The Third Hotel

by Laura van Den Berg

  Richard, she said. Come look.

  He stood behind her, his hands resting on the shelf of her hips. He reached around and pushed the window open, letting in the mineral air. The music floated up to their room and she could swear she heard Roy Orbison in Spanish. They began to sway like the couples in the beige tracksuits, the back of her head against his warm chest. Little hairs were still stuck to her collarbone. He plucked them up one by one and cast them out.

  Do your remember our honeymoon? she asked.

  Of course, Richard said.

  For their honeymoon, she’d looked into the bed-and-breakfast her parents used to run in Georgia, but it had been razed and converted into a luxury hotel that cost five hundred dollars a night, with private cabanas on the beach. She had wanted to show him the southern coast, and so they went north to Myrtle Beach instead.

  On a morning walk, they found a hundred-dollar bill on the beach. They picked it up and raised it to the sun like jewelers examining a stone. In San Diego, the rent was steep. She was between jobs and her husband was saddled with student loans—and, she would discover six months into their marriage, major credit card debt.

  We sure didn’t budget for this, Clare had said as they examined the watermark.

  They pocketed the bill and walked on. A little while later they found another one blowing around in the sand, crisp and green and fresh-smelling, like it had just been printed. They felt sure these bills must be fake, even though the watermarks looked authentic enough. Who could possibly lose two hundred dollars?

  The weather had been chilly, the beach quiet; on their way back they didn’t pass anyone searching for lost money. They took the bills straight to a local bank, where a teller confirmed their authenticity. You just found these? the teller had asked, his voice laden with suspicion. They burst back out into the day feeling as though the universe had bestowed on them an omen of great prosperity.

  That, or the universe is telling us it’s going to be an expensive divorce, Clare had joked, and they’d both laughed. It was only funny because neither of them had enough money to warrant an expensive divorce.

  We bought overpriced margaritas, Clare added. We promised to put the rest in savings.

  By the window Richard pulled her close.

  In her husband’s notebook, she had come across a quote from Tzvetan Todorov on the fantastic: “In a world which is indeed our world, the one we know, a world without devils, sylphides, or vampires, there occurs an event which cannot be explained by the laws of this same familiar world.” In Myrtle Beach, a world of serendipity had opened up within the familiar, a world that defied the usual laws. She thought such a thing might be happening now, a world opening within another.

  Do you think we would have had an expensive divorce? Richard said.

  Expensive divorces are for people with children or lots of assets. She snapped her fingers. Ours would have been quick and clean.

  She told Richard that she had a theory about marriage, though in truth it was less a theory than an idea that had sprung itself upon her moments ago. The ideal marriage would last for one season. You could have many marriages over the course of your life, if you wanted. Some would be better than others, maybe a person would decide they liked winter marriages the best and summer marriages the least or no marriages at all. The point was that you would get out before you had a chance to change.

  There’s a name for that, Richard said. It’s called a fling.

  No, no, said Clare. This would have an entirely different feeling.

  A season is no guarantee, Richard said. A person could change in a week or in five minutes’ time. Imagine if a boulder came smashing through this window and knocked you straight off this mountaintop. Would you not be changed by the time you reached the bottom?

  I might be dead, Clare said.

  He spun her around. He clasped her hand, raised it toward the ceiling. Now they were really dancing.

  Yes, he said. And that would be quite the change indeed.

  * * *

  They fell asleep together under the thin sheets, the curtains closed tight, the room quiet and dark, but Clare woke in a different place. Something in her bodily wiring had gone wrong. One minute she could not even raise her pinkie finger. The next she felt like she would explode if she did not start running down the beige halls. She was shaking and feverish, burning up and freezing cold. She had once again been loosed in the dark forest and this time she had run straight into a lightless pit with no walls and no floor. She was falling and falling.

  She struck herself hard in the face. A fire spread across her skin and then evaporated.

  She crashed against the pit’s hard bottom, knocking the wind out. She pinched her dry nipples. She squeezed her scaled elbows. She twisted around on the hard mattress. Her calves were cramping. She imagined the eels were back, squirming around inside the muscle.

  She struck herself in the face again. She knocked the molar loose and swallowed it whole.

  She reached for the man sleeping beside her. The sandpapered knuckles, the dry palms. She spent a long time listening to him breathe. This man was Richard, they were on the island of Cuba, in a hotel known for ecotours and hydromassage—how could this be? It could not be, he was not here, it was impossible, no one could conjure such a thing.

  This was the destination her mind kept reaching.

  The more she listened to him breathe, or pretend to breathe, the more she felt the widow within, her former self, from her former life, thrashing underneath the surface. The woman who listened to the surgeon explain about the ruptured spleen, the woman who called his parents and then her own, who spoke the unspeakable into the phone, the woman who selected a coffin, the woman who had been given a shovel at the funeral and was asked to participate in smothering her husband in dirt.

  The woman who complied.

  With each movement of the shovel she had felt she was committing a crime against him.

  The widow thrashing within knew she was lying next to an abomination, a delusion of grief, and that any moment she would wake up next to a corpse or alone and so she straddled him. She clawed his shorn hair, her nails piercing his scalp. She groped his face. She wrapped her hands around his throat and squeezed. You’re dead, she kept saying, No one is in here. But there were his eyes popping open, wide and afraid. There he was twisting and kicking underneath her. There was his voice shouting her name. She gasped and let go. The wild sweep of his arm knocked her off the bed and they lay panting—husband and wife, assailant and victim, living and not-quite-dead—in the same room until she felt the heat of morning rise up through the wood floor.

  PART 3

  LAWS UNKNOWN

  The traveler was not a peaceful presence in the world. The thought had crossed Clare’s mind at the Seahorse, after seeing rooms torn to bits by guests (drawers hanging out like dislocated jaws, shower curtain rods pulled down, soiled balls of sheets—Get the gloves, her mother would say) or when a guest left a room so pristine it reeked of a person attempting to pave over misdeed. Like a hotel room was just another body to fuck up. Threatening reviews posted online: “I WOULD BURN THIS PLACE IF I COULD.” The moment the plane touched down, the moment the traveler was handed a room key, they were compromised. I’m not myself here. Clare had been sold this line and she had sold it. The traveling self was supposed to be temporary, disposed of when it was time to go home—therefore, how could this self be held responsible? But maybe a person became even more themselves when away, liberated from their usual present tense and free to lie. Maybe travel sent all that latent, ancient DNA swimming to the surface. Was that a family of five or a band of marauding conquistadors. Was that a wife or a murderer.

  Grief could take the form of violence too, could give a false sense of permission, erase the world around, and that was what frightened Clare most about violence, how transferable it was. After her college boyfriend sent her down the stairs, she had not wished him violence in return. She had not even wanted to file a complaint. S
he had only wanted to move on, to not disturb the soil. Yet when she passed a man climbing a tall ladder, months later, she had wanted to grab the legs and give them a very hard shake, the desire so powerful it had felt like a command.

  Lately she had been troubled by the thought that perhaps a life amounted to a sequence of critical looks, and one’s time on earth was measured by the willingness to look in the right direction at the right moment. Clearly she lacked such a willingness: her lens had cut away at the wrong times, pivoted in the wrong directions. Systems were hard to shed, and that included the system of her own misdirection, which had taken her entire lifetime to construct. Not what you said or even what you did but where you looked and where you refused to—perhaps that was how a person determined if they were brave or honest or even just reasonably good. The eye was silent and therefore frightfully truthful. The eye did not have to share what it saw with anyone, after all; it did not have to tell a soul.

  * * *

  From the floor, she watched Richard lace up his shoes. She was perpendicular to the bed and could only see his feet, his wrists, his nimble fingers. She blinked and blinked, a lens uselessly shuttering, her cheek pressed flat to the wood. The points of her bones were tender, her muscles jellied. Her brain had been replaced with an orb of steel wool. Her stomach felt like she had spent the night swallowing rocks.

  She took a personal inventory and found she was no longer concerned about the suited man with his Pocket Atlas of Remote Islands.

  That man is gone, she said aloud. I killed him in the night.

  The next thing she knew Richard was standing and walking out, his movement summoning her to rise.

  Every motion was a fragment, one scarcely connected to the next. She unpeeled herself from the wood floor a single limb at a time. She collected her clothing scattered around the scentless room. She found her wristwatch on the bedside table and was shocked to discover that it was noon, that time had slithered from morning into day. She sat on the edge of the bed to dress. First her watch and her socks and her sneakers, then her clothes. All her movements were out of order.

  * * *

  She raced down the massive stone staircase and through the lobby with the bright art, her backpack banging against her shoulders, and past the patients congregating on the green lawn. They reminded her of very tall birds, flocking to the grass. Despite being surrounded by endless miles of hiking trails, she had yet to see someone in a beige tracksuit actually leave the property.

  She went down a steep driveway and then followed a painted wood sign to a trailhead. She spotted Richard in the distance, loping up a brown dirt path halved by a thin spine of grass.

  Hey, she said when she caught up to him. Hey.

  He did not acknowledge her. Movement had been a wall for her husband too, she supposed. During a fit of furious cleaning, she could hover over him and ask any question in the world and it was as though he had erected a shield off which all language bounced; nothing could get through.

  Stop, she said. Just stop.

  The earth trembled. A tour group on horseback appeared behind them, the animals moving in a slow trot, the riders bouncing in heavy leather saddles. Clare and Richard stepped to the side, into a shallow ditch. She glimpsed a light pink ring around her husband’s neck. A man on a black horse held a small camcorder to his face, the lens swooping across Clare and Richard as he narrated his journey aloud. The guide waved as the group ascended the trail. Richard walked on, Claire in pursuit, moving deeper into a forest lush with vegetation, the trail bordered by bamboo and palms. Small birds rustled around in thickets of vine. She heard something rattling in the grass. Some branches were straight as arrows, others serpentine. They passed bushels of pink brugmansias, the inverted trumpets swaying in the wind. Brugmansias were popular in some parts of Florida; the flowers had hallucinogenic properties. A rope bridge led them across a shallow stream and then farther uphill. The path turned rocky and steep. Through the branches the sky was such an intense shade of blue it looked almost fake. A hoax sky.

  She heard a mechanical screeching and glimpsed a body in a harness skating across the treetops, and remembered the brochures for ziplining she’d seen in the lobby of the Cure Hotel. Ziplines, cruise ships. What was it about tourists and always wanting to be physically above things?

  All the while she felt time ticking down, a heavy pulse in her gut.

  They walked until they reached a shallow pool of water that led to a vast limestone cave. Clare felt a little stunned by the cave’s beauty, the marvel of it hidden in the trees. It moved her and pained her to see a thing so colossal and so fragile, with its glistening spindles of stalagmite. The mouth was very tall and very slender, the gap shielded by long, thin vines with small, pointy leaves.

  A black cable had been secured to the rock, to guide visitors in their climb to the entrance. Richard sloshed through the water and grabbed hold of the cable. Clare watched him pull himself up one rock and then another before disappearing through the tall gap in the limestone. Her own ascent was not so graceful. The cord felt like it had been greased. She scrabbled along the limestone, scraping her knees. Her backpack tugged at her shoulders, arguing in favor of gravity. She heard the sound of falling water. She smelled wet stone and was relieved to have been returned to the world of scent. Once she was inside she found Richard sitting on a large rock, hunched and panting for air. The dead might get to play by their own rules, but even they were not immune to altitude.

  She stood at the edge of the cave, her back to the long mouth. Beyond Richard she could make out a dense valley of shadow, and she was uncertain of how much closer she wanted to get.

  I want to tell you a story, Richard said in the cave.

  His voice was like a glass of cold water poured over her head.

  She sat beside him on the rock. She dusted the sweat from her cropped hair.

  Years ago, when they were living in San Diego, he had a colleague in the film department who, after his wife died, hired a woman to take her place. Not all the time—just select weekday evenings, the occasional Sunday afternoon. He was not privy to the exact terms, but in this man’s presence she went by the same name as his dead wife. She dressed like his wife; she had gotten the same haircut. From office windows, colleagues had seen them strolling around campus, arm in arm, just as this man used to do with his real wife, before she died. It was all very peculiar, but people were slow to criticize—he was, after all, in a state of mourning. But then there were rumors that he was mistreating this woman. He had been seen berating her in restaurants, pulling her roughly down streets. It was unclear if these were things he had done to his former wife, and somehow managed to hide, or things he had always wanted to do but never had. One night, the police came to his home. The rumor was that he had started slapping her during sex and things had gotten worse from there; it sounded like he had nearly tried to kill her, though in the end she declined to press charges. After that, no one saw the stand-in wife anymore. The professor retired and put his house up for sale, his current whereabouts unknown.

  This is not a true story, Clare said. I was in San Diego with you. How come I never heard anything about a madman with a stand-in wife?

  It happened a few years before we arrived, he said. I know because I took over the professor’s office.

  That office had been located on the basement level, one barred window to let in minimal light, not enough to keep a philodendron alive. To her, it was a nondescript space, no obvious signs of menace, though now she wondered if this is where the department had stashed the professors they did not particularly care for.

  My point here is that the grieving are very dangerous, Richard said. They are like injured animals with fearsome claws, bloodied and pushed into a corner.

  Okay, said Clare.

  They are deranged, he continued. They shouldn’t be let out of the house. Immediately after the funeral some sort of waiting period should be instituted, a period of confinement. It is a matter of public safety.
/>   Clare lifted her right leg and stepped down on his foot.

  She said, Your point has been made.

  From the inside the cave entrance was guarded by long limestone stalagmites that cast shadows onto the rocks. She felt like they were sitting within a creature, in the soft tissue just behind the jaw.

  I should have expected something like this, Richard said. I should have been prepared. For months and months, you’d been acting so strangely.

  I had been acting strangely?

  You were the one, she said. You were the one who started acting strangely.

  The conversation made her feel like she was standing in front of the cave wall and pushing against the stone; something about it was too big, too solid and difficult to move.

  Richard told her that wasn’t right at all. He had only been trying to get to the bottom of what was happening to his wife. Did she really not remember how, in February, she came back from Omaha and didn’t speak a complete sentence for days? At first he thought she might be having an affair, though later he began to suspect something even more complicated and grave. This evolution in suspicion started after she fell into a similar state of speechlessness upon receiving a piece of mail from her father. A thin envelope that she opened in the bathroom. She’d refused to say what had been inside.

  No, Clare said. This is not right at all.

  It is, he insisted.

  No. She covered her eyes.

  I am not capable.

  No decision has been made.

  Richard pulled her hand away from her face, one finger at a time.

  * * *

  They walked deeper into the cave, climbing over sharp rocks and ledges of limestone, stepping across blankets of pebble, the surfaces glossed by water, and silver wedges of silt. She had expected the cave to grow darker, and that with each step they would be committing to move into this darkness together, no place or maybe every place to hide now, but instead currents of natural light brightened the cave floor. The sound of falling water grew louder, a rushing that burned between her ears. She thought that this was what the last year of their marriage had been like. A deafening current all around, drowning out their small and deceitful voices. She watched their hunched shadows creep across the stone walls.