I Hate to Leave This Beautiful Place

by Howard Norman

  I delivered the suitcases to the woman’s room. Every bellman had been instructed to tell each patron his name and say, “If there is anything you need, please ask for me at the front desk.” But after setting her suitcases down, I said, “If you want to jump out the window, call the front desk and ask for me. I’ll come right up and open it for you.” I didn’t wait for a tip. The hotel manager had politely kept the gate of the electric lift open and was waiting for me. I was unemployed by the time we reached the lobby.

  Despite being fired, I often hung around the hotel lobby. I liked sitting on one of the big sofas to read. I had lunch with Isador at least three times a week. But the pertinent thing here is that Isador adored Mathilde. I knew so few people in Halifax, and he was the one person who spent any time with us as a couple, mainly over dinners at the hotel. On the other hand, I met any number of Mathilde’s artist friends, usually over coffee in cafés or at art galleries. Whenever anyone asked me what I did in life, I’d say, “I’m working on it”—feeble, unimpressive, but true. Once, a little tipsy at a painting exhibit, I said, “Well, I’m going to write a novel, but I’m not starting it for fifteen years.” (This must have sounded acerbic if not delusional, but as it turned out, it was prophetic: my first novel was published when I was thirty-eight, and it took three years to write.) I knew the question, from Mathilde’s friends, was really, “Why are you with him?” It was a good question, a question from curious and protective friends. It was a question I’d often asked myself.

  So, during Hanukkah, Isador would say the blessings, light the candles, and set out dinner, sent up from the hotel kitchen. I had some deep discussions with him about life and love. By life I mean Mathilde. With Isador it was never a case of his dishing out platitudes, no Tuesdays with Morrie bullshit, all sweetness and light. “You know who I saw the other day?” he asked. “That son of a bitch Mr. Kelb. You remember, I told you he used to live in the hotel here, what, maybe twenty years. Then his son and daughter-in-law gave him his own room above their garage. Do you know that when that son of a bitch lived in the hotel, he used to walk in, hand me his bag of groceries—me, the senior bellman—get on the electric lift, and slide the gate shut behind him so I’d have to wait for him to send it down again. He’d say the same goddamn thing every time: ‘I prefer to go upstairs unencumbered.’ Let them put that on his gravestone for all I care. Except I hope when he kicks the bucket he’s going downstairs, not upstairs, if you know what I mean.”

  Apart from the elopement postcard, I wasn’t hearing from Mathilde at all. On the fifth night of Hanukkah, I mentioned this to Isador. He’d just set the room service tray out in the hallway. “What’s there for her to tell you?” Isador said. “She’s freezing her tuches off out there in Saskatchewan. She’s painting her paintings. She’s sleeping, she’s waking up. But that’s not the problem, is it? No, the problem is, you’re in over your head with this Mathilde. You’re drowning. She’s walking so far ahead of you—is this how it feels?—she’s about to turn the corner and disappear. You need to figure out what skills you have. I can get you work in the hotel if you want. I’m sure the thing that happened with the anti-Semite is water under the bridge by now. Besides, the hotel’s got a new owner. It’s been advertising for bellmen.”

  “I showed Mathilde some of my writing.”

  “What did she say about it?”

  “She suggested hotel work—for the time being.”

  “See, brilliant minds think alike. There’s worse things than hotel work, let me remind you.”

  Each night a candle was added to the menorah on Isador’s kitchen table; each night another conversation about the ongoing soap opera, as Isador called my life. By the eighth night, he’d narrowed his tolerance for my unwillingness to see the truth. “Once and for all, here’s my understanding of everything with this,” he said. “Your Mathilde’s got bigger appetites for life than you have. God in heaven, you can’t even read half the same menu she’s reading. So what’s your choice? Savor the time you have with this Mathilde, for as long as one of her appetites is for you. Count your blessings. Let me put this in an old immigrant’s way: she’s got a lot of stickers on her steamer trunk.” (I’ve never since been able to see, in a photograph or movie, world travelers about to embark on, say, a 1930s luxury liner, standing on the dock next to their big steamer trunks festooned with travel stickers, without thinking of Isador saying this to me.) “Now, can we please try and enjoy the last night of this ancient holiday without you sounding like such a pitiful shmuck? Meshugga, so worked up! It’s like you’ve forgotten how to take a piss. Forgotten how to lift a fork to your mouth. You aren’t thinking of doing anything harmful to yourself, are you?”

  Roughly a month after I’d first met Mathilde, I got Isador to go with me to my favorite birding haunt near Port Medway, about a two-hour drive from Halifax. This was, believe me, a triumph of Herculean dimensions, getting Isador Sarovnik out to a beach. Through stubborn persistence I’d managed to persuade the editor of the travel section of the Sunday Halifax Herald to commission an article on a protected bird preserve. I felt this to be the start of something substantial, possibly even a career. Once I’d informed Isador and asked him to accompany me, he said, “Sure, why not? I’d just as soon drop dead out by the Atlantic Ocean as anywhere, what’s the difference? Besides, I need the actual evidence of you earning some money, being a solid citizen. You can take your millions and buy your Mathilde some paintbrushes. How much are they paying you, this newspaper, to write about birds?”

  It was $150, but the way I put it was, “Over four months’ worth of rent.”

  It was early October, warm and windy on the rocky beach. “This is Canada,” Isador said. “Winter can arrive suddenly, on a whim. So I’m wearing more layers than a layer cake.” He had napped on the drive out. I sat him down in a folding chair out of the wind, between boulders, facing the sea. I stuck an umbrella fixed to a long pole in the sand, supplied him with water and lemonade, a makeshift oasis.

  “I have mixed feelings about the ocean,” he said when he had settled in. “Some days I have real affection for it. Other days I feel otherwise.” I walked back and forth along the beach, taking notes on what late-staying sea and shore birds I could find, checking identifications against my field guide. When I got back to Isador, he said, “I’ve been thinking. Now that we’re out here, can you arrange for a nice duck for supper? I’m in good standing with the hotel chef.”

  “Maybe next time,” I said. “I’m going to sit with you for a while, then I have to walk to the marsh—that’s the actual place I’m commissioned to write about. Are you going to be all right?”

  “You put too much sugar in the lemonade,” he said. “You know, I look at the ocean and I think, I never learned to swim. Lucky thing I didn’t fall off the boat that brought me to Canada. Some people, and I saw this with my own eyes, jumped off the ship halfway between there and here. No matter how bad things had gotten for them before, they figured it was going to get worse.”

  “You don’t know all the reasons, Isador.”

  “I’m only saying, I saw it with my own eyes.”

  I sat drinking lemonade with him, talking about this and that.

  “This is a comfortable chair you provided for me here,” he said. “If I ever get to go on an ocean cruise, I’d like this chair. Do they let you bring your own chairs?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Coming over from Europe, that’s not what I’d call an ocean cruise.”

  “No, I guess not, Isador.”

  “I had a change of clothing and my childhood menorah. That’s it.”

  “You told me.”

  “That was a rough passage. Nobody knew their fates. Nobody knew what was what. What was this place Canada, anyway? Still, Jewish children from many countries were conceived on shipboard those weeks. How anyone found privacy on that ship beats me. A hotel, now that’s a different story. But a ship full of refugees—really something, don’t you think?”
/>   “Yes, I do. Would you like to get back to the city now?”

  “You said you had more you needed to look at.”

  “I can come back, if you’re too tired.”

  “In a little while. This umbrella is nice. Let me ask you something. What’s with you and birds, anyway? I don’t understand.”

  “I look at those sea ducks and I wonder where they go at the end of a day.”

  “What’s the mystery? At the end of the day they go home. What’s there to figure out?”

  “Want to look at sea ducks through these binoculars? They have beautiful faces.”

  “I prefer the pigeons of my Russian youth. I close my eyes and see them. For this I don’t need binoculars.”

  “I’ll be back in an hour, probably. No more than two.”

  Later that October, Mathilde and I drove out to Peggy’s Cove, mainly to walk on the beach, catch the last autumn sun, and have lunch at the Oyster Café. In the car, I offered the fact of my having been at the Woodstock music festival back in August as a bona fide of worldliness. This didn’t have the effect I’d hoped for. Mathilde listened intently, as focused as a stenographer who would be responsible for reading back a transcript, as I described what I’d seen and heard in the muddy fields and hills of Yasgur’s upstate New York property. I dropped the names of musicians, some of whom I saw perform: Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, the Incredible String Band, Richie Havens, Canned Heat, the Who, Joan Baez, and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. I mentioned that I saw a lot of people making love on rubber rafts on a pond. I told her I had the use of a cottage in Jeffersonville, not far from the festival site, owned by the poet Jerome Rothenberg and his wife, Diane, in dairy farm country.

  When I had finished my recollections, Mathilde, between kissing my ears and mouth with big smacking noises and mussing my hair, all teasing sweetness, interrogated me, hoping to discover to what extent I’d authentically experienced things at Woodstock. “So you probably had a bath every night,” she said, “at your friend’s cozy little cottage, right? Did you have any luck in the fucking-in-the-pond department? Did you get hypnotized by what’s-his-face, the Maharishi-something? Did you get all crazy and slide on your bare ass in the mud? You tell me, but my guess is, no to all of the above.”

  “I had a very good time listening to the music,” I said. “Mostly I sat on a hill way back from the stage and looked at the performers through binoculars. Is that what you wanted to hear?”

  “Oh, I’ve hurt your feelings.”

  “No, it’s just that I thought I’d had a better time than I obviously did.”

  Mathilde attempted a reconciliation. She held my hand in hers and said, “If I were there, I’d have wanted to sit in that bathtub with you. I don’t need a pond. I prefer a bed. I’m glad you had a nice time.”

  “In my own way.”

  “You know what the joke is about Woodstock? Because of all the dope and LSD and stuff? The joke is, if you remember Woodstock, you weren’t really there.”

  “So then, by those lights, I wasn’t there. But still I remember it.”

  The plane had departed Regina at dusk and lost radio contact somewhere between the airport and Kyle, in north-central Saskatchewan province. The wreckage was found scattered and smoldering. Mathilde had been the only passenger. She always scrupulously worked out a strict budget for her painting sojourns; transportation was always the most difficult part to afford. The pilot’s and her body were incinerated; Mathilde’s identity was forensically verified by dental records. The inventory of possessions in her motel room in Kyle included toiletries, canvases, paintbrushes and tubes of paint, turpentine, postcards, a book of watercolors by Toulouse-Lautrec, and a book of watercolors by Egon Schiele. Her remains and her paintings were sent to London; she was buried there within walking distance of her parents’ townhouse. When I wrote to extend my condolences, Mathilde’s mother’s return note read: “Thank you. Although we did not know any of you, it is a comfort to know that Mathilde had so many Canadian friends.”

  The trajectory of a life sponsored for any period by unresolved conversations and love, and then abruptly deprived of these things, is something to behold, let alone experience firsthand. In the immediate aftermath of Mathilde’s death I did a number of things without rhyme or reason, but perhaps with what the poet Denise Levertov called, in a lecture I heard her give, “the marionetting of the whole person by an invisible hand, the sorrow dance.” Whoever or whatever was in control of my life over the next six or so months, it wasn’t me. Quite often I’d simply fall off a curb.

  Amid this disorderly order of psychological incidents, as I have come to think of them, I decided to take Isador up on his offer to get me work at the Lord Nelson Hotel. He had given me a magazine article titled “Hold Your Tongue,” which contained advice about how to know when a person should, and shouldn’t, keep his opinion to himself. I had a low opinion of this article. But Isador said, “It’s useful for a bellman.” He had set up an interview with the personnel director of the hotel. I put on my dark brown herringbone sports coat, black trousers, beige shirt, necktie, and black dress shoes, and arrived early for my two P.M. interview.

  As soon as I stepped into the lobby, however, I noticed two young women carrying a painting of tropical birds, walking toward a conference room down a hallway off the lobby. I followed them and discovered that an auction was in progress. I knew that on occasion private auctions were held in the hotel. This one dealt primarily with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century zoological and botanical book illustrations, and a few other drawings and paintings as well. There were approximately forty people in attendance, along with the auctioneer and his staff. I sat in the back row as if I’d been invited.

  Looking around, I saw that I was properly dressed for this auction. I sat through the bidding for half a dozen works. I sensed a certain acquisitive fever in the air, but by and large the auction was all etiquette and protocol, and for me every moment was an education. People were forking over impressive sums of money, upward of five thousand dollars for a drawing, which to me was an unimaginable amount. Then a late-eighteenth-century work, Laughing Gull, painted by Mark Catesby, was put on the easel, and bidding started. I cannot say what got into me, but when the auctioneer reached the point of asking, “Do I hear three thousand?” I shot my arm in the air like a schoolboy excitedly wanting to answer a question. At that time I had around eighty dollars in my savings account.

  I was startled when the auctioneer addressed me directly. “Sir, are you representing yourself?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Very well,” he said. “We have a bid of three thousand. Do I hear three thousand five hundred?”

  A woman in the front row held up a kind of paddle. The auctioneer said, “We have thirty-five hundred. Mark Catesby, first reproduction of the original for portfolio—Laughing Gull. Provenance fully verified. Do I hear four thousand?”

  “Four thousand!” I said.

  “Four thousand once. Four thousand twice. Sold—for four thousand dollars.”

  Not to mention the commission due the auction house.

  I’d missed my interview. Isador was not pleased. I found him playing checkers with the chef in the restaurant’s kitchen. The chef said, “I’ll leave you two alone to talk. I’ve got dinner to prepare, eh?”

  I sat down across a table from Isador and told him about the auction. “Did you sign legal papers?” he asked. “Did you put your John Henry on a bill of sale?”

  “It was part of things.”

  “Then you’re screwed—pardon my French.”

  “It just happened.”

  “You and birds. What did you buy again? A seagull?”

  “An eighteenth-century seagull.”

  “That’s been dead a long time.”

  “Isador!”

  “Did Mathilde like seagulls? I’m asking.”

  “I’d say they were among her favorites.”

  “Okay, that explains some of it, but not the whole meshug
geneh stupidity.”

  “I don’t have the money to pay for it.”

  “Visiting hours probably will be on Thursdays and Saturdays, and I promise not to fail you in that department. I’ll bring you lemon cake, your favorite. But I won’t hide a saw in the cake, like in the movies.”

  “This is no joke, Izzy.”

  “No, I should say it isn’t. Look, go in there and tell them it was a mistake. They can’t get blood from a stone. You just don’t have the money. The problem is, once you win a bid, the thing’s off the market. Plus, you signed your name. This is not good.”

  “I’m screwed.”

  “You need employment.”

  The auction house was sympathetic, but legally unyielding. In short, we worked out reparations. I would give them five hundred dollars on the twentieth of each month until the debt was paid. I signed another document to that effect. I was asked whether I wanted to return Laughing Gull and let the auction house privately advertise its availability. This would save us all embarrassment. If someone was interested at four thousand dollars, I’d be off the hook. I should have leaped at this opportunity, but I refused it. They kept the painting in storage.

  Nearly broke, in debt up to my ears, I then made another lunatic decision, which was to rent Mathilde’s vacant apartment on Robie Street. “So, you couldn’t bring yourself to live with her before—not that she didn’t ask,” Isador summarized. “So now what? You’ll live without her in the rooms you should’ve lived with her?”