the truth. I put it away and began making some revisions on the episode of Dead Air that I would read in the evening, and in the space of a sigh I was away from all the cares that had made me lie late in bed, brooding. I was no longer the assistant innkeeper at a failing hotel; I wasn’t even there, in my workroom, sitting at my computer; I was in the past, my favorite place. Even though the piece of the past that I was exploring was pocked with treachery, shame, and danger, being there, following my former self around, invisible to him and everyone else, I was, if not happy, exactly, at least amused, particularly by the difference between what I saw and understood and what my younger self saw and understood, and by the thought that he would grow up to be me, and would at my age be sitting where I was sitting, amused by his earlier self. After a while, I leaned back and read from the screen, trying the sound of what I had written. I was pleased by it, and I was reminded why I prefer to write about the past. It is a place to go, another place, not this place. It is another life, not this life.
Only after I had turned the computer off and started downstairs did I become depressed by the thought that my childish self would grow up to be assistant innkeeper at a failing hotel, and his wife’s jailer.
THAT NIGHT, however, I had my biggest audience so far. It was a Friday night, so we had a few extra people for dinner, beyond the hotel guests, and there were even a few people who in response to Albertine’s advertising had come out in their own boats just to hear my reading. I was cheered by this show of support, and I think I did a good job with episode four of Dead Air, “Masters of the Arts.”
[to be continued]
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide. The Substack serialization of Little Follies begins here; Herb ’n’ Lorna begins here; Reservations Recommended begins here; Where Do You Stop? begins here; What a Piece of Work I Am begins here; At Home with the Glynns begins here; Leaving Small’s Hotel begins here.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed. The Substack podcast reading of Little Follies begins here; Herb ’n’ Lorna begins here; Reservations Recommended begins here; Where Do You Stop? begins here; What a Piece of Work I Am begins here; At Home with the Glynns begins here; Leaving Small’s Hotel begins here.
You can listen to “My Mother Takes a Tumble” and “Do Clams Bite?” complete and uninterrupted as audiobooks through YouTube.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of Little Follies, Herb ’n’ Lorna, Reservations Recommended, Where Do You Stop?, What a Piece of Work I Am, and At Home with the Glynns.
You’ll find overviews of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy (a pdf document), The Origin Story (here on substack), Between the Lines (a video, here on Substack), and at Encyclopedia.com.
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