Part 8 (1/2)

”Who do you think you are?” she said. ”Or, more to the point, who do you think I am? I may be a dumb toot,” she said, ”but how dare you think I am such a dumb toot that I would think what you just did was glamorous?”

This was the lowest point in my life, possibly. I felt worse then than I did when I was put in prison-worse, even, than when I was turned loose again. I may have felt worse then, even, than when I set fire to the drapes my wife was about to deliver to a client in Chevy Chase.

”Kindly take me home,” Sarah Wyatt said to me. We left without eating, but not without paying. I could not help myself: I cried all the way home.

I told her brokenly in the taxicab that nothing about the evening had been my own idea, that I was a robot invented and controlled by Alexander Hamilton McCone. I confessed to being half-Polish and half-Lithuanian and nothing but a chauffeur's son who had been ordered to put on the clothing and airs of a gentleman. I said I wasn't going back to Harvard, and that I wasn't even sure I wanted to live anymore.

I was so pitiful, and Sarah was so contrite and interested, that we became the closest of friends, as I say, off and on for seven years.

She would drop out of Pine Manor. She would become a nurse. While in nurse's training she would become so upset by the sickening and dying of the poor that she would join the Communist Party. She would make me join, too.

So I might never have become a communist, if Alexander Hamilton McCone had not insisted that I take a pretty girl to the Arapahoe. And now, forty-five years later, here I was entering the lobby of the Arapahoe again. Why had I chosen to spend my first nights of freedom there? For the irony of it. No American is so old and poor and friendless that he cannot make a collection of some of the most exquisite little ironies in town.

Here I was again, back where a restaurateur had first said to me, ”Bon appet.i.t!” ”Bon appet.i.t!”

A great chunk of the original lobby was now a travel agency. What remained for overnight guests was a narrow corridor with a reception desk at the far end. It wasn't wide enough to accommodate a couch or chair. The mirrored French doors through which Sarah and I had peered into the famous dining room were gone. The archway that had framed them was still there, but it was clogged now with masonry as brutal and unadorned as the wall that kept communists from becoming capitalists in Berlin, Germany. There was a pay telephone bolted to the barrier. Its coinbox had been pried open. Its handset was gone.

And yet the man at the reception desk in the distance appeared to be wearing a tuxedo, and even a boutonniere! boutonniere!

As I advanced on him, it became apparent that my eyes had been tricked on purpose. He was in fact wearing a cotton T-s.h.i.+rt on which were printed a trompe l'oeil trompe l'oeil tuxedo jacket and s.h.i.+rt, with a tuxedo jacket and s.h.i.+rt, with a boutonniere boutonniere, bow tie, s.h.i.+rtstuds, handkerchief in the pocket, and all. I had never seen such a s.h.i.+rt before. I did not find it comical. I was confused. It was not a joke somehow.

The night clerk had a beard that was real, and an even more aggressively genuine bellyb.u.t.ton, exposed above his low-slung trousers. He no longer dresses that way, may I say, now that he is vice-president in charge of purchasing for Hospitality a.s.sociates, Ltd., a division of The RAMJAC Corporation. He is thirty years old now. His name is Israel Edel. Like my son, he is married to a black woman. He holds a Doctor's degree in history from Long Island University, summa c.u.m laude summa c.u.m laude, and is a Phi Beta Kappa. When we first met, in fact, Israel had to look up at me from the pages of The American Scholar The American Scholar, the Phi Beta Kappa learned monthly. Working as night clerk at the Arapahoe was the best job he could find.

”I have a reservation,” I said.

”You have a what?” he said. He was not being impudent. His surprise was genuine. No one ever made a reservation at the Arapahoe anymore. The only way to arrive there was unexpectedly, in response to some misfortune. As Israel said to me only the other day, when we happened to meet in an elevator, ”Making a reservation at the Arapahoe is like making a reservation in a burn ward.” He now oversees the purchasing at the Arapahoe, incidentally, which, along with about four hundred other hostelries all over the world, including one in Katmandu, is a Hospitality a.s.sociates, Ltd., hotel.

He found my letter of reservation in the otherwise vacant bank of pigeonholes behind him. ”A week?” he said incredulously.

”Yes,” I said.

My name meant nothing to him. His area of historical expertise was heresies in thirteenth-century Normandy. But he did glean that I was an ex-jailbird-from the slightly queer return address on my envelope: a box number in the middle of nowhere in Georgia, and some numbers after my name.

”The least we can do,” he said, ”is to give you the Bridal Suite.”

There was in fact no Bridal Suite. Every suite had long ago been part.i.tioned into cells. But there was one cell, and only one, which had been freshly painted and papered-as a result, I would later learn, of a particularly gruesome murder of a teen-age male prost.i.tute in there. Israel Edel was not himself being gruesome now. He was being kind. The room really was quite cheerful.

He gave me the key, which I later discovered would open practically every door in the hotel. I thanked him, and I made a small mistake we irony collectors often make: I tried to share an irony with a stranger. It can't be done. I told him I had been in the Arapahoe before-in Nineteen-hundred and Thirty-one. He was not interested. I do not blame him.

”I was painting the town red with a girl,” I said.

”Um,” he said.

I persisted, though. I told him how we had peeked through the French doors into the famous restaurant. I asked him what was on the other side of that wall now.

His reply, which he himself considered a bland statement of fact, fell so harshly on my ears that he might as well have slapped me hard in the face. He said this: ”Fist-f.u.c.king films.”

I had never heard of such things. I gropingly asked what they were.

It woke him up a little, that I should be so surprised and appalled. He was sorry, as he would tell me later, to have brought a sweet little old man such ghastly news about what was going on right next door. He might have been my father, and I was his little child. He even said to me, ”Never mind.”

”Tell me,” I said.

So he explained slowly and patiently, and most reluctantly, that there was a motion-picture theater where the restaurant used to be. It specialized in films of male h.o.m.os.e.xual acts of love, and that their climaxes commonly consisted of one actor's thrusting his fist up the fundament of another actor.

I was speechless. Never had I dreamed that the First Amendment of the Const.i.tution of the United States of America and the enchanting technology of a motion-picture camera would be combined to form such an atrocity.

”Sorry,” he said.

”I doubt very much if you're to blame,” I said. ”Good night.” I went in search of my room.

I pa.s.sed the brutal wall where the French doors had been-on my way to the elevator. I paused there for a moment. My lips mouthed something that I myself did not understand for a moment. And then I realized what my lips must have said, what they had to say.

It was this, of course: ”Bon appet.i.t.” ”Bon appet.i.t.”

11.

WHAT WOULD the next day hold for me? the next day hold for me?

I would, among other things, meet Leland Clewes, the man I had betrayed in Nineteen-hundred and Forty-nine.

But first I would unpack my few possessions, put them away nicely, read a little while, and then get my beauty sleep. I would be tidy. ”At least I don't smoke anymore,” I thought. The room was so clean to begin with.

Two top drawers in the dresser easily accepted all I owned, but I looked into all the other drawers anyway. Thus I discovered that the bottom drawer contained seven incomplete clarinets-without cases, mouthpieces, or bells.

Life is like that sometimes.

What I should have done, especially since I was an ex-convict, was to march back down to the front desk immediately and to say that I was the involuntary custodian of a drawerful of clarinet parts and that perhaps the police should be called. They were of course stolen. As I would learn the next day, they had been taken from a truck hijacked on the Ohio Turnpike-a robbery in which the driver had been killed. Thus, anyone a.s.sociated with the incomplete instruments, should they turn up, might also be an accessory to murder. There were notices in every music store in the country, it turned out, saying that the police should be called immediately if a customer started talking about buying or selling sizeable quant.i.ties of clarinet parts. What I had in my drawer, I would guess, was about a thousandth of the stolen truckload.

But I simply closed the drawer again. I didn't want to go right back downstairs again. There was no telephone in my room. I would say something in the morning.

I was exhausted, I found. It was not yet curtain time in all the theaters down below, but I could hardly keep my eyes open. So I pulled my window-shade down, and I put myself to bed. Off I went, as my son used to say when he was little, ”to seepy-bye,” which is to say, ”to sleep.”

I dreamed that I was in an easy chair at the Harvard Club of New York, only four blocks away. I was not young again. I was not a jailbird, however, but a very successful man-the head of a medium-size foundation, perhaps, or a.s.sistant secretary of the interior, or executive director of the National Endowment for the Humanities, or some such thing. I really would have been some such thing in my sunset years, I honestly believe, if I had not testified against Leland Clewes in Nineteen-hundred and Forty-nine.

It was a compensatory dream. How I loved it. My clothes were in perfect repair. My wife was still alive. I was sipping brandy and coffee after a fine supper with several other members of the Cla.s.s of Nineteen-hundred and Thirty-five. One detail from real life carried over into the dream: I was proud that I did not smoke anymore.

But then I absentmindedly accepted a cigarette. It was simply one more civilized satisfaction to go with the good talk and my warm belly and all. ”Yes, yes-” I said, recalling some youthful shenanigans. I chuckled, eyes twinkling. I put the cigarette to my lips. A friend held a match to it. I inhaled the smoke right down to the soles of my feet.

In the dream I collapsed to the floor in convulsions. In real life I fell out of my bed at the Hotel Arapahoe. In the dream my damp, innocent pink lungs shriveled into two black raisins. Bitter brown tar seeped from my ears and nostrils.

But worst of all was the shame shame.

Even as I was beginning to perceive that I was not in the Harvard Club, and that old cla.s.smates were not sitting forward in their leather chairs and looking down at me, and even after I found I could still gulp down air and it would nourish me-even then I was still strangling on shame.

I had just squandered the very last thing I had to be proud of in life: the fact that I did not smoke anymore.

And as I came awake, I examined my hands in the light that billowed up from Times Square and then bounced down on me from my freshly painted ceiling. I spread my fingers and turned my hands this way and that, as a magician might have done. I was showing an imaginary audience that the cigarette I had held only a moment before had now vanished into thin air.