The Mackerel Plaza: A Novel

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The Mackerel Plaza: A Novel Page 10

by De Vries, Peter


  I wrote “Mr. and Mrs. Nicholas Plantagenet” on the registration card in bold flourishes. My theory was that if I made it fantastic enough it would be convincing, because nobody would make up a name like that.

  A bellboy appeared, rather to my surprise, and took us up to room 518. The elevator was piloted jerkily upward by a youth who read a comic magazine on the way and sniffed continually through one nostril. The bellboy held his head straight but rolled his eye at Molly once. She looked down and drew a glove on tighter.

  The room managed to be cold and muggy at the same time. The bellhop made a great show of snapping on lights and feeling radiators by way of implying “appointments” which the room simply did not have, till I packed him off with a dollar bill.

  Finally the door was closed. I squatted to peer through the keyhole, but there seemed no eye on the reverse side looking in. I locked the door softly and turned back into the room, and this was the moment round which all my ravenous daydreams had wound: the moment when Molly would cry “Alone at last” and fling herself into my arms. Instead she flung herself into the only chair in the room and burst into tears.

  I stood watching her inactively. My mouth was dry and had a metallic taste.

  “What.”

  “If you could see yourself in that derby,” she said, in accents that seemed, apart from the content of the statement, shrieks of genuine grief.

  “I’ll get us a drink. Usual for you, dear?”

  I hung up the derby which I’d been holding and sat down on the bed to phone down. I imagined that we were on our honeymoon and that brides behaved in this way.

  The switchboard operator seemed amused at the implication that they had room service, but gratefully so, as though that was the nicest thing anybody had said to them in a long time.

  “This is a real dive,” I said to Molly after I had hung up.

  Molly was doubled over in the chair with her forehead touching her knees. Her bag lay on the floor, open. I had the sense of having stumbled into some strange rite rather far from the revels for which we had come and whose existence I had not suspected, but which was instructive and stimulating in itself and calculated greatly to widen my horizons. I felt a trickle of perspiration go down my torso. I picked up the fallen handbag and set it on the night table. I watched Molly a moment longer. Then I snapped my fingers, remembering something, and turned to the bed across the foot of which the bellboy had hurled the suitcase.

  “I nearly forgot. My Bellows.”

  “You’re going to start a fire?” she said, looking wildly around for a hearth.

  “No, whiskey. I took a pint along just in case.”

  With that she burst into peals which were like nothing I had heard, or hope to hear again. I hurried with the whiskey, pouring her a copious drink into a glass which I got from the bathroom, first removing a mote of matter from its rim.

  “Here. Take this.” I shook her shoulder—or rather sharply stayed its own shaking—and put the glass to her lips. She drank it all, dried her eyes and took my hand. “I’m sorry.”

  “I know. This sort of thing isn’t for us,” I said, running a disdainful eye around the interior.

  “Let’s go.”

  “No. It would look funny if we left right away. Come lie down a while.”

  I took her coat and hat from her and settled her on the bed, which was hard as a rock. I drew the pillow out from under the spread and laid it under her head. Then I took control of the situation.

  “Now then. You’ve taken the other sedative. That makes two. That ought to calm you down fairly soon, and you’ll be all right. Just relax.”

  She ground out a hollow in the pillow with her head and smiled up at me. “Maybe I’ll be O.K. pretty soon.”

  “Sure. Forget everything.” She could not have known my relief at finding her otherwise than skilled at profane love. No one with a casual past could have exhibited such signs of nervousness. If the hour were completely botched, it could do no worse than change to soaring joy the one doubt I’d carried in my heart for months.

  “I’ll go out and get us some sandwiches, as long as there’s no room service. We’ll want something later, anyway. There’s a famous delicatessen on this block—the neighborhood has some compensations—and we’ll have a snack of supper. Pastrami O.K.?” She smiled wanly and nodded from the bed.

  I felt more than ever like a newlywed foraging for his bride, as apprehension gave way to the proper emotion of tenderness, and I blew her a kiss from the door. “Be sure the door is locked behind me,” I said softly, and, taking the second of two keys from the dresser, went out.

  I removed the pastrami sandwiches from the sack in which the delicatessen man had put them and slipped one, wrapped in its own wax paper, into each of my overcoat pockets. I didn’t want the hotel personnel to see me carrying anything up to my room, for some reason. I hummed as I mounted in the elevator, which was operated by the same comic-reading youth. I went down the corridor to 518 with the key in my hand. I fitted it into the lock. The key turned in it but the door wouldn’t open. Molly had turned the bolt, which was apart from the key, from the inside.

  I rapped on the door. There was no stir in the room. I knocked louder, than louder, till I was afraid of creating a disturbance. Still no answer. The muted strains of Calypso music came from a radio in a linen closet nearby. I leaned toward the door and put my ear to the crack. All I felt was a minute draft blow into it. The radio music momentarily stopped, and I caught the sound of Molly’s breathing—faint, easy, rhythmical. The sedatives had taken effect.

  I stood a moment in the darkened corridor, debating what to do. Two barbitals were quite a dose, and there was little hope of awakening Molly without bringing heads from every other door on the floor as well. I went back down to the lobby to think things over.

  I sat in a chair for some time without coming to any conclusion except that Molly certainly needed the rest and that I probably shouldn’t awaken her too soon. I diverted myself by studying the faces of guests in other chairs. They sat under potted palms reading or smoking or doing nothing. I soon tired of this. A half-hour had passed, I saw by a clock which said six-twenty. I tried to calculate the hours Molly might remain oblivious under present sedation, but my ignorance of the tablet strength vitiated any arithmetic. In any case, two made a substantial dosage to have to take into account in the night’s adventure.

  I was very hungry. Changing my chair to one behind a pillar in a corner, I drew one of the sandwiches from my pocket and unwrapped it on my knee. Making sure I was not seen, I bit into it. It was delicious, and accompanied by a spear of dill pickle that was also capital. I remembered that Molly didn’t like pickles, and took the one from her sandwich and added it to my repast. I picked the last remaining crumbs from the wax paper with a moistened finger-end and dropped the wax paper into a large ashtray. It was one of those tall heavy-based ashtrays that right themselves no matter how far you tip them, and for a few minutes I amused myself by slapping this one down and watching it swing up again. I noticed that a girl attending the newsstand was looking, and stopped.

  It was ten minutes to seven. I had sat there an hour already. How much longer? If Molly slept the clock around, as well she might, I would be here all night. The only alternative was to rent another room for myself for the night. That wouldn’t look right here, so I would have to engage it in another hotel. There was one across the street.

  Then I realized that I could telephone Molly. I got laughingly to my feet to do so. However, on the way to the phone booth I checked myself. Why not let the poor girl have an hour or two more in dreamland? She certainly needed it. It had all been a terrible strain. I would go out for a walk.

  Strolling down the street, I found myself approaching the movie district. I recognized one of “our” theaters. Why not take in a film? It would help pass the time. I consulted a marquee or two and chose a picture that had Kim Novak in it. I paid my admission and darted hopefully inside.

  Kim Novak w
as my favorite actress, and as I settled down in my seat I wondered why. I thought about it as I ate the second sandwich, and at length worked out a theory that seemed cogent.

  I decided, watching her now, that her appeal lay in some sheer incorporeality. She was impalpable. She was a soft gold cloud of a girl, who drifted through scene after scene of the utmost intimacy without being there. She had flung herself on Frank Sinatra’s racked body without being there. She had died in Tyrone Power’s arms without being there. She was flawlessly unpresent, weaving an abstraction called love. I ran into the lobby for a Hershey bar, still ravenous, and ate it in my seat with the wrapper peeled down. A scrap of foil got between my teeth as I nibbled in the dark, and I had a time fishing it out. I dropped the wadded-up wrapper under my chair, settled my coat on my knee, and slumped drowsily down. After a while I dozed off.

  I awoke with a jerk in the middle of the co-feature. Pirates with drawn knives were pouring out of a hatch and yelling mutinously. I scrambled to my feet and made for the phone booth in the lounge downstairs, my overcoat flying behind me. What if Molly had awakened and found me gone! A clock said five minutes to ten. When the hotel switchboard operator answered, I couldn’t remember my room number. “Just a minute,” I said, fumbling for the key in my overcoat pocket. But I couldn’t read the tag in the booth, where the light was broken. I’d had to dial the operator to get me the number.

  “Are Mr. and Mrs. Plantagenet registered there?” I said.

  “I’ll give you room information.”

  They were registered there, and presently I heard the room phone ringing. Twice, three times … “Keep ringing,” I told the operator. “I know they’re there.”

  “Would you like us to page Mr. Plantagenet?”

  “No, that won’t be necessary. Just ring again please.”

  She did, and finally I heard Molly’s sleepy voice say “Yes?”

  “Darling, it’s me. Look, you’ve got the door latched. That little round knob, you know? Turn it back. I’ll be right up.”

  “So sorry,” she mumbled. “’Bye,” and hung up.

  I got into the room this time all right, but she was asleep again when I arrived there. She lay sprawled over in a pale nightgown, the covers kicked down in a jumble at her feet. She muttered apologies as I began to get ready for bed, lifting an arm and letting it flop again as if in some cryptic salute to my durability under the stern demands of the hour.

  I soaked in the tub for half an hour and then brushed my teeth. I drew on fresh red silk pajamas and sat in the chair drinking—a habit I seemed to be acquiring. I had three or four whiskeys-and-water, raised the window an inch or two, turned out the light and went to bed, where I soon fell into a deep, if not exactly untroubled, sleep.

  I awoke from a horrible nightmare. I dreamed that Mrs. Calico had put down roots at a garden party I was giving behind my house. She had been sitting on the grass with the other guests, and when it came time to go was found to be unable to rise, being affixed to the lawn. It took the combined efforts of two men pulling her by the arms to uproot her, and when she finally came free it was with a tearing sound, taking a great deal of sod with her. I came to see Molly bending over me, shushing me and trying to quell my threshing arms.

  “Wake up,” she was whispering. “Sh! Wake up and be quiet.”

  “What sa mah?” I mumbled, sitting up frantically. “Where are we? What’s ’is?”

  “Sh! We’re in a hotel room. We’re at the Coker. Are you awake?” I now appeared to be, and she asked, “My God, what did you dream?”

  It was broad daylight. The room swam into focus, without, however, remaining precisely fixed. I had a splitting headache, besides being slightly dizzy—the dizziness that comes from the so-called middle ear disturbance with which I am recurrently troubled. Under this arrangement, the room in which a patient is lying tends to rotate in a steady flow, like the picture in a television set that is in need of vertical tuning. It’s something like the sensation that arises from a hangover. The difficulty seems to be caused by a circulatory distention affecting the balancing apparatus in the middle ear, and is said to be the result of emotional tension or stress. It is often accompanied by marked, though never conclusive, nausea.

  “Do you have some aspirin?” I asked Molly. She was still bending over me. Her features were mangled with sleep, and one eye was glued shut. She looked strange and even a little sinister.

  “I believe so,” she said, and turned away to get them from her bag on the bedside table, where I had put it.

  She started to leave the bed to get me a glass of water but I stayed her with a hand and said, “No. Let me.” I faced the crucial discovery of learning just how dizzy I was. If it was bad, I would be bedridden for a day or two; if not, it would wear off as I went about my normal activities. I put a foot carefully on the floor and sat up. The room wavered violently and I thought I was for it; but then it settled, and when I rose and started for the bathroom it seemed a little better.

  Downing the two aspirin she had laid in my palm, I caught a look at myself in the bathroom mirror. I put the water glass down and inspected myself stoically. My face was pinched and blurred, so that I resembled a wire photo of myself. I thrust out my tongue to find it thick and deplorable. I turned it over and moodily inspected its underside. My pajama coat was open and I observed a morning ritual I have of punching my stomach to see if it is still satisfactorily hard. At the least sign of fat I immediately start walking great distances and dieting. It seemed all right now. To one side of it I have a reddish blue mark, like the government stamp on dressed beef.

  I went back to bed. Molly lay on her side, away from me, the covers up to her ears.

  “So sorry,” she said, her voice muffled. “I didn’t think two pills could do that to you. Just absolutely doped.”

  “Think nothing of it,” I said.

  She said, cozily, “What was your nightmare?”

  “I don’t remember. It was nothing.”

  “Of course you remember. What was it?”

  I couldn’t very well tell her it was about her mother, so I related a nightmare I’d had earlier in the week.

  “I dreamed I was in this barn, a kind of livery stable, really, and that I wasn’t an animal exactly, but not a human being either,” I said. “Then I was forced, or at least I was supposed, to get down on all fours while a couple of characters who seemed to know what they were doing started to brush me down. Brushes and curry combs and one thing and another, just as though I were a horse. After a while somebody came in and asked what the big idea was. And one of the men with the brushes said, ‘He’s being groomed for an executive position.’”

  She gave a single, indolent laugh, and then, turning over, slipped an arm around my waist. I snuggled over closer and put mine around her. My dizziness was going to be all right, thank God, but I was still dizzy, and the headache was as splitting as ever, so any ardors beyond an inert embrace was simply more than could be confidently undertaken at the moment.

  “This is just plain not for us,” I said, giving the room a contemptuous glance as it went by. “We want it to be beautiful. We want it to be right.”

  We lay together, cherishing the carnal jewel of purity. “So dopey,” she murmured, and dropped off again. After a half hour of listening to her quiet breathing, and of stroking her hair and inhaling her delicate scent, I climbed carefully out from under the covers to shave.

  I was oddly exhilarated. I felt our failure to have sprung from elements that lay somewhere close to the heart of human worth. Think how we would have felt if we had done what we had come to this cheap hotel to do. Now the cheap hotel was part of our triumph, a pleasant memory to carry into married life instead of an embarrassment. Too, I derived from the whole experience that sense of widened horizons in sexual matters, of understanding women, and of the mastery over them.

  As I was buttoning my shirt in the room, a few minutes later, something shot toward the bathroom on the edge of my vision. It was
Molly, clutching a dress which she had snatched out of the closet on springing out of bed. “I’ve got to get to the office,” she said. “It’s half-past ten. I thought my watch was stopped from last night but it isn’t. Mother’s spelling me till I get there, but I don’t want to arrive too late. What if she takes it into her head to phone this girl I’m supposed to be staying with?”

  Most of this came from behind the slammed bathroom door. When she came out again, wriggling into her dress, I felt a lash of desire.

  “Darling,” I said, “let’s wait till tonight. I can’t wait to have you, and we may be in the mood then.”

  “I can’t possibly stay out another night. Mother thinks there’s something fishy already.”

  I sighed, and walked to the dresser to tie my tie. “I suppose. But I’ll be lonely here tonight.”

  “Tonight?”

  “I told Hester I was going to New York for a couple of days to do some research at the library. So I can’t really go home till tomorrow.”

 

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