“I have some advice for you,” I said to him.
“Lay it on me,” he said.
“Lay it on me. How old are you?”
He shook his head. “What’s your advice?”
“You should call your callers Caller. Like, Are you there, Caller?”
“They like to be called by name.”
“Overly familiar,” I said.
“That’s your advice.”
“Yes,” I said.
He was sitting on the edge of the tub then. The ice in his glass, if there had ever been any, had melted. I had no idea what he might do. Kiss me. Put a hand in the water. His eyebrows had peaks. Up close his mustache was even more impressive. I had never kissed a man with a mustache. I still haven’t. It’s not that I’m not attracted to men with mustaches but that men with mustaches aren’t attracted to me.
“Can I have your maraschino cherry?” I asked.
“No maraschino cherry.”
“I love maraschino cherries. All kinds. Sundae kinds, drink kinds, fruit cocktail. Tell me to change my life,” I said to him, and put a damp hand on his knee.
“I won’t tell you that.”
“But I need someone to tell me.”
He put his glass down where the little bottle of shampoo was. Such a big hotel. So many minuscule bottles. “You must change your life,” he said.
“Good but I’m going to need some details.”
“I keep sitting here I’m going to fall into the water.” He stood up. “You know where to find me.”
There isn’t a moral to the story. Neither of us is in the right. Nothing was resolved. Decades later it still bothers me.
No way to tell how much later I awoke, facedown in the bath, and came up gasping. I had fallen asleep or I’d blacked out. It was as though the water itself had woken me up, not the water on the surface of me, which wasn’t enough, not even the water over my face like a hotel pillow, up my nose, in my lungs, but the water that soaked through my bodily tissues, running along fissures and ruining the texture of things, till it finally reached my heart and all my autonomic systems said, Enough, you’re awake now, you’re alive, get out.
That was one of the few times in my life I might have died and knew it. I fell asleep in a bathtub at twenty-seven. I was dragged out to sea as a small child; I spun on an icy road into a break in oncoming traffic on Route 1 north of Rockland, Maine, and miraculously stayed out of the ditch; I did not have breast cancer at twenty-nine, when it was explained to me that it was highly unlikely I would, but if I did, it was unlikely, it would be fatal, almost never at your age, but when at your age, rapid and deadly.
Those are the fake times I almost died. The real ones, neither you nor I ever know about.
The radio shrink would have said, I guess she died of a broken heart, and I would have ended my life and ruined his, for no reason, just a naked drunk dead woman in his room who’d gotten herself naked, and drunk, and dead.
But I wouldn’t see the radio shrink again. I was gasping and out of the tub, and somebody was knocking on the bathroom door. I don’t know why knocking—the door was unlocked—but the water was sloshing onto the floor, the tap was on, it couldn’t have been on all this time, and I would find out it was raining into the bathroom below, I had caused weather, and the radio shrink had packed up and left but had hung the DO NOT DISTURB sign on his door, and had paid for my room. Was gone. Dawn from Baton Rouge was a disembodied voice again, but the redheaded woman from the front desk, Eileen, she was here, slipping across the floor, tossing me a robe, turning off the tap, tidying up my life.
“You’re all right,” she said. I could feel her name tag against my cheek. “You should be ashamed of yourself, but you’re all right now.”
I would like to say this was when my life changed. No. That came pretty quick, within hours, but not yet. I would like to say that the suggestion of kindness took. That I went home and wished everyone well. That I forgave myself and it was as though my fury at myself was the curse: forgiveness transformed me and I became lovely. All that came later, if at all. He was wrong, the shrink: nothing ever happened to me that made me cry more than I did in those weeks of aftermath. I’m one of the lucky ones. I know that. I became kinder the way anybody does, because it costs less and is, nine times out of ten, more effective.
At some point it had snowed. Last night, this morning. It had been hours since I’d been outside. The snow was still white, still falling, the roads with the ruts of tires. Soon the snowplows would be out, scraping down to the pavement. My clothing, left behind by the side of the tub, had gotten sopping wet, so I was wearing a sweat suit abandoned by some other guest at the Narcissus Hotel, found by Eileen, a stranger’s socks, too, my own shoes and winter coat. I had to walk past the house of the couple who’d been necking everywhere, a story that seemed already in the past. By past I mean I regretted it, I was telling the story in my head. The woman I hadn’t been left for drove a little red Honda. There it sat in her driveway, draped in snow. That was all right. It was a common car in those days, and I saw it and its doppelgangers everywhere. Even now a little red Honda seems to have a message for me, though they look nothing like they used to. When will this be over, I wondered as I walked in the snow. The humiliation is what I meant. Everything else is over, and all that’s left is the vehicle of my humiliation.
You would recognize my voice, too. People do, in the grocery store, the airport, over the phone when I call to complain about my gas bill. Your voice, they say, are you—?
I have one of those voices, I always say. I don’t mind if they recognize me but I’m not going to help them do it.
He kept telling me I had to be kind. Why? Why on earth? When life itself was not.
A Splinter
When Lenny was sixteen he ran away from home. Sailed. Bussed, as in bussing tables. Walked, from table to table to the ship’s kitchen and back, round and round the decks of the Queen Elizabeth 2, on its voyage from New York to Southampton. His family knew he’d gone—his father had helped him land the job—they just expected him to turn around with the boat itself, same job, opposite direction, home in two weeks. But instead of spending a single day wandering Southampton he hitchhiked to London and tried to get a job in show business. “How stupid,” his mother said, when she heard the news. She was English. He was not. Or he was, but in a way that only he understood.
He had gone to London because he’d fallen in love with a lady ventriloquist on board the ship. If he could have smuggled himself off in her trunks he would have, but she already had a man packed away. A toy man: his name was Willie Shavers. She also had a parrot, a little girl with braids, and a yellow cat. It was the parrot she was famous for: the parrot’s name was Squawkanna, and with Lottie—Lottie was the woman, Lottie Stanley—she’d had a hit song, though that had been ten years before, in the mid-1970s. Famous for a summer. If you heard her name and were English, you’d say, Who? and if you heard the song you’d say, Oh, right. You might wince. It wasn’t a good song. On board the QE2, Lenny had watched Lottie’s act every single night. She was plump in her sequined gowns, and wore her blond hair in an old-fashioned hairdo, with lots of hair spray and a series of paste tiaras. She’d given him her calling card with a flourish, amused by his attention, and now here he was, ringing her bell at the address in Ladbroke Grove, being shown in by the doorman and sent down the hallway to her ground-floor flat.
The hairdo had been a wig, the glamorous face largely makeup, the cheekbones trompe l’oeil. But she was there, like a developing photograph, younger than he’d thought, plusher. She might have been the age of his oldest sister, Eloise, who was thirty-two.
“Huh,” she said, when she saw him. “You don’t belong here.”
“I do,” he said. Then, “I want to learn how to be a ventriloquist.”
She frowned at him. “Good afternoon.” Her voice was different on its own, singsongier.
“Good afternoon,” he said. “Could you teach me?”
&n
bsp; “Really?”
“Yeah,” he said.
“Don’t tell me how old you are.”
“I’m sixteen,” he said, knowing he didn’t look it. His body hadn’t changed yet, but his soul had: this year he had developed delusions of grandeur and a morbid nature and a willingness to die for love; next year, pubic hair and broad shoulders.
“Christ,” she said. “Come in.”
Her furniture looked serious, antique: she was a grown-up. The sofa was red velvet. He could feel the wood at its heart, as though, if she manipulated it, she could give it a voice and a personality. He thought she was a very good ventriloquist, though he didn’t know much about what that entailed. She regarded her puppets with indifference, as though their energy tired her; he’d stared at her mouth, waiting to see her lips move. Eventually they would, a little, gleamingly, like a thin necklace you weren’t sure a girl was wearing: you looked for it to appear for the pleasure of having it disappear just afterward.
“I’m not too young,” he said.
“If anything you’re too old. To be a vent. Most boys pick it up ten or so. Where are your parents?”
“Ithaca.”
“Greece?”
“Ithaca, New York,” he clarified.
“Yes, I thought you were American.”
He decided not to argue with that, though he disagreed. True, he’d been born in the United States, and raised there, but his parents were English, his older sisters were English, every single person he was related to was English. A dog is a dog though born on a sheep farm, he told himself.
She said, “Was anybody with you on the boat?”
“No.”
She extracted a cigarette from a tin box and lit it with a large chrome lighter that gave off the scent of fuel. In her act, she struck matches on Willie Shavers’s cheek, then smoked while he talked. “You didn’t stow away,” she said, leaking smoke.
He shook his head.
“But you want to stow away here.”
“I can’t go back,” he said.
“To Ithaca, New York,” she said, with an amused expression. “No? Why?”
He had his reasons, but they were ineffable. The fact was he’d planned from the first day to walk off the boat in Southampton, track down one of his sisters—all three of them lived in England: Katie in Sussex, Fiona in Bath, and Eloise in a village in Norfolk called Little Snoring—and ask for sanctuary. But his sisters would no doubt fling him back to his parents. He felt the nap of the velvet sofa, toed the herringbone parquet floor. One of the planks was loose under his sneakered foot, and he knew he could kick it up and out. He wanted to take it with him. All around were pictures of Lottie Stanley with famous people he didn’t recognize. He could only tell they were famous, and English: the sideburns, the teeth, the ears. Americans weren’t better-looking, they were only more ashamed. He stood to go.
She said, “Sit down, my darling,” and appraised him through her winding smoke. On the ship he’d stared at her face for an hour a night, every night for seven. He wasn’t used to being looked at, or being called my darling. “I’ve got a home I can’t go back to myself. Can you pay weekly rent?”
“A little,” he said. He hadn’t been paid for his work on the boat—that would have happened on the return—but in his knapsack he had a stack of traveler’s checks, his entire savings, withdrawn the day he left.
“Remind me your name?”
“Lenny.”
“Oh no,” she said. She reached over to an ashtray on a side table to stab out her cigarette, the same gesture she used to punctuate all conversations, including the ones she had onstage with her several varieties of self. Her hair was a strange tweedy combination of dark and light. “We’ve already got a Lenny. What’s your last name?”
“Valert.”
“Jack,” she said. “Jack Valert. Suits you.”
So he was Jack.
He called his parents six nights later, two in the morning on Lottie’s phone, with the knowledge that it would be cheaper at that hour though possibly still astronomically expensive. He’d never made a long-distance phone call in his life. It was the day before he was due to return.
“How are you?” his mother said. “Shattered, I expect.”
“I’m in London.”
There was a pause. He wondered how much each second would cost. He would have to pay Lottie back.
“Why are you in London?” his mother said at last.
“I’m fine. I’ll come back in time for school.”
“Better had,” said his mother. He could hear his father in the background, and his mother said, her hand over the phone lightly, so he could hear, “It’s fine, it’s Lenny, it’s long-distance.”
He’d been Jack for less than a week but Lenny seemed lives ago. Of course his parents wouldn’t be alarmed. His youngest older sister had been twelve when they’d moved to New York, already boarding at Downe House in Berkshire. He had a faint memory of her as a womanish child or childish woman during school breaks. Fiona and Eloise, too, had gone to boarding school, come to the States for the summers and winter hols, and then graduated and gone on to English lives. Months went by when his parents didn’t see the girls. Only Lenny had been raised as an American, sent by his parents to public school—public in the American sense, less impressive, as everything was, in the American sense—as an experiment or a form of surrender. They regarded him as a sort of hanger-on with a pot-metal accent.
“Come when you’re able,” his mother said to him. “Do let us know your plans.”
Lottie gave him her guest room, a narrow space at the back of the flat, with a window at the foot of the bed and a large dresser with a mirror along one wall. “For practice,” she said. “That’s the only way to learn, practice in the mirror. I can’t teach you. I can give you this book, and you can read it, but you’ll have to put in the hours.”
“Am I really too old?”
“No,” she said. “You’re young yet. You might make it.”
“Were you young?”
“I was, yeah. Ten. My brother had an Archie Andrews figure he’d lost interest in. It’s like a language or an instrument. Easier when you yourself believe in all the mysteries of the universe. But not impossible afterward. Here.” From the top dresser drawer she got out a puppet shaped like a hen, brown with a yellow beak and a drooping red comb.
He put it on his hand. It was tight across the knuckles and abrasive around the wrist.
She turned him by the shoulders so they faced the mirror. Without puppet or pretense, she began to talk without moving her lips. “The hardest letter to say is B. Bottle of beer. The boy bought a ball. Barnum brought barnacles by Boston.” Then her mouth was mobile again. “The trick is you don’t really say it. You say D, but you think B.”
What he had loved about watching her on the boat: the hot cider of her voice against the dry toast of Willie Shavers’s, her measured exasperation with him. No: what he loved was big Willie Shavers himself, the glass eyes that looked from side to side, his levering eyebrows, the mystery of his mouth with its stiff lips and painted tongue. Squawkanna the parrot bored him; ditto the yellow tomcat, whose name was Captain Sims. This nameless hen, too. They were mere puppets, animals, sweet, but Willie Shavers unsettled Lenny—Jack, now, he agreed, it suited him—Willie Shavers upset Jack in a way that felt very much like love. He realized, in this small room, shirtless, looking at himself in the mirror, that it was Willie he had come for. Willie, who was a bully but yet could be bullied.
Lottie collected his rent and assigned him chores. She was astounded by what he didn’t know. “Rinse out the tub after a bath!” she said. Also, “Sit down while you eat.” Also, “It’s a small flat, nothing can be higgledy-piggledy.” Also, “Time to draw the curtains.” She believed in putting the physical world in order in a way he would have thought impossible. She was a genius at it. She paid him for lugging her equipment to performances, took the money back for rent and groceries. Her bathroom was long, with a
navy-blue toilet and a navy-blue tub with no shower and an entire mirrored wall: maybe she practiced her Bs and Vs in every room. He hated standing up from a bath to catch sight of his dripping, naked body, the acne he’d acquired down his breastbone, the allover insufficiency of him. Nights he sat with Lottie on the sofa and they watched TV. English television was shockingly dull. One night they showed a documentary about the ‘60s. “I slept with her,” said Lottie, all of a sudden, when they showed footage of a clothing designer with a short black bob.
“Oh!” said Jack.
“I slept with everyone for a while,” she said. Even at home, she favored a kind of dated glitz, rough blue lamé blouses and toreador pants. Her feet were bare, her toenails coral. “Men and women. What about you?”
It occurred to him that he’d shipped himself off to another country so that he could attend to his late puberty alone, like the injured animal he was. Why boys joined the navy in the old days. Why anyone went to sea.
“That’s all right,” she said. “You don’t need to know.”
Even later he could not decide whether she was trying to seduce him or be a listening friend.
Think of B while saying D. Think B, say D. But all his life he could only say what he thought. He never got any better at it.
He practiced with the hen, whom he loathed. He wouldn’t do it in front of Lottie. “The boy bought a ball,” he said to his reflection. The doy dought a doll. You could try it with Gs, too. The goy got a gall. That at least was a sentence. Maybe he hated the whole enterprise. With the hen on his hand he could feel half his soul, more, leak from his body into the puppet, Siamese twins, the hen the twin with the major organs. The thing he could never do—he saw, looking in the mirror—was hold still. The hen spoke. Jack raised his eyebrows, pecked at the air. He had no talent for making believe. He could not stop being himself.
He could hear his father say it. You just can’t stop being yourself, can you?
He’d thought he’d feel at home in England. In upstate New York they all were foreigners: despite his accent, Jack’s childhood clothes were English, ordered through the mail, and his packed lunches, and his particular snobberies that drove his classmates crazy. He did not have friends at school because he felt superior to everyone, and also inferior.
The Souvenir Museum Page 6
