The Pink Hotel

by Anna Stothard

  “What’s wrong, David?” I said finally. “What was wrong with the photographs? You’re scaring me.”

  “When are you going in to work today?” he replied, pale, formulating his words with care.

  “Sam’s picking me up at three,” I said. “We could say fuck it. Go to Mexico today. Can we go away to Mexico today? Or the moon, or Rio, or wherever? Sam can find another script supervisor, it doesn’t matter at all. What’s wrong?”

  David looked like he was holding his breath or biting his tongue.

  “I don’t want to talk to you now,” he said. “I need to go out, clear my head. Okay?”

  I felt like we were in one of Sam’s movies, only the eye lines didn’t match up. Or like I was trapped in a game of charades and we hadn’t read any of the same books or watched any of the same movies.

  “What’s happened? How did it happen?” I said.

  “When will you be home?” he said, not answering.

  “The film wraps this time tomorrow. I don’t have to go, though.”

  “Let’s talk tomorrow then.”

  “Are we actually arranging a date to argue? Let’s just do it now,” I said.

  He was standing up, within touching distance of me.

  “No,” he said.

  “Why not now?” My voice was getting high-pitched.

  “Cos neither of us have slept, and the sight of you is making me feel sick,” he said, and lifted his hand in a way that made me flinch, although it turned out he was merely reaching for his bag on the hook behind my head. “Plus I have a hangover,” he said. My skin lifted where I thought it was going to be hit, blood rushing to the surface and making me flush.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “You’re a liar,” he said.

  “I should have told you,” I said.

  “I’ve really fucked up,” said David.

  I wasn’t really sure what was going on. If I could do it again, I’d make him hit me. It would have been nice to add David’s anger to the physical map on my body. Through all our bedtime wrestling matches he never left a scar, and I badly wished that he had.

  “I’m not going to hit you,” he said, measured.

  “Why aren’t you shouting at me,” I said.

  “Valium,” he said, and there was almost the trace of a smile on his lips. He’d got drunk and lost his temper earlier, and now he was sedated.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said again. It was all I could think of to say. It sounded lame and beside the point. I wished I’d been there when he smashed the chair to pieces and smashed plates on the floor. Some physical pain would have been better than the absence he left me with instead.

  “Just get some sleep,” he said. He hesitated at the door before he left, a funny look in his lopsided green eyes.

  35

  I went to the pet shop as planned that afternoon, believing David would be home when I got back and we could somehow talk everything through. Even though I was about to spend the night on a sweaty film set, I wore David’s favourite navy-blue dress, black kitten heels and the little pearl earrings he bought me. In our breaks during shooting, Sam and the crew huddled in the strip-mall parking lot clutching cups of coffee and taking pills from the cinematographer, whose girlfriend was a narcoleptic set dresser. We’d just shot a scene where the main actor was trying to choose from a tower of translucent plastic jars, each containing a nearly identical blue tropical fish with a chiffon-like tail. They put blue dye in each jar of water, so it looked like a parody of water.

  I told Sam that David was angry with me, but Sam didn’t say much. Sam just gave me a hug and wink, and told me that his bed was always open for me. I was standing with Sam in the car park when everything suddenly started to melt in front of my eyes. I’d been exhausted and tired and tearful all night, of course, but by 5:00 a.m. I was feeling sick. Some others – a gaffer and an extra – had gone home with food poisoning earlier in the night. It’s amazing how your life can hinge on one moment of awful timing, like bad film-set pizza toppings. I tried to keep my surroundings steady, as if I was holding up a falling bookshelf. The flat sky, the concrete buildings, the cars winking by the pet shop – everything began to lose its definition, and suddenly I desperately wanted to be horizontal, with my hot cheek resting on the cool early-morning tarmac. All my dreams of fainting that summer didn’t prepare me for that feeling of wanting to pass out.

  “What’s wrong?” said Sam, taking coffee from my hand. I felt nauseous, but I could have remained standing, I thought, if it wasn’t that I wanted so badly to fall.

  Before I passed out, I didn’t think about David or Lily or the fainting game, but about fish. There was a time, when I was little, when Dad said he was going to the fish shop. I knew that Grandma and Grandpa’s café downstairs had fish on the menu, but somehow I’d missed a link between the things that swam around in the nursery school aquarium and the white flesh caked in batter that we sometimes sold drenched in vinegar and riding on a bed of yellow chips on the café menu downstairs. In retrospect we were probably at the fish market so that Dad could speak with a supplier, but of course I thought we were going to get a pet fish. I imagined my own private underworld of plastic treasure chests and seaweed arches like the bowl we had at school. I was very quiet and good all the way to the market, where we walked through corridors of fruits and vegetables – plums and apples and baskets of fresh strawberries. Then we turned a corner into a funny smell. Suddenly I saw a mausoleum. Hundreds and hundreds of heavy eyes stared. There were tiny little ones overflowing their boxes, big silver monsters with damp pink flesh hanging from sliced open stomachs, ignominiously open-mouthed, salivating ice and blood. Each one was staring at me accusingly. I lost Dad like I often did in crowds because he walked so fast, but he looked behind in time for me to run forwards and grab his hand.

  “Bad fish,” I said to Dad after some mental gymnastics, deciding they must be bad, because they had been killed. Good fish couldn’t possible end up like that. What I remember most is a bit of a fish’s face that I picked up from my father’s feet as he talked to one of the vendors. It was half a head, the eyeball very much intact, with a visible spinal column coming out of the neck for a few centimeters before snapping. The flesh that was still clinging to the spine felt sopping wet, the texture of conditioner-soaked hair in the plughole after bath time. Then the scales were dryer and firmer than expected, as was the eyeball itself, which I touched with appalled glee.

  36

  After fainting I woke up abruptly and found myself at the Kaiser Hospital in Los Feliz. Out of the seven of us who got sick that night on set only I was still in the hospital four days later. David wasn’t in the hospital with me, and when I asked where he was, the nurse said she wasn’t aware that anyone called David had come in to see me. The other people from the set who got food poisoning from the same pizza toppings had been discharged two days earlier. There had been “complications” in my situation. The nurse kindly explained that she was afraid I’d “lost the foetus” – for some reason I just laughed. The air smelt of disinfectant. Then with baffled pride I nodded solemnly and frowned, pretending to her that “the” foetus was an entity I was even vaguely familiar with. It was only a few weeks old, so nothing really, but overwhelming nausea came over me again. The nurse also told me that my friend Sam was coming to visit me later that afternoon, and that he’d been very worried. They assumed Sam was the dad of this empty space in my tummy.

  It didn’t matter at all. I didn’t think about what might have happened or could have happened or what I would have done if it weren’t for the Adderall and the food poisoning. “The” foetus only existed for the fraction of a second after she told me it was dead, since only then did I acknowledge that at one point it had been alive. There was a sweet old woman in the hospital room with me who’d just had a stroke. She kept sticking out her tongue at me and telling me the beginning of a joke about how many Jewish Grandmothers it took to screw in a light bulb, but she couldn’t remember th
e punch line. She looked terribly confused, and I wanted to telephone Dad, but didn’t know what I’d say to him. I think I would have liked to tell him that it was suddenly apparent to me that he’d done his best and failed. That I should have tried harder to stay out of trouble at school and that I wouldn’t be going back.

  I picked up Lily’s suede shoulder bag and left the hospital early that morning without waiting to see Sam. I took the bus back to David’s. It was just getting light when my clumsy fingers shoved the key hurriedly into David’s gate and swung it open. I walked upstairs. “Broken bird,” David had said once while he kissed my shoulder blades, which stuck out just like broken wings from the bones of my back. I was most fond of David in the morning, when he was grumpy and clumsy. I liked his moments of brokenness, too, just as he liked mine. I loved him when he burnt his fingers, spilled coffee on the business section of the New York Times, bumped his head, forgot to close the fridge. It was in these living moments that I saw an amalgamation of his past and his present, momentary visions of what he might have been like as a child or during gawky adolescence. I loved David most during the moments I pretended not to notice, when he dropped cereal on the floor or when he lost his car keys and had to hunt through the wash basket for yesterday’s pair of trousers. Perhaps this is how love works – in flashes of banality that become brilliant because of love. One night, when we lay bedraggled in bed, he read the beginning of Paradise Lost to me with a sonorous and theatrical voice. There’s a bit when Satan has just fallen from heaven into hell and is described as having “baleful eyes”, with which he glances around the sordid place he’s fallen into. I thought that “baleful” meant woebegone, because that’s how the word sounds. To me it suggested that the fallen angel had melancholy, but purposeful eyes. For a while after he read me that, I thought that David cast “baleful eyes”, just like Satan’s, especially in the morning, when he had to confront a broken light bulb or a burnt piece of toast. I checked in a dictionary, though, and the word actually means “hostile” and “mean”.

  I got to the top of the stairs and noticed that the window of his flat, which looks into the balconied corridor, seemed different. Before I opened the door, I saw through the window that the flat was empty. The sofa, the glass-topped coffee table that he cleaned so lovingly twice a day, the flat-screen TV, the saucepan I’d cooked him scrambled eggs with, it was all gone. There were shadows of his possessions, like indentations in the carpet where his furniture used to lie, but this only intensified the absence. There were rectangles of bright paint where his pictures had hung, surrounded by faded white. The flat looked much bigger without anything in it, and the fitted carpet looked uglier. There were balls of red fluff from his carpet, paper clips, Kirby grips and stray rubber bands in dusty corners. The bedroom was empty too, as was the bathroom. He was gone. He had evaporated.

  I went and stood where the kitchen table had been, and bent down to touch the dents in the laminate flooring and the skid marks on the walls from where he must have attacked the chair a week earlier, when really he ought to have been attacking me. The dents in the floor looked like dimples, the marks on the walls looked like scars on very pale skin. I walked to the kitchen and took a sip of water from the familiar tap. I drank from my hands, because there weren’t any cups. I didn’t wait for the water to cool down, and glugged it lukewarm from my skin, which still tasted slightly acidic, like illness and hospitals. I don’t actually remember falling asleep, lying on the pressed bit of carpet where the sofa bed used to be. I didn’t dream of anything. Not animals or dust or sunsets.

  “Excuse me,” said a voice. I opened my eyes. It was Yuri, the Armenian building manager, standing at the door with his arms crossed over his belly and his earphones half attached to his ears, as always. It was funny that he always stood as far away from other people as he could. It meant I had a very clear sense of his shape – the too-short T-shirt over his belly, his out-turned legs and slumped shoulders. I rubbed my eyes and sat up, still lying where the sofa ought to have been.

  “What happened?” I said groggily.

  “What, um, do you mean?”

  “Where is he?” I clarified, as I stumbled to my feet in front of Yuri. Perhaps I looked a little feral, because Yuri frowned and took a step back as I took a step forwards. He looked like one of the scared younger boys who used to watch us play football at the Swiss Cottage football pitch, too nervous to join in.

  “Where did he go?” I asked.

  “I think,” Yuri said, “he moved out.”

  “Clearly,” I said, frowning. “When did he go? Where?”

  Yuri shrugged, helplessly. “I don’t know,” he said. “He didn’t give forwarding address. I don’t know.”

  “He can’t have just...gone,” I said. “When?”

  “Three days,” said Yuri.

  “Three days,” I repeated. Something awful must have happened. If he’d known I was in hospital, however angry he was, he wouldn’t have left. I know that. My voice remained steady, but Yuri looked like he was watching a necklace break at his feet, bits falling everywhere. Yuri was looking directly at his trainers, not at me.

  “He left your clothes, though,” Yuri said, pointing to a couple of supermarket bags in the corner. I hate it when the voice inside your head is different from the image you’re presenting. I believed myself to be standing in the empty flat looking a little impish, a little crumpled as I noticed David’s shopping bag of clothes. I believed myself to look righteous and perhaps just adequately pitiful, but in fact I probably looked more like one of those alley cats that skulk around dustbins at night with their fur fraying. My skin and hair were dull, my body was anxiously thin, my lips chapped, and I was holding onto the wall as if I was about to collapse at the knees and cease to exist.

  I almost laughed at myself as I stared at the neatly folded clothes in the bags at the corner of the room, but the fizz of false amusement got stuck in my throat and turned into a shiver as I glanced at the clothes he’d bought for me at the outlet mall. I walked over to the corner and bent down. There was my pink toothbrush, some lipstick, some “volumizing shampoo”, my hairbrush, my little pearl earrings. Lily’s white dress with the black buttons, Lily’s jeans and T-shirts and scuffed grey ballet pumps. My baseball cap. My Adidas jumper. Lily’s teardrop earrings and lipstick and sunglasses. From one of the bags I unearthed a bunch of photographs that I’d never seen before – the ones he’d mentioned that he was going to develop when we were walking up to the Observatory. Some of the pictures were of me in my red baseball cap and sports clothes from that first day when I arrived in Los Angeles, and some from when David took playful photographs of me laughing that day when he’d persuaded me to take off my clothes in the living room.

  “Fuck,” I said, and felt a little dizzy. My eyes stung as if tears were brimming there. “Fuck, Fuck, Fuck, Fuck.”

  “Are you all right?” Yuri asked.

  “Fuck,” I said, and Yuri quietly left the room.

  I flicked through the photographs. There were dozens of them, at least thirty. Most of them are like the rest of the photos around David’s flat: weird, anonymous, disembodied. One was of the skin on my hand clutching a cigarette, and an ugly hangnail; another was the shadow of my baseball cap obliterating my eyes, my back to the camera. In the third photograph I was asleep on the bench with my hat slightly askew and my cheek pressed onto Lily’s Play-Doh red suitcase. It was before I woke up that first morning after the wake, ten weeks ago, when I was dreaming about drowning. One of my tracksuit legs was rolled up, and you could see the scabs on my pale knees. Then there was a close-up of my face, which looked like a baby’s face. It’s funny to imagine how tough I thought I was, because in the photo I looked exhausted and innocent.

  The next three photographs were from only a week or so ago, of me in various stages of undress. They made me cringe. There was a photo of just my belly button, a photo of my nipple, a photo of my smile. There was a photo of me with my back to the camera turning a
round to smile at David, but the one he meant me to look at – the one that changed everything – was a photograph of me wearing a white T-shirt over a bikini and laughing at the camera. After that laughing photograph, the next photograph in the pile was one of Lily. It was the photograph David stole from the Pink Hotel on the night of the wake. In the stolen photograph Lily had her legs crossed under a tree, wearing a white T-shirt over a bikini and laughing, her pale eyebrows crouched playfully over dark eyes. She was a bit older than me in the stolen photograph, with much longer and darker hair. She was sitting under a tree, and I was standing inside a shadowy apartment, but comparing the two photos Lily and I looked eerily similar. The colour and shape of our eyes were the same as we laughed, and our mouths were folded into the same shape. It was also something about the gesture, both our hands hovering up near our mouths slightly like we were embarrassed to be laughing so hard. I imagined David watching as the photo of me developed in the darkroom he used at work. I wondered how long it took for him to realize how much I resembled Lily. I felt sick again, and dropped the photographs onto the carpet.

  37

  Yuri let me sleep on the floor of the empty apartment until the afternoon, when the Armenian mothers came to hover around me in the empty flat. They brought a smell of chlorine and slow-roasted garlic with them into the sticky air. Dalita was in her faded tropical bikini with a T-shirt from some pizza restaurant, plastic bangles jumping on her brown wrists as she consoled me with a cup of homemade nettle tea. The first sip was bitter and boiling. It burnt my tongue, and the shock made me blink.

  “You’re too good for that son of a bitch,” said Dalita, looking solemnly around while my tongue blistered.

  “He was too old for you,” said another, leaning her bony shoulders on the door frame and artfully flicking cigarette ash back onto the corridor floor.