The Hotel Eden: Stories

by Ron Carlson

  Of course, Elizabeth Rensdale, seeing her at the pool that way, so casually naked, made me think of Linda and the fact that I had no idea of what was going on. I couldn’t remember her body, though, that summer, I gave it some thought. It was worse not being a virgin, because I should have then had some information to fuel my struggles with loneliness. I had none, except Linda’s face and her voice, “Here, let me get it.”

  From the truck I called Nadine, telling her I was finished with Scottsdale and was heading—on schedule—to Mesa. “Did you pick up Mr. Rensdale’s walker? Over.”

  “No, ma’am. Over.” We had to say “Over.”

  “Why not? You were supposed to. Over.”

  The heat in the early afternoon as I dropped through the river bottom and headed out to Mesa was gigantic, an enormous, unrelenting thing, and I took a kind of perverse pleasure from it. I could feel a heartbeat in my healing burns. My truck was not air-conditioned, a thing that wouldn’t fly now, but then I drove with my arm out the window through the traffic of these desert towns. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know. Should I go back? Over.” I could see going back, surprising the girl. I wanted to see that girl again.

  “It was on your sheet. Let it go this week. But let’s read the sheet from now on. Over and out.”

  “Over and out,” I said into the air, hanging up the handset.

  Half the streets in Mesa were dirt, freshly bladed into the huge grid which now is paved wall to wall. I made several deliveries and ended up at the torn edge of the known world, the road just a track, a year maybe two at most from the first ripples of the growth which would swallow hundreds of miles of the desert. The house was an old block home gone to seed, the lawn dirt, the shrubs dead, the windows brown with dust and cobwebs. From the front yard I had a clear view of the Santan Mountains to the south. I was fairly sure I had a wrong address and that the property was abandoned. I knocked on the greasy door and after five minutes a stooped, red-haired old man answered. This was Gil, and I have no idea how old he was that summer, but it was as old as you get. Plus he was sick with the emphysema and liver disease. His skin, stretched tight and translucent on his gaunt body, was splattered with brown spots. On his hands several had been picked raw.

  I didn’t want to go into the house. This was the oddest call of my first day driving oxygen. There had been something regular about the rest of it, even the sanitized houses in Sun City, the upscale apartments in Scottsdale so new the paint hadn’t dried, and the other houses I’d been to, magazines on a coffee table, a wife paying bills in the kitchen.

  I pulled my dolly into the house, dark inside against the crushing daylight, and was hit by the roiling smell of dog hair and urine. I didn’t kneel to wipe the wheels. “Right in here,” the old man said, leading me back into the house toward a yellow light in the small kitchen, where I could hear a radio chattering. He had his oxygen set up in the corner of the kitchen; it looked like he lived in the one room. There was a fur of fine red dust on everything, the range, the sink, except half the kitchen table where he had his things arranged, some brown vials of prescription medicine, two decks of cards, a pencil or two on a small pad, a warped issue of Field & Stream, a little red Bible, and a box of cough drops. In the middle of the table was a fancy painted plate, maybe a seascape, with a line of Oreos on it. I got busy changing out the tanks. You take the cardboard sleeve off, unhook the regulator, open the valve on the new tank for one second, blasting dust from the mouth, screw the regulator on it, open the pressure so it reads the same as you came, sleeve the old tank, load it up, and go. The new tank was always hot, too hot to touch from being in the sun, and it seemed wrong to leave such a hot thing in someone’s bedroom. Nadine handled all the paperwork.

  The cookies had scared me and I was trying to get out. Meanwhile the old man sat down at the kitchen table and started talking. “I’m Gil Benson,” his speech began, “and I’m glad to see you, David. My lungs got burned in France in 1919 and it took them all these years to buckle.” He spoke like so many of my customers in a hoarse whisper. “I’ve lived all over the world, including the three A’s: Africa, Cairo, Australia, Burberry, and Alaska, Point Barrow. My favorite place was Montreal, Canada, because I was in love there and married the woman, had children. She’s dead. My least favorite place is right here because of this. One of my closest friends was young Jack Kramer, the tennis player. That was many years ago. I’ve flown almost every plane made between the years 1938 and 1958. I don’t fly anymore with all this.” He indicated the oxygen equipment. “Sit down. Have a cookie.”

  I had my dolly ready. “I shouldn’t, sir,” I said. “I’ve got a schedule and better keep it.”

  “Grab that pitcher out of the fridge before you sit down. I made us some Kool-Aid. It’s good.”

  I opened his refrigerator. Except for the Tupperware pitcher, it was empty. Nothing. I put the pitcher on the table. “I really have to go,” I said. “I’ll be late.

  Gil lifted the container of Kool-Aid and raised it into a jittery hover above the two plastic glasses. There was going to be an accident. His hands were covered with purple scabs. I took the pitcher from him and filled the glasses.

  “Sit down,” he said. “I’m glad you’re here, young fella.” When I didn’t move he said, “Really. Nadine said you were a good-looking kid.” He smiled, and leaning on both hands, he sat hard into the kitchen chair. “This is your last stop today. Have a snack.”

  So began my visits with old Gil Benson. He was my last delivery every fourth day that summer, and as far as could tell, I was the only one to visit his wretched house. On one occasion I placed one of the Oreos he gave me on the corner of my chair as I left and it was right there next time when I returned. Our visits became little three-part dramas: my arrival and the bustle of intrusion; the snack and his monologue; his hysteria and weeping.

  The first time he reached for my wrist across the table as I was standing to get up, it scared me. Things had been going fine. He’d told me stories in an urgent voice, one story spilling into the other without a seam, because he didn’t want me to interrupt. I had I’ve got to go all over my face, but he wouldn’t read it. He spoke as if placing each word in the record, as if I were going to write it all down when I got home. It always started with a story of long ago, an airplane, a homemade repair, an emergency landing, a special cargo, an odd coincidence, each part told with pride, but his voice would gradually change, slide into a kind of whine as he began an escalating series of complaints about his doctors, the insurance, his children—naming each of the four and relating their indifference, petty greed, or cruelty. I nodded through all of this: I’ve got to go. He leaned forward and picked at the back of his hands. When he tired after forty minutes, I’d slide my chair back and he’d grab my wrist. By then I could understand his children pushing him away and moving out of state. I wanted out. But I’d stand—while he still held me—and say, “That’s interesting. Save some of these cookies for next time.” And then I’d move to the door, hurrying the dolly, but never fast enough to escape. Crying softly and carrying his little walker bottle of oxygen, he’d see me to the door and then out into the numbing heat to the big white pickup. He’d continue his monologue while I chained the old tank in the back and while I climbed in the cab and started the engine and then while I’d start to pull away. I cannot describe how despicable I felt doing that, gradually moving away from old Gil on that dirt lane, and when I hit the corner and turned west for the shop, I tromped it: forty-five, fifty, fifty-five, raising a thick red dust train along what would someday be Chandler Boulevard.

  Backing up to the loading dock late on those days with a truck of empties, I was full of animal happiness. The sun was at its worst, blasting the sides of everything, and I moved with the measured deliberation the full day had given me. My shirt was crusted with salt, but I wasn’t sweating anymore. When I bent to the metal fountain beside the dock, gulping the water, I could feel it bloom on my back and chest and come out along my hairline. Jes
se or Victor would help me sort the cylinders and reload for tomorrow, or many days, everyone would be gone already except Gene, the swing man, who’d talk to me while I finished up. His comments were always about overtime, which I’d be getting if I saw him, and what was I going to do with all my money.

  What I was doing was banking it all, except for pocket money and the eight dollars I spent every Sunday calling Linda En-right. I became tight and fit, my burns finally scabbed up so that by mid-July I looked like a young boxer, and I tried not to think about anything.

  A terrible thing happened in my phone correspondence with Linda. We stopped fighting. We’d talk about her family; the cookie business was taking off, but her father wouldn’t let her take the car. He was stingy. I told her about my deliveries, the heat. She was looking forward to getting the fall bulletin. Was I going to major in geology as I’d planned? As I listened to us talk, I stood and wondered: Who are these people? The other me wanted to interrupt, to ask: Hey, didn’t we have sex? I mean, was that sexual intercourse? Isn’t the world a little different for you now? But I chatted with her. Neither one of us mentioned other people, that is boys she might have met, and I didn’t mention Elizabeth Rensdale. I shifted my feet in the baking phone booth and chatted. When the operator came on, I was crazy with Linda’s indifference, but unable to say anything but “Take care, I’ll call.”

  Meanwhile the summer assumed a regularity that was nothing but comfort. I drove my routes: hospitals Mondays, rest homes Tuesdays, residences the rest of the week. Sun City, Scottsdale, Mesa. Nights I’d stay up and watch the old movies, keeping a list of titles and great lines. It was as much of a life of the mind as I wanted. Then it would be six a.m. and I’d have Sun City, Scottsdale, Mesa. I was hard and brown and lost in the routine.

  I was used to sitting with Gil Benson and hearing his stories, pocketing the Oreos secretly to throw them from the truck later; I was used to the new-carpet smell of all the little homes in Sun City, everything clean, quiet, and polite; I was used to Elizabeth Rensdale showing me her white breasts, posturing by the pool whenever she knew I was upstairs with her father. By the end of July I had three or four of her little moves memorized, the way she rolled on her back, the way she kneaded them with oil sitting with her long legs on each side of the lounge chair. Driving the valley those long summer days, each window of the truck a furnace, listening to “Paperback Writer” and “Last Train to Clarksville,” I delivered oxygen to the paralyzed and dying, and I felt so alive and on edge at every moment that I could have burst. I liked the truck, hopping up unloading the hot cylinders at each address and then driving to the next stop. I knew what I was doing and wanted no more.

  Rain broke the summer. The second week in August I woke to the first clouds in ninety days. They massed and thickened and by the time I left Sun City, it had begun, a crashing downpour. It never rains lightly in the desert. The wipers on the truck were shot with sun rot and I had to stop and charge a set at a Chevron station on the Black Canyon Freeway and then continue east toward Scottsdale, crawling along in the stunned traffic, water everywhere over the highway.

  I didn’t want to be late at the Rensdales’. I liked the way Elizabeth looked at me when she let me in, and I liked looking at her naked by the pool. It didn’t occur to me that today would be any different until I pulled my dolly toward their door through the warm rain. I was wiping down the tank in the covered entry when she opened the door and disappeared back into the dark house. I was wet and coming into the air-conditioned house ran a chill along my sides. The blue light of the television pulsed against the darkness. When my eyes adjusted and I started backing up the stairway with the new cylinder, I saw Elizabeth sitting on the couch in the den, her knees together up under her chin, watching me. She was looking right at me. I’d never seen her like this, and she’d never looked at me before.

  “This is the worst summer of my entire life,” she said.

  “Sorry,” I said, coming down a step. “What’d you say?”

  “David! Is that you?” Mr. Rensdale called from his room. His voice was a ghost. I liked him very much and it had become clear over the summer that he was not going back to Pennsylvania. He’d lost weight. His face had become even more angular and his eyes had sunken. “David.”

  Elizabeth Rensdale whispered across the room to me, “I don’t want to be here.” She closed her eyes and rocked her head. I stood the cylinder on the dolly and went over to her. I didn’t like leaving it there on the carpet. It wasn’t what I wanted to do. She was sitting in her underpants on the couch. “He’s dying,” she said to me.

  “Oh,” I said, trying to make it simply a place holder, let her know that I’d heard her. It was the wrong thing, but anything, even silence, would have been wrong. She put her face in her hands and lay over on the couch. I dropped to a knee and, putting my hand on her shoulder, I said, “What can I do?”

  This was the secret side that I suspected from this summer. Elizabeth Rensdale put her hand on mine and turned her face to mine so slowly that I felt my heart drop a gear, grinding now heavily uphill in my chest. The rain was like a pressure on the roof.

  Mr. Rensdale called my name again. Elizabeth’s face on mine so close and open made it possible for me to move my hand around her back and pull her to me. It was like I knew what I was doing. I didn’t take my eyes from hers when she rolled onto her back and guided me onto her. It was different in every way from what I had imagined. The dark room closed around us. Her mouth came to mine and stayed there. This wasn’t education; this was need. And later, when I felt her hand on my bare ass, her heels rolling in the back of my knees, I knew it was the mirror of my cradling her in both my arms as we rocked along the edge of the couch, moving it finally halfway across the den as I pushed into her. I wish I could get this right here, but there is no chance. We stayed together for a moment afterward and my eyes opened and focused. She was still looking at me, holding me, and her look was simply serious. Her father called, “David?” from upstairs again, and I realized he must have been calling steadily. Still, we were slow to move. I stood without embarrassment and dressed, tucking my shirt in. That we were intent, that we were still rapt, made me confident in a way I’d never been. I grabbed the dolly and ascended the stairs.

  Mr. Rensdale lay white and twisted in the bed. He looked the way the dying look, his face parched and sunken, the mouth a dry orifice, his eyes little spots of water. I saw him acknowledge me with a withering look, more power than you’d think could rise from such a body. I felt it a cruel scolding, and I moved in the room deliberate with shame, avoiding his eyes. The rain drummed against the window in waves. After I had changed out the tanks, I turned to him and said, “There you go.”

  He rolled his hand in a little flip toward the bedtable and his glass of water. His chalky mouth was in the shape of an O, and I could hear him breathing, a thin rasp. Who knows what happened in me then, because I stood in the little bedroom with Mr. Rensdale and then I just rolled the dolly and the expired tank out and down the stairs. I didn’t go to him; I didn’t hand him the glass of water. I burned; who would ever know what I had done?

  When I opened the door downstairs on the world of rain, Elizabeth came out of the dark again, naked, to stand a foot or two away. I took her not speaking as just part of the intensity I felt and the way she stood with her arms easy at her sides was the way I felt when I’d been naked before her. We looked at each other for a moment; the rain was already at my head and the dolly and tank was between us in the narrow entry, and then something happened that sealed the way I feel about myself even today. She came up and we met beside the tank and there was no question about the way we went for each other what was going on. I pushed by the oxygen equipment and followed her onto the entry tile, then a moment later turning in adjustment so that she could climb me, get her bare back off the floor.

  So the last month of that summer I began seeing Elizabeth Rensdale every day. My weekly visits to the Rensdale townhouse continued, but the
n I started driving out to Scottsdale nights. I told my parents I was at the library, because I wanted it to sound like a lie and have them know it was a lie. I came in after midnight; the library closed at nine. After work I’d shower and put on a clean shirt, something without my name on it, and I’d call back from the door, “Going to the library.” And I knew they knew I was up to something. It was like I wanted them to challenge me, to have it out.

  Elizabeth and I were hardy and focused lovers. I relished the way every night she’d meet my knock at the door and pull me into the room and then, having touched, we didn’t stop. Knowing we had two hours, we used every minute of it and we became experts at each other. For me these nights were the first nights in my new life, I mean, I could tell then that there was no going back, that I had changed my life forever and I could not stop it. We never went out for a Coke, we never took a break for a glass of water, we rarely spoke. There was admiration and curiosity in my touch and affection and gratitude in hers or so I assumed, and I was pleased, even proud, at the time that there was so little need to speak. There was one time when I arrived a little early when Mr. Rensdale’s nurse was still there and Elizabeth and I sat in the den watching television two feet apart on the couch, and even then we didn’t speak. I forget what program was on, but Elizabeth asked me if it was okay, and I said fine and that was all we said while we waited for the nurse to leave.

  On the way home with my arm out in the hot night, I drove like the young king of the desert. Looking into my car at a traffic light, other drivers could read it all on my face and the way I held my head cocked back. I was young those nights, but I was getting over it.

  Meanwhile Gil Benson had begun clinging to me worse than ever and those prolonged visits were full of agony and desperation. As the Arizona monsoon season continued toward Labor Day, the rains played hell with his old red road, and many times I pulled up in the same tracks I’d left the week before. He stopped putting cookies out, which at first I took as a good sign, but then I realized that he now considered me so familiar that cookies weren’t necessary. A kind of terror had inhabited him, and it was fed by the weather. Now most days I had to go west to cross the flooded Salt River at the old Mill Avenue Bridge to get to Mesa late and by the time I arrived, Gil would be on the porch, frantic. Not because of oxygen deprivation; he only needed to use the stuff nights. But I was his oxygen now, his only visitor, his only companion. I’d never had such a thing happen before and until it did I’d thought of myself as a compassionate person. I watched myself arrive at his terrible house and wheel the tank toward the door and I searched myself for compassion, the smallest shred of fellow feeling, kindness, affection, pity, but all I found was repulsion, impatience. I thought, surely I would be kind, but that was a joke, and I saw that compassion was a joke too along with fidelity and chastity and all the other notions I’d run over this summer. Words, I thought, big words. Give me the truck keys and a job to do, and the words can look out for themselves. I had no compassion for Gil Benson and that diminished over the summer. His scabby hands, the dried spittle in the ruined corners of his mouth, his crummy weeping in his stinking house. He always grabbed my wrist with both hands, and I shuffled back toward the truck. His voice, already a whisper, broke and he cried, his face a twisted ugliness which he wiped at with one hand while holding me with the other. I tried to nod and say, “You bet,” and “That’s too bad. I’ll see you next week.” But he wouldn’t hear me any more than I was listening to him. His voice was so nakely plaintive it embarrassed me. I wanted to push him down in the mud and weeds of his yard and drive away, but I never did that. What I finally did was worse.