by Zadie Smith
“No, you can’t,” said Adam.
“Hi, it’s me. I was just—”
“I know it’s you—it’s late, man. And no, you can’t.”
“Can’t?”
“Have her number. The ward closed at seven.”
“Please, Ads. I need to speak to her.”
“I know—but I’m telling you, she’s fine. It went fine. I’ll give you the number tomorrow.”
“She’s all right? It all went all right?”
The relief came in a terrific swoop, as it will. His chin could not keep its shape, it stumbled and fell. Graceless tears carried on down his neck, ran down one arm.
“You saw her?”
“I went in this afternoon. She was groggy, but she was making jokes. I told her you couldn’t get out of New York—”
“I couldn’t, Ads. It was all paid for.”
“Right.”
“And . . . I don’t know . . . she didn’t seem to want me to be there much.”
“I think the point was that you were meant to want to be there.”
The line went quiet. Alex started gulping, loudly.
“Look,” said Adam with a sigh, “her heart works. It always did. Better than most. Come on, Alex—you’re fine, she’s fine. Calm down. Have you been drinking?”
“Bit.”
“All the more reason to leave it, then. Call her tomorrow. Okay? How’s New York. Any better?”
“Again? I can’t hear you.”
“Said: any better?”
“Oh. Hard to tell.”
“Well, you’re home soon,” shouted Adam, over the increasingly crossed line. “Tomorrow you leave, right? So. You’ll live. Worse things happen at sea. Oh—and it’s on Thursday, okay? So you best be learning it.”
“Oh, Ads, man . . . come on, I already told you—”
“You can buy it in any bookshop over there. Remember, it’s the Mourner’s; one. Kaddish Yatom. There’re like four different ones. Okay?”
“I can’t hear you.”
“WHAT?”
“I’M NOT DOING IT. I TOLD YOU.”
“Look, I’ve got to go to bed, mate. This line’s awful, and I’m knackered. I can barely hear you. Talk tomorrow, yeah?”
“Wait, wait—”
“And Esther’s fine, I promise you. Groggy, that’s all. Oh, and Grace is doing all right, too. Shalom, Alex.”
“Adam?”
“Shalom aleichem, Alex.”
“Shalom, yeah.”
Alex slid down the bath, submerged and watched the ceiling swim. When he surfaced, he had wet his questionnaire and had to hang it over a radiator to dry.
Were the range of television channels sufficient for your needs?
Television is always sufficient.
How did you find your sleeping arrangements?
Lonely.
What changes would you make to the menu?
Less food.
What single thing would have most improved the standard of service you received during your stay?
Monkey butlers.
Would you appreciate group activities scheduled for you and your fellow guests during your stay?
I’d need more details before venturing an opinion.
Here at the Burns Baldwin Hotel Group we have a simple, homespun philosophy, which we’ve taken as our promise to our guests: Every day is a new beginning.
We think each and every hotel room should be returned to a state of perfection day after day, night after night, and we work hard to keep that promise. We also like to know as much as possible about our guests and their opinions and desires—that way we can give you more of what you want! By taking the time to fill me out, you’re helping the good people of Burns Baldwin to help you. Please feel free to write your own philosophy of life in the space below.
Regret everything and always live in the past.
By seven, Alex had finished with the wine and moved on to a bottle of bourbon, sipping it like a girl. He started to watch an advert. Half an hour later he was still watching it. He had been misled; now he was late. He put on his approximation of evening wear (white T-shirt, black jeans) and left the room. The lift had moved. It was not to the left and round the corner, its last known location. Nor was it to the right. All arrows led to exit signs and bleak fire escapes. Alex resented even the idea of stairs in a hotel context. The point was ease. Always ease. Even if it had to be the kind of ease that makes things more difficult.
He found the lift, finally, to the left and around three corners, in a spot from which he could clearly see the door of his own room. An arrow lit up.
“Room for one more?” chirruped Alex, thinking himself suitably amiable, American. He clapped his hands. There was a documentary team in there, four men in earphones and equipment, and a girl with a clipboard. Unsmilingly, they took a collective step backwards.
“Going down?”
“Nope,” said a man with a camera. “Goin’ up.”
Alex looked to his right and saw the number thirty-seven burning amber. He pressed L. “You know,” he said to a man with a sound boom, “when people are asked to choose a number between one and one hundred, most people choose thirty-seven.”
The boom mike slipped and bounced off Alex’s shoulder. The man apologized. In the silence, Alex wondered which part of him wanted to be in their documentary. How big was that part? Floor twelve elided into floor fourteen.
“Who’s it about?”
“Excuse me?” said a man. Like the others he had the word TEAM written on the front of his T-shirt. Alex looked closer and spotted his laminate, the face of a famous adolescent.
“Shylar,” said Alex, nodding. “She’s very good. Amazing what she does with her . . .” Alex pointed to his own potbelly. He moved it to the right and then the left. “Almost improbable.”
They reached floor 25. From this point onwards, thought Alex, a fall would be one hundred percent unsurvivable. Just a splat, while a ring or a necklace kept its noble metal shape, because we are not as strong as things. Things win. The lift shuddered and stopped and opened. A woman and her young daughter squeezed in. Alex was now pressed close to the man with the boom, facing him, with the boom itself hanging overhead as if it wanted to record Alex’s words. Now he became aware of a strong smell of alcohol coming from his own mouth.
“The three most—I read this somewhere, it’s true—the three most typed words—typed, as in entered into computers when they’re . . . you know, the three most thingied words are: God,” said Alex, showing an erect thumb, “Shylar, and—” Here Alex swore obscenely, and the American mother, in a proud display of Puritan gestural technique, waited two beats into the following silence, made a noise of disgust and put her big pink hands over the child’s ears.
SHE LOOKED AMAZING. A plum-colored sleeveless satin dress this time, as once worn by the popular actress Rita Hayworth. The gloves were black satin and elbow length. Her hair seemed to be completely different hair from the day before. About five inches longer, with a chestnut streak in it.
“You look amazing,” said Alex, tumbling into his chair.
“Thank you,” said Honey pertly, patting herself down. “Took about five hours. Some of it was painful and the rest was just goddamn boring. I am so glad I’m a woman. And you look awful—how thoughtful of you.”
“Put the blame on Mame. So,” said Alex, picking up a long piece of card, “what are we eating?”
“Lots of tiny-ass pieces of food piled on top of each other in the shape of a tower.”
“Good. We love tall food. I want the tallest thing on this menu.”
“That’s the wine list, baby. An’ it’s upside down. What’s the matter with you? Why you so nervous?”
“I’m not nervous.”
“I’m not nervous,” parroted Honey in a passable accent. “Bull.”
“I think you’ll find you’re confusing the two states of ‘nervous’ and ‘pissed.’ ” Alex took an ice cube from a glass full of them and gripped i
t in his hand, an old sobering trick.
“Fairly weird day, no?”
“I’ve had weirder, to tell you the truth.”
“I checked the handwriting. It’s Krauser’s completely. I mean, you just have to look at it.”
“Yeah, I figured,” said Honey, putting her wine down before it reached her lips. “God, but that’s sad, isn’t it? I just think that’s so sad. For both of them. Jesus. You can’t say anything to her—she’s clearly in denial. She doesn’t want to know, obviously. Talk about living a lie, right? Jesus.”
She moved her hand across the table and laid it over his.
“Honey?”
“Oh—my—God. Please don’t say Honey like that, like we’re in some bad TV movie. What? What is it? Just say it, whatever it is.”
“I really, really don’t want you to take this the wrong way.”
Honey scowled and took back her hand. “Lemme tell you something. There’s no wrong or right way to take anything. There’s just words and what they mean. Be an American. Say what you mean.”
Alex put his elbows on the table. “I just wanted to—I mean, I want to make sure . . . rather, to establish, that this isn’t— Because, you know I leave tomorrow, and there’s someone who— So, I wanted to, just to be clear, that this isn’t—”
Honey got him by the neck and brought his face to hers and gave him one of the most luxurious kisses he had ever experienced. It was like eating. He was being given something rich and rare.
“No,” she said, drawing back and lifting her hand for the waiter, “this isn’t a date. Don’t flatter yourself. That was just a period on the end of an unusual day.”
Here, a breakdown in transatlantic communication, rare these days.
“You know, a period? The black spot at the end of sentence—what do you call them over there? That was almost one, but that was a question, that’s not quite . . . and that’s not it either; and now here’s the real thing, you know, look out, at the end of this.” She curved her hands around the empty air, and gave a sharp nod.
“We call that a full stop.”
“Really?” She smiled. “That’s nice. That’s kind of more like what I meant.”
JUST AFTER THE DESSERTS came, Alex noticed the hotel tilt and all the air disappear from the room. Honey was telling him about a gallery exhibit “of Jewish stuff” that she thought he might like, but everybody else in the room was being drawn into a vacuum that had just presented itself with its entourage at the circle bar.
“My daughter just loves her,” said the waitress, and spilled the coffee. Alex held himself up a few inches from his chair. He could see the tiny girl, a bodyguard the size of a water buffalo, and about fifteen people of the kind the magazines call “handlers.” The aura was being effectively handled. Though the girl was only a hundred yards from Alex, she seemed a galaxy away.
“You’d think she could afford a better hotel,” he said, feeling oddly offended that she had made herself so accessible to him.
“Well, exactly,” agreed the waitress.
“Am I boring you?” said Honey loudly. Alex scrutinized the black hole, its unusual nature. Everybody knew it was there, and there it sat in its uniform of hot pants and halter top; everybody was already inside it (in her skin, as the girl herself, or in some orifice, doing the girl), but not one person looked at it directly.
“We probably shouldn’t stare,” said Alex, who had once spent three hours staring at pictures of this girl’s head attached to the naked bodies of other girls.
“Oh, man. Are you serious? Don’t you know what that is over there?” asked Honey, turning around finally. “That’s dry shit on a stick. That’s the cypress tree in the garden. That’s three pounds of flax. Buddha is Buddha is Buddha is Buddha. So what is the big deal, exactly?”
“Sexual vortex,” said Alex, feeling it as strongly as the next man. “Symbolic sexual vortex, added to by means of infinite repetition, televisual sheen. Not necessarily prettier than the waitress. Or you. Or me. Irrelevant. She is the power of seventeen. You remember the power of seventeen? It’s nuclear. She’s seventeen for the whole world.”
Honey threw her napkin onto the table.”I know there’s not a thing a pretty girl can’t have in America for a while. Until she can’t have it no more. Symbol, my ass. MU! Come on, let’s get out of here.”
As they made their way through the lobby, they passed the documentary team setting up a shot of the concierge welcoming Shylar to the hotel, although Shylar had been there three days already.
“That was Honey Smith,” said the cameraman to the clipboard girl and clapped one hand on the front desk.
2.
Here goes the city. Here it goes. There it is. On television. In a magazine. Written on a towel. In a photograph that hangs above the bed in moody black and white, as you sit indoors in this Technicolor city. There it is again. On channel 9, on 23, briefly on 7, in cartoon form on 14 and always on number 1, which is the channel of the city. And it is also out that window, or so you hear. Car horn, Spanish yell, women’s laughter, syncopated beat, barking. A swooping cop’s siren, like a prehistoric bird, passing through. In here, laid out along the bed, are the secrets of the minibar, multicolored bottles in descending order: we finish one, we knock it to the floor. We finish one, we knock it to the floor. Ten green bottles. And that’s just the beers. This is fun! Honey has retired to her room. But who needs women? Look at this television! The channel of history offers history in neat half-hour segments. The only history is the history of Hitler. The channel of entertainment entertains, ruthlessly. It wants your laughter. It will do anything. The channel of sex looks like sex and sounds like sex but it doesn’t do smells. Smells are important. The channel of nostalgia shows dead people up and walking, hour on hour, always. They tell corny jokes, they clutch the curtains and weep, they tap-dance sometimes. The channel of nostalgia is the channel of old films and—my God—there she is! There she is. Right there, on the screen. And that was her beauty and those are pearls that were her eyes, and yes, you know the problems of two people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world but still. But still. Here is your coat and those are your shoes and that is the door.
And it is not a real plan, of course, until you are standing outside the hotel, swaying slightly, inebriated, and horrified by the cold, the snow. It’s one in the morning. Where did all this white stuff come from? On channel 15 it was late summer, leaves just beginning to curl and blush. The concierge, who understands incapacity, hails you a cab.
IN YOUR OWN CITY, a nighttime cab ride is a dull box with your thoughts inside. In another, it’s the only journey. There’s not enough light to use your tourist eyes. Nothing can be seen until you are at its feet or by its side—there are no views, only shapes becoming themselves before you. The streetlamps are one continuous stripe. The cabs run through town like a blood supply, taking drunk people to bars. He is surprised at himself, for doing this. But Honey told him he would, and she knows Autograph Men. The very definition of them might be that they find it hard to let go.
He reaches forward and asks a man called KRYCHEK, GARY to take him on a detour through a square famous for its museums and prostitutes. It has, Alex realizes for the first time, almost a metaphysical name. There is even an imposing electronic counter sitting on top of a tower, clicking backwards to some zero date that cannot be contemplated when one is this drunk. He can see all the doors of the museums are flung open. Byzantine art, Renaissance sculpture, medieval French armor. The city is having a festival to encourage culture by opening museums (as they put it) 24/7. But the real crowds are still here, outside, letting those vile LEDs count their lives away. They eat popcorn while they wait and look up at the ticker-tape news, traveling round the edge of a skyscraper. A president has died: it’s not theirs. The snow is timorous now, falling in light flakes that can’t survive the wet ground. On a soapbox four black boys are screaming about reincarnation. Adverts shine and move and speak and transform. Stretched the l
ength of a building, a mammoth moving image of a white cat, licking at a bowl of milk. This last is very beautiful, like a dream everybody’s having together. The days of the museums are numbered. A chubby redheaded whore stops Alex’s cab from presuming to cross her path with one flick of her ass. She shows them the International Gesture of contempt (middle finger) and trots into an exhibition of Chinese ancestor painting.
“See, this area ain’t really ideal for driving tours,” says Krychek dryly. “Lot of pedestrians. With big asses.”
“Roebling, then,” says Alex-Li, at which Krychek laughs and stops the cab and Alex has to give him twenty dollars to start the engine again.
And so they pass over a bridge and its water.
3.
All the opening lines he can think of call for a younger woman in the role (“I couldn’t leave without seeing you again”; “We’ve got to talk”). He ends up standing in the doorway with his mouth open. But there is no noise from either of them, only the sibilant swish of a silk dressing gown as she accepts him into her apartment, leads him to the lounge. Here she picks up a pocket watch from the top of a cabinet and holds it up in her hands like a baby bird.