May moved out of the line and away. But the two were nice young men, she saw them glance at Cole’s reddened face and get busy.
She stood at the fireplace warming her hands. She was surprised after a minute to see that it was a gas fire; a little pipe at the side of the logs was feeding gas into the flame.
The smoke that had blackened the stones all the way to the mantel was from another era, not from the fake logs crumbling apart so realistically. May put her finger in the spring water running into a curved black bowl set into the side of the fireplace. She could feel the heat in the stones. Her legs tingled. Somewhere deep under the hotel was a hot river insisting its way to the springs for which the place was famous.
Cole, still flushed, was coming away from the desk with both suitcases. She knew she had packed too much and she tried to take her suitcase from him, but he held on. When the elevator came it was a tiny, paneled box. She stopped the sliding grille so he could go in sideways with the bags. “Oh, wait, I’m going to get another key. I mean don’t wait, I’ll be up in a minute.”
At the counter the two young men were bending over a newspaper, absorbed. One of them said to the other, “So, they found the husband. The Russian girl’s husband. Weren’t you here then? No? I’ll tell you. May I help you?”
“I just need a second key. But I don’t know what room it is. Nilsson.”
He gave her the key and she thanked him. When she went on standing there he looked up and she smiled helplessly. “Oh, excuse me. I just—I’m eavesdropping.” He smiled back. He turned the paper on the counter for her and pointed.
A body found Saturday by hikers in the Sharp Creek area is believed to be that of a Russian teaching in the U.S., who disappeared two years ago, sparking an intensive 40-day search of the area. Nikolai Sobol, of Seattle, Washington, was visiting the resort with his wife, who had arrived in the U.S. two days before, when he apparently wandered off a little-used trail while hiking alone and fell to his death near Sharp Falls.
Officials say numerous guests of the resort, as well as his wife, who spoke no English, aided in the search. Although not a person of interest to the authorities, she remained in Canada throughout the investigation.
Authorities are in touch with relatives in the Soviet Union.
“How sad. Is there a picture? On another page?” There was no picture.
“She stayed here a month, this girl. I was here,” the young man said to May, tapping his chest. “Summer job,” he added, with a look to say he had not always been here.
“What was her name?”
“Let’s see.” He looked at the newspaper. “‘Nikolai Sobol.’ Wait a minute. OK, I’m thinking Olga. Olga. They kept paging her. ‘Olga Sobol.’”
She thanked him and went to wait for the elevator. There was no one else waiting. The little car was musty and swung perceptibly on its cable.
In this old, thin-walled part of the hotel, above the water singing and moaning in the pipes you could hear voices. In the room next to theirs a deep voice made a bass hum in the wall, with a woman’s voice sounding intermittently as a lighter humming, full of pauses. Insinuation and mood but no words: a kind of hieroglyphics of speech. The hum filled the walls. Lovers away for the weekend. May knew that sound, she had murmured and cried out in hotel rooms.
Husbands and wives. Teenagers yelling in the hall, escaping their parents to go find the pools.
She wouldn’t think about Nick. He was with her sister Carrie, he was safe. No one with something to sell him would be able to find him. Carrie would not let someone from his past, the recent past, get anywhere near him; she had promised to go with him if he went anywhere, she would not let harm come to him.
They each sat down on the mattress, testing the old-fashioned coil springs. “Not great,” Cole said. As if the bed mattered. For he had hidden his long convalescence away from all the people who said he had come through, all but her, and how was she to approach him, now, with nothing seductive left of her? Under the lily pads of her kindness to him since his heart attack, an old, stirring bog: the past in which they had striven against each other with shouts and accusations, and besought each other in tears, and grinned into the same bathroom mirror, and planned and promised and loved. Those two were their rivals now. They would not go away; they made everything an echo of themselves. And how blindly she had counted on her own appeal, as the heat had risen and fallen between them.
“Look! It says you can order a bed board!” May held up the hotel brochure.
He lay back on the bed and closed his eyes. “I’ll be fine,” he said. He didn’t like any reference to his bad back, let alone his heart.
She read the brochure for a while, looking at the historical map with its drawings of fish, canoes, and explorers falling into the lake in their coonskin hats. The men in the water were laughing and floating, under wavy lines indicating steam. “Want to have tea? It says they’re serving tea.”
Downstairs, they received their cups of tea at the beautifully laid table. Effort had been put into this lobby in the old building, with its carpets of gray-turquoise and draperies of that beigey rose, almost mauve, just starting to appear in hotels. In the heavy woven upholstery an undertow of pride, a sign new customers had been imagined, people not satisfied with the greens and sun-oranges seen everywhere, people who would require new colors to stand for prosperity and ease.
A harpist was playing on a little harp of dark glowing wood. “Why do they all play ‘Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring’?” Cole said as they drank their tea.
“Why not just listen. Or look at the lake.”
“Or at the honeymooners,” he put in, with a tired smirk, and for a while she did look, with a gradual softening of her mood, at a young couple who had claimed the corner sitting area. They sat by the fire in two fat purple chairs pulled close together, paying everything a fixed attention that fed back to each other without their touching or even looking at each other at any given moment. Not a sleek, traveled couple, she with her ponytail and he in his white socks. An innocent pair, by the look of them, very young, coming away from whatever they did in their Canadian town, the makeshift things May had done at their age, nineteen, twenty. They had to work; they would have lost, even if only recently, the real virginity of never having had a job, they were part of the world, married, looking surreptitiously at their rings. Oh, you’ll see, May felt her unmanageable smile signal them. She surprised herself with the vehemence of what she would say if they were to show any welcome to her frank stare, and be drawn slowly over to her, and ask, as kids being stared at by older people never think to, “What is the message you have for us?”
Don’t let fights worry you. Don’t let shouts and tears and running out of the house worry you, or cruel silence, or astounding breaches and omissions. Was that what she would say? Don’t think in broad categories such as “unbearable.” Think of a fish, a salmon, ploughing upstream. So the midwife had counseled her daughter Laura. No, up, up—up a fish ladder.
This is marriage we’re talking about, after all. Don’t be ashamed of the things you’re going to do. It will turn out not to have been all that bad. It will turn out to have been a kind of happiness.
And birth, of course, she would say. Don’t forget that. The infants. The pure aural pleasure, as lips with the nursing blister still on them form the m’s of what they think is your name, the word that becomes your name. And then they are driving away, the name drives away, it was not yours at all.
Don’t let the unforgivable worry you.
The harpist spread her voile skirt, which May acknowledged might have looked better floor-length, so her round calves and little feet in pale stockings and tight pumps, planted on the floor, wouldn’t show. But the full-skirted, flowered dress was all right, after all; it went with her white, tapered fingers and her small, emotional mouth.
“Ah. From Bach to ‘Puff the Magic Dragon.’” About music, about songs in particular, Cole had delicate, developed feelings. Surgeons were like th
at. They played the piano. Cole listened to Bach and Mozart, but he couldn’t play them; when he sat down to play Gershwin and Hoagy Carmichael and Cole Porter—for whom he said his mother had named him, but May knew his mother didn’t know music, and Cole Porter hadn’t even become famous then—he played by ear. No one had provided him with lessons because his family had been poor, so he had taught himself. Music, like math, was easy for some people. Yet you, May thought, hear the harp, not the music. And then, ashamed of herself, she puzzled over which was the right thing to hear.
“Honey,” she said, “don’t be so discriminating. Try to just—”
“Just what?” But he rubbed his face, he let her take his hand as they gazed across the room at the honeymooners.
They found the husband.
The husband of Olga. Olga Sobol. May heard the name repeating itself, taking root in her mind as certain foreign words, usually the names of her students, could do if she wasn’t careful. Lately, if the news was on while she was grading papers in the evening, Cambodian names were having that effect. Lon Nol. Neak Luong. She heard them in the morning when she opened her eyes—Angkor Wat, Yeng Sary—as if they had kept on while she slept.
Perhaps the young Russian couple had come to celebrate. He, the paper said, was already teaching in the U.S. She had stayed behind, perhaps waiting for a visa. A long, thwarted time apart. Something bureaucratic.
Crossing a border would have made her uneasy, on her way to this old hotel. Because she was young she would not notice the architectural mess; each thing that appeared or came to pass would be itself alone, unprecedented.
Imagine setting out from home, a Russian woman, or girl, as the desk clerk had called her, to see your husband, and going home without him. But things like that must happen all the time. People died on vacation. Vanished from national parks, trekked into nowhere. Died in transit, on ferries and trains and in the air, passports in hand.
Olga. In her first youth.
Not beautiful. Dark brown hair, pulled back, a white parting. Glasses. A heavy, drooping mouth that broke open, for her husband only, in a lavish smile. She would be thinking only of getting into their room. Their room in the old part of the hotel, just remodeled and painted a grave, hushed blue-green with some black in it, like the surface of the lake they would see from their window. They would see the color May and Cole saw; it dyed everything. Olga and her husband. Not long married.
The room had a transom above the door. With the long rod he would twirl theirs wide, as if to break the seal of the room. She would find cups in the bathroom and pour some of the vodka she had in her suitcase, and after they drank take her glasses off and then his, put her hands on his chest and kiss him.
A wave of desperation for a child had been rising in her.
Something had happened to him in her absence; he was not as he had been. Something in that city, that terrible country, had cramped his generosity, shut down his passionate talk, his impulsive laughter. His hand was cold and lay loosely in hers; his heat was gone.
He had not touched her in the two days she had been there. Walking, he didn’t lean on her when she leaned on him. She had lost her balance, the first time. He kept saying he had to talk to her. But all the way there he had the car radio turned up and told her more about rock music than she could possibly sort out.
The clouds were massed on a darkening sky. The lake, if it moved, had a slow, invisible movement. He was at the window, and she saw his black hair where it grew stubbornly down under his collar. She willed him to turn around and send her the look she knew, out of eyes still as thickly, childishly lashed as the dark eyes of ponies at home, the ones she had led around the park with children on their backs, when she had no other job. Children.
First, bed. Afterward, lying on his back with his hand somewhere on her and his eyes closed, he would be able to talk. She understood that. He seemed to have forgotten that they knew everything about each other, and to have reverted, possibly so as not to shock her by resuming their old ways too quickly, to the formality of their earliest acquaintance. Strangest of all, he had forgotten that she was taller than he. He admitted that. He kept glancing at her and shaking his head, as if she had grown.
She found herself sitting on the bed with her long legs curled under her. She was conscious of her dress, which needed ironing. “Where are the jeans I sent you?” he had asked her. She couldn’t say, “I sold them.” She wasn’t sure what he would do. Because they had been apart so long. Of course the resolution, the awaited plunge into blind warmth, the consent between them to obliterate the year—all of that was awkward, and more so because already postponed. She said his name, but he didn’t hear her, he was rattling the window, which was painted shut. Certainly they would have to talk about the problem, whatever it was. He would explain in his harried, confused way and she would listen and try to soothe him. But first, before anything else, the big Canadian bed.
Olga would see the bed in this hotel as large, luxurious, would she not? Or was May thinking of characters in Gorky, or Tolstoy, who slept on stoves and shelves, and on piles of wool, or in threes and fours, in the villages? Of course everything had changed in Russia, and changed again, since Gorky fell asleep in his grandmother’s bed. But where was Olga from? Perhaps she was from a peasant village where such things still went on, and her husband Nikolai, the teacher, half-American now after a year—perhaps he was conscious of something left in her of those days, something he had not noticed until now.
After she kissed him, he put his glasses back on.
After dinner May and Cole were going to the mineral pools, but coming into the lobby and seeing the big purple armchairs empty, they went to sit by the fire.
They had eaten so much at dinner that May thought if they put on their new bathing suits she would not be able to hold her stomach in, in the black suit so bitterly and comically searched for with Leah, over days of store mirrors. While she and Cole ate, a four-man band had played “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” and “Harbor Lights” and “Red Sails in the Sunset,” and impeccable old men with handkerchief points had danced with wives in cocktail dresses and jewelry, while young couples still in the jeans of their hikes had waltzed without self-consciousness. She and Cole had not danced; they had been planning to but when their coffee was finished he had gone to the men’s room and come back ready to leave.
May watched the implacable gas fire, whose flames did not dart up the chimney or flake off sideways, or suddenly, craftily gutter and hiss under the logs, even though they were real flames. Sometimes a heaviness lodged itself in her chest and back, as if she and not Cole had had the heart attack and gone through all the assaults of fists and electric pads and hypodermics and was now laid out only half awaiting reprieve, as Cole had been. Almost content to die, he had said, he had dared to say to her, when he was going over the little of it he could reconstruct.
Almost content to die. And now he kidded around as the scrub nurse snapped his gloves on for him in the OR, as he went running in his new sweats, and gathered the medical students around him, and played the piano, and denied he had suffered, out of nowhere, a stupendous crushing-out of his breath, denied he had suffered anything at all, let alone been dead.
For a minute a fury poured through her and she couldn’t look at his tired face or any part of him, the leg crossed over his knee or the black socks or the hand on the chair arm. He wouldn’t sit long before a fire. And he stood and said, “I’m going up to change. I have a journal article I have to read, it’s short, and then we’ll go. Or you can go get started and I’ll come.”
“You go up. I’m going to wander around.”
She walked to the new wing, where the carpet was deep and the rooms had no transoms. Here the elevators were big and silent, and the guests came and went with muffled steps, to and from the pools in heavy white robes provided by the hotel. Finally she went out through the lobby doors and stood in the blue dark. Then she followed the sidewalk some distance to the spring, which surprised
her with its smallness, a dark little pool bubbling in a wrought-iron enclosure. She took hold of the palings and stood there for a while listening to the sound before she let go. For eons it had gurgled in this way, unheard, when there was no one like herself to foolishly admire it, foolishly seek its endlessly reiterated message.
When she got back to the room Cole had already gone. She changed into the black suit, caught sight of her bare self in the mirror, and rubbed handfuls of the hotel body lotion into her legs and arms. Then she remembered the instructions not to enter the baths wearing any cream or oil, and had to get out of the suit and into the shower. In all her care with packing she had forgotten her robe. There were no robes offered to the guests in these older rooms. He had booked this room for her. She put her clothes back on over the suit.
In the middle of the night Nikolai got out of bed. Olga was mumbling in her sleep, his name and a few garbled words in the intimate Russian he was not used to. She had thrown back the covers and swept the pillows onto the floor, and her long white leg hung off the bed. Tears had streaked her face with the new black makeup she used on her eyes.
In the long corridor the illuminated exit signs winked one by one across the badly fitting pastel sweatshirt she had foolishly carried thousands of miles to him, not understanding that he had been living in a country where such things can be found in grocery stores. He hurried, looking straight before him. He was not wearing a coat.
Olga had heard a terrible thing, if she had understood it.
“We don’t know where your husband is.”
She stood waiting for the next person who was coming to talk to her. They were looking for someone in the hotel who knew Russian. Possibly one of the Swiss—though why should that be so? She did not wring her hands. She couldn’t summon, here in this hotel, on this continent, the gestures from her own country that expressed hopelessness.
Seven Loves Page 7