by Peter Straub
I wanted to understand what my long marriage had really been: I wanted to know its true shape. Was it the narrative of cooperation and accommodation I had imagined it to be, or had my own role in it been only secondary, because long ago—perhaps from the beginning!—usurped by another? Even after so long a time, wasn’t that a point you had to make clear?
After Olson and I had returned to Cedar Street, I debated with myself, then called the reservations desk of the hotel now before me. When a clerk picked up, I asked to speak to a guest named Spencer Mallon. The clerk informed me that while Mr. Mallon was indeed expected at the Golden Atlantic Sands, his arrival was not scheduled for another twenty-four hours. Yes, Mr. Mallon was a frequent guest at the Golden Atlantic Sands, the clerk was happy to say. Mr. Mallon was a fine gentleman who cut quite a figure in the informal world that was Rehoboth Beach.
“Aristocratic,” I said.
“I’d say that’s an excellent description of the gentleman,” said the clerk.
Could the clerk also check to see if a Ms. Lee Truax was expected around the same time?
“Oh! Ms. Truax!” the clerk exclaimed. “Everybody here knows her, she’s a fabulous person! We all just love her, honestly we do. Well, listen to me, chattering away like a magpie. Well, she is special. You know it, too, if you know her.”
“Oh, yes,” I said.
“We like to say our hotel is Ms. Truax’s second home, she’s with us so often … Let’s see, now. No, I can’t find any reservations in her name, I guess it’ll be a while before we have the pleasure of her company again. Is there some other way I can be of help to you, sir?”
No, but thanks for asking.
Where would the Eel be staying while she sojourned in this beachfront community, if not in the hotel where everyone loved her so profoundly?
Actually, there was a reasonable answer to that question. I called back and asked if the ACB had taken accommodations of any sort over the next few days. No, sir, came the answer, the ACB had requested no accommodations until their meeting in May of next year. So that door slammed shut. The Eel had told me she would “probably” stay at the usual place: the question that animated me now was whether or not she would be staying there with someone else.
I had called her cell phone, but she did not answer. Three hours later, I called again, with results only slightly more satisfactory. She was too busy to talk, she would call back later. Where in Rehoboth Beach was she staying? No, she wasn’t there yet, she’d leave Washington tomorrow. Well, where was she staying in Washington? Where? That was a question I seldom asked. But if I really wanted to know, she was staying in the guest room of her ACB friend Heidi Schumacher, who owned a beautiful house in Georgetown—she was being to Heidi what Dilly was to him! As for Rehoboth Beach, there were a couple of possibilities. What was happening, was I worried about her? Just curious, I said. I’m a little old blind lady, I can’t get too wild, she told me. Don’t worry, don’t worry about anything. Hold tight, do some work, she’d be home after the weekend, and then they could make arrangements for Hootie.
Call me when you get to Rehoboth Beach, I’d asked. She promised, and she did call, but the reception was so foul I scarcely understood a word. Since then, nothing. Unable to keep from doing so, I had told Don I had to go out of town on a business matter, and would be back in a day or two. My accountant, my business manager, it was too boring to explain, but I had to go. And after that I got on the phone, packed a bag, and, despairing, went.
I knew I was being crazy. The one saving grace in my ridiculous scheme was that if Lee Truax should happen to walk down the Boardwalk when I happened to be lurking there, she would be unable to witness my shame. This reflection was not without a private shame of its own, namely that I had thought of it at all. I stood beside the ugly little car, looking at a hotel where my wife was a beloved guest, and told myself it was not too late to turn my back on both the hotel and my witless scheme. All I had to do was get back in behind the wheel, start it up, and drive back to Wicomico Regional Airport to wait for the next flight that could begin the process of returning me to what seemed now the land of the sane. Why was I here, anyhow? Because I thought my life might have been saved by a man motivated by guilt over cuckolding me? Because my wife had scarcely bothered to invent a good reason for coming to this little beach town? Because I knew Spencer Mallon was still alive and had good reason to keep on visiting the place?
I locked the car and walked past the hotel’s sign to take a path around the side and get on the Boardwalk. If I saw them, I thought, it would be there—and for the first time realized that although my wife would be incapable of seeing me, Mallon certainly would not.
No sooner did I enter upon the Boardwalk then I was faced with the day’s second awkward recognition, that it was early June, and although the Delaware shore had been hot, hazy, and as humid as New York City in mid-July, the season had not yet begun. Although some tourists and pleasure seekers were strolling in and out of the shops and fast-food outlets, they were far fewer than I had anticipated. I felt exposed, as if a spotlight played upon me. If I were to remain unseen, I needed a disguise.
In the first likely-looking store I examined a shelf piled with caps and hats and paid $32.99 for a wide-brimmed straw number with a bobbing fringe of untrimmed straw around the brim. In the same shop, I passed twenty dollars over a different counter and purchased a bug-eyed pair of sunglasses so dark I could barely see the way back to the door. A little way further down the Boardwalk, I bought a copy of the Cape May Gazette from a vending box and carried it to a bench near the railings over the long beach. A few deeply tanned couples, some of them equipped with books they were not reading, lay sprawled on towels and loungers.
I perched myself on the bench’s inside edge, opened my newspaper, leaned back, and through my inky shades and beneath the screen of the dangling straw fringe, cast a long look in both directions before concentrating my attentions on the wide glass doors that led into the hotel where my wife had become such a beloved figure.
That, with many rattles of the newspaper and long sideways looks, also a few swift inspections of the long beach and a single pee break, was what I did for the next five hours. At six o’clock, starving, I folded the paper under my arm, got my overnight bag out of the car, and went through the hotel’s main entrance to check in.
I was given a room on the fifth floor, which awakened some dim echo, not of something I had seen or heard, but something once described to me, some part of a tale, an anecdote. I had heard this said: You watch the needle swing up and see it stop on the fifth floor … The next elevator comes down and opens its doors, and you jump in and push 5 and the Close Door button before anyone else can get on. The anecdote, the story, had to do with Spencer Mallon and some “mind-blowing” nonsense he had passed off as wisdom. Its fragmentary mental reappearance now was a completely meaningless coincidence.
The elevator took me to my floor without incident. In absolute peace, comfort, and silence, I followed the directional arrows around several corners and gained my room, 564. Where a bellman once turned on lights, opened closets, and located the bathroom, now the weary guest does it all for himself, thereby spared the expense of a handsome sum in the neighborhood of five dollars. In the continuing state of peace, comfort, and silence, I removed my hat and glasses, zipped open my overnight bag, arranged my clothes atop the dresser, and carried my toiletries kit into the bathroom, where an incurious glance into the mirror put an end to peace and comfort, also silence. What the mirror displayed made me groan, “Oh, God.”
I seemed to have aged at least ten punitive years. A shrunken, defeated old man was looking back at me. The old man was Lee Harwell, but not in an incarnation I ever wanted anyone to see. My eyes seemed sunken and as red as if filled with blood. Wrinkles carved my face, and my hair was dull and lead-colored. My entire head seemed to have shriveled, and my teeth looked yellow and enormous. My shoulders hunched over the suggestion of a concave chest. Whatever appeal or ch
arm had once been visible here existed now as a ghastly parody of itself. That I had felt so fine only seconds before astonished me. Clearly, I was tottering on the far edge of exhaustion.
The mirror, I realized, had given me a moral shock: Here you are, this is what you have made of yourself.
To avoid looking any longer into my blood-filled eyes, I splashed cold water over my face and rubbed it in. Under my hands, the contours and planes all felt familiar and unchanged. When I lowered my hands, that depraved and dying animal was still gazing at me from the opposite side of the mirror. I fled the room, picking up my sunglasses on the way and slipping them on before I reached the elevator.
On the way down, I hunched in the corner, wondering how long it would be before I would need a cane. The elevator stopped at the third floor, and two slim blond girls in their early teens walked in, followed by their mother, also slender and blond, and like her daughters attired in a tight-fitting T-shirt and jeans. Their flip-flops revealed the small, scarlet nails of fresh pedicures. I withdrew deeper into my corner and avoided displaying my teeth. The girls cast haughty, peeved looks at me, and the mother ignored me completely. At the lobby, they bolted as if from a foul stench. I cast around the lobby until I noticed a set of stairs rising to a dark wooden arch, investigated, and discovered the hotel’s main restaurant, the Ocean Room.
The restaurant featured low lighting and paneled walls mounted with giant stuffed fish. The opacity of my lenses made it difficult for me to see even the hostess at her podium, who, lit from beneath, bore a passing resemblance to a floating severed head. She spared a curious look for my glasses, but was too polite to ask. I felt like an elderly vampire.
From the waiter’s endless recital I ordered French onion soup, roasted chicken with mushroom and pine-nut sauce. With a glass of pinot noir. Discreetly, I scanned the room for two faces I was certain would burn through the murk of my optics like spotlights. Though the restaurant contained any number of gray heads, none belonged to either Lee Truax or the wizardly creature who had addressed me in the Dane County airport. My soup arrived.
After the better than acceptable soup came an uninspiring chicken. When arrayed on the breast of a dry and overcooked chicken, mushrooms and pine nuts do not join hands and sing. Because I was still hungry, I labored through the meal, then signed the check, and pushed myself away from the table.
From the top of the steps, I surveyed the lobby. I was bored, and the pine nuts were still irritated with the mushrooms. A priest in a soutane swept through the lobby, followed by a sobbing woman. What was that about? In an envelope of laughter-spilling babble, a group of teenagers moved out of an open elevator and swerved toward the Boardwalk exit. A line of frustrated-looking men and women waited to check in at the registration desk. A knot of people moved into the elevator the teenagers had left, among them a striking silver-haired man in loose black clothing who turned to face the front of the car just as the doors began to slide shut. I had time only to notice his prominent cheekbones. Had his hair been unusually long for a man of his age, did his eyes penetrate the darkness? Three or four women I barely took in had been standing near the man. I moved rapidly down the stairs, watching the glowing red numbers track the ascending elevator.
Had one of those women in the elevator been small, white-haired, astonishingly lovely? Did the desk clerks and the maids adore her?
At precisely the moment when the numeral 5 appeared in the LED window, I remembered the entire context of the memory fragment that had visited me at the registration desk. It had been part of a story the Eel had told about Spencer Mallon. Mallon had described an unnamed disciple—a you—following him to a fifth-floor corner where he had to be concealed behind one of two doors. You had to choose one, then decide whether or not to knock. If you had the right room, Mallon rewarded you with wisdom; if you had chosen wrong, hideous curses afflicted your beloved. You chose; you knocked, it did not matter on which door, for you had already admitted the evil into the equation. Something like that, anyhow. The story ends at the point you’d assume it really begins, when the door opens.
Back in my room, I felt too agitated to go to bed. I picked up the telephone and asked to be connected to Mr. Mallon’s room. Then I listened to the harsh, distressing sound of a phone ringing and ringing. Finally, a recorded voice requested me to leave a voice-mail message. I hung up.
I went into the bathroom and switched on all the lights. I did not look normal, not exactly, but I was younger and healthier than I had seemed before. My eyes were bloodshot, but not filled with red, and my cheeks were not sunken and bisected by fissures. My hair looked healthy, too, the color of pewter, not of lead. My teeth were a long way from Moby Dick, movie-star whiteness, but they looked like normal teeth, not fangs. I splashed cold water on my face again, then turned and pulled a towel from the rack. After I had dried my face, I looked as ruddy as if I had been hunting grouse on a Scottish moor. My shoulders still seemed hunched. I made myself stand up straight. The improvement was slight, though definitive—I no longer looked like a vampire. I decided to reward myself for my physical renewal with a trip to the lobby bar. I’d had only a glass of wine with dinner, and it was still before nine o’clock. Anyhow, I had always liked reading in bars, and it had been months since I’d had this pleasure.
Alone in the elevator, I checked my hair and posture in the smoky mirrors. Yes, there I was, back again, live and wide awake.
The lobby bar, the Beachcomber, was tucked in behind the steps up to the Ocean Room. A windowed wall fitted with batwing doors led into a long dim rectangular space scattered with tables and sofas and anchored by a shiny, light-emitting counter at its far end. Couples in play clothes sprawled on the sofas, waving their arms and pointing at things as they spoke. At two of the tables, athletic young men attempted to charm attractive young women. A few single men with expectant faces nursed beers at other tables. They were pausing in their journeys, awaiting the arrival of the next adventure. I wished them well.
At the bar I took a stool, placed my book beside me, and when a chipper fortyish blonde wearing a blue chambray shirt and a black vest with THE BEACHCOMBER embroidered on its breast approached me and, smiling, asked for my order, I named the first single-malt whiskey that came to mind. Neat, water back. Appreciatively I watched her move down the rows of bottles stacked in tiers, slid my book before me, and opened it.
When the bartender returned with my drink, she said, “Good book?”
“It’s been good so far,” I said. “Never bites, doesn’t smoke, always puts the toilet seat down.”
“And yet, it likes sitting in bars,” she said. “You never know, it might have a wild streak.”
“Probably it does.” I showed her the cover. “Consider the source.”
“My mom’s a big fan of Tim Underhill’s.”
“Good. Tim’s a friend of mine.”
She stepped back, feigned wide-eyed amazement, then grinned and leaned in toward me. “So … what’s he like?”
“Weird, weird guy,” I said.
Wondering how inventive I should be about Underhill’s imaginary weirdness, I swallowed whiskey and turned my head to look at the glass wall, the ugly batwing doors, and the lobby beyond. Striding past the glass and just moving out of view was the silver-haired man in black clothing I had seen from the top of the stairs. A smaller person, a woman, bustled along beside him.
I slid off the stool and fished out a twenty-dollar bill. “Whoops, I gotta go, sorry.”
When I got out into the big, empty lobby I saw the couple just entering one of the elevators. The woman faded out of sight at the side of the car before I could get anything like an adequate look at her. A family of three in shorts and T-shirts piled in, and I caught only a flash of the man as he leaned forward to push a floor button. He then disappeared to the side and joined the woman who had been with him.
The man in the elevator could have been Mallon; just as easily, he could have been a gray-haired stranger. I had a feeling it was th
e latter, but that feeling incorporated an uncomfortably large area of doubt, 25 percent, maybe 30. Of the woman, I had seen next to nothing.
I moved through the spaces of the lobby, watching the mounting LED numbers above the elevator. It stopped on three. The tourists, or the gray-haired man? The numeral 3 hung in the display window for far longer than I expected it to. The elevator at the end of the row opened up, and a small, suntanned tribe emerged, lively and talkative and young, probably on their way to a club. No one else waited for an elevator. Deciding to move at the instant I did so, I rushed into the elevator, stuck out my elbow, and pushed 5 and Door Close. Why did I use my elbow? Ever since I had checked into the Golden Atlantic Sands, I had been opening doors with my forearm or the back of my hand. Until now, I had not even been conscious of this odd behavior. It was as if a hidden part of me were making secret plans to destroy some enemy, and labored in the dark, awaiting its moment.
The doors swiftly glided together, and I began to ascend. My heart shifted into overdrive. Whether these physical transformations actually took place or not, I thought I could feel the following changes take place in my body: my shoulders bent forward over my concave chest, my eyes filled with blood, and the life and vitality drained from my face. My lips shrank back from my teeth. Within my linen suit, my body seemed to dwindle and weaken.