Len walked back to his office and closed the door against the raucous explosion of laughter to come. When it did, it rang in his ears like the world—like the entire goddamned miserable world—was laughing, just at him.
“Why don’t we close up,” said Rachel, for what must have been the ten-millionth time that young year, “and be done with it.” They were in the hotel kitchen, a huge tiled space built for a staff of thirty, now manned by three full-time cooks and two part-timers, local kids they paid in cash. Len was upside down, his head in a nonfunctional oven, trying to find the pilot.
“And do what?”
“Anything. Literally anything else.”
“For money, I mean.”
“Are we making money here? We could do nothing and make more money. Not making any money would be a vast improvement.”
“I don’t want to have this discussion.” He heard her sigh. The pilot flickered on, but he stayed in the oven, avoiding his wife’s face. It was nice here. “My grandparents built this place, Rach. I can’t just walk away from it.”
“Yes, you can. That’s exactly what you can do. Your grandparents would not want you destroying our lives, our children’s lives.”
“How do you know that? You didn’t know them, maybe that’s exactly what they would have wanted.”
“We’re still young.”
“I’m forty-five.”
“That’s young. We have time to start over.”
“I don’t want to start over.” The pilot light flickered back out. Everything hated him. He pulled his head out and looked at his wife standing over him in a posture of exasperated complaint, as he’d known she would be, the only way he could imagine her these days. “This place is my birthright, okay? I want to turn things around. I want to save it.”
“Oh my God.” With a sweep of her thin, freckled arm and a bustle of her black hair, still full and girlishly long, with only a bit of gray at the temple—and oh, how he’d loved that hair when they met! How he still did!—she gestured at the kitchen, decaying like everything else. The Salvadoran dishwasher in the corner scrubbing a banquet pan didn’t hear or understand, or graciously pretended not to. “There’s no turning it around. There’s nothing to save. Wake up, Leonard. People are frightened of coming here, to Liberty. And even if they weren’t, the Catskills are done. The dream is dead.”
“Look,” he said, hugging his knees to his chest. “Here’s how it is, okay? This place is like life. However bad it gets, you just keep going. It gets worse and worse, and you keep going until you can’t anymore, until it ends. That’s how it’s going to be. We just keep going with this thing until it ends.”
She walked away, not even needing to respond with the obvious—that she had no intention of going until the end. And she was probably right; there was no turning it around. What did he hope would happen? Force majeure, he supposed, sticking his head back in the oven.
The restaurant that night—and most nights—was dead, depressing. Len sat at the bar with his ritual postwork drink prepared by Sander Levin, the longtime bartender. There was a table of policemen in one corner of the large room, whom Len had seated as far away as possible from a young couple who stared down at their menus in mild bewilderment, as if wondering how they’d wound up in this place. It was possible they were the only other guests in the hotel at this point; Len hadn’t checked the registry. Sander, encased in a frayed tux, eyes clouded behind thick glasses, leaned over the bar. “Mr. Sikorsky,” he said. “We need to talk.”
“So talk.”
“I gotta give you my notice.”
“What?”
“I’m leaving.”
Len stared at Sander, who straightened with defensive dignity. Sander had been there since time immemorial. As long as Len could remember, he had been behind the bar in his white tux and steel-rim glasses, iron hair plastered back, a living monument to constancy through the decades, a tenure during which, to Len’s knowledge, Sander had not missed one day of work. This was like one of the structural pillars in the lobby calling it quits.
“Come on,” said Len.
Sander shook his great head, trembling very slightly—more emotion than Len had ever seen him display. “You have to know this kills me, Mr. Sikorsky. But I just can’t make a living anymore. I even picked up a couple of shifts over at that new TGI Fridays in Bellhaven, trying to supplement. But I make more there than I do here.”
“TGI Fridays.”
“I’m sorry.”
“But what are you going to do?”
“Well, I was thinking Florida. My daughter and son-in-law are down there, in Fort Myers. I wouldn’t mind some nice weather for a change. If I sell the house, I’ll have a little money to move with. Louisa’s starting a plant nursery; I could be a help.”
“Listen, we can work something out. You should have told me sooner.” A roar issued from the policeman’s table, and in the nearly empty room, Len found himself having to yell to speak over them. “I can give you a raise. Or some kind of profit sharing.”
Sander looked at him with an expression so full of pity that Len had to look down into his drink at the two little olives impaled on their plastic spear. Sander said, “Mr. Sikorsky, come on now, let’s not make a big tzimmes over this. It’s been a good run, I’ve loved my time here. I loved your father and mother, it’s just time, is all.”
Len got the idea the next morning, reading the paper with his coffee, a small thing about an easement dispute at Yasgur’s Farm, site of Woodstock nineteen years before. Len had been a little too old for it at the time, already running the hotel’s day-to-day operations, unable to take three days off to eat acid and roll around in the mud with naked girls named after horoscope symbols, not that that sounded unpleasant. By 1969, he and Rachel were almost through their extended courtship—the four years she spent at Vassar, the four years he spent visiting her there. He’d logged enough time in Vassar’s dorms to deserve an honorary degree.
Rachel did go to Woodstock with some friends and said it was far out, though he sensed a hesitation on her part. Deep down, he thought, beneath the intellectual hippie routine, lurked a good upper-class Jewish girl, too well-brought up and smart to buy into all this free-love stuff. Though afterward, she did bring back a powerful joint, get him high on the roof of the hotel, and proceed to make love to him there all night. He did have Woodstock and its ethos to thank for that.
Maybe, he thought, old Yasgur could help him out again. He put the paper down and called Saul Javits. It was Javits’s day off, and he let the phone ring a dozen times, knowing the man would be puttering around his mountaintop cabin, doing twenty things and nothing at once. Finally, in the manner of an old-style detective, he answered: “Javits.”
“I had an idea.”
“He has an idea. It can’t wait until tomorrow, this idea?”
“I was thinking—the twenty-year anniversary of Woodstock is coming up, right?”
“Next summer. August.”
“There’s gonna be a thing, I heard. A tribute, some of the old people playing.”
“Well, drop a dime, someone picks it up.”
“My thinking, exactly. What if we throw an event, get a big name to come and perform in the ballroom, make a whole thing out of it. Position ourselves as the Woodstock hotel.”
“Why?”
“What do you mean, why? Because we need to drum up business, that’s why.”
There was a long silence as Javits thought about it. He said, “I don’t know. Seems desperate.”
“It seems desperate because we’re desperate. Drowning men look desperate, they can’t help it. They’re too worried about drowning.”
“You want we should bring in Jimi Hendrix to play the national anthem? Maybe Richie Havens can sing ‘Freedom’ for three hours?”
“Yeah, exactly.”
“I was joking, Lenny, come on. This isn’t the Neversink, we run a nice place here, for families. You know the kind of people that would attract?”
/> “People with money? And what kind of people are we attracting now?”
Javits sighed and said, “It’s a downturn. Things’ll pick up.”
“Not on their own, they won’t. I’m going to talk to Mickey, see what she thinks.” Mickey Shulman was a talent agent who had booked the main stage at the Neversink and other hotels for decades. She was a longtime friend and business associate, a contemporary of Len’s father and former agent of his Uncle Joey. At seventy-something, she still worked nine-to-five and represented a stable of working entertainers. There was another long silence, and Len finally said, “I’m not asking for your opinion, Saul. We’ve got to do something.”
“Hey, if you didn’t want to know, why call? Tell Mickey hi. Mazel tov.”
Mickey was more enthusiastic than Javits. Not a bad idea, she said, which quelled Len’s doubts, a little. Later that day, having made some calls, she faxed over a list of possible performers and their guarantees. Len went down the list. Among them was, indeed, Richie Havens, although his fifteen-thousand-dollar ask seemed a little steep. But some others were more affordable—for instance, John Sebastian, whose name Len dimly recognized. From the Mamas and the Papas, he thought: “California Dreamin’.”
He found his daughter, Susannah, working on homework by the outdoor pool, on which floated a scrim of dead leaves. He made a mental note to clean it, though the weather was still too cold for anyone to want to swim, if there had been anyone there in the first place. The girl was wrapped in a blanket and writing on a sheet of loose-leaf paper with an edge bothered by the wind.
Len said, “Why are you out here?”
She shrugged. She was thirteen, and had last willingly engaged in a conversation with him maybe two years earlier. “Mom said watch Noah.” Noah was eight and nowhere to be seen, and Len’s heart pounded a little as he walked to the edge of the pool. Down the adjacent sloping field, his son sprawled on a small hummock, engaged in incomprehensible, operatic war play with plastic toys that turned into other things.
“Noah!” he yelled, and the boy turned. “Come back up here! Stay where your sister can see you.”
The boy moved reluctantly into the pool area, settling with his toys near the cabana. Len returned to his daughter and said, “Hey, do you know who John Sebastian is?”
“No.”
“He’s a musician.”
“Okay, great.”
“Mamas and Papas, I think. You know who they are?”
“Old-fart stuff?”
“Right, that’s who we want.”
She looked up. “What are you talking about?”
“Nothing. What are you working on?”
“Algebra. It’s complicated.” She looked back down.
You have no idea, he thought, walking back inside to the front lobby where Rachel was meant to be working—you have no idea how complicated. As usual, walking through the Great Hall, he was assaulted by the number of things that needed repairing, replacing, soldering, mending, patching, and painting. It would take a team of repairmen a year, on the outside, to get the place back into good condition, and that would be if the hotel was closed the whole time. Somehow it had all gotten away from him.
As he turned the corner into the lobby, Rachel was nowhere to be seen. The front desk sat vacant, and for a horrible moment he was struck by the sense that the hotel had already shuttered without his knowledge. In the same moment, he seemed to see into the future, see the lobby and the adjoining natatorium in a state of utter dilapidation, covered in garbage, carpet torn away, walls dripping with graffiti, industrious weeds pushing through cracks in the riven cement. He shivered and cried, “Rachel!”
“What?” Her voice issued from the café, and like a child lost in the supermarket, he moved toward it with grateful desperation.
She sat at the counter, eating rugelach and drinking a cup of coffee, the edge of the saucer holding down the page of her book. Some paperback mystery—she was always in the middle of one, reading with steady inexorability over the last decade. Len Deighton and Carl Hiaasen had replaced Woolf and Foucault. He gestured to the entryway, said, “The desk?”
“Oh,” she craned her neck around him. “I didn’t hear the tour bus arrive. One moment.”
“Is the sarcasm really necessary?”
“I don’t know, is scolding me really necessary?”
“It just looks bad.”
“To whom? To whom does it look bad?”
He slumped on the stool next to her and pulled out the fax sheet from his pocket, which he unfolded on the Formica countertop. “Fine,” he said. “On that note, take a look at this.”
“What is it?”
He explained, glancing at her now and then, though less often as he went on and her face remained frozen in an expression of mute incredulity. “You’re serious,” she said, finally.
“Yeah, I think I am.”
“I don’t know what to say.”
“Mickey thought it was a good idea.”
“Mickey gets a 5 percent commission, of course she thinks it’s a good idea.”
“It’s not all business—she’d tell me if she thought it was bad.”
Rachel looked at the sheet for another few seconds. “You want to pay Abbie Hoffman ten grand?”
“Abbie’s a natural for this. People will love it.”
“And John Sebastian? From the Lovin’ Spoonful?”
Len took the sheet. “I thought he was the Mamas and the Papas. One of the Papas.”
“Are you out of your fucking mind?”
“Desperate times, Rach.”
She stood. She wore a pair of jeans under her hotel smock, and as he saw the heavy curve of her hip, he again felt the press of the future, like something physical, already real and simply waiting for him, for them both. “Spend money to make money, right?”
“As the saying goes, yeah.”
“I want you to listen to me and understand what I’m saying, Len. If you take twenty thousand dollars out of our savings, out of Suse and Noah’s college money, for this harebrained scheme, I swear to God I’m going to leave you. You can ruin our lives if you want, but not our children’s lives. Is that clear?”
“What you’re saying is clear, yes.”
“Good. Reporting back to post, captain.” She left for the front desk, and he remained in the café, washing up her cup and plate. That night, lying beside her, the three inches of mattress between them might as well have been the desert of Midian. His eyes weren’t open—who lies in bed with their eyes open?—but he couldn’t sleep and knew he wouldn’t all night. Rachel appeared before him as she had one night shortly after they’d gotten married, shortly before she’d become pregnant with Susannah, on a walk they’d taken in the nearby woods, the Neversink River babbling somewhere in the invisible nearness. She was wearing one of his flannel shirts, open off the collarbone, dark hair massed like the storm clouds hanging above the nearby flame-streaked trees. She’d walked ahead of him on the trail and turned, looking at him as if there were no one else in the entire world, and said something. What had she said? It hadn’t been I love you—nothing that obvious or common; it had been one of those funny little beginning things that form the strange bedrock of a relationship, eventually obscured by the elaborate and sprawling mansion built on top. She stared at him now, in the vision, and very clearly said, Do it for us. Please, Lenny, do this thing for us.
The policeman was young, twenty-five at most, brush-cut and apple-cheeked from a raucous lunchtime bender, and passed out dead in the hall. In an unlikely coincidence, he’d happened to fall over directly in front of one of the five occupied rooms—Len had checked the register—and was blocking the guest’s door. Len managed to roll the cop out of the way, freeing Mr. Teitelbaum, who’d been coming up for an early springtime golf getaway practically since the course had been built, forty years ago. He was a thin man, with a thick wedge of white hair pointing down like an arrow at the lumpy, prone form beneath his feet.
“If you
r mother was alive to see this,” he said, the white V shaking back and forth.
“Thank God she’s gone, huh?”
“You know I would never suggest such a thing. Your mother was a great woman, and I loved her very much.”
“I know, sorry.”
“But yes, perhaps it is a small blessing she isn’t here for this.”
“Yes, perhaps.”
Mr. Teitelbaum moved slowly away and Len dragged the policeman a few feet in the opposite direction before realizing he had no idea where he was taking him. He unlocked a room and pulled him inside, just to get him out of the hall. He got the man’s feet free of the door and it shut behind him. There was no possibility of getting him onto the bed, and for a moment, standing astride Officer Lasky—according to the lanyard twisted around his neck—Len was struck by the knowledge that he could do anything he wanted to the man: pour water on his face, beat him with a shoe, stick his fingers up his nose, anything. It didn’t lack a certain appeal. Mr. Teitelbaum was right—his mother, had she still been alive, would have been instantly felled by the spectacle of these drunken lunatics crawling around, of the current state of things. Of course, his mother would never have let things get like this, would have done something to save the hotel, as she had, in fact, done several times during her four-decade tenure at its helm.
He shook his head and left the room, jogging down the stairs to the first floor with a mounting anger that constricted his throat. Beating on the door yielded Sergeant Mikulsky, bathrobe-clad and similarly red-faced with drink, although ambulatory and sentient, more or less.
“What?” The TV blared in the room behind him, the floor of which was littered with refuse and bottles.
The Hotel Neversink Page 15