“I need a room, Mr. Karim.” She began to sweat, but this could have been because of the intense heat bearing down on the island. The pill’s effects still held. But what, for heaven’s sake, was she supposed to do if she didn’t get a hotel room?
She had stayed at the St. George Inn every time she had come to Guernsey. It was a bargain hotel, squeezed in between buildings. She had had the thought before that Michael could well have found her more plush accommodations than this one. Here the smell of past meals lingered between the walls; the thick, wine-red carpet was covered in filth; and the staircase was narrow and neckbreakingly steep. The bathrooms lacked any notion of comfort — not to mention the fact that the little stalls were so small you could barely turn around in them and were always banging your elbows on the wall when you tried to blow dry your hair. But at some point Franca had grown accustomed to the stuffy rooms and to Mr. Karim, and Michael’s calculations turned out to be correct: In the end, Franca clung to the things that were familiar to her. Even if she never really felt comfortable in the hotel, still it seemed to her far more tolerable to maintain a horrible condition that was familiar than to try something new with the possibility of finding herself in horrible circumstances that she was unaccustomed to.
“Of course you need a room, of course,” Karim was saying, “But unfortunately I am completely booked up. As I am sure you know, I have never been able to complain of a shortage of guests!” He laughed. Franca had not known this, in fact she couldn’t imagine it, but she assumed he was telling the truth about the way things stood currently. If he had had even the tiniest cubbyhole available, he would have offered to squeeze her into it.
“May I use the telephone? Franca asked.
“Of course you may!” He pushed the phone towards her, an outdated black monstrosity that Franca had only ever seen in nostalgic made-for-TV movies. She dialed Michael’s office number and extension.
He picked up immediately. “Yes?”
“Michael, it’s me, Franca. I’m here at the St. George, and, well, can you imagine, something must have gone wrong. There isn’t a booking for me.”
“That can’t be.”
“But it is. Mr. Karim has no entry.”
“Then he should give you whatever other room is available.”
“It’s all booked up. There’s absolutely nothing available.”
Michael sighed. “That can’t be.” The way he spoke, his tone of voice, it sounded like he was saying, “What have you screwed up this time? Is there nothing, and I mean really nothing, that you can do right?”
A nerve began to vibrate somewhere in her body. It was a peculiar kind of pain, and yet still not something she could locate, nor something she could describe. It was as if there was a spot there that had been rubbed raw over the years, so that now it radiated pain at the faintest touch.
“I don’t know whether it can be or not,” she said, “but in any case, it is so. No room has been booked for me here.”
“Then something must have been overlooked,” Michael said, “Anyway, I did let Sonia know.” Sonia was his secretary, and in general she performed every task with the utmost conscientiousness.
“So what am I supposed to do now?” Franca asked, losing heart.
Michael gave another sigh. “Surely you are capable of finding another hotel and renting a room there! My God, what am I supposed to do for you from over here?”
“Michael, I’m afraid. What I’d really like to do is to fly back. I …” She hesitated to admit her blunder, but she managed to get the words out. “I don’t have any pills. I had only one left, and I had to take it during the flight. Now I don’t know …”
“Oh now really you just cannot be serious.” If someone had overheard Michael, he or she might have thought he was dealing with a mentally deficient person, someone who was wearing on his nerves more and more. “I send you to Guernsey. I pay for the flight. I ask you for something one time. And …”
“I’ve come here for you more than once.”
“It is however the only thing that is requested of you. God knows I don’t ask you for anything else. My demands are the most minimal that a man can make. It’s only this one favor that I still ask of you — and just twice a year! And now this is also too much? You now feel that this, too, is an unreasonable demand? You’re now too fragile, too delicate, too sensitive, for this as well?
“I wasn’t saying that at all.” The faint vibrating pain grew stronger. The medicine was still working, but Franca knew that if she didn’t end the conversation now it wouldn’t take six hours for her becalmed state to come crashing in on itself.
“You will not break off your stay on Guernsey now! Do you hear me? You will go to the bank tomorrow and only afterwards will you come back. If you don’t want to wait until Saturday, then try and get a flight for tomorrow evening. But you are going to the bank! Do we understand each other?”
“Yes,” she whispered. Like always, she had the feeling that she was literally becoming smaller under his voice. As if she was actually shedding inches, shrinking into herself. Eventually she would be so small that no one could see her anymore. Or she would simply dissolve.
Just then Michael began to sound a bit friendlier. He seemed to remember that her bouts of panic could be severe, and possibly it occurred to him that it might be better to shore Franca up a bit, rather than robbing her of her last ounce of self-confidence.
“You can handle it. Right now you’ll go and find a place where you can spend the night. Maybe Mr. Karim can help you. Call me tonight and let me know if everything worked out.” And with that he ended the conversation. Franca, who still had something she wanted to say, swallowed her words and hung up as well.
“Could you help me find a room?” She turned to Karim.
He scratched his head. “That will be difficult. Extremely difficult. It may well be that the whole island is booked up.”
Alan Shaye felt completely ridiculous, parked here outside the house where Maya lived, staring at the door and the windows as if at any moment he expected something special to happen.
A miserable little snoop, he said to himself. If Maya finds me here she’ll die laughing. Every now and then cars would drive by on the steep, narrow road and have trouble getting by him. Some drivers touched their foreheads or shook their heads demonstratively. He ignored them. He looked up to the third floor and asked himself what was going on up there.
Though in fact he knew exactly what was going on. He knew Maya well enough, maybe better than he knew himself. She didn’t disappear into her apartment with a man in order to drink tea and chit-chat with him. Maya had a very clear notion of what pleasure was supposed to look like. When it came to men, her outlook was simple. Could they satisfy her sexually, to the highest degree possible? Did they have money and were they prepared to spend it generously on her? Did they make the fewest possible claims on her? Were they satisfied with what they got, and not inclined to go on a jealous rampage when they found out they shared Maya’s bed with a dozen other lovers? Because Maya couldn’t be satisfied with just one man.
“That would be like if I were to read only one book,” she had explained once, after he had reproached her for her lifestyle. “Or only got to know one country in the world. Always ate spaghetti and nothing else. Always drank the same kind of wine. My understanding of things would be completely limited!”
“You can’t just compare things that way! You can’t lump men in with eating, drinking, travel, and reading. You can’t try men out like different wines or different kinds of travel guide!”
She had laughed. “And why not? Name one reason why there should be any difference between them! Why shouldn’t I take a look at everything that’s on offer before I decide?”
“No one said that you should stick to the first man that comes into your life.”
She had laughed
again. “Because it wasn’t you. Otherwise you’d ask that of me as well!”
“Maya, what you’re doing goes well past looking around and trying out. You’re indiscriminate, you devour everything. You’re not involved with a man nearly long enough or deeply enough to be able to say anything at all about him. It’s like a game for you. And furthermore, you don’t want to decide. It looks to me like you plan to spend your whole life this way.”
She had put her arms around him and smiled. She was stunningly pretty, and she could be very charming. “Oh, Alan! You sound like a governess! And you look so serious and uptight. Look, in my own way I’m completely faithful! I’ve been with you almost four years. No matter what I do, I’ll never really leave you!”
He’d freed himself from her arms. What she was saying was too ridiculous, too humiliating. “We have not been together for almost four years! For four years you have occasionally included me in your collection of lovers. You find it nice to be with me every now and then. But you aren’t ready to be in a relationship with me.”
“But we are in a relationship!”
“Excuse me, but it’s possible we each define the term a bit differently. For me, being in a relationship means the two parties are truly involved in each other’s lives. Do you understand? And this, in turn, means excluding any potential third party. If I were together with you I wouldn’t very well go to bed with other women.”
“You could, though.”
“The fact that you can seriously say that shows that you’re not in love.”
“Ugh!” She had turned away, irritated and bored. “Love? I’m twenty-one, Alan! What is it you want from me? A promise for all eternity? A pledge of fidelity? A vow: You and no one else? That might be common at your age, but the way I feel about it is, I’m just too young!”
She had hit the nail on the head, of course. That was the problem. He had the thought again, now that he was sitting there, parked outside her house on this hot afternoon in September, slowly baking between the sheet metal and the leather seats. The age difference was too great. He was now forty-two years old. Maya would soon be celebrating her twenty-second birthday. He was twenty years older, simple as that. In no way did he feel old, but compared with her, he was. He had different notions about things than she did, because he was at a different stage in his life. Not that he could remember having had such an excessive lifestyle as she when he was in his early twenties. And in fact, he didn’t know anyone who had.
Forget her, he thought wearily. Just stay the hell away from her!
He had planned not to see her during his stay on Guernsey. After their last meeting in the summer, sometime in early June, he had told her that as far as he was concerned, their relationship was over. She had shrugged her shoulders. “We hardly ever saw each other anyway,” she had said. “You’re in London, I’m here … the few times during the year when you’re around … but then for sure you didn’t want it otherwise!”
“I wanted you in London!”
“Yes, but on your terms. You wanted me to go to school, to get some kind of training, to work, to …”
“To finally get your diploma, yes. But in the meantime we could have lived together. I would have supported you. You know that.”
“You’re a real champion of moral standards, Alan. I have to be on my best behavior, and then you give me my reward. But you can’t treat me like a little girl. I’m a grown woman.”
“Then act like it. Bring some kind of structure into your life. It doesn’t work the way you think it does. You live from one day to the next, sleep through half the morning, while away the afternoon and dance and drink through the night. You let your grandmother pay your way and seem to think things will continue to be that way forever!”
“It will continue to be that way. Why should I think about how things will be ten years from now? Something will come up!”
“Mae won’t live forever.”
“Then there’ll be someone else.”
“A man, you mean?”
“Yes. There will always be some man or another.”
He had looked at her thoughtfully, her mouth laughing, her eyes shining. She was worry free. “You won’t always be twenty, Maya. You won’t always be as attractive as you are now. Do you understand? There won’t be men falling over themselves to support you all your life.”
“You always have to be so apocalyptic, Alan. You always paint such a bleak picture! You can be so terribly dull and boring! A girl gets to be so gloomy when you’re around.” And with that she had laughed, far away from any kind of gloom.
Today, at the St. Martin airport, as he was getting off the plane from London, he was thinking that he’d hardly be able to avoid seeing Maya. She would probably be there tomorrow for his mother’s birthday. He was angry that he would even waste his time in thinking about it, but he was afraid of this meeting. Afraid that his face could betray the feelings he harbored for her. He had fought these feelings for years, and the fight had been as bitter as it was unsuccessful. He asked himself why he couldn’t manage to tear Maya from his heart once and for all. Why was she always there? In his apartment in London, in his office. When he met with friends and even when he was together with other women. He couldn’t get rid of Maya.
It’s so pathetic, he thought sometimes.
He had rented a car at the airport, and instead of driving straight to his mother’s house in Le Variouf — which he had no desire to do; it would happen soon enough — he had taken the route to St. Peter Port and had driven onto the street where Maya’s apartment building was. She lived there in a very costly two-room apartment paid for by her grandmother, Mae. From her back windows she had a magnificent view of the sea and of Castle Cornet, the fortress in the city’s harbor.
Just as he had been about to get out of the car, he had suddenly caught sight of Maya. She was coming up the steep road, very slowly — a reasonable pace, considering the heat that day. She wore a tight, short skirt and a white T-shirt that ended just above her waist and left her belly button exposed. Her long legs were tanned a dark brown color. She had tennis shoes on and seemed as untroubled as always.
The man who accompanied her struck Alan as more than suspect. A Mediterranean type with a ton of gel in his black hair and eyes hidden behind the mirrored lenses of his sunglasses. He was thin but wiry, no doubt he was strong. He looked like nothing so much as a suburban pimp.
And maybe, Alan thought, that’s just what he is.
Naturally he stayed where he was and hoped that Maya wouldn’t spot him. She wouldn’t recognize the car, and she wouldn’t really be looking that closely anyway. She was beaming at the guy next to her — he wasn’t smiling back, however. He followed her inside and the door shut behind them. Alan told himself that the best thing would be to hit the gas and drive off. Anything else was pure masochism. Why should he subject himself to the agony of sitting here and waiting till the two of them had finished their business inside the apartment? But something held him back, rooted him to the spot, forced him to take the torture upon himself and to keep sitting there under the windows behind which she was having such a good time. Eventually, he thought, it’ll be over with. He didn’t mean her erotic play with the greasy ape. He meant his obsession. One morning he would wake up and realize that he no longer loved Maya Ashworth. That she belonged to the past and he had won back his freedom. That he could love other women and enjoy life again.
Six o’clock approached and he couldn’t take it anymore. He had been thirsty this whole time, which was hardly any wonder in this weather. But the need began to crystallize into a particular type of thirst. He wasn’t thirsty for just water or orange juice. He needed something stronger. Like he always did. Almost every single day.
Down the street a short ways from Maya’s apartment there was a pub that opened at six. When Alan went in, there was no one there aside from the fou
r young people behind the bar. A large poster announced that there would be a live band that night. Alan ordered a whiskey and took a seat in front of the large fireplace set in the wall opposite the bar. The place was gigantic. It took up two stories, with massive ceiling beams and many wooden tables and chairs. Late at night, Alan remembered, it was always packed in here. For now, he remained alone for almost an hour before two men came in, obviously fishermen, who were talking about a trip taking tourists to Sark by boat. In this time he drank two more whiskeys and went to the bathroom three times. He wanted to order himself a fourth whiskey but he considered the fact that he still had to drive and that his mother would start nagging again if he came home smelling of alcohol. The whole time he had been staring at the door, had half expected that it would open and that he’d see Maya and that guy come inside. He knew she came to the bar sometimes. But today she’d probably opted to stay in bed, or she and the man had gone someplace else. He stood up heavily, went to the bar and paid. Then he walked out onto the street.
Autumn was making itself known. The sun had disappeared behind the houses, and in the shadows it was already cool. To stay outside now you would need a warm sweater.
Soon the days will all be gray, he thought. Particularly in London. The nights will be long and dark and lonely. It’ll take a hell of a lot of whiskey to get through them.
There was no light on in Maya’s windows, but that didn’t necessarily mean she had left. Maybe they had gone to sleep. Thanks to the whiskey, the thought weighed on him a bit less.
It’s none of my concern, he thought. It has nothing to do with me.
He was about to open his car door when he saw the woman. She was standing on the sidewalk on the other side of the car. He thought at first that she couldn’t make it in between his car and the front of the building, since he’d parked so carelessly that he’d actually blocked the whole sidewalk. But then he saw that she was holding herself up with both hands on the roof of the car. Her whole face was ashen; even her lips were gray. Her skin was covered in sweat.
The Rose Gardener Page 4