The Hotel New Hampshire

by John Irving

  'I still want you,' she murmured to me. It was four-thirty in the afternoon. When I entered her, she winced.

  'Are you sore?' I whispered.

  'Of course I'm sore!' she said. 'But you better not stop. If you stop, I'll kill you,' Franny told me. She would have, too, I realized later. In a way -- if I had stayed in love with her -- she would have been the death of me; we would have been the death of each other. But she simply overdid it; she knew exactly what she was doing.

  'We better stop,' I whispered to her. It was almost five o'clock.

  'We better not stop,' Franny said fiercely.

  'But you're sore,' I protested.

  'I want to be sorer,' Franny said. 'Are you sore?' she asked me.

  'A little,' I admitted.

  'I want you a lot sore,' Franny said. 'Top or bottom?' she asked me grimly.

  When Lilly knocked at the door again, I was on the verge of imitating Screaming Annie; if there'd been a new bridge around, I could have cracked it.

  'Come back in an hour!' Franny yelled.

  'It's seven o'clock,' said Lilly. 'I've been away for three hours!'

  'Go have dinner with Frank!' Franny suggested.

  'I had lunch with Frank!' Lilly cried.

  'Go have dinner with Father!' Franny said.

  'I don't even want to eat,' Lilly said. 'I've got to write -- it's time to grow.'

  'Take a night off!' Franny said.

  'The whole night?' Lilly asked.

  'Give me three more hours,' Franny said. I groaned quietly. I didn't think I had three more hours left in me.

  'Aren't you getting hungry, Franny?' Lilly said.

  'There's always room service,' Franny said. 'And I'm not hungry, anyway.'

  But Franny was insatiable; her hunger for me would save us both.

  'No more, Franny,' I begged her. It was about nine o'clock, I think. It was so dark I couldn't see anymore.

  'But you love me, don't you?' she asked me, her body like a whip -- her body was a barbell that was too heavy for me.

  At ten o'clock I whispered to her, 'For God's sake, Franny. We've got to stop. We're going to hurt each other, Franny.'

  'No, my love,' she whispered. 'That's exactly what we're not going to do: hurt each other. We're going to be just fine. We're going to have a good life,' she promised me, taking me into her -- again. And again.

  'Franny, I can't,' I whispered to her. I felt absolutely blind with pain; I was as blind as Freud, as blind as Father. And it must have hurt Franny more than it hurt me.

  'Yes you can, my love,' Franny whispered. 'Just once more,' she urged me. 'I know you've got it in you.'

  'I'm finished, Franny,' I told her.

  'Almost finished,' Franny corrected me. 'We can do it just once more,' she said. 'After this,' she told me, 'we're both finished with it. This is the last time, my love. Just imagine trying to live every day like this,' Franny said, pressing against me, taking my last breath away. 'We'd go crazy,' Franny said. 'There's no living with this,' she whispered. 'Come on and finish it,' she said in my ear. 'Once more, my love. Last time!' she cried to me.

  'Okay!' I cried to her. 'Here I come.'

  'Yes, yes, my love,' Franny said; I felt her knees lock against my spine. 'Hello, good-bye, my love,' she whispered. 'There!' she cried, when she felt me shaking. 'There, there,' she said, soothingly. 'That's it, that's all she wrote,' she murmured. 'That's the end of it. Now we're free. Now that's over.'

  She helped me to the bathtub. The water stung me like rubbing alcohol.

  'Is that your blood or mine?' I asked Franny, who was trying to save the bed -- now that she had saved us.

  'It doesn't matter, my love,' Franny said cheerfully. 'It washes away.'

  'This is a fairy tale,' Lilly would write -- of our family's whole life. I agree with her; Iowa Bob would have agreed with her, too. 'Everything is a fairy tale!' Coach Bob would have said. And even Freud would have agreed with him -- both Freuds. Everything is a fairy tale.

  Lilly arrived coincidentally with the room service cart and the bewildered New York foreigner who delivered our multi-course meal, and several bottles of wine, at about eleven in the evening.

  'What are you celebrating?' Lilly asked Franny and me.

  'Well, John just finished a long run,' Franny said, laughing.

  'You shouldn't run in the park at night, John,' Lilly said, worriedly.

  'I ran up Fifth Avenue,' I said. 'It was perfectly safe.'

  'Perfectly safe,' Franny said, bursting out laughing.

  'What's the matter with her?' Lilly asked me, staring at Franny.

  'I think it's the luckiest day of my life,' Franny said, still giggling.

  'It's been just a little event among so many for me,' I told her, and Franny threw a dinner roll at me. We both laughed.

  'Jesus God,' Lilly said, exasperated with us -- and seemingly revolted by the amount of food we had ordered.

  'We could have had a most unhappy life,' Franny said. 'I mean, all of us!' she added, attacking the salad with her fingers; I opened the first bottle of wine.

  'I still might have an unhappy life,' Lilly said, frowning. 'If I have many more days like today,' she added, shaking her head.

  'Sit down and dig in, Lilly,' said Franny, who sat down at the room service table and started in on the fish.

  'Yes, you don't eat enough, Lilly,' I told her, helping myself to the frogs' legs.

  'I had lunch today,' Lilly said. 'It was a rather gross lunch, too,' she said. 'I mean, the food was all right but the portions were too big. I only need to eat one meal a day,' Lilly said, but she sat down at the table with us and watched us eat. She picked an especially slender green bean out of Franny's salad, eating half of it and depositing the other half on my butter plate; she picked up a fork and poked at my frogs' legs, but I could tell she was just restless -- she didn't want any.

  'So what did you write today, Franny?' Lilly asked her. Franny had her mouth full, but she didn't hesitate.

  'A whole novel,' Franny said. 'It was truly terrible, but it was something I just had to do. When I finished it, I threw it away.'

  'You threw it away?' Lilly asked. 'Maybe some of it was worth saving.'

  'It was all shit,' Franny said. 'Every word. John read a little of it,' Franny said, 'but I made him give it back so I could throw the whole thing out. I called room service and had them come pick it up.'

  'You had room service throw it away for you?' Lilly said.

  'I couldn't stand to even touch it any longer,' Franny said.

  'How many pages was it?' Lilly asked.

  'Too many,' Franny said.

  'And what did you think of what you read of it?' Lilly asked me.

  'Trash,' I said. 'There's only one author in our family.'

  Lilly smiled, but Franny kicked me under the table; I spilled some wine and Franny laughed.

  'I'm glad you have confidence in me,' Lilly said, 'but whenever I read the ending of The Great Gatsby, I have my doubts. I mean, that's just so beautiful,' Lilly said. 'I think that if I can't ever write an ending that perfect, then there's no point in beginning a book, either. There's no point in writing a book if you don't think it can be as good as The Great Gatsby. I mean, it's all right if you fail -- if the finished book just isn't, somehow, very good -- but you have to believe it can be very good before you start. And sometimes that damn ending to The Great Gatsby just wipes me out before I can get started,' Lilly said; her little hands were fists, and Franny and I realized that Lilly clutched what was left of a dinner roll in one of them. Lilly didn't like to eat, but she could somehow manage to mangle a whole meal while deriving no nourishment from it, whatsoever.

  'Lilly, the worrier,' Franny said. 'You've got to just do it, Lilly,' Franny told her, kicking me under the table again as she said 'do it.'

  I would go back to 222 Central Park South a wounded man. In fact, I wouldn't realize until after our enormous meal was over that I was in no condition to run for about twenty blocks and
a zoo; I doubted that I could even walk. My private parts were in considerable pain. I saw Franny grimace when she got up from the table to get her purse; she was suffering the aftermath of our excesses, too -- it was just as she had planned, of course: we would feel the pain of our lovemaking for days. And that pain would keep us sane; the pain would convince us both that awaiting us in this particular pursuit of each other was our certain self-destruction.

  Franny found some money for a cab in her purse; when she gave me the money, she gave me a very chaste and sisterly kiss. To this day -- between Franny and me -- no other kind of kiss will do. We kiss each other now the way I imagine most brothers and sisters kiss. It may be dull, but it's a way to keep passing the open windows.

  And when I left the Stanhope -- on that night shortly before Christmas, 1964 -- I felt truly safe, for the first time. I felt fairly sure that all of us would keep passing the open windows -- that we were all survivors. I guess, now, that Franny and I had been thinking only of each other, we had been thinking a little too selfishly. I think Franny felt that her invulnerability was infectious -- most people who are inclined toward feelings of invulnerability do think this way, you know. And I tended to try to follow Franny's feelings, as exactly as I could manage.

  I caught a cab going downtown at about midnight and rode it down Fifth Avenue to Central Park South; despite the agony of my private parts, I was sure I could walk to Frank's from there. Also, I wanted to look at the Christmas decorations in front of the Plaza. I thought of walking just a little out of my way so that I could look at the toys displayed in the windows of F. A. O. Schwarz. I thought of how Egg would have loved those windows; Egg had never been to New York. But, I thought, Egg had probably imagined better windows, full of more toys, all the time.

  I limped along Central Park South. Number 222 is between the East Side and the West, but nearer to the West -- a perfect place for Frank, I was thinking; and for us all, for all of us were the survivors of the Symposium on East-West Relations.

  There is a photograph of Freud -- of the other Freud -- in his apartment in Vienna at 19 Berggasse. He is fifty-eight; it is 1914. Freud has an I-told-you-so sort of stare; he looks both cross and worried. He looks as emphatic as Frank and as anxious as Lilly. The war that would begin in August of that year would destroy the Austro-Hungarian Empire; that war would also convince Herr Professor Doktor Freud that his diagnosis of the aggressive and self-destructive tendencies in human beings had been quite correct. In the photograph one can imagine where Freud got his idea that the human nose was 'a genital formation.' Freud got that idea 'from the mirror,' as Frank says. I think Freud hated Vienna; to his credit, our Freud hated Vienna, too, as Franny was the first to point out. Franny also hated Vienna; she would always be a Freudian in her contempt for sexual hypocrisy, for example. And Frank would be a Freudian in the sense that he was anti-Strauss -- 'the other Strauss,' Frank would note; he meant Johann, the very Viennese Strauss, the one who wrote that dippy song: 'Happy is the man who forgets what he cannot change' (Die Fledermaus). But both our Freud and the other Freud were morbidly obsessed with what was forgotten -- they were interested in what was repressed, in what we dreamed. That made them both very un-Viennese. And our Freud had called Frank a prince; Freud had said that no one should call Frank 'queer'; the other Freud had also endeared himself to Frank -- when some mother wrote the good doctor and begged him to cure her son of his homosexuality, Freud brusquely informed her that homosexuality was not a disease; there was nothing to 'cure.' Many of the world's great men, the great Freud told this mother, had been homosexuals.

  'That's right on target!' Frank was fond of shouting. 'Just look at me!'

  'And look at me,' Susie the bear used to say. 'Why didn't he mention some of the world's great women? If you ask me,' Susie used to say, 'Freud's a little suspect.'

  'Which Freud, Susie?' Franny would tease her.

  'Either one,' Susie the bear used to say. 'Take your pick. One of them carried a baseball bat, one of them had that thing on his lip.'

  'That was cancer, Susie,' Frank pointed out, rather stiffly.

  'Sure,' said Susie the bear, 'but Freud called it "this thing on my lip." He didn't call cancer cancer, but he called everyone else repressed.'

  'You're too hard on Freud, Susie,' Franny told her.

  'He's a man, isn't he?' Susie said.

  'You're too hard on men, Susie,' Franny told her.

  'That's right, Susie,' Frank said. 'You ought to try one!'

  'How about you, Frank?' Susie asked him, and Frank blushed.

  'Well,' Frank stammered, 'that's not the way I go -- to be perfectly frank.'

  'I think there's just someone else inside you, Susie,' Lilly said. 'There's someone else inside you who wants to get out.'

  'Oh boy,' Franny groaned. 'Maybe there's a bear inside her that wants to get out!'

  'Maybe there's a man inside her!' Frank suggested.

  'Maybe just a nice woman is inside you, Susie,' Lilly said. Lilly, the writer, would always try to see the heroes in us all.

  That night shortly before Christmas, 1964, I painfully inched my way along Central Park South; I started thinking about Susie the bear, and I remembered another photograph of Freud -- Sigmund Freud -- that I was fond of. In this one, Freud is eighty; in three years he would be dead. He is sitting at his desk at 19 Berggasse; it is 1936 and the Nazis would soon make him abandon his old study in his old apartment -- and his old city, Vienna. In this photograph, a pair of no-nonsense eyeglasses are seriously perched on the genital formation of Freud's nose. He is not looking at the camera -- he is eighty years old, and he hasn't much time; he is looking at his work, not wasting his time with us. Someone is looking at us in this photograph, however. It is Freud's pet dog, his chow named Jo-fi. A chow somewhat resembles a mutant lion; and Freud's chow has that glazed look of dogs who always stare stupidly into the camera. Sorrow used to do that; when he was stuffed, of course, Sorrow stared into the camera every time. And old Dr. Freud's little sorrowful dog is there in the photograph to tell us what's going to happen next; we might also recognize sorrow in the fragility of the knickknacks that are virtually crowding Freud out of his study, off 19 Berggasse and out of Vienna (the city he hated, the city that hated him). The Nazis would stick a swastika on his door; that damn city never liked him. And on June 4, 1938, the eighty-two-year-old Freud arrived in London; he had a year left to live -- in a foreign country. Our Freud, at the time, was one summer away from getting fed up with Earl; he would return to Vienna at the time when all those repressed suicides of the other Freud's day were turning into murderers. Frank has shown me an essay by a professor of history at the University of Vienna -- a very wise man named Friedrich Heer. And that's just what Heer says about the Viennese society of Freud's time (and this may be true of either Freud's time, I think): 'They were suicides about to become murderers.' They were all Fehlgeburts, trying hard to become Arbeiters; they were all Schraubenschlussels, admiring a pornographer.

  They were ready to follow the instructions of a pornographer's dream.

  'Hitler, you know,' Frank loves to remind me, 'had a rabid dread of syphilis. This is ironic,' Frank points out, in his tedious way, 'when you remind yourself that Hitler came from a country where prostitution has always thrived.'

  It thrives in New York, too, you know. And one winter night I stood at the corner of Central Park South and Seventh Avenue, looking into the darkness downtown; I knew the whores were down there. My own sex tingled with pain from Franny's inspired efforts to save me -- to save us both -- and I knew, at last, that I was safe from them; I was safe from both extremes, safe from Franny and safe from the whores.

  A car took the corner at Seventh Avenue and Central Park South a little too fast; it was after midnight and this fast-moving car was the only car I could see moving on either street. A lot of people were in the car; they were singing along with a song on the radio. The radio was so loud that I could hear a very clear snatch of the song, even with the
windows closed against the winter night. The song was not a Christmas carol, and it struck me as inappropriate to the decorations all over the city of New York, but Christmas decorations are seasonal and the song I heard just a snatch of was one of those universally bleeding-heart kind of Country and Western songs. Some trite-but-true thing was being tritely but truthfully expressed. I have been listening, for the rest of my life, for that song, but whenever I think I'm hearing it again, something strikes me as not quite the same. Franny teases me by telling me that I must have heard the Country and Western song called 'Heaven's Just a Sin Away.' And indeed, that one would do; almost any song like that would suffice.

  There was just this snatch of a song, the Christmas decorations, the winter weather, my painful private parts -- and my great feeling of relief, that I was free to live my life now -- and the car that was moving too fast tore by me. When I started across Seventh Avenue, when it looked safe to cross, I looked up and saw the couple coming toward me. They were walking on Central Park South in the direction of the Plaza -- they were headed west to east -- and it was inevitable, I would later think, that we should have met in the middle of Seventh Avenue on the very night of Franny's and my own release. They were a slightly drunk couple, I think -- or at least the young woman was, and the way she leaned on the man made him weave a little, too. The woman was younger than the man; in 1964, at least, we would have called her a girl. She was laughing, hanging on her older boyfriend's arm; he looked about my age -- actually he was a little older. He would have been in his late twenties on this night in 1964. The girl's laughter was as sharp and as splintering of the frigid night air as the sound of very thin icicles breaking away from the eaves of a house encased in winter. I was in a really good mood, of course, and although there was something too educated and insufficiently visceral in the girl's cold, tingling laughter -- and although my balls ached and my cock stung -- I looked up at this handsome couple and smiled.

  We had no trouble recognizing each other -- the man and I. I could never forget the quality of the quarterback in his face, though I had not seen him since that Halloween night on the footpath the football players always used -- and everyone else would have been well advised to let them use it, to let them have it for themselves. Some days when I was lifting weights, I could still hear him say, 'Hey, kid. Your sister's got the nicest ass at this school. Is she banging anybody?'