She stops trying to read and, annoyed, turns to look at him.
Oh, she thinks. Oh. Because while he might be crazy, he is also quite handsome.
The man is about Louisa's age. He wears his hair long, as if he were a British poet. His hands are large and rough. Each fingernail has been bitten back to a red nub and is lined with black grease. His shoulders are quite broad, and he wears the collar of his coat turned halfway up, halfway disheveled and down. He pushes a pair of wire spectacles back up the bridge of his nose.
"Louisa Dewell," he says. "Hello." He smiles. "How's Marlene?"
"What?" she asks. She's never seen this man before in her life.
"Marlene the pigeon. You don't remember me?"
"No. I'm sorry. I don't."
"I'm Arthur Vaughn. You and I were in primary school together. I guess that was a long time ago now."
Louisa remembers everyone from elementary school, but she does not remember this man. And she would remember him. "Are you sure?" she asks.
"You went to Elias Howe Elementary on Forty-fifth Street. Your homeroom teacher was named Miss Knott. Right?"
"Yes. That's right." For some reason what this man says makes Louisa blush. It burns. Louisa is not one accustomed to blushing. She's had a good deal of experience with the opposite sex, and while she couldn't say that she's ever been in love, it is only because she hasn't chosen to fall in love. Men do not intimidate her; instead she delights in intimidating them. She considers herself thoroughly modern. She once shocked a suitor by walking herself home, alone, at ten o'clock at night. She has little patience for prudes.
"And I won't ever forget. One day you brought a pigeon to school in a wicker cage. It was for show-and-tell," the stranger on the platform says.
"That's right." Louisa remembers how at a prearranged time Miss Knott nodded to Louisa, who fetched the covered cage from the back of the classroom and carried it up to Miss Knott's wooden desk. Louisa had been terrified. She scratched at her head, chewed on her lips. She was flustered to be standing before a perhaps inhospitable classroom full of fourth graders. She began to sweat and twitter.
"Go ahead" Miss Knott said, so finally, after one large swallow, Louisa pulled back a worn chamois cloth that had been covering the cage. The bird was lean, strong, and gorgeous. Its iridescent feathers looked like a jewel.
A few children snickered because pigeons were as common as dust in New York City. Louisa opened a small door on the wicker cage. The bird hopped over to her outstretched pointer finger. And Louisa removed the bird from its enclosure.
"Ladies and gentlemen," she said to the roomful of fourth graders, just as Walter had practiced it with her. "Study this bird well." Louisa paused with the pigeon perched on her finger. The bird was nearly purple everywhere except for her extraordinary neck and her feet, which were the healthiest shade of bright pink magenta. She had a small white ring around her orange eye, an eye that did not blink. The bird bobbed herself nervously about, ducking and stretching her neck as though she were a miniature Irish boxer in the thick of a rumble. "Ladies and gentlemen," Louisa repeated, though they were really just boys and girls. "Please remember what this bird looks like," she said and turned to the bank of windows at the head of the classroom. After pushing on one of the wooden slats that held the rippled panes in place, she drew the window up with one hand while extending her arm outside. The bird took flight simply, magnificently, as birds do, and Louisa turned to collect her cage. The class mustered a round of applause for Louisa, though her demonstration remained to them as mysterious as the bird's iridescent neck.
Mysterious, that is, until the following day at school, when Louisa returned with her cage once more, and again at the appointed time Miss Knott gave her nod, and Louisa, standing before the class, no longer nervous but this time with all the confidence of a studied magician, whisked the chamois cover off the cage. Inside was the exact same bird that Louisa had set free the day before.
She began to explain to the class, "You see, Marlene is a homing pigeon..."
"So how's Marlene?" Arthur Vaughn asks her.
"Marlene's dead," she says.
"Oh, I'm sorry." Arthur twists his bottom lip with his fingers. "Hmm," he says and then nothing more. Louisa waits. He twists his lip some more before looking up at the subway ceiling. "I've been meaning to ask you" he finally says. Arthur keeps his voice very quiet, and Louisa has to lean in closer to hear. She can smell him, pepper and beeswax. "Ever since that day in school I've been wondering, how do pigeons know their way home?" When he speaks he moves the tips of his fingers, as if conducting.
Louisa shakes her head, blushing. She has no idea how pigeons find their way home.
The tunnel fills with sound. The subway train pulls into the station. Arthur and Louisa watch it come to a stop in front of them. The doors make a hissing pop as they open and Arthur turns to smile at Louisa, waiting for her to board the subway first. She steps inside, rigidly aware of his presence behind her as if he were a huge magnet pulling her heart, her lungs, her stomach into his.
The train lurches forward. Once he has found a seat for them both, he leans into her, placing his mouth not more than three inches away from her ear. "Well, how do they?" Arthur asks so softly that Louisa smiles.
"Who?" she asks, wanting to keep his mouth, his breath this close.
"The pigeons. How do they always know the way home?"
"I," she says, "haven't," as slowly as she can, "any idea, Arthur."
"Forty-second Street. Connection to the BMT and IRT available!"
"Oh." He straightens up. "I see," he says raising his voice, pulling back from her, disappointed as if he himself had been trying to find his way home and was hoping Louisa would tell him. "Well, I think we should find out. Don't you?"
She sees dark hairs inside his nose and it thrills her. He is an adult, complicated by all the adult things, hairs, scars, breath, glasses. "How?" she asks.
He raises his eyebrows. "I don't know yet," he says. "But I'll think about it and let you know." And then Arthur stares right at her and Louisa stares right back, her mouth open a bit because it is this staring that seems to make him so very different from any other men Louisa has ever known, even Walter. Arthur, unlike the others, actually seems to be trying to see her. She draws back, suspicious as if she'd found a dollar bill in the street. At first one always thinks something good is a trick.
He shakes his head and his hair falls over his eyes.
"Thirty-fourth Street. Pennsylvania Station. Transfer available to the IRT and Long Island Railroad!"
"This is my stop. I have to go," she says.
"Well, think about it. Let me know if you come up with anything," he says.
"I will. I will" She steps through the door. "Happy New Year."
"Happy New Year, Louisa. See you" Arthur yells.
"How?" she turns to ask—rather coyly, she thinks—but then the doors close and she is mortified to be left holding an unanswered question, as if he duped her somehow. She watches him a moment through the glass and her eyes flash. He lifts one arm to wave through the window. She turns quickly so that he won't see, as she heads off toward the hotel, how the eyes of Arthur Vaughn have been burned into the very back of her brain.
Louisa surfaces in the middle of a construction site. Ever since they tore down the El, building has been booming. The sidewalks are lined with scaffolding and cranes. Metal and wood skeletons surround new buildings that rise so high Louisa can barely see the tops of them. The workers use a system of derricks, ropes, and pulleys to haul building supplies from the sidewalk up hundreds of feet. Pallets of goods swing high up into the air before being lowered slowly into a circle of outstretched arms waiting to gently receive the delivery. Louisa imagines a crane that would swoop her up of the sidewalk, her skirt billowing in the breeze, the fabric lifting halfway up her thigh. She'd be suspended on an iron hook that would raise her fearlessly high up into the sky before slowly, slowly lowering her into a union of outstre
tched arms, the eager limbs of surprised and delighted construction workers, each one of them Arthur Vaughn. Louisa bites her lip. Nine Arthurs, adjusting their eyewear, waiting to receive her.
She speeds her steps past the construction site. She's going to be late for work.
The Hotel New Yorker, at Thirty-fourth and Eighth Avenue, was the tallest building in New York City when it was built in 1930, at a cost of over twenty-two million dollars. It is forty-three stories high. It has its own power generator, producing enough energy to support thirty-five thousand people. The kitchen is an entire acre. There is even a hospital with its own operating room inside the hotel. There are five restaurants, ten private dining rooms, and two ballrooms where, as the brochure says, World famous orchestras interpret the syncopated rhythms of today! There is an indoor ice-skating rink on the Terrace Room's dance floor where chorus girls perform an Ice Fangles at both lunch and dinner daily. Magical conveyor belts whisk dirty dishes through secret passageways down to the fully automated dishwasher. Four stories below ground, bedsheets and tablecloths are miraculously laundered, dried, ironed, and folded without ever being touched by a human hand. There is not only a beauty salon but a barbershop. Each room, all two thousand five hundred and three of them, has its own radio broadcasting on four hotel channels from noon until midnight. There are twenty desk clerks at all times, twenty-three elevator operators, and a personal secretary for each floor to record messages for guests who are out seeing the sights. Two thousand people work at the hotel, and Louisa is one of them.
When Louisa first started working here, her powers of navigation proved utterly useless. Anytime she had to venture of her known path, she would find herself lost in the labyrinth. It was not uncommon for a new employee to be dispatched on a small errand only to return three hours later, shaken and completely exhausted, having wandered for hours through machine rooms, boiler basements, and endless hallways trying to find her way back to the lobby.
Louisa enters the hotel through an unmarked service door on Thirty-fourth Street, slipping inside the beast ten minutes late and barely noticed.
"Trudy's sick. You're on thirty-three and thirty-four today," the head maid, a woman named Matilda, tells her as she punches in at the time clock. Not her usual floors.
Through the pale esophagus of service passages, past the stomach that is the laundry where thirty-two acres of sheets and sixty-five miles of towels are washed every day, Louisa finds herself in the tiny gallbladder of the lady employees' changing room. The room is ripe with bleach fumes.
A number of other women are getting changed either into or out of their uniforms. Louisa squeezes past them on the way to her locker. "Hi, Lou," an older woman named Francine says. Francine's bosom rides so heavy and low on her chest it threatens to sever the threadbare straps of her brassiere.
"Hi." Waves of peeling paint rise and fall on the walls.
Sunny and Anika, two other chambermaids, inconveniently have their lockers on either side of Louisa's. They are eighteen and good friends. Both of them date sailors who are overseas. They are, to Louisa's thinking, immature and bothersome. Their closeness makes them giddy, and so they like it when Louisa stands between them. They enjoy having someone to perform for, someone to play the monkey in the middle.
"Ani, I went up to the roof last night," Sunny says as Louisa fiddles with the key on her locker. "And I thought, OK, God, give me a sign, should I wait for Luke or should I go out with Mario, you know the sous-chef, Mario?"
"Ugh, Mario," Anika says.
"What's wrong with Mario?"
"He smells like Brussels sprouts."
"I like Brussels sprouts."
"Anyway, the roof?"
"Yeah, the roof. So you know what God does?"
"No."
Sunny is standing in just her tights. Her pale, puffy stomach rises up and out where the waistband cuts into her hip. "Nothing. God didn't do a damn thing. So what do you think? Mario or wait for Luke?"
Anika is laughing while Sunny stands, a hand on her hip, still staring toward Anika, looking right through Louisa. She repeats, "Come on. Mario or wait for Luke?" Anika only shakes her head, not answering.
"What about you, Lou? What do you think?" Sunny curls the tip of one lip and jerks her head.
"Mario has a wife," Louisa says without looking to the left or the right.
Sunny turns back to her locker and stands, frozen, staring at the metal grating, a troubled look on her face.
Louisa gets the key to work and, opening her locker, she blocks Sunny's stare.
"That son of a bitch," Sunny says. "Son of a gun of a bitch." She slams her metal locker door so that it vibrates like an angry cymbal. Anika starts to laugh again.
Louisa barely notices the commotion of the changing room. She's trying to remember who Arthur Vaughn is, how he knows her. She'll ask Walter tonight. He remembers everything. Louisa strips down to her slip, gets into a simple black dress, ties a white frilled apron around her neck and waist before affixing a puffy black and white bonnet to her head—the official uniform. It is a cloak of invisibility. She likes it that way: alone with her thoughts and her cart of cleaning supplies.
She keeps a small chip of mirror in her locker. She uses it to try to fix herself, but her hair has dried out with the winter and it sits like a wild black cat upon her head. She pokes at it. Slowly she scrapes and tugs a piece of flaked skin off her bottom lip, digs some sleep out of her eye, and, her beauty regimen complete, rides the service elevator up to the thirty-fourth floor.
The hotel is a gentle monster, a sleeping giant that endures the constant bustle of so many guests. Everywhere art-deco designs make the eyeballs pop. The carpets in the hallways yawn in looping half moons of color. The wall sconces grip their moldings like angular irises. Patterns repeat upon patterns, bright colors that seem to spring from the cigar boxes and bands for sale in the lobby. Everywhere is the world of tomorrow. Efficiency! Hurry! Chrome and glass! And Louisa imagines herself a small but necessary part of the glimmering hotel.
"Housekeeping," Louisa says, quietly knocking once and then a second time just to make sure.
No one answers and so she turns the key. "Housekeeping?" The room is empty and she wheels her cart inside, closing the door behind her. Louisa lifts her chin. There's a feeling of quiet excitement that she gets every time she closes a hotel door behind her. "Hotel New Yorker chambermaids are never to close the door to a guest room," says the official handbook, but Louisa does. Always. She wants to be the bestkept secret in New York City, and hidden behind one of two thousand five hundred and three doors, she is.
Immediately she shifts into her alter ego, part chambermaid, part detective. She sifts through the guests' belongings, looking at any papers they might have left, newspapers from foreign towns or travel brochures and pamphlets. She looks through their playbills. She inspects their room-service trays to see what they have been eating. Gently she opens all their drawers and suitcases. She examines the dirty laundry they've left strewn on the floor.
She'd never take anything. It's just that she's curious. She makes people up from the bits they leave in their rooms. And these people, the imagined ones, are so much easier to deal with than the hotel's actual guests, who can be needy or demanding. She has been working at the hotel ever since she graduated from high school, and in that time it has become very much like a home to her, a home now populated with thousands of wonderful guests whom she has created from a polyester slip left on an unmade bed, from a pair of leather shoes whose outer heels are nearly worn through.
The glow of the lamp, the scratch of dust on the rug, the rumble of the boiler many floors below sending steam heat into the bathroom radiators, are the only sounds other than a voice every now and again passing in the hallway. "The poor child was born with her legs fused together and her mother didn't want to have them separated, thought she'd given birth to a mermaid. Well, the doctors insis—" The elevator doors close and the voices disappear. Eventually Louisa gets aroun
d to cleaning. Change the sheets, replace the towels, empty the trash, refill the automatic soap dispenser, straighten up. It is very easy. Except for lugging around the Protecto-Ray. Someone at General Electric had the bright idea that the only way to really get the Hotel New Yorker's bathrooms clean was to zap each of them with ultraviolet rays and then seal the room off with cellophane. The Protecto-Ray does the zapping. It looks more like an iron lung than a sanitizing agent. It scares children. It both fascinates and horrifies Louisa. She turns it on to zap, and after taking a seat on top of the toilet tank, she falls mesmerized into its purple light. Sanitized. Hypnotized.
Her second room of the day seems quite regular. There are two windows looking out over Thirty-fifth Street, and they are both open. The curtains are blowing in the cold air. It's January 1st, 1943. She closes the windows. The double bed has been used on only one side. Married. There is little mess, suggesting that the guest is new here. Yet there is lots of luggage, suggesting a long visit. Dusting the bureau, she investigates further—matches from a train-depot coffee shop in Illinois. One cigarette quickly lit and then stubbed out, as though sampled by a novice who found the smoke disgusting. Possibly this guest is in town for the first time. She opens one of the suitcases and quickly confirms that the guest is a man. All seems normal. She cleans the bathroom quickly, sets the Protecto-Ray to ON while sweeping up the carpet in the main room. But when roller brooming beneath the bed, she strikes something solid and weighty. What? She drops to her knees to gather more information. There, tucked beneath the dust ruffle, is a footlocker. Why would someone stash a footlocker beneath the bed in a room as spacious as this one? She is elated by her find and pulls the case out.
"Hello?" Louisa knocks on the chest's lid. She anticipates the worst—the man from Illinois is traveling with his wife stuffed into a steamer trunk. Her knock gets no answer, and so she thinks, "She's dead! He's slaughtered her!" Suddenly, there's a universe of possibilities. His tools for murder—a machete, perhaps, or a bomb, or a chemist's lair of toxic poisons. A magician's doves or marionettes. A traveling salesman's Bibles and encyclopedias. A drunk's bar. A big-game hunter's moose head. A sailor's seashell collection. She tries to open the top. It's locked. "Hello?" she asks the box again, lowering her ear to its lid. There's no response. "Hello?" She can hardly stand such a puzzle. It feels as though the box is beginning to hum, broadcasting all the mysteries of the universe, every potentiality right here in the Hotel New Yorker. What's inside? "Hello?" she asks one last time, banging on the top. "Fine!" Louisa says and roughly shoves the box back under the bed. Furious. She quickly finishes sweeping the floor and, irritated by her unsatisfied curiosity, only replaces some of the dirty towels. She seals the bathroom with cellophane but forgoes the mint on the pillow of the impossibly secret man from Illinois.
The Invention of Everything Else Page 4