The Hotel Neversink

by Adam O'Fallon Price

  She followed him right onto Fifty-Eighth Street, along the parquet sidewalk in front of the hotel and its shops, then right again up Sixth Avenue. She saw herself in the windows she passed, furtive in her fur coat, large collar turned up against the wind. With sunglasses, she might have been a Russian spy on assignment in one of the books she’d been reading; a double agent trailing her man through the maze of the city, a mole among moles. A double agent—the words echoed in her head as she measured her steps, pausing half a block behind as he paused at the crosswalk to Central Park—was that what she was? It seemed so. He moved across the street and she thought about the evening she’d spent months ago with the small figure sauntering ahead of her in the darkness, how easily she’d forgiven herself for it and forgotten about the deception. She was a counterintelligence agent in her own life, plainly traitorous to her husband, and, it seemed, to herself—though here the mechanism of the deceit became murkier. Who was she, and who was she really working for? And whoever’s employ she was in, how much did she know?

  More pressingly, why—why was she doing this? It seemed to her that rather than following Daniel, she was somehow following the other version of herself, the one who had slept with him. What would it have meant to become intertwined with this man? This strange man who now whistled something, strolling along, literally whistling in the dark. She strained to hear what it was, some merry little number that repeated after two or three phrases, something from a musical she’d heard long ago. Pirates of Penzance, maybe. Yes. He is the very model of a modern major general.

  The buildings of Central Park West were visible over the left edge of trees, windows burning in the night; it reassured her to be so close to other people, though for the moment it was just her and Daniel. It occurred to her that he was exactly the kind of guy who would walk through Central Park late at night—that he might be a bona fide hedge-lurking rapist. He cut into the foliage off the main walk, momentarily confirming these fears. Instead, it was a cobblestone path leading out of the park. She was briefly camouflaged by the presence of other people: drunks, late-night dog walkers, other unclassifiables of the city night. But two blocks north, he cut left on Sixty-Fourth Street, and they were alone again. His steps echoed ahead of her, and she hesitated—if he turned now, he would surely see her, recognize her from the hotel, know he was being followed. He crossed the street, already melting into shadows cast by the carefully manicured trees that lined the block.

  He entered a nondescript brownstone with a striped awning. Rachel stood outside, shivering, then moved across the street and sat on the dark stoop of an adjacent restaurant. After a minute, a second-floor light dutifully flicked on. Through half-closed blinds, she could see his figure moving around the apartment. Another figure emerged, a woman. There was some further movement, then they both disappeared and the light went off. She sat there for quite some time before getting up and beginning the long walk back.

  The next morning, Len answered the phone with a froggy hitch in his voice. “Hello.”

  “Hi, it’s me.”

  “Hi. What time is it?”

  “Eight thirty. You were sleeping?”

  “My dirty little secret. We sleep in on Sundays.”

  “What does Suse eat?”

  “Honestly? I let her stay up watching TV with me, eating ice cream. She’s usually crashed until nine or ten.”

  “Len.”

  “It’s just so nice to sleep in once a month. I know, I’m a horrible father.”

  “No,” she said and looked around the room, the Queen Anne bed beneath her and heavy curtains drawn against the prying eyes of the city. “You’re not. Sorry to wake you up, I was just wondering if you’d mind me staying one more day this time.”

  “No. Why?”

  “Well, I ran into an old friend last night. From college. She invited me to dinner with her and her husband, and I just thought it would be nice. But I understand if you think no. We shouldn’t really pay for another night here.”

  “No, you should. I could come down.”

  “What?”

  “Sure, Javits could watch things for the night.” She paused, making a contemplative sound while ordering her thoughts, but he’d already understood her reaction. “Never mind, it’s fine.”

  “Are you mad?” she said.

  “Me? I totally understand, an old friend. I was just offering to be nice, honestly.”

  “You sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  Feet still sore from last night’s walk, she took a cab the twenty-odd blocks to West Sixty-Fourth. The restaurant, she had noted the night before, opened at eight. She requested the table in the window and ordered coffee to start, saying someone was meeting her. No one would rush a woman being stood up—she knew that from working in the hotel restaurant. You treated a woman being stood up like a terrorist wearing a vest made of dynamite. She could take two or three hours, bravely ordering breakfast after a long while, dabbing her eyes now and then.

  But as it turned out, she’d sipped only half the coffee when Daniel emerged, holding the hand of a small girl. They were followed by a woman carrying a baby. He wore a conservative blue suit and overcoat, and the little girl a bright-red jacket with wooden buttons. His wife wore a long fur coat with a high collar, which, combined with her sunglasses, conferred a regal, even imperious, look. They walked east and disappeared north at the next block.

  Rachel put down three dollars and pushed back out into the street. It was a bright, cold winter day, and the rising sun, rather than warming the air, clarified and sharpened the chill. Daniel’s family had crossed the road and was walking two blocks ahead, slowly. She drew nearer. The wife held the baby over her left shoulder, and it seemed as though the child had identified Rachel as an enemy agent, tracking her behind them with an unhappy watchfulness.

  The clan stopped on Sixty-Ninth Street, at a small Episcopal church named St. Stephen’s, a picturesque brick building set back from the road in a tranquil yard and further obscured by a rank of holly bushes. The building’s red-tile roof and angular dormers gave it an oriental look. They entered next to an area of scaffolding where it appeared a new section was being built. Christ, she thought, seriously? She’d known they must be going to church, but the almost Dickensian hypocrisy had seemed implausible until that moment. She stood in the cold, hesitating, then moved down the concrete walkway, under the scaffolding, to a heavy wooden door.

  Inside the long, narrow building, prefatory organ music softly piped. The Daniels sat confidently near the front on the left, with an air of assuming their normal spot. Rachel sat in the back row, twenty or so pews behind, on the right-hand side. Daniel leaned over and said something to his wife, who shook her head. The conspiratorial air was gone. In the light of day—in a church—his face was less grotesquely sensual; it conveyed a stoic mournfulness. There was a posture of unhappiness between the two, though Rachel supposed she might be inferring that from the night before—it didn’t take a genius to guess their marriage wasn’t in the best possible shape. The preacher, or priest, or whatever he was—she’d never been to an Episcopal church, had gone to temple infrequently in her life, though more than she liked since marrying Len—came out and began speaking in a soft Boston accent, and her mind instantly wandered back to the central question: What the hell was she doing?

  It was, of course, crazy, as was the night before. Following him had begun as a half-drunken lark, a curious tour of the unknown. But when she’d seen the woman through the window, when she’d understood the level of deceit he was engaged in, a different kind of curiosity had taken hold. All the way back to the hotel, she’d thought about it, what it would be like, leading two lives. How did he do it?

  In a sense, she knew: it was what she’d been doing on these trips to New York, living a shadow existence or existences. Yet wasn’t it all make-believe? Didn’t she know that when Sunday came, it was over and her real life would once again resume? But maybe that was how Daniel felt—maybe the occas
ional room at the Plaza was his little vacation, maybe he told himself the same thing: This is not your real life, and come Sunday morning it’s all over. How much of our phantom selves, she wondered, as she stood and sat and kneeled in automatic imitation of the assembled, did we take back home from these excursions into make-believe?

  After five hours of fitful dreams, she’d awakened wanting to see Daniel’s real life being lived. How did he do it? So here she was, and she realized as she stood and sat, and stood and sat, that it was not edifying. Maybe it was the milieu—the painted hanging lamps, the two-dimensional stained-glass saints frozen in prayer—but it all seemed simple and clear. He was a liar, a cheat. A man who screwed other women at the Plaza, not a mile from his sleeping wife and children. What had she possibly thought there was to learn about it, or about herself? She rose, excused herself past an elderly woman, and pushed on the door, but it did not open.

  Something was blocking the way, and when she pushed again there was a loud scraping sound. The priest paused midsentence. She hurriedly walked down the side aisle to the front exit and outside, where she saw the edge of the scaffolding that had caught the door frame. She looked behind her, but no one was there, just the homely little church, its dormers like raised eyebrows. She clutched her coat around her and walked back to the hotel.

  Having the whole day to kill, she sat with coffee in the lounge, trying her best to get a toehold in Dostoevsky. Why were good books so much harder to read than bad ones? It seemed like it should be the other way around.

  The white-coated waiter returned with coffee, refilling her cup and asking if she wanted lunch. No, she said, just bill it to her room. Like a magic trick, as the waiter left, Daniel seemed to appear in his place. Without asking, he sat down next to her. “Rebecca, right?”

  She looked at him, unable to speak.

  “Were you following me?” He paused and went on. “I saw you at St. Stephen’s earlier, and when I did, I got the strangest feeling I saw you here last night. Is that so?”

  She nodded.

  “Well, I don’t know what you’re doing, but you should stop.”

  “How do you do it?”

  “What?” he said.

  “Whatever it is you do here. Have affairs, lie about who you are.”

  “You don’t know anything about me.”

  “I know a little. That woman last night, the blonde.” He stood to leave. “Wait,” she said. “I really want to know. How do you make it work in your head? Going to church the next day with your children and wife.”

  “Has it occurred to you that she might know?”

  It hadn’t, and the realization that it hadn’t was more startling than Daniel’s appearance had been. He ran a hand through his thick brown hair, seemed to think about just walking away, then, with a nearly imperceptible shrug, he said, “I don’t know why I’m bothering to tell you this, but we have an arrangement.”

  “You sleep with other women at the Plaza?”

  “I try. I don’t always succeed, obviously.”

  “How does that work?”

  “Marriages are strange.” Pursing his big wet lips with contempt, he looked down at her wedding ring and said, “But then, you know that already, don’t you?”

  She didn’t know why, but she felt the need to win this argument, whatever argument it was they were having. “So I guess if I went back to your apartment and knocked on the door, and I told your wife we’d slept together, she wouldn’t mind?”

  “Don’t talk about my wife,” he began in a quick hiss, then stopped himself. He looked around the lobby to make sure no one was listening—the nearest person was a porter loafing at the concierge station, thirty feet away. He leaned over the chair’s back and whispered, “Listen, I love her and my kids more than you could ever know. And if you come near us again, I’ll fucking kill you, got that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. Have a nice life.”

  She called Len and told him her friend was sick, canceled the room, and caught the train home that afternoon. Seated backward, she watched the city, then the outskirts, then the suburbs, then whatever was outside the suburbs vanish continually to the south as the country reappeared: shambolic houses with sagging fences you could see over; a dog trotting through the small ravine that ran beside the track choked with gray February sludge; an abandoned factory sitting in the middle of the river, with its brick stanchions like a fisherman in waders. Earlier, she’d canceled her standing reservation at the Plaza. There would be no more of that—no more of these trips, no more alternate selves, no more pretending.

  Thinking of Daniel’s face, her hands still shook. The scariest part was not the threat he’d made. Even if he was serious, she wouldn’t be back. It was the intensity of his words and feeling, the fervency of his allegiance to his wife and his children. Had he been telling the truth about the cheating, the arrangement? It didn’t really matter. What mattered was that he claimed his life with utter certainty. She’d never cheated on Len, but had she ever felt that strongly about him, about their life? And was it so inviolable that she’d threaten a stranger? The answer to both questions, she knew, was no. Some part of her had never completely accepted her own life, and so she now understood that there was one more version of herself she had yet to inhabit.

  As the train rumbled toward Liberty, it seemed to her she was coming here for the first time. Looking out the window, the familiar procession of small towns (even the names: Scott’s Ferry, Newburgh, Monticello) seemed strange, as did the landscape’s landmarks. The used car dealership, the distant ski lodge, the bending river, the last rickety bridge before Liberty station—she saw all of them with new eyes. It was nearly dark when the taxi climbed the long hill and pulled to a stop in front of the Hotel Neversink. She paid the driver and got out, and the cab pulled away, leaving her on the drive with her suitcase. In the purplish light, the hotel was ablaze, filled (half filled, anyway) with people, all those different lives. How incredible that this was hers. At that moment she felt she’d never been here before, like a stranger to her own life: a tourist. And anyone watching, as she picked up her suitcase and moved hesitantly toward the front door, would have thought that was exactly what she was.

  10. Alice

  1985

  The man sitting next to Alice at the bar had a face like the map of the storm on the TV wedged in the corner, a huge, violent system plowing through the Midwest. His features shifted constantly as he talked, aswirl with expression and varicolored—red nose, blue-red eyes, grayish teeth. Or maybe it was all the drugs in her system: cocaine, Quaaludes, Benzedrine, Valium, marijuana, alcohol, and Benadryl, if you restricted the list to things she’d taken in the last twenty-four hours. Now that she noticed it, everything around her seemed to pulse, not just the man’s face.

  “What brings you to Iowa?” That she was not from Iowa he had apparently sussed out from their previous exchange, which she’d already forgotten.

  “A book tour.” It seemed like a lie, but it was true, and she could hardly believe it herself. She’d been on a bender that began with her New York release party and continued until nowish. It wasn’t like this was an enormous deviation from her usual behavior, but it was nice to have a real excuse. The man didn’t seem to register what she’d said, so she tried again. “A tour for a book?”

  “That you wrote?”

  “Yes.”

  “What about?”

  Even at her sober friendliest she found this question difficult to answer, and she was far from her sober friendliest. “I don’t know,” she said, “some stuff happens at a college. People want different things and make hard decisions.”

  It would have been easier, she thought, if she’d written a novel about vampires or nuclear war. Then she could respond to that question with “vampires” or “nuclear war.” But instead—for her undergraduate senior honors thesis—she’d written a big, unwieldy campus novel, something of a roman à clef, about a cult of personality that springs up around a profes
sor, mainly for the purpose of irritating the real-life professor in question. That the professor had, in fact, been flattered; that he had shown it to his agent; that she had signed Alice on; that a publishing company had bought the book; and that it had come out to quite a bit of fanfare—all seemed inexplicable to her, let alone a strange man whose face was twirling around like a pinwheel.

  She was internally braced for more questions, but a flash of lightning and an immediate thunderclap forestalled her interlocutor. The lights flickered off momentarily, and a couple of sillier people screamed. Alice took the opportunity to get up and push her way through a horde of bargoers, past rows of tattered vinyl booths, to the front of the room, where one of her hosts, a young assistant professor named Don, stood with bourbon in a plastic cup. He and her other university hosts had dragged her out after the reading to this place, a dive bar housed in a large Victorian near campus. She’d wanted to go back to her hotel and sleep for two days, though she had to be in St. Louis tomorrow. Or Chicago.

  “You brought the weather,” he said. Through the front windows, rain lashed the brick street and the other large Victorians in the immediate area. It had been sprinkling when they got there, twenty minutes before. As they watched now, the rain seemed to double in force every ten seconds or so. It seemed that in another five minutes they would be underwater, inside a filled-up bowl.

  “Don’t blame me.”

  “No? I bet a black cloud follows you everywhere.”

  Don was not unattractive, though married, judging by the ring on his finger, and she wondered what it would be like to sleep with him. Probably boring and anyway not worth it; he seemed like the type who would write agonized letters, tell his wife, compose a poetry chapbook about his divorce called Nuclear Fission or something. She took his cup from his hand, raised it in a mock cheers, and downed the whole thing. He smiled at her, not unpleasantly, just quizzically and with a bit of earnest concern. “You okay?”