Yes, he would stay, he told himself again.
He took another deep breath and then, gathering the two bags, went outside to his own destruction.
Seaside Town
1.
In past years, Hovell had simply not bothered to vacation away, but the arrival of Miss Pickaver had changed that. Her arrival had, in fact, changed a lot of things. In the past, Hovell’s idea of vacationing had been sitting around in his ratty sweater and khakis in his bedroom, reading the newspaper very slowly, savoring it even, letting his cigarette ash fall where it would, each day like the next until he had to return to work. But then Miss Pickaver had swept into his life and into his bed, taken him to hand and slowly taken him to task, and now, yes, he’d been made to understand that, as a vacation, this simply wouldn’t do.
“But where would I go?” he pleaded.
“We, you mean,” said Miss Pickaver, “where would we go? Because it isn’t just you anymore.”
But Hovell didn’t care to go anywhere. A man of regular habits, he was an incurious person. He did not care to learn about new things. Even the old things he already knew about he often thought it was better to forget. He still lived in the house he’d been born in, the house he’d inherited when his mother died. He had some difficulty understanding how it was that Miss Pickaver had suddenly jimmied her way into his life, coming in a matter of weeks to have so much of a say in everything.
“To Europe,” Miss Pickaver said decisively.
“Europe?” he repeated, as if confused.
“You have the money. You’ve never been to Europe. It has to be Europe, James.”
It made Hovell wince when she called him by his first name—nobody called him by his first name, and even to himself he was simply Hovell, but he had given up correcting her. Miss Pickaver had a first name she used, but he suspected he would always think of her as Miss Pickaver.
And so, Europe. He did not, he was surprised to find, immediately give in. He had the presence of mind to at least let her know that if he had to go to Europe, he wanted to stay put, to stay in one place. And once he told her that if she wanted, she was welcome to do one of those tours—six countries in four days or some such—as long as he could go somewhere and stay put, she agreed. She’d stay with him for a few days on either end of the trip, she told him, get him established at the beginning and help him pack at the end, but in the middle he’d be on his own. She couldn’t help it if he didn’t want to make the most of the trip. But no worries, she said: she would be sure to tell him all about everything he missed.
The flight alone all but killed him. Though Miss Pickaver had managed to sleep for most of it, Hovell had hardly even blinked. When they landed in Paris, Miss Pickaver had delicately stretched and given a little yawn, exposing what had always looked to Hovell like too many teeth, as if she had an extra row, then proceeded to lead Hovell implacably through the nightmare that was French customs. Did monsieur have anything to declare? No, monsieur did not. Was monsieur sure? Would monsieur please open his bags? The sight of the officers fingering their way through his carefully folded underthings while Miss Pickaver tittered was too much for him, and when he lost his temper it was only Miss Pickaver’s quick action and heartfelt apologies on his behalf that kept him from ending up detained in a back room for hours. When he tried to sleep later, on the train to the seaside town whose name even the French themselves were apparently unsure how to pronounce, she told him no, considering what time it was, he would be better off staying awake until night came. Thus, every time he began to nod off, she would nudge him awake.
He arrived at the seaside town disoriented and half blind with fatigue. There were no taxis waiting at the train station, and Miss Pickaver wasn’t willing to wait while they figured out how to call one, so they walked along the road and into town, him pulling both bags while she turned the map over and about, trying to figure out where they were heading.
“But I thought you’d been here before,” complained Hovell.
“I have been,” said Miss Pickaver. “With that German gentleman I used to know. But he was the one who knew the place. I just followed along in his tracks.”
“German gentleman?” he asked. “I’m staying in a house you stayed at with some previous lover?”
“Surely I told you about him,” she said. “It was years before you and I met. Well, months anyway.” She frowned, smoothed the map over her belly. “And I can’t imagine what objection you could possibly have to me taking you to a place I’ve been to before and can vouch for,” she added, as if the whole reason for her taking a German lover had been entirely for his benefit here, now.
Sighing, he trudged on.
The place was part of a gated community, a little triangle of buildings full of apartments, some of which had motorized metal shutters that could be brought down at night, sealing you in like a tin of preserved meat. The courtyard between buildings seemed deserted—no sign of habitation visible through the windows and no people out walking on the compound grounds.
Miss Pickaver found the right building, managed to extract a key from the concierge despite Miss Pickaver having no French and the concierge having no English. They were on the third floor, room 306. The tiny elevator was too small for him to ride in with the suitcases, and so she went up first, and he sent the bags up one at a time to her. When, finally, he climbed in, he found it to be even smaller on the inside than it looked from the outside, a kind of lacquered wooden box with a sliding grate for a door. He felt as if he were riding in a coffin.
As the elevator slowly trundled up, creaking, he felt panic beginning to rise. By the time he reached the third floor, he was a nervous wreck.
“Don’t be so dramatic,” she said. “It’s just an elevator.”
And true, yes, it was just an elevator, but he had lived fifty years of his life to this point never having to ride in such an elevator as this. Why should he have to ride in one now?
She had already turned away, was looking for their apartment. There was one long, dingy hallway stretching away, apartment doors dotted to either side of it, odd on one side, even on the other. They ran out at 305. There was no 306.
“Are you sure the concierge said 306?” he asked.
But the look she threw him made him wish he hadn’t asked. Yes, of course she was sure—she was always sure. Even though there was no number on the key fob, she still claimed to be sure.
“It’s simply not here,” he said.
Stubbornly she went down the hall again, scrutinizing each door in turn with such intensity that Hovell wouldn’t have been surprised if 306 did suddenly appear. But, of course, it didn’t.
“There must be another third floor,” she said.
“Another third floor,” he repeated dully.
“Sure,” she said. “That you can’t get to from this elevator. That you have to get to from another elevator.”
He was dispatched to question the concierge, but he refused to take the elevator this time, trudging instead down the tight winding stairs that circled the elevator shaft. The light in the stairwell was dim, and he had to grope, but it was better, even if just a little, than the elevator.
He reached the bottom to find the concierge’s lodge locked, and nobody answered when he rang the buzzer. He waited as long as he dared, then trudged back up to deliver the bad news to Miss Pickaver. Miss Pickaver, he knew from experience, did not take bad news well. But when he arrived on the third floor, he found only the pile of their bags; Miss Pickaver was nowhere to be seen.
He trudged nervously up the hall and back. He opened the elevator and looked in. And then, quietly, and somewhat hesitantly, he called her name. There was no answer. Maybe she had gotten tired of waiting and taken the elevator down to find him. But surely, if that had been the case, he would have heard the elevator, would likely have even seen her in it when he crossed the first- and second-floor landings on his way back up. Or at least seen the cable moving.
He knocked again on the conci
erge’s door for good measure. Still no answer. He poked his head out of the building, but it was still just as deserted outside the building as it had been before.
When he finally headed back upstairs, she was there, arms crossed, waiting.
“Where have you been?” she said. “I’ve been calling for you.”
“I was just . . .” he started, then took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. He didn’t want to fight. But he wasn’t sure he could help himself. “Where were you?” he asked, trying not to sound accusatory.
“I,” she said, drawing herself up, “was busy finding our place.” And then she led him up the dim stairs, up halfway between the third floor and the fourth, where, in the round wall of the stairwell, off one tread, was a small door.
He leaned in close, peered at it in the dim light. He had to squint to read the numbers.
“It says 309,” Hovell said.
“That’s a mistake,” Miss Pickaver said. “It has to be. You saw the hall only went to 305, and there are no other halls.”
“I thought you said there had to be another elevator,” he said. “Another third floor.”
“Don’t be difficult, James,” said Miss Pickaver. “This is the right room.”
But there had been no rooms in the stairwell between the first and second floors, or in the stairwell between the second and third floors. Why would there be a room here? Maybe it was just that he was tired, but it didn’t seem right to him.
“It says 309,” he insisted.
“Someone must have taken the 6 out and put it in upside down, as a joke.”
“What kind of joke is that?” he asked.
She ignored this. Instead she pushed past him, jostling so that he almost slipped and tumbled down the stairs. A moment later the door swung open.
“The key works,” she said. “It has to be the right place.”
But even after that, as he hauled the suitcases one by one up the stairs and inside, as he ducked down and shouldered his own way in, as he watched Miss Pickaver opening the windows and airing out the apartment, he still wondered if they were in the right place.
2.
From the window, the courtyard looked not busy exactly, but at least not deserted like it had when they had come in. At a distance, he could hear the sound of the waves. He watched people come and go.
He had slept for hours, had awoken disoriented with no clear idea of what time it was. Miss Pickaver looked refreshed and relaxed, the exact opposite, he supposed, of how he looked. She had been out to purchase some groceries: olives in a reddish goo, strange tubs of pureed meat, cheese pastes, drinkable yogurts, boxed milk, tins depicting sauerkraut and tiny sausages, dried packets that apparently could be reconstituted into soup or, at least, broth. He stared at it all as if stunned.
“Feeling better?” she asked brightly.
He nodded weakly. She had done her hair, he noticed now, and had applied a thick, unnaturally dark shade of lipstick. “Are we going out?” he asked.
She gave a peal of laughter. “I’ve been out, darling. There’s no point in your going out, especially not now. It’s nearly night again. You slept the sleep of the dead.”
The sleep of the dead, he thought now, nursing a bowl of tepid tea as he sat at the window, staring out. The other apartments, the ones on the real third floor, all had balconies, but all theirs had was the window. He watched, on one of the balconies below, the backs of a man and a woman, the man holding the woman around the waist as they stared out across the courtyard and through the gap in the buildings to the sea beyond.
He followed their gaze. The light, he had to admit, was beautiful, just as Miss Pickaver had suggested it would be, and if he sat at just the right angle, he had a glimpse of the beach. It was littered with bodies. Mostly Eastern Europeans or Germans, he guessed, based on the gold chains they wore and the fact that the women were blonde and seemingly topless. The men, he noticed now, mostly wore nothing at all, lying baking nude in the sun, their flesh leathery, as if being cured.
“Is it a nude beach?” he asked.
But Miss Pickaver, in front of the bathroom mirror plucking her eyebrows, humming softly to herself, didn’t seem to hear. He couldn’t bring himself to repeat the question. He did not want to be accused by Miss Pickaver of staring at the nudes on the beach. That seemed a humiliation.
When he looked back down at the balcony, the couple was no longer there. He shifted his chair. In the courtyard below, a couple crossed back and forth, their heads bent toward one another. Was it the same couple? He didn’t know. The man was about his age, the woman, roughly the age of Miss Pickaver. There was, now that he thought about it, a physical resemblance as well, both to him and to Miss Pickaver, but they were in the long shadow cast by the building, and their faces were turned away, so perhaps that was partly imagined. But when he realized from the cloying smell of her perfume that Miss Pickaver had left the mirror and was standing behind him, he pointed them out to her.
“Like us, no?” he said, smiling.
She leaned forward and squinted, then drew slowly back. “I don’t see the resemblance,” she said. Then she kissed him on the top of his head. He imagined the dark stain the lipstick must have left there. “Will you help me carry down my bag?” she asked.
“Your bag?”
“I catch the train in an hour,” she said. “For my little tour.”
“You’re leaving already?” he said, beginning to panic a little.
She crossed her arms, stared at him. “This is what you wanted,” she said in a clipped voice. “You wanted to stay put. This is what we agreed on.”
But had it been? They’d barely arrived and already she was going. He didn’t know the place, he hardly knew how to get to town, but when he voiced these complaints, she opened the fridge and gestured at its contents.
“You needn’t go to town,” she said. “You have everything you need right here.” She patiently batted away his objections until, fifteen minutes later, a plain white car pulled into the courtyard below and honked.
“There’s my ride,” she said.
“But it’s not a taxi,” he said. “It’s just someone’s car.”
“That’s how taxis are here,” she claimed.
“But—”
“Who’s been here before?” she asked. “You or I?”
Confused, he hauled her bag down the stairs and to the elevator and sent it down. “No point in you coming down. I’ll have the driver come in and get it,” she said. “You don’t need to bother.”
He lingered at the window until darkness and then lingered a little longer. Long after dark, there was the noise of the couple walking around below, the gentle murmur of their voices. Though, over time, that murmur became less and less gentle, finally concluding in a shriek from one or the other of them. He kept listening, wondering if he should go down and check on them, but there was only silence. After a while, he closed the window and went to bed.
But he couldn’t sleep. His body had no idea what time it was, and he had slept too long during the day, and so he lay in the dark staring up at the ceiling. Perhaps he should have gone with Miss Pickaver. Perhaps he should have done twelve countries in ten days or whatever it was, expanded his horizons a little—no, this was only nervousness about being left alone. He did not want to see twelve countries. He did not want to see even one country, but now that he was here in this one, there was little he could do.
He lay in bed obsessing, tossing and turning until quite late, one or two in the morning, before he got up and found a book. He tried to read, but the words weren’t sticking with him, and after a few pages he had no idea what he’d read. So he turned off the light and went back to the window, resting his elbows on the sill.
There was a moon out now, pale and nearly bitten through but still casting a fair amount of grayish light. If he leaned far enough out, he could see, below and to the left, the pale, white glow of the balcony for the room closest to him on the real third floor. There was a dark s
hape on it, large, though difficult to say whether it was the man or the woman. From time to time it moved a little or settled in a different way.
Down below, on the paving of the courtyard, a dark blotch of some sort, largish, much bigger than a man. Hard to say exactly what it was, however, and it was in any case motionless. Maybe it wasn’t anything at all, a trick of the light. But if it wasn’t a trick of the light, what could it be?
He stayed there staring down, eyes flicking from the shape in the courtyard to the shape on the balcony, until, after a while, close to morning, he began to feel sleepy and went to bed.
3.
When he stumbled awake it was well past noon. He poured out something pink from a jug in the fridge, found it to be slightly sour, but whether it was supposed to be like that or not he was at a loss to determine. He put it away, poured himself a glass of rusty water from the tap.
Before he knew it, he was back at the window, looking down. Whatever had been in the courtyard the night before had left no sign of its presence. When he leaned out he could see the balcony below, but it was bare, no drink glasses or shoes or bits of clothing to indicate who had been there.
What would he do today? He could find the town, wander through it, just to expend a few hours. Or he could stay here, up in the apartment, read a little, relax, stare out the window.
There was a buzzing sound, unfamiliar but insistent. At first he thought it must be the door, but then it continued and he realized it wasn’t coming from the door, but from the kitchen, from the telephone on the wall there. Why bother to answer it? he wondered. It wouldn’t be for him—nobody knew he was here, at least nobody who mattered. He would just ignore it.
But it was hard to ignore. It just kept ringing and ringing. After a while, he got up and went into the kitchen and stayed there, staring at it. Each time it rang, it shook slightly in its cradle. No, he wouldn’t answer it. But it was all he could do not to answer it.
A Collapse of Horses Page 7