by Joan Silber
“No promises,” she said.
All the workers in the hotel knew about us, but no one was carrying tales. The night before Debbie left, I went back after supper to the chambers I shared with Melanie, and my wife was lying on the bed in her clothes. “Do I look green?” she said. “I feel green.”
“What did you eat?”
“It’s not the food,” she said. She turned her face to the wall.
I had a very disturbing thought, but I let it go. I didn’t say, Are you pregnant? I said, “Sleep, my lover.” And I went off to see Debbie. She would be gone so soon, what did any of it matter? I had the rest of my life to minister tenderly to Melanie.
Debbie was giddy with triumph on her last night. “I’m going to make you remember me!” she said. This meant added flourishes in foreplay, which I certainly appreciated—much slyness and laughing, and then the more serious drama, the wild unstoppable resolve, the whimpering and calling out in voices not our own.
When we were done, Debbie whispered into my shoulder, “How will you ever get along without me?”
“Very badly,” I said. It did occur to me that I had a lover to go home to and she didn’t.
“It was not very bright of you to get married so young,” she said. “Really very stupid.”
“Stop it,” I said. “Okay?”
“Why were you so stupid?”
“Debbie,” I said. “I think it’s time to shut up.”
“You shut up,” she said.
“I will, then,” I said. “If you want.”
I turned away, but not for long. There she was, when I turned back. Her tanned face was radiantly pink and misty with sweat.
“You just look so sad,” she said. “I hate to see you look so sad.”
I made a dopey sad-clown face. I was a little appalled at myself.
“Poor baby,” she said.
I crumpled my brow, I turned down my lips in a pout. How greedy I had gotten.
“Cheer me up,” I said.
Before dawn, I went back to Melanie, who slept in our bed, breathing evenly into her own dreams. Some hours later I came out of a deep slumber to hear her throwing up in the bathroom. “Honey, are you okay?” I said.
“Look at your back,” she called out. “Just look.”
I started to joke about how I didn’t have eyes in the back of my head, did I, but by then I was swerving in the mirror and saw the row of scratches on my skin. Freshly rusty. I was sure there was a lie that would help me, but I couldn’t think of it.
“You’re the one I love,” I said.
This only made her shriek and yowl—Melanie, the sanest of women.
She was still shouting, and her eyes were wet and furious when she came out of the bathroom. “How did I end up with you?” she said. “What’s wrong with me that I picked you?”
“This was nothing,” I said. “Really nothing.”
“That’s so reassuring,” she said. “You betrayed me for nothing.”
Melanie stood in her little flowery cotton nightgown, with her slender legs looking spindly, and I was more convinced by the minute that she was pregnant. I kept thinking, as she raged and twisted her face in disgust and I argued and cowered, that she would never leave me if she were having my baby. She was too solid a girl to maroon herself like that. I would do whatever penance I had to to keep her and she would never make it easy, but I would win her over in the end.
“Don’t be upset, don’t be. Tell me what you want me to do,” I said. “I’ll do anything.”
“Give me all your money,” she said. “Give me your salary for the rest of your life.”
“Very funny,” I said. “I guess we’ll talk later.”
“Talk is cheap,” she said.
For most of the next week, Melanie had a stomach virus. She burned a low fever and threw up many times a day, and I came back to the room as often as I could to set down cups of tea, plates of dry toast, bowls of clear broth. Did she want ginger ale? A cold compress? If she was pregnant, she didn’t say so. What she said was, “I’ll be so glad to get out of this phony hotel and away from phony you and your phony family.”
She got me to confess Debbie’s name, and she didn’t know who Debbie was. That seemed to especially enrage her. Her mouth was a bitter line when we talked. I held fast to the notion that she would come back to herself if enough time passed. My father paid a visit and brought her some favorite records to get well by. Tommy Dorsey, Miriam Makeba. She gave my father an earful about me. My father told my mother.
“Oh, Anthony,” my mother said. “You were so nice when you were a little boy.” I began taking most of my meals in our room. I ate what I could and I said anything I could think of to coax Melanie out of hating me. She lay slumped against the pillow, pale and fixed. I listed what was beautiful about her, I went into tales of great times in college, I gave her a soft, fuzzy bathrobe from the hotel gift shop. I bought her a very good pair of pearl earrings from the hotel jeweler. Even with my name and discount, I had to pay in installments, but the pearls were perfect and pure, her kind of thing.
The earrings were a big mistake. “Oh, no,” she said, when she saw the box. When I finally got her to open it, she said, “You thought I’d melt with joy? You want me to crow with glee like a hooker?”
“You can exchange them for some you like better,” I said.
“I’m not a hooker,” she said. “You have everything all wrong.”
And so I did, it seemed. Anything I said made things worse. My speed in getting into bed with someone else—after we’d been married less than a year, she kept saying—was an insult she could not get over. In truth, we were both at an age before we’d learned to get over anything. And I was undergoing the shock of knowing myself (me, Anthony) as the callous and unspeakable creep who kicked his sweet wife in the teeth. Melanie, for Christ’s sake. If I had dreamed for a second that she might find out . . . (another argument that didn’t do much for me). I had never before been the villain of the piece and it made me feel abused by fate. I sputtered and fought, and when that didn’t work, I glowered and spoke in sad monosyllables.
I did everything I could to keep her from leaving, but I could see she only grew surer that her honor lay in disdaining me. At night, in my exile on the couch in our suite, I remembered how glad she’d once been to see me walking toward her on campus, how her face would suddenly open and change into toothy joy. It was pretty devastating to remember. All my feeling for her was as clear and strong as ever, but now I was like a man in love with a movie star who didn’t even know him. When she moved out with all her clothes and books and records and went back to her family, she said, “I don’t feel sorry for you. But I will.” She left behind her rings and an angora sweater with a fox collar that I’d bought her and the hi-fi I’d given her in college, which she said had always been crappy.
And I couldn’t stand to hear any music now, it turned out. If I set down the needle, I’d take it up in a few seconds. Every tune sounded blithe and inane to me. But in the afternoon, when most guests were out, I’d go back to my room and put towels against the door to muffle the sound and I’d play my clarinet. I hadn’t picked it up in a few years and my tone was terrible, breathy as a sick sheep. I kept playing the same simple tunes (“One for My Baby,” “Autumn Leaves”) until I was a little better. It was one of the few things I could stand to do.
And I gave Melanie almost as much alimony as she asked for, despite the brevity of our marriage and the fact that she had left my bed and board. I did this out of sheer desolation. My lawyer was disgusted with me. Even my father, who’d always liked Melanie, thought I was a patsy. Maybe everyone did. The whole town knew my story. When I sat at our hotel bar trying to pace my shots of Seagram’s so I didn’t get too blotto with guests around, people tried to be nice (“Sorry about your troubles”) and they commiserated about money. Men did. They’d say, “They soak you, don’t they?” or “Freedom has its price, oh, boy.” Women said, “You’re young. Time for a new st
art, when you’re ready.”
It was fortunate I could drink for free at the hotel, since my cash had to stretch much further now. The weekday bartenders, an ancient and discreet crew, became people whose faces I knew as well as my own. Women did hover around me at the bar—I’d become someone to be curious about, to ask personal questions, to offer comfort or more than comfort, and it made me feel somewhat elegant, to be a man who turned down luxuries.
The thing was not to drink too much. I could get too confident, could hold forth about how Rita Hayworth liked me or how divorce is a racket for lawyers. I’d tell any woman in the bar she was a member of the smartest sex by far, that men were just dopes compared to females. One woman told stories about how they measured the intelligence of dogs (were men as smart as dogs?) and the conversation got so jokey and riotous that I ended up going back to her room and having an entirely enjoyable fling. She was gone within a few days, back to her husband, but a friend of hers knew about me and liked to joke with me, as if we had a secret. Pretty soon (the steps were not that many) we began to have our own secret. She too was married—her name was Kitty, a breezy, languid sort of woman—and we had to be careful because the husband was sometimes about. She was not afraid of him but I was. “He’s a bluffer,” she said. “That’s what bankers are.” How spoiled I was, letting her tickle me under the covers. This was an odd time for me—my heart was clotted with pain, aching for Melanie, and I was somehow also having an almost genuine form of fun.
The house rule, explicitly stated to all hotel employees, male and female, was no fooling around with guests. Well, of course not. Think of the trouble, the lawsuits, the tawdriness. I understood the need to be careful. But one night I fell asleep and woke up to the stench of burning fibers—I was sleeping in a nest of flames! Kitty’s bed was on fire, from one of my cigarettes. I tried to keep myself from shouting at the mattress while I hit it with a blanket. Kitty had the sense to get wet towels, which worked better. By then the room was full of black smoke and we had to run out to the hallway. I was just getting my pants on when the other rooms emptied out. People blinked at me in their pajamas. The firemen coming up the stairs cursed me for being in the way just as I was getting the hell out of there.
I was back in my own room, safe and asleep, when my parents woke me sometime early in the morning. “This can’t go on,” my mother said. “You can’t live here and keep this up.”
“He knows that,” my father said. They had let themselves in and were standing by my bed.
“What did we work for?” my mother said. “What is this hotel, then?”
“Nobody says you’re not a bright boy, Anthony,” my father said.
“They might do this in France,” my mother said, “but not here.”
“You got to get out of here for a while,” my father said. “Go stay with your sister Gigi in Tampa. She’d love to have you. Dry out. You listening?”
My father used to run a speakeasy, and my mother was once the belle of Village radicals, to hear her tell it, before she left a husband and went off to mess around with my father. I wondered, not for the first time, where they had buried those parts of them. I was very, very thirsty and my head weighed four hundred pounds. “Is Kitty okay?” I said. The skin on my palm was oozing where I’d apparently burned it. My mother brought me a tumbler of water to drink. “Okay, okay, I’ll go,” I said.
I was in a secret rage at the hotel. It had been my ruin, that palace of quiet piggery. I knew this was a stupid form of blame, but every monogrammed towel, every sculpted brass faucet, every strain of piped music in the lobby now gave me the willies. Things I’d been around since birth seemed to me full of corruption. My parents were right: I had to leave.
But I certainly wasn’t going to Gigi’s in Tampa. Tampa and I didn’t seem like a good match. I began to think Paris was the right idea. My mother and Henry Miller had put this particular bee in my bonnet. City of liberté and chacun à son goût. I was fairly sure I would like it better without Melanie.
I had no money for a ticket, unless, of course, I skipped this month’s alimony. If a man happened to be behind on such a thing, was it illegal for him to leave the country? I had the feeling it was wiser to keep my plans to myself. The thing was to go soon and stay as long as I could. Not that I had any savings for such a move. But I was the one whose job it was to pick up the cash from the front desk, tally the accounts, and put all those greenbacks in the safe. When not all of it reached the safe, the ledgers (kept by me) didn’t show any such loss. I had some guilt about doing this, some edginess as I walked down the halls with a secret lump in my briefcase. I did it five times, and each time the thefts also made me a little high.
I packed my clarinet in its black leather case, with a decent supply of reeds, and two valises. I told my family I was going off to Gigi’s, and I drove to the airport and boarded a plane to Paris. Simple as that. My plane left at sunset, when the sky was hot orange and strange. What dream did I think I was in? I was drinking, or I might have treated my parents better, but what liquor made me see was not entirely wrong. The mess I’d made of things was from a spirit in me that could get grim and fiendish or could spill into a brighter night.
The unsimple part was that I had no idea at all what to do when I landed. I got lost in the airport trying to read signs with my high school French. All I could think of was to take a cab to the hotel where Melanie and I had stayed, that elegant hulk near Avenue Foch. How jaded I felt, walking again into the gilt-and-curlicued lobby. They had no room and sent me around the corner to a dowdier place, a curtained fortress of iron balconies. Tired as I was, I put pillows against the door of my room and I took out my clarinet and began to play “Au Claire de la Lune” very, very slowly. The skin on my palm was still stiff from the burn I’d gotten in the fire, but the slowed tune had a sweet drag to it. I waited for someone to knock and tell me to be quiet (I was afraid of French people being fierce), and no one did. And then I fell asleep in my clothes.
Early the next day, I woke up dull-headed but dazzled that I wasn’t in Tampa with Gigi. I had to go out to the American Express office to telegraph my parents, to keep them from worrying I was dead. HAVE TAKEN DETOUR TO PARIS, I wrote in my telegram. Perhaps they would all be envying me my adventure.
I walked all day, following my nose, fueled on caffeine and a panic close to joy. How cheap things were here. I bought a pack of Gitanes for almost nothing, I bought a pitcher of wine at lunch for spare change. I settled on a bench in a park and watched a child and her mother feed pigeons. I must’ve looked very American (no European had a haircut that short in 1962) but no one bothered me, no one cared.
It was October, but I ate outside that night at a pretty restaurant with tables on the sidewalk. Some very good-looking women walked past me, while I savored my entrecôte and drank my Pomerol. One went by in a chartreuse coat, and I said, “What a nice color.” I said it in English, and she answered me by asking if I knew her friend Barbara in New York. (She said Bar-bar-a, sounding each syllable.)
“Oh, yes,” I said. “I know her well. A lovely person.”
“Maybe she says you are very nice too,” the woman said.
She looked to be about my age. She was a pale girl with blots of pink in her cheeks and dark hair neatly trimmed. There was nothing vulgar in her looks, and yet she was flirting with a stranger.
“I am a student,” she said. “You are a student?”
I was not eating in a students’ restaurant, that was for sure. I considered saying I was in school, if she wanted that. “I own a few hotels,” I said. “What are you studying?”
She was reading American literature and she very much liked Hemingway and Faulkner (which she said Foke-ner). “You know where is Mississippi?” she said.
I said I was from Florida, which was farther south and even warmer than Mississippi.
“I like the warm countries,” she said.
“Would you like to sit down?” I said. “Maybe have a bite to eat?”
> This expression made her laugh—“Bite you?”—but she did sit. When would her studies be done, and what would she do then? “I will starve,” she said.
She might have been starving now, from the way she ate the steak she ordered. She cut and chewed with charming speed. Did I enjoy Paris, she asked, did I want to see more of Paris, she could show me.
No wonder this city wasn’t so great with Melanie, I thought. The woman’s name was Liliane, and I wanted her to see my hotel, which I thought she’d admire, but the staff might give me a hard time if I took her to my room. Some hotels were like that and some weren’t.
In the end, after we’d gone through more wine, I walked her (with my hand at her chartreuse back) to a taxi stand, and I gave the driver some bills to take her wherever she lived. She was coming the next day to show me very fine things. I got in some extensive kissing before she took off. I wasn’t sure she was really coming back the next day, but I was okay with that.
The sight of her in my lobby in the morning was like a jolt of pure adrenaline, like a drug anybody would pay bags of gold for. She walked me all over the Eighth Arrondissement and the Seventh. I didn’t really care all that much about churches—why did she think I wanted to see them?—but these were necessary foils to our actual mission. A chill wind blew leaves at our feet. She shivered with cold in her chartreuse topper, and I showed off by gazing into the window of some illustrious store on the Rue de Rivoli and buying her a very snappy red wool coat right then and there. I admired the casual way she slipped on different models, her lack of cloying thanks. Once the coat was bought, we were more intimately tied.
I wouldn’t have done this at home—buy an expensive present for a woman I’d only just met. At home I didn’t have to. Everyone knew who I was. Here I was unknown even to myself, at the perilous start of who could say what. Her English made my English more stilted, and I had only my dollars to help me. I had to do what I could to make everything go well.
And so it did. We had a bang-up dinner in a bistro she picked on Saint-Germain-des-Prés and then she took me to hear jazz in a club, which was just what I wanted to do. I had to drink many coffees to stay awake, which sobered me slightly, and I heard, truly, the saxophone waiting, talking, waiting, while the drum muttered back and the bass laughed at them. I’d heard better groups, but not in person, and my skin could take in all the vibrations, my breath followed all the bypaths. Liliane said they were having a good night.