by John Irving
'Susie?' I said.
'Thought you'd never guess,' she said.
'Susie!' I cried, and turned to her, returning her embrace; I had never been so happy to see her.
'Keep it down,' Susie ordered me. 'Don't wake up your father. I've been crawling all over this fucking hotel trying to find you. I found your father first, and someone who says "What?" in his sleep, and I met an absolute moron of a dog who didn't even know I was a bear -- the fucker wagged his tail and went right back to sleep. What a watchdog! And fucking Frank gave me the directions -- I don't think Frank should be trusted to give the directions to Maine, much less to this queer little part of the wretched state. Holy cow,' said Susie, 'I just wanted to see you before it got light, I wanted to get to you while it was still dark, for Christ's sake, and I must have left New York about noon, yesterday, and now it's almost fucking dawn,' she said. 'And I'm exhausted,' she added; she started to cry. 'I'm sweating like a pig in this dumb fucking suit, but I smell so bad and look so awful I don't dare take it off.'
'Take it off,' I told her. 'You smell very nice.'
'Oh sure,' she said, still crying. But I coaxed her out of the bear head. She smudged her tears with her paws, but I held her paws and kissed her on the mouth for a while. I think I was right about the blueberries; that's what Susie tastes like, to me: wild blueberries.
'You taste very nice,' I told her.
'Oh sure,' she mumbled, but she let me help her out of the rest of the bear suit. It was like a sauna inside there. I realized that Susie was built like a bear, and she was as slick with sweat as a bear fresh out of a lake. I realized how I admired her -- for her bearishness, for her complicated courage.
'I'm very fond of you, Susie,' I said, closing my door and getting back into bed with her.
'Hurry up, it will be light soon,' she said, 'and then you'll see how ugly I am.'
'I can see you now,' I said, 'and I think you're lovely.'
'You're going to have to work hard to convince me,' said Susie the bear.
For some years now I have been convincing Susie the bear that she is lovely. I think so, of course, and in a few more years, I think, Susie will finally agree. Bears are stubborn but they are sane creatures; once you gain their trust, they will not shy away from you.
At first Susie was so obsessed with her ugliness that she took every conceivable precaution against a possible pregnancy, believing that the worst thing on earth for her to do would be to bring a poor child into this cruel world and allow him or her to suffer the treatment that is usually bestowed upon the ugly. When I first started sleeping with Susie the bear, she was taking the Pill, and she also wore a diaphragm; she put so much spermicidal jelly on the diaphragm that I had to suppress the feeling that we were engaging in an act of overkill -- to sperm. To ease me over this peculiar anxiety, Susie insisted that I wear a prophylactic, too.
'That's the trouble with men,' she used to say. 'You got to arm yourself so heavily before you dare do it with them that you sometimes lose sight of the purpose.'
But Susie has calmed down, recently. She seems to feel that one method of birth control is adequate. And if the accident happens I can't help but hope that she will accept it bravely. Of course, I wouldn't push her to have a baby if she didn't want to; those people who want to make people have babies they don't want to have are ogres.
'But even if I weren't too ugly,' Susie protests, 'I'm too old. I mean, after forty you can have all sorts of complications. I might not just have an ugly baby, I might not even have a baby -- I might give birth to a kind of banana! After forty, it's pretty risky.'
'Nonsense, Susie,' I tell her. 'We'll just get you in shape -- a little light work with the weights, a little running. You're young at heart, Susie,' I tell her. 'The bear in you, Susie, is still a cub.'
'Convince me,' she tells me, and I know what that means. That's our euphemism for it -- whenever we want each other. She will just say, out of the blue, to me, 'I need to be convinced.'
Or I will say to her, 'Susie, you look in need of a little convincing.'
Or else Susie will just say 'Earl!' to me, and I'll know exactly what she means.
When we got married, that's what she said when she came to her moment to say 'I do.' Susie said, 'Earl!'
'What?' the minister said.
'Earl!' Susie said, nodding.
'She does,' I told the minister. 'That means she does.'
I suppose that neither Susie nor I will ever, quite, get over Franny, but we have our love for Franny in common, and that's more to have in common than whatever thing it is that's held in common by most couples. And if Susie was once Freud's eyes, I now see for my father, so that Susie and I have the vision of Freud in common, too. 'You got a marriage made in heaven, man,' Junior Jones has told me.
That morning after I'd first made love to Susie the bear I was a little late meeting Father in the ballroom for our weight-lifting session.
He was already lifting hard when I staggered in.
'Four hundred and sixty-four,' I said to him, because this was our traditional greeting. Recalling that old rogue, Schnitzler, Father and I thought it was a very funny way for two men living without women to greet each other.
'Four hundred and sixty-four, my eye!' Father grunted. 'Four hundred and sixty-four -- like hell! I had to listen to you half the night. Jesus God, I may be blind, but I can hear. By my count you're down to about four hundred and fifty-eight. You haven't got four hundred and sixty-four left in you -- not anymore. Who the hell is she? I've never imagined such an animal!'
But when I told him I'd been with Susie the bear, and that I very much hoped she would stay and live with us, Father was delighted.
'That's what we've been missing!' he cried. 'That's really perfect. I mean, you couldn't ask for a better hotel. I think you've handled the hotel business brilliantly! But we need a bear. Everybody does! And now that you've got the bear, you're home free, John. Now you've finally written the happy ending.'
Not quite, I thought. But, all things considered -- given sorrow, given doom, given love -- I knew things could be much worse.
So what is missing? Just a child, I think. A child is missing. I wanted a child, and I still want one. Given Egg, and given Lilly, children are all I am missing, now. I still might convince Susie the bear, of course, but Franny and Junior Jones will provide me with my first child. Even Susie is unafraid for that child.
'That child is going to be a beauty,' Susie says. 'With Franny and Junior making it, how can it miss?'
'But how could we miss?' I ask her. 'As soon as you have it, believe me, it will be beautiful.'
'But just think of the color,' Susie says. 'I mean, with Junior and Franny making it, won't it be an absolutely gorgeous fucking color?'
But I know, as Junior Jones has told me, that Franny and Junior's baby might be any color -- 'I'll give it a range between coffee and milk,' Junior likes to say.
'Any color baby is going to be a gorgeous-colored baby, Susie,' I tell her. 'You know that.' But Susie just needs more convincing.
I think that when Susie sees Junior and Franny's baby, it will make her want one, too. That's what I hope, anyway -- because I am almost forty, and Susie has already crossed that bridge, and if we're going to have a baby, we shouldn't wait much longer. I think that Franny's baby will do the trick; even Father agrees -- even Frank.
And isn't it just like Franny to be so generous as to offer to have a baby for me? I mean, from that day in Vienna when she promised us all that she was going to take care of us, that she was going to be our mother, from that day forth, Franny has stuck to her guns, Franny has come through -- the hero in her has kept pumping, the hero in Franny could lift a ballroom full of barbells.
It was just last winter, after the big snow, when Franny called me to say that she was going to have a baby -- just for me. Franny was forty at the time; she said that having a baby was closing the door to a room she wouldn't be coming back to. It was so early in the morning when the
phone rang that both Susie and I thought it was the rape crisis center hot-line phone, and Susie jumped out of bed thinking she had another rape crisis on her hands, but it was just the regular telephone that was ringing, and it was Franny -- all the way out on the West Coast. She and Junior were staying up late and having a party of two together; they hadn't gone to bed, yet, they said -- they pointed out that it was still night in California. They sounded a little drunk, and silly, and Susie was cross with them; she told them that no one but a rape victim ever called us that early in the morning and then she handed the phone to me.
I had to give Franny the usual report on how the rape crisis center was doing. Franny has donated quite a bit of money to the center, and Junior has helped us get good legal advice in our Maine area. Just last year Susie's rape crisis center gave medical, psychological, and legal counsel to ninety-one victims of rape -- or of rape-related abuse. 'Not bad, for Maine,' as Franny says.
'In New York and L.A., man,' says Junior Jones, 'there's about ninety-one thousand victims a year. Of everything,' he adds.
It wasn't hard to convince Susie that all those rooms in the Hotel New Hampshire could be used for something. We're a more than adequate facility for a rape crisis center, and Susie has trained several of the women from the college in Brunswick, so we always have a woman here to answer the hot-line phone. Susie has instructed me never to answer the hot-line phone. 'The last thing a rape victim wants to hear, when she calls for help,' Susie has told me, 'is a fucking man's voice.'
Of course it's been a little complicated with Father, who can't see which phone is ringing. So Father, when he's caught off guard by a ringing phone, has developed this habit of yelling, 'Telephone!' Even if he's standing right next to it.
Surprisingly, although Father still thinks that the Hotel New Hampshire is a hotel, he is not bad at rape counseling. I mean, he knows that rape crisis is Susie's business -- he just doesn't know that it's our only business, and sometimes he starts a conversation with a rape victim who's recovering herself with us at the Hotel New Hampshire, for a few days, and Father gets her confused with what he thinks is one of the 'guests.'
He might happen upon the victim, just composing herself down on one of the docks, and my father will tap-tap-tap his Louisville Slugger out onto the dock, and Four will wag his tail to let my father know that someone is there, and Father will start chatting. 'Hello, who's here?' he'll ask.
And maybe the rape victim will say, 'It's just me, Sylvia.'
'Oh yes, Sylvia!' Father will say, as if he's known her all his life. 'Well, how do you like the hotel, Sylvia?' And poor Sylvia will think that this is my father's very polite and indirect way of referring to the rape crisis center -- 'the hotel' -- and she'll just go along with it.
'Oh, it's meant a lot to me,' she'll say. 'I mean, I really needed to talk, but I didn't want to feel I had to talk about anything until I was ready, and what's nice here is that nobody pressures you, nobody tells you what you ought to feel or ought to do, but they help you get to those feelings more easily than you might get to them all by yourself. If you know what I mean,' Sylvia will say.
And Father will say, 'Of course I know what you mean, dear. We've been in the business for years, and that's just what a good hotel does: it simply provides you with the space, and with the atmosphere, for what it is you need. A good hotel turns space and atmosphere into something generous, into something sympathetic -- a good hotel makes those gestures that are like touching you, or saying a kind word to you, just when (and only when) you need it. A good hotel is always there,' my father will say, the baseball bat conducting both his lyrics and his song, 'but it doesn't ever give you the feeling that it's breathing down your neck.'
'Yeah, that's it, I guess,' Sylvia will say; or Betsy, or Patricia, Columbine, Sally, Alice, Constance, or Hope will say. 'It gets it all out of me, somehow, but not by force,' they'll say.
'No, never by force, my dear,' Father will agree. 'A good hotel forces nothing. I like to call it just a sympathy space,' Father will say, never acknowledging his debt to Schraubenschlussel and his sympathy bomb.
'And,' Sylvia will say, 'everyone's nice here.'
'Yes, that's what I like about a good hotel!' Father will say, excitedly. 'Everyone is nice. In a great hotel,' he'll tell Sylvia, or anybody who'll listen to him, 'you have a right to expect that niceness. You come to us, my dear -- and please forgive me for saying so -- like someone who's been maimed, and we're your doctors and your nurses.'
'Yes, that's right,' Sylvia will say.
'If you come to a great hotel in parts, in broken pieces,' my father will go on and on, 'when you leave the great hotel, you'll leave it whole again. We simply put you back together again, but this is almost mystically accomplished -- his is the sympathy space I'm talking about -- because you can't force anyone back together again; they have to grow their own way. We provide space,' Father will say, the baseball bat blessing the rape victim like a magic wand. 'The space and the light,' my father will say, as if he were a holy man blessing some other holy person.
And that's how you should treat a rape victim, Susie says; they are holy, and you treat them as a great hotel treats every guest. Every guest at a great hotel is an honored guest, and every rape victim at the Hotel New Hampshire is an honored guest -- and holy.
'It's actually a good name for a rape crisis center,' Susie agrees. 'The Hotel New Hampshire -- that's got a little class to it.'
And with the support of the county authorities, and a wonderful organization of women doctors called the Kennebec Women's Medical Associates, we run a real rape crisis center in our unreal hotel. Susie sometimes tells me that Father is the best counselor she's got.
'When someone's really fucked up,' Susie confides to me, 'I send them down to the docks to see the blind man and Seeing Eye Dog Number Four. Whatever he tells them must be working,' Susie concludes. 'At least, so far, nobody's jumped off.'
'Keep passing the open windows, my dear,' my father will tell just about anyone. 'That's the important thing, dear,' he adds. No doubt it is Lilly who lends such authority to my father's advice. He was always good at advising us children -- even when he knew absolutely nothing about what was wrong. 'Maybe especially when he knows absolutely nothing,' Frank says. 'I mean, he still doesn't know I'm queer and he gives me good advice all the time.' What a knack!
'Okay, okay,' Franny said to me on the phone, just last winter, just after the big snow. 'I didn't call you to hear the ins and outs of every rape in Maine -- not this time, kid,' Franny told me. 'Do you still want a baby?'
'Of course I do,' I told her. 'I'm trying to convince Susie of it, every day.'
'Well,' Franny said, 'how'd you like a baby of mine?'
'But you don't want a baby, Franny,' I reminded her. 'What do you mean?'
'I mean Junior and I got a little sloppy,' Franny said. 'And rather than do the modern thing, we thought we knew the perfect mother and father for a baby.'
'Especially these days, man,' Junior said, on his end of the phone. 'I mean, Maine may be the last hideout.'
'Every kid should grow up in a weird hotel, don't you agree?' Franny asked.
'What I thought, man,' said Junior Jones, 'was that every kid should have at least one parent who does nothing. I don't mean to insult you, man,' Junior said to me, 'but you're just a perfect sort of caretaker. You know what I mean?'
'He means, you look after everybody,' Franny said, sweetly. 'He means, it's kind of like your role. You're a perfect father.'
'Or a mother, man,' Junior added.
'And when Susie's got a baby around, perhaps she'll see the light,' Franny said.
'Maybe she'll get brave enough to give it a shot, man,' said Junior Jones. 'So to speak,' he added, and Franny howled on her end of the phone. They'd obviously been cooking this phone call up together, for quite some time.
'Hey!' Franny said on the phone. 'Cat got your tongue? Are you there? Hello, hello!'
'Hey, man,' said Junior Jones. 'Y
ou passed out or something?'
'Has a bear got your balls?' Franny asked me. 'I'm asking you, do you want my baby?'
'That's not a frivolous question, man,' said Junior Jones.
'Yes or no, kid?' Franny said. 'I love you, you know,' she added. 'I wouldn't have a baby for just anybody, you know, kid.' But I couldn't speak, I was so happy.
'I'm offering you nine fucking months of my life! I'm offering you nine months of my beautiful body, kid!' Franny teased me. 'Take it or leave it!'
'Man!' cried Junior Jones. 'Your sister, whose body is desired by millions, is offering to change her shape for you. She's willing to look like a fucking Coke bottle just to give you a baby, man. I don't know exactly how I'm going to put up with it,' he added, 'but we both love you, you know. What do you say? Take it or leave it.'