The Hotel New Hampshire (53 page)

“And if you don’t come,” she told me, “that’s my fault. But you’ll come,” she assured me.

“Please,” I said to her, “if it’s all the same to you, I wish you
wouldn’t
come. I mean, I wish you wouldn’t pretend to. I would appreciate a
quiet
ending,” I begged her, but she was already beginning to make curious sounds under me. And then I heard a sound that scared me. It resembled nothing I’d ever heard from Screaming Annie; it was not the song Susie the bear had coaxed out of Franny, either. For an awful second—because there was so much
pain
in the sound—I thought it was the song Ernst the pornographer was making Franny sing, and then I realized it was
my
sound, it was my own wretched singing voice. Screaming Annie started singing with me, and in the vibrating silence that followed our awesome duet I heard what was clearly Franny’s voice yelling—so close by she must have been standing on the second-floor landing—“Oh,
Christ
, would you hurry up and get it
over with
!” Franny screamed.

“Why did you do it?” I whispered to Screaming Annie, who lay panting under me. “Do what?” she said.

“The fake orgasm,” I said. “I asked you not to.”

“That was no fake,” she whispered. But before I had a moment to even consider this news as a compliment, she added, “I
never
fake an orgasm. They’re
all
real,” Screaming Annie said. “Why in hell do you think I’m such a wreck?” she asked me. And why, of course, did I think she was so convinced about not wanting her dark daughter in the “business”?

“I’m sorry,” I whispered.

“I hope they
do
blow up the Opera,” Screaming Annie said. “I hope they get the Hotel Sacher, too,” she added. “I hope they wipe out all the Kärntnerstrasse,” she added. “And the Ringstrasse, and everyone on it. All the
men
,” whispered Screaming Annie.

Franny was waiting for me on the second-floor landing. She didn’t look any worse than I did. I sat down beside her and we asked each other if we were “all right.” Neither one of us provided very convincing answers. I asked Franny what she found out from Ernst, and she shivered. I put my arm around her and we leaned against the banister of the staircase together. I asked her again.

“I found out about everything, I think,” she whispered. “What do you want to know?”

“Everything,” I said, and Franny shut her eyes and put her head on my shoulder and turned her face against my neck.

“Do you still love me?” she asked.

“Yes, of course I do,” I whispered.

“And you want to know everything?” she asked. I held my breath, and she said, “The cow position? You want to know about that?” I just held her; I couldn’t say anything. “And the elephant position?” she asked me. I could feel her shaking; she was trying very hard not to cry. “I can tell you a few things about the elephant position,” Franny said. “The main thing about it is, it
hurts
,” she said, and she started to cry.

“He hurt you?” I asked her softly.

“The elephant position hurt me,” she said. We sat quietly for a while, until she stopped shaking. “Do you want me to go on?” she asked me.

“Not about that,” I said.

“Do you still love me?” Franny asked.

“Yes, I can’t help it,” I said.

“Poor you,” said Franny.

“Poor you, too,” I told her.

There is at least one terrible thing about lovers—real lovers, I mean: people who are in love with each other. Even when they’re supposed to be miserable, and comforting each other, even then they will relish their every physical contact in a sexual way; even when they’re supposed to be in a kind of mourning, they can get aroused. Franny and I simply couldn’t have gone on holding each other on the stairs; it was impossible to touch each other, at all, and not want to touch everything.

I suppose I should be grateful to Jolanta for breaking us up. Jolanta was on her way out to the street, looking for someone else to abuse. She saw Franny and me sitting on the stairs and aimed her knee so that it struck me in the spine. “Oh, excuse me!” she said. And to Franny, Jolanta added, “Don’t get involved with him. He can’t come.”

Franny and I, without a word, more or less followed Jolanta down to the lobby—only Jolanta went through the lobby and out onto the Krugerstrasse, while Franny and I went to have a look at Susie the bear. Susie was sleeping on the couch that had the ashtray spilled on it; there was an almost serene look on her face—Susie wasn’t nearly as ugly as she thought she was. Franny had told me that Susie’s little joke about being the original not-bad-if-you-put-a-bag-over-her-head girl was not so funny; the two men who had raped her
had
put a bag over her head—“So we don’t have to look at you,” they told her. This kind of cruelty might make a bear out of anyone.

“Rape really puzzles me,” I would later confess to Susie the bear, “because it seems to me to be the most brutalizing experience that can be survived; we can’t, for example, survive our own murder. And I suppose it’s the most brutalizing experience I can imagine because I can’t imagine
doing
it to someone, I can’t imagine wanting to. Therefore, it is such a foreign feeling: I think that’s what seems so brutalizing about it.”

“
I
can imagine doing it to someone,” Susie said. “I can imagine doing it to the fuckers who did it to me,” she said.

“But that’s because it would be simply revenge. And it wouldn’t work, doing it to a fucking
man
,” Susie said. “Because a man probably would enjoy it. There are men who think
we
actually enjoy getting raped,” Susie said. “They can only think that,” she said, “because they think
they
would like it.”

But in the ash-gray lobby of the second Hotel New Hampshire, Franny and I simply tried to put Susie the bear back together again, and get her to go to her own room to sleep. We got her on her feet, and found her head; we brushed the old cigarette butts (that she’d been lying in) off her shaggy back.

“Come on, come get out of your old suit, Susie,” Franny coaxed her.

“How
could
you—with Ernst?” Susie mumbled to Franny. “And how could
you
—with
whores
?” she asked me. “I don’t understand either of you,” Susie concluded. “I’m too old for this.”

“No,
I
am too old for this, Susie,” said Father gently, to the bear. We hadn’t noticed him, standing in the lobby, behind the reception desk; we thought he had gone to bed. He wasn’t alone, either. The gentle mother-like radical, our dear
Schlagobers
, our dear Schwanger, was with him. She had her gun out and she motioned us all back to the couch.

“Be a dear,” Schwanger said to me. “Get Lilly and Frank. Wake them up nicely,” she added. “Don’t be rough, or too abrupt.”

Frank was lying in bed with the dressmaker’s dummy stretched out beside him. He was wide-awake; I didn’t have to wake him. “I knew we shouldn’t have waited,” Frank said. “We should have blown the whistle right away.”

Lilly was also wide-awake. Lilly was writing.

“Here comes a new experience to write about, Lilly,” I joked with her, holding her hand as we walked back to the lobby.

“I hope it’s just a
little
experience,” Lilly said.

They were all waiting for us in the lobby. Schraubenschlüssel was wearing his streetcar conductor’s uniform; he looked very “official.” Arbeiter had come dressed for work; he was so well dressed, in fact, that he wouldn’t have looked out of place at the Opera. He was wearing a tuxedo—all black. And the quarterback was there, the signal caller was there to lead them—Ernst the lady-killer, Ernst the pornographer, Ernst the star was there. Only Old Billig—Old Billig the radical—was missing. He blew the way the wind blew, as Arbeiter had observed: Old Billig was smart enough to have excluded himself from this end of the movement. He would still be around for the next show; for Ernst and Arbeiter, for Schraubenschlüssel and Schwanger, this was surely the gala (and maybe the final) performance.

“Lilly dear,” Schwanger said. “Go fetch Freud for us. Freud should be here, too.”

And Lilly, once again cast in the role of Freud’s Seeing Eye bear, brought the old blind believer to us—his Louisville Slugger tap-tap-tapping in front of him, his scarlet silk robe with the black dragon on the back was all he wore (“Chinatown, New York City, 1939!” he had told us).

“What dream is this?” the old man said. “Whatever happened to democracy?”

Lilly seated Freud on the couch next to Father; Freud promptly whacked Father’s shin with the baseball bat.

“Oh, sorry!” Freud cried. “Whose anatomy is that?”

“Win Berry,” my father said softly; it was eerie, but that was the only time we children heard him speak his own name.

“Win Berry!” Freud cried. “Well, nothing too bad can happen with Win Berry around!” No one looked so sure.

“Explain yourselves!” Freud shouted to the darkness he saw. “You’re all here,” the old man said. “I can smell you, I can hear every breath.”

“It’s really quite simple to explain,” Ernst said quietly.

“Basic,” said Arbeiter. “Truly basic.”

“We need a driver,” Ernst said softly, “someone to drive the car.”

“It runs like a dream,” Schraubenschlüssel said, worshipfully. “It purrs like a kitten.”

“Drive it yourself, Wrench,” I said.

“Be quiet, dear,” Schwanger said to me; I just looked at her gun to confirm that it was pointed at me.

“Be quiet, weight lifter,” Wrench said; he had a short, heavy-looking tool protruding from the front pants pocket of his streetcar conductor’s uniform, and he rested his hand on the tool as if the tool were the butt of a pistol.

“Fehlgeburt was full of doubt,” Ernst said.

“Fehlgeburt is dead,” Lilly said—our family realist, the family writer.

“Fehlgeburt had a fatal case of romanticism,” Ernst said. “She always questioned the
means
.”

“The ends
do
justify the means, you know,” Arbeiter interjected. “That’s basic, truly basic.”

“You’re a moron, Arbeiter,” Franny said.

“And you’re as self-righteous as any capitalist!” Freud told Arbeiter.

“But mainly a moron, Arbeiter,” said Susie the bear. “A truly
basic
moron.”

“The bear would make a good driver,” Schraubenschlüssel said.

“Stick it in your ear, Wrench,” said Susie the bear.

“The bear is too hostile to be trusted,” Ernst said, so logically.

“You bet your sweet ass,” said Susie the bear.

“
I
can drive,” Franny said to Ernst.

“You
can’t
,” I said. “You never even got your driver’s license, Franny.”

“But I know how to drive,” Franny said. “Frank taught me.”

“I know how to drive better than you, Franny,” Frank said. “If one of us has to drive, I’m a better driver.”

“No,
I
am,” Franny said.

“You
did
surprise me, Franny,” Ernst said. “You were better at following directions than I thought you’d be—you were good at taking instructions.”

“Don’t move, dear,” Schwanger said to me, because my arms were jerking—the way they do when I’ve been curling the long bar, for a long time.

“What’s
that
mean?” Father asked Ernst; his German was so poor. “
What
directions—what instructions?” Father asked.

“He fucked me,” Franny told Father.

“Just sit tight,” Wrench said to my father, moving near him with his tool. But Frank had to translate for Father.

“Just stay where you are, Pop,” Frank said.

Freud was swishing the baseball bat as if he were a cat and the bat were his tail, and he tapped my father’s leg with it—once, twice, thrice. I knew that Father wanted the bat. He was very good with the Louisville Slugger.

Occasionally, when Freud was napping, Father would take us to the Stadtpark and hit us some grounders. We all liked scooping up ground balls. A little game of good old American baseball in the Stadtpark, with Father whacking out the ground balls. Even Lilly liked playing. You don’t have to be big to field a ground ball. Frank was the worst at it; Franny and I were good at fielding—in a lot of ways, we were about the same. Father would whack the sharpest grounders at Franny and me.

But Freud held the bat, now, and he used it to calm my father down.

“You slept with Ernst, Franny?” Father asked her, softly.

“Yes,” she whispered. “I’m sorry.”

“You fucked my daughter?” Father asked Ernst.

Ernst treated it like a metaphysical question. “It was a necessary phase,” he said, and I knew that at that moment I could have done what Junior Jones could do: I could have bench-pressed twice my own weight—maybe three or four times, fast; I could have pumped that barbell up and not felt a thing.

“My
daughter
was a necessary
phase
?” Father asked Ernst.

“This is not an emotional situation,” Ernst said. “This is a matter of technique,” he said, ignoring my father. “Although I’m sure you could do a good job of driving the car, Franny, Schwanger has asked us that each of you children be spared.”

“Even the weight lifter?” Arbeiter asked.

“Yes, he’s a dear to me, too,” Schwanger said, beaming at me—with her gun.

“If you make my father drive that car, I’ll
kill
you!” Franny screamed at Ernst, suddenly. And Wrench moved near to her, with his tool; if he had touched her, something would have happened, but he just stood near her. Freud’s baseball bat kept time. My father had his eyes closed; he had such trouble following German. He must have been dreaming of hard ground balls spanked cleanly through the infield.

“Schwanger has asked us, Franny,” Ernst said, patiently, “not to make you children motherless
and
fatherless, too. We don’t want to hurt your father, Franny. And we
won’t
hurt him,” Ernst said, “as long as
someone else
does a good job of driving the car.”