A Beauty Read online

  “Jesus Christ, Merv.”

  “I know.”

  “Why bring it up? Why go on about it? It’s too late now. We couldn’t pay the first month’s premium.”

  They’d bought the hotel for the proverbial song during Prohibition and for a few years after repeal they’d managed to think they’d made a solid investment. When the Depression hit, they’d had to lay off the young girl and the old man they’d employed to do the work. Merv and Pansy were in their fifties by then and firm in their opinion that management was more their style than labour.

  Pansy pulled her worn old nightie over her head and poked her arms into it.

  “I think you’re thinner,” Merv said. He could still see quite a bit of her through the greyed fabric with its once-perky sprigs of some unknown flower.

  “Thinner than what? You? Christ. That would be something.”

  They had both lost weight as the years went on. Neither of them liked to cook and when it came to meals, as in many other instances, they’d fallen into the habit of waiting one another out. Neither ever wanted to be the first to make a move. They ingested their fair share of baloney, trimming off the green when it got rather old.

  Pansy shimmied out of her skirt under the nightie’s tent. She fumbled at her waist to unpin her underpants, and half-stood. The elastic was so shot they slid to her ankles and landed at her feet, licking at her feet in a pale puddle Merv knew would be warm. Then she had the pin in her mouth, open, between her teeth. Silver colour, one end hooded, the other straight and sharp. Merv held his breath until she reached down and refastened the thing in the pants to be there ready the next morning.

  “I wonder what Old Jock and Old Caldwell had for supper,” he said. It was a game she liked as it gave fair scope for sarcasm. The cat rolled in his lap and bared its belly, then grabbed at his hand with its claws-out paws when he stroked it. Scared of what it wanted. Could only take it for a minute, and then rolled back again to feel his hand from the fine bones of its head down its bumpy length and along its tail. Liked its tail pulled. Wouldn’t we all? Merv thought, lazily.

  “Steak and onions,” Pansy said. “Ham and scalloped potatoes. Pork chops and – some goddamn entrée. Seeing they can afford to eat out.” Jock and Caldwell were the two old bachelors who made their home at the hotel. The skirt and the underpants joined the blouse on the rocker, and she fell back on top of the bed.

  “Jesus. This room is stifling,” she said. It was his fault, like everything else, and she meant to bring to his mind all the other rooms she might have found herself in, and didn’t and couldn’t, because of him. “And that cat is making the most annoying sound.”

  “Ah yes,” he said. “The sound of contentment.”

  He could still make her laugh. She always acted surprised, as if he’d just developed a sense of humour as a gift for her. And when she laughed she looked right into his eyes. He made her laugh as often as he could. It took the two of them right out of time, right away from that place. It was like being immortal, for a second, or at least not the owners of the Addison Hotel.

  He got up and let the cat out. Pansy refused to sleep with it in the room; she’d refused even to give it a name. He lowered the lamp wick and the room went dark. He crawled onto the bed. The two of them lay flat on their backs on top of the sheets, gazing at the shadowed ceiling, waiting for oblivion.

  One thing Merv didn’t like about getting older was the worrying. He didn’t recall worrying so much when he was young, and about things that hadn’t happened and were unlikely at that. Some nights it was tough to get the picture of her swallowing that pin out of his mind.

  Bill said it would be hard to get a room if they left it too late. Elena said she’d never been inside a hotel.

  “These small-town hotels are mostly excuses for beer parlours,” he said.

  “I’ve never been in one of them, either,” she said.

  “You couldn’t. No women allowed. You don’t get out much, do you, kid?” She was still snuggled up to him, and he rubbed her arm to show her he felt warm towards her.

  They pulled into Addison, one of the villages every seven miles or so along the rail line – seven miles reputedly being the distance a crew could lay track before needing a bed for the night, back when they were building the railroad. “This look like anywhere?” Bill asked, pulling up in front of the one hotel.

  “It sure does,” she said.

  He went ahead to make the arrangements, in other words to wake the owners up, since every window in the false-fronted box was dark and the whole of Main Street, which was almost the whole of Addison, was deserted.

  If there was one thing that could remind Merv and Pansy who they were and where they were, if not why, it was a rap on the front door after they’d locked up for the night. Neither of them moved except to stop breathing. A little while passed and whoever it was knocked again, louder this time. Pansy groaned.

  “I’m not going,” Merv said.

  “Well I’m not,” Pansy said.

  Down the hall, in the minuscule rooms they rented by the year, Old Jock Macklin and Old Caldwell Kurtz pulled their pillows over their heads. They knew the owners, if the poor sod outside didn’t.

  Elena waited in the roadster with the top down and the night around her. Bill looked up at the stars while he waited for someone to come and answer the door.

  “Ever think about those things?” she called to him.

  “All the time,” he said. About a billion of them had pricked through by now, clustering in constellations he felt he should be able to name. He knocked on the door again, and turned back to see her sitting in the open convertible, her face moonlight-pale. He lit a cigarette and took a long drag that was like drinking her in. The night was still warm but with that rim of coolness where it met his skin. He backed away from the door and looked up at the hotel and saw a man’s narrow face disappear from the middle window on the second floor and the curtain drop. He heard someone on the stairs – the walls were thin enough to allow that, he noted – and got his semi-apologetic smile ready.

  The room wasn’t as clean as it might have been, but it didn’t matter so much because the globe on the one lamp was so smoky it hardly let out light. The water in the two pitchers on the dresser had sat there for several days, the drinking water covered with a cloth that said “Addison Hotel” in some kind of nubby pink cross-stitch, or actually “Addis Hote”; the last letters had been picked out or fallen off. The wash water had drowned an unfortunate pair of houseflies who floated on it, belly up, each of them with his brittle black legs tangled in his last struggle against his fate. The commode down the hall had been fully appreciated by Old Jock and Old Caldwell.

  Bill passed her his flask after he’d taken a swig, but she wouldn’t have any. Just as well, he thought, gauging how much was left by the heft. He’d drunk quite a bit of it before going into the dance hall, as he usually did.

  In those days a double bed was smaller than it is now, and this one swayed to the middle, so when they were both in it, they were almost necessarily touching. He slid his arms around her and nuzzled and kissed the back of her neck. She hadn’t taken her dress off, had only slipped out of her shoes, and his lips nudged at her collar and bumped along the curved vertebrae and vibrated over the fine hairs there. He moaned. It was a quiet, involuntary, yet satisfying moan. It had welled all the way up from his groin. He thought it reached out to her, the articulation of his desire. She didn’t respond. He moaned again, more communicatively this time.

  “I feel I do not know you well,” she murmured.

  He laughed. That was involuntary, too.

  When he didn’t move away, she said, “I am quite serious.”

  “Elena,” he said.

  She gave a little, foreign-sounding half-laugh.

  “What’s so funny? Eh?”

  “Men.”

  “Men? What do you know about men? Come on, I’d like to know. And then I’ll tell you what I know about women. Especially women
that are cockteasers, eh? Lead a fellow on and then turn prim. I ain’t used to that, baby.” He stretched back against the meagre pillow with his hands behind his head. There were occasions when a guy had to lay it on the line. He gazed up at the dark ceiling and recalled her asking if he ever thought about the stars. He was pleased he’d answered, “All the time.” It seemed a strangely sophisticated exchange to have with a country girl. He remembered asking if he could take her home, and her turning right away to the door.

  “Hey, Elena!” He tugged on her shoulder. But she was asleep. He couldn’t believe it. Fast asleep, in the old meaning of fast, like a locked-up vault. He shook her and she didn’t wake up. He needed another belt from the flask after that. In fact, he drained it, and then he lay down beside her and made retributive plans to dump her in the morning.

  Being deeply suspicious of strangers, Pansy Badger wasn’t suited to running a hotel. She kept Merv awake with her quizzing.

  “A young man and wife,” Merv said.

  What did they look like? What did they talk like? Had they been drinking? Were they really married? Arriving at this time of night? Merv didn’t know. He pulled the sheet up to his shoulder and turned his back on her.

  “It’s too hot for a sheet,” she said. “Where did they come from?”

  “Trevna.”

  “Trevna? If they were married, they wouldn’t need a room here. Merv, I said, if they were married they’d have their own place in Trevna. It’s just down the road, for Christ’s sake.”

  “Look, they paid for the room.”

  “I won’t aid and abet that kind of thing.”

  “I’m asleep,” Merv said.

  She thought for a minute. “Tell me about the girl,” she said. But he was asleep. He was already snoring. She could only stay awake and listen for any sounds that might indicate there was trouble down the hall.

  During the night Bill made a trip to the toilet to relieve himself of the effects of trying to sleep beside the girl. When he came out of the bathroom, shuddering from the smell he’d labelled eau de commode, a crazy woman poked her head out, two doors down. Her chopped grey hair stuck out all over her head, and her face and neck strained out the doorway, the muscles all strung as taut as kite string, as if some cranky wind had yanked her out of her room. Her eyes bored into his.

  “What?” he said. As a kid he’d sleepwalk now and then, and get caught outside in his pyjamas. He felt like that, like a kid in a place where he shouldn’t be – and right now he didn’t even have pyjamas on; he had nothing but the dim light clothing him. She pulled her head back in, left him shaking his, watching her door slowly almost close. He’d bet she still had an eyeball up against it. As he turned back to his room he swaggered a bit – since he was young, after all, and buck-naked.

  Bill woke up to discover the girl still dead to the world, and started rehearsing what he was going to do. He was going to get out of bed and get dressed and take off – leave her there for Scrawny to find her and make a royal fuss when he found out she hadn’t a cent to her name, which Bill was pretty sure was the case. But the rest of him wasn’t listening to the plan, and he reached out and put his hand on the curve of her shoulder, where it fit so well he thought he’d remember it for the rest of his life, the bone so strangely solid through the thin fabric, and warm against his palm. His fingers curled over into the hollow between her shoulder and her collarbone, and she stirred. Almost immediately she turned and slid right into him, the full length of her.

  “You awake?” he said. It came out like a croak, being his first utterance of the day.

  She nodded and whispered something too low for him to hear that sounded strangely matter-of-fact for the situation. Her breath smelled odd, not bad exactly, but different. He noticed it but ignored it. He didn’t know that a sharp, chemical smell is a sign a person is actually starving, and when he did learn it, later, he was still inclined to ask himself how anyone could have expected him to know. Her body was hot against him, pressed against him; her toes arched against his. The silky fine cotton between them slid against his bare skin. He didn’t have to think to peel it off. He did, however, have a policy of using a prophylactic. It didn’t help in these circumstances since it created more friction than he wanted, and there was that knotty little flesh gate to fight past. And sometimes girls would be embarrassed by the condom, preferring to think you’d had no prior intentions and were just overcome by a sudden unstoppable desire for them and them alone, a desire that would later easily be translated into love. (Elena was the third girl he’d had intercourse with, so he was able to employ this sort of generalization.) Anyway, he wasn’t going to have any little gal or her old man tracking him down, coming after him with a carrot-topped claim against him, so he soldiered ahead with the rubber on his dick and the look of thinking of England on her face.

  Afterwards, with the remembrance of the tepid Christmas mornings of his childhood floating through his mind, he reached for his cigarettes. You could still get them in flat tin boxes in those days; these were Black Cats, in a yellow tin with an appropriate picture of a black cat on it, kind of grinning at you. Bad-luck cat. A new thought occurred to him. “So, I guess you got to know me overnight, eh?”

  She didn’t answer right away but finally, in the formal way she had, she said, “Yes, I guess I did.”

  A little sunny-morning clarity trickled through the grimy windowpane across the room. “Ah, I respected you,” he said.

  She laughed, that foreign-sounding laugh again, with the bitter edge. Went on quite long this time, so he offered her a cigarette. She hadn’t wanted one the night before but this time she accepted it, slid it from the package with her small fingers and took it in her mouth. Waited for him to light it for her. The match cracked to life at the first stroke, but he wasn’t any too steady holding it for her, and when she inhaled, the flame went out. The thin paper stuck to her swollen lips, pulling them out a bit when she drew it from her mouth, and then she poked out her little pink tongue and plucked a curl of tobacco off it, and he was on top of her again. This time it was way more like Santa Claus had come to town.

  When he rolled off her, she sat up, blinking as if the lights had brightened. She gathered the sheet to her, then seemed to change her mind and got up. She hadn’t taken two steps before she staggered and fell to the floor. Just crumpled while he watched. He lay propped up on one elbow, staring at her. “Hey!” he called, in case there was any possibility she was kidding around, teasing him for some reason he couldn’t understand but could accept if it would mean there wasn’t something really the matter. She didn’t move, just lay there in a naked heap. He started shaking so badly he could hardly crawl over the bed and down to the floor and when he did, sitting beside her on the cool linoleum, he only stared at her white face. He couldn’t believe it. He couldn’t believe his eyes. He’d never seen a face so white.

  He wouldn’t look down at her body. He expected he’d see a pool of blood down there and more blood seeping or gushing out. And whose fault would that be? She’d bled a little after the first time, but that was only natural. He prodded her breastbone a couple of times. Nothing. And no, he couldn’t look down. He picked up her hand and started chafing it and whispering to her. “Elena, Elena,” he hissed, over and over, staring into her face.

  When she opened her eyes they weren’t focussed. He could tell she wasn’t seeing. He said her name again and she said something, a word he couldn’t understand, the same word a few times, in some foreign language. Then her eyes cleared and she looked at him and smiled as if she understood his distress, knew it was more for himself than for her, and pitied him.

  “Man and wife,” Pansy said with a snort. “When’s the last time you seen a man and wife order breakfast sent to their Christly room?” She’d agreed to toast and coffee. If they wanted anything more, they could drive themselves someplace else. They wouldn’t get it in Addison on a Sunday morning. But she helped Merv carry it up, not having seen them the night before, or at lea
st not having seen the girl. She’d had an eyeful of the guy, thank you very much. Merv had the tray with toast, jam, cups and cutlery. She carried the coffee pot. Caldwell Kurtz heard them on the stairs and poked his fuzzy old pelican head out his door. Pansy shooed him back into his room.

  And there they were, the two of them, sitting up in bed, as downy-headed as a pair of pelicans themselves, and glowing like two light bulbs, side by side. There was nowhere to put the tray. The young man patted the small space between their bodies and Merv leaned over him and set it down.

  The girl thanked him. She was wearing a dress, although it might as well have been a nightgown; it was wrinkled and clung to her breasts.

  “I’ll settle up later,” the young man said, a smart-assed look on his face, as well there might have been, with Merv practically bowing out of the room so as not to have to take his eyes off the girl.

  As soon as the Badgers left the room, Bill and Elena fell on the toast. Make extra, Bill had told Merv, but there were only four dry slices. He offered to let her have it all, but she said it wouldn’t be good for her to have too much at once. She’d finally told him she hadn’t eaten in quite a while. It came out when he’d asked her what foreign language she spoke.

  “Finnish,” she said. “But only a little. Did I say something? I don’t recall.”

  He said it was Eeesa. When she’d come to, she’d said, “Eeesa.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Isä. It means father. I always think it’s my father, when I hear someone calling my name.”

  Bill wasn’t all that interested in her old man. He kept asking her if she was okay, and after she’d told him a dozen times that she was, and finally that it was only that she needed food, he’d gone downstairs and got Scrawny moving on some breakfast.

  She was so adorable and weak while they waited. He was fascinated by her weakness. He held her hand and she put her head on his shoulder. It seemed to him this was more than physical closeness; he’d earned this weight on his shoulder. He’d stood by her. He’d done the right thing. He was good to her. And that was why a bond was forming between them – he was sure it was, he could feel it – while they lay propped against the thin, folded-over pillows, waiting for their breakfast. She was different from other girls. She was intelligent in a way he hadn’t encountered before, and he liked that about her. She said things you could make a smart answer to and feel pretty good about, like did you ever think about stars. If only she didn’t laugh sometimes when things weren’t funny, and other times gaze at him as if she had him up against a wall with a measuring stick.