MY LITTLE AUDIENCE was receptive, even appreciative, and my heart was warmed by their attention. We talked for a while. Lou explained to Elaine several times that she didn’t have to be concerned about having missed the earlier episodes. Albertine did a hilarious impression of Mr. Fillmore. Elaine laughed radiantly and crossed and recrossed her legs, but when she told us that she worked in public relations there was something about the way she smoothed her skirt and clasped her hands on her knee that made me think that, perhaps, she was not being quite honest. I think we all wanted to stay up late, talking and drinking till dawn, but suddenly we discovered that we were tired, and so, like grown-ups, we went to bed.
I LAY IN THE DARK feeling miserable. I twisted this way. I twisted that way.
“Okay, what is it?” asked Al.
“I’m not happy,” I said.
“You’d be happier if you were asleep.”
“I’ve been lying here telling myself that I ought to be happy, that there is no insurmountable reason for me not to be happy. I have told myself that I owe it to you to be happy, so that you can be happy — ”
“I’d be happy if you were asleep.”
“ — but everything seems to block the way to my happiness, all the mistakes I’ve made in life — all the disappointments — there they are, heaped upon the road ahead of me like the sand that the surging tide dumps on a shore road in a storm. Shoveling it all away seems much too much for me to do now, so late in life, with so much sand on the road, so much sand in the bottom of the hourglass. I can’t get to my future. The sands of error and disappointment block the way.”
“Why don’t you jot that thought down and go to sleep?”
“That’s not quite right,” I continued. “It’s more like having blundered into a swamp, lost my way. It’s hot, steamy. The heat is debilitating, enervating. A swarm of tiny mistakes envelopes my head like a cloud. In constant motion, they hum around me. I flap my hands, wave them away, but there are too many for me to dispel. Disappointments — enormous beetles the size of rats — click and clatter around my feet, biting my ankles and heels with their pincers. I’ll never get out of this swamp, never walk in the sun again.”
She seemed to be asleep.
I tried to lie still and work on the swamp metaphor. I had the feeling that I was on to something. I began cataloging the mistakes in the maddening swarm, the mistakes — my mistakes — that had led me into the swamp. First, and worst, my decision to buy the hotel. It now seemed wrong on all counts. We had wasted years in hard work on endless tasks, and when we added it all up, as Albertine was forced to do every day, it came to nothing. Less than nothing. I had imagined that our work and our profits would buy the hotel for us. I had imagined our growing old here, living in our rooms on the top floor for as long as we continued to run the hotel and then retiring to one of the little cottages at the water’s edge as permanent guests. I had supposed that I would go on writing the Larry Peters books, my little stories for boys and girls my age, and they would bring the money we would need. Another mistake: by refusing to introduce blood, gore, mayhem, and misery into the Larry Peters series, I had lost it.
I — I — I! I suddenly realized that I had been using the wrong metaphors, the wrong metaphors entirely, and they had blinded me to the truth. The buzzing swarm, the grains of sand — wrong. They didn’t describe the problem. Suddenly I saw the problem, saw it clearly, as if a gust of wind had cleared the air, blown the buzzing swarm and heaps of sand away. It stood in front of me like a fat man in a narrow hallway. No, no — like a fat man in a tunnel. Yes. A fat man blocking our way out of a cave. Blocking our escape from the dank and dripping cave of our unhappiness, blocking the way to the light, to hope, to a future.
I began to feel better. I wasn’t happy, but I felt better. At least I knew who was to blame. The man in the way. Me.
[to be continued]
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