The Hotel Neversink

by Adam O'Fallon Price

  9. Rachel

  1979

  On the last weekend of the month, Rachel Sikorsky went to the city. It was a long-standing tradition, a marital agreement based originally on Len’s tacit understanding that, in order for her to live in the boondocks, she needed to still feel connected to her family and her past. As the years had gone on, it had become more simply an escape: from the endless demands of the foundering hotel; from the provincial dullness of Liberty, a place enlivened only by the ambient dread of a killer lurking somewhere in its gray midst; from the love of her wonderful husband, multiply exhausting in its relentlessness and the guilt it produced when she felt drained rather than nurtured by it; and, most of all, from herself. And indeed, from the moment she arrived at Liberty station, black overnight bag by her side, until she stepped off the train two days later, she did feel like someone else—a tourist.

  She felt this way in two senses. First, in terms of how dramatically New York—crystallized in her mind at eighteen—had changed during the decade she’d spent in the hinterlands. Her old neighborhood, previously a stronghold of quaint continental bohemianism, had become overrun by homosexuals, supplanting the wispy-cheeked boys of her youth who’d strummed guitars on the steps of the Gaslight or Café Wha? On one visit, she saw two men holding hands and kissing in front of a bar, an unthinkable sight even five years before. The whole city had become more crime-ridden, darker, seedier, and sexier as well, and she felt old at times, as out of touch as any gawking Midwesterner.

  But in a deeper and more elusive sense, it also seemed on these visits that she was touring her potential lives, all the former possible versions of herself that had been preempted by the choices she’d made ten years earlier: Len, motherhood, the Neversink. For these thirty-six hours once a month, it was as though all of these different, dead versions of her came to life, doing away with the real one.

  She felt it from the moment she set foot on the train, a shiver of potentiality, and as the scenic monotony of the valley gave way to suburbs and the first concrete encroachments of the city—as they passed beneath the North Bronx bridge graffitied with the words GALAXY KREW—she felt increasingly like a person returning to, not visiting the city: the prodigal daughter. Sitting on her stool at Sabatini’s, stirring her drink, looking out the window, with its backward-stenciled name, at the hectic crush of Forty-Second Street, tracing with her toe the hexagonal black-and-white tiles of the old-fashioned floor, making conversation with the courtly barman in his heavy knight’s vest of gold-black brocade, she wondered who he thought she was. A lawyer with a drinking problem? A Park Avenue mother taking a break from her shopping? Or just another tourist?

  While she was hailing a cab on Park Avenue, the electric feeling entered her—like a charge released into her tensed calves by the coursing energy of the street—that she wasn’t herself any longer. Sliding over onto the cool leather, speaking the familiar address to the cab driver, his slight nod and the meter flag saying here is another someone going somewhere. The flashing eyes of pedestrians that momentarily held then released her, the disembodiment they conferred as, for a second, she became the thing being seen and vanishing, making room for the next thing. In the city, she became everyone, anyone, no one.

  At her parents’ apartment, she became the dutiful daughter, perhaps the child who had never left. Ten minutes spent there brought on a drugged feeling, a sense-memory of adolescence, of being clogged with hormones and wracked by a restlessness that turned to lethargy at a moment’s notice. It was not actually unpleasant. Unpacking in the guest room—her old room, with its antique wainscoting and crown molding like the edges of a birthday cake—this lassitude would creep over her, and she would wonder why she’d bothered doing anything. She could still be living there, eating her mother’s brisket twice a week, reading Le Carré or Cruz Smith in the study with her father while Dvořák wheezed from the enormous stainless-steel record player, petting their immortal tabby, Frisco, and taking evening walks over to Washington Square.

  On these walks, she became the single woman, the self-sufficient seeker, a person who, at thirty, might still be finishing her PhD. This woman would have made more of her time at Vassar, would have spent nights in the cozy old library with its creeping ivy and fathomless stacks, would have sought out mentorship and guidance, and would have graduated with honors and an eye toward advanced study; this woman would not have spent four years preoccupied by romance, smuggling in her illicit lover and fiancé-to-be, talking on the dormitory phone until two most mornings, mooning her way toward a C average.

  At the Plaza, on Saturday nights, she became a married woman again, but a different married woman in a different marriage. This woman, sipping a glass of white wine in the corner of the lounge, seated like Marie Antoinette in an ornate gilt-backed chair, was married to one of the men who passed by. That one: the older graybeard in a sleek suit—a financial analyst and expert squash player who gave head with the desperate greed of a starving dog thrown prime rib-eye. No, that one—the younger man checking in at the front desk—an unassuming tax lawyer of great secret ambition, the kind of cautious man who just needs an intelligent, bold partner to help him inherit the earth. Or someone else, any of these men, Jewish or not, old or young, married, unmarried, fat, thin, vigorous, lame, handsome, harelipped, hairy as a mountain ape or bald as a newborn babe, she married them all. Whoever they were, and whatever their faults may have been, they all shared the same vital virtue: they were not her actual husband.

  And yet she didn’t want to cheat on Len. She had, in fact, been afforded that opportunity a few months before and had turned it down. One of these men, one of her phantom husbands, had brought a dewy glass of scotch over and stood beside her. He was handsome at a glance, very handsome, though he became less handsome with sustained inspection. His features were exaggerated and overripe, like fruit gone just past sweet to cloying. He said his name was Daniel.

  “I’m Rebecca.” It was a name she’d prepared on the off chance anything like this happened. She’d thought it was to protect the sanctity of her real life, though, saying it, she wasn’t so sure it wasn’t the other way around.

  “Do you mind if I join you for a minute?”

  “It’s a free country.”

  “So they say.”

  He sat in a chair diagonal to hers. On the glass table between them, facedown, lay the book she’d been reading, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. He picked up the edge and laughed. “Not what I expected.”

  “Oh? What did you expect?”

  “A pretty woman by herself in the hotel lounge? Probably Cosmo or Vogue? Kidding.” He held his hands up and she found herself charmed by him in spite of the corniness, or perhaps because of his willingness to put on a corny show for her benefit.

  “Funny stuff.”

  “But really, Soviet spy novels at eight thirty on a Saturday?”

  “What can I say? I’m into political intrigue.”

  He asked her about herself, and she told him: English professor at Brown (Princeton seemed too brazen) in the city for a conference; traveler, this year to Buenos Aires (how she longed to go there, poring over travel brochures in her few unoccupied moments); dog lover (Len had been denying her a retriever puppy for ages, saying it was wasteful buying purebreds, saying they were too busy right now to train a dog, but they were always too busy for that and lots of other things, besides); and last, unmarried (the ring sat in her room, but this was due to a heat rash encircling her finger, the boiling city in July).

  “Never marry,” he said. “Take it from me.”

  “You’re divorced?”

  “Twice. Never again.” He sipped his drink and his big lips glistened, obscene and fascinating.

  “Even if you met the perfect woman?”

  “Even so. I’d still be an imperfect man.”

  “So the divorces were your fault?”

  “Oh, yeah. Not entirely, of course, but yeah. I’m an army brat, there’s this sense of impermanence with everythi
ng. I want something permanent until I have it, then I get spooked. So I keep the door cracked. Just a little, but it’s enough.”

  “Sounds terrible.”

  “Well, you know, I’m not sorry I got married to them.”

  “I thought you said never marry.”

  “Did I? This isn’t my first drink tonight.”

  He bought them another round, and then it was nearly one in the morning. Their conversation had felt conspiratorial from the outset, and they sat close to each other, as though trading secrets, though mostly it was talk about his business here (boring money stuff, he said) and his life in Miami, where he’d moved seven years earlier. He came up to the city about once a month to keep an eye on things, otherwise he worked with a phone to his ear and his eye on the blue sliver of ocean he could see from his office window.

  With a childish fist over his mouth, he yawned and said, “Listen, I have a meeting at ten in the morning, and I’ve got to hit the sack. I’m going to be very forward here, because I like you and I think you like me. I hope you don’t find this kind of thing insulting; I don’t get the feeling you’re the kind of person who would. I’m in room 485. If you want, come and knock, I’ll be up for a little while; I have half a bottle of some pretty good whiskey up there. But I’m not waiting up, either—I’ll be asleep inside of twenty minutes. So, no pressure, but it would be fun. And either way, it was really good to meet you, Rebecca.”

  She sat there those twenty minutes, watching the ormolu clock behind the bar as though it were an official countdown, finishing her drink, frightened by how easily this alternate person had emerged. It was as though the details of this life had nested in her for years, waiting for the perfect moment to fly from her mouth and soar to and fro in the air around her disbelieving ears, stunning her with a barnstorm ballet of deceit. After thirty minutes had passed, she took the elevator up to the fourth floor and walked to her room. She got undressed, thinking of the stretch of hallway—thirty feet or so—separating the two of them. Lying in bed, she vowed never to lie about who she was ever again.

  The summer faded, and with it, Daniel. The memory soon felt like a story someone had told her once, perhaps after a few drinks, while she’d half listened. There was just too much to do at the hotel. Business slowed in autumn—business had slowed in general, especially with what had happened to Alice, and the discovery of the boy’s body—but as it did, the hotel entered a hectic annual phase of repair and renewal. Walls were repainted where children’s fingers had smudged them with chocolate or jelly; the pools, inside and out, had their expensive yearly servicing, including a retiling of the lip (especially odious this year was the drain cleaning, a chore that had always fallen to Michael, the longtime maintenance man who’d recently left—Rachel found herself bent over the pool’s edge, fighting off nausea as she tugged on a stubborn hank of hair); the golf course was reseeded and landscaped; the kitchen appliances required deep-cleaning and parts replacement; the staff received their performance reviews and a couple would probably have to be let go (always with the accompanying talk of Jeanie and her loyalty, though this, like so many things about the old woman, who continued her decade-long decline in the cottage’s guest room, was mythological—Rachel knew for a fact she’d sacked a light-fingered maid in the fifties). October through December, the hotel was like a patient on bed rest, requiring constant care and attention, to be disturbed as little as possible.

  She continued making her trips every month but no longer felt she was exploring alternate identities. She was who she was: a mother and wife taking a monthly break with her husband’s blessing. On a brisk March day, she emerged from Grand Central, her face stung by a whipping wind. Sabatini’s was empty, save for a large woman at the end of the bar picking ice from a glass and chewing it a cube at a time. Rachel ordered her gin and tonic and relaxed as the liquor spread through her veins. Looking out the front window of the restaurant, she complacently thought about what she might buy on Saturday—an antique chamfer-edged mirror she’d had her eye on at a West Broadway furniture store. A man passed by, his hat down, and a strange shiver went through her. She worried, not for the first time, that she might be getting sick with whatever it was the children had been passing back and forth the last three months.

  Her parents were well, the brisket was good, Frisco was old but hanging in there. She slept soundly. The next day, reading with her father, she finished Smiley’s People. Sighing with pleasure, as though she’d completed a difficult and important project, she closed the book. She scanned the nearby shelves and picked out a worn annotated copy of The Brothers Karamazov. This, she thought, this is the next thing, this is good. The room was warm and snug. She yawned virtuously, read the first page twice, and woke up three hours later.

  After a little light shopping with her mother, they parted ways and she installed herself at the Plaza. She ate dinner and considered having a drink at the bar, but the look of it—brightly lit, lined with four men in nearly identical gray business tweed—depressed her, and she returned to her room. She called Len and was apprised of the day’s non-events (burst pipe, Javits out sick with the flu). As always, his deep voice reassured her; as always, he missed her. She read a bit more of the borrowed book, then turned off the lights.

  Then she was at the Neversink, and it was empty, except for her. Room to room she went, calling for Len, but there was no one there. Passing a wall mirror, she saw that she was a young girl again, and she was suddenly afraid, certain she’d been abandoned. Then she heard voices coming from the floor below, and so she went down there, into the Great Hall, where a crowd was milling around. Some kind of celebration, though no one looked especially happy—they wore black and had expressions of grim forbearance. She heard Len’s voice and pushed through the crowd, toward the middle. A woman stepped aside and she could see Len, but it wasn’t Len. Another man she’d seen before. She saw his face. It was—

  —a nightmare of some sort. She sat up in bed with the distinct feeling someone had been in the room with her, though that was impossible. She tried to remember the dream, but its wispy contours were already fleeing like a tattered ghost, escaping under the edge of the door, where a yellow band of light came from the hall. She checked the time: 1:15. Without thinking much about it, she got dressed in the clothes she’d laid out hours before on the suitcase and brushed her hair. Feeling a chill, she put on her coat and took the elevator to the ground floor.

  The bar was empty now, as was the lounge, save for a couple seated at the far end. She ordered a martini and watched the bored bartender make it. The smooth, learned, repetitive motions were soothing, almost as soothing as the drink was when she took the first cold sip. She felt the dream recede like a bad smell just on the verge of clearing. It was strange to be up at this hour, but she’d known she couldn’t possibly go back to sleep. After a drink, she’d read more and try again.

  The couple laughed at some joke, and Rachel glanced over; as she did, the man turned. It was Daniel. He turned away again. It had been only a second, but it was him. The exaggerated and slightly moist features were unmistakable. He’d looked at her, but no recognition had crossed his mobile face. He hunched toward the woman—some anonymous bottle blonde in her forties—with the same conspiratorial attitude that Rachel remembered from their evening together. The woman said something, and he threw back his head to laugh wolfishly; he’d reacted the same way, she remembered, when she told him how she’d once been stuck naked in an outdoor shower at Manhasset Beach because someone had taken her swimsuit. It had been, maybe, the one true thing she’d told him that night.

  She watched Daniel and his prey in the angled mirror behind the bar. Eventually he stood, presumably having made his offer. He walked away, to the elevator bank, without looking back. The woman brushed a wisp of hair away from her face, lost in thought, and Rachel remembered that feeling as well, luxuriating in the long minute after he’d left, considering his offer. Unlike her, however, the woman smoothed her dress—spaghetti-strap
ped black with a ruffled gilt hem—and made her way to the elevators.

  The thought of going back up to her room and trying to sleep was now unthinkable, so Rachel ordered another drink. As she sipped it, she looked at herself in the bar mirror across from her—the mass of dark hair, the long nose and wayward gray eyes looked unfamiliar. This version of her had slept with Daniel and would do so again. This version would not be taking the Hudson Valley Line tomorrow, would not be on her hands and knees fixing the pilot light under the kitchen stove, would not be adding up the dismal winter numbers in the office and steeling herself for an argument with her mulish husband, would not be settling in next to him in their drafty bedroom with the wind knocking wet black trees around outside the window.

  “About to close up. Get you anything else?” asked the bartender, Windexing the glass shelves.

  “No, thanks.” The ormolu clock behind the bar said forty-five minutes had passed. The martini was gone, leaving only the oily dregs of vermouth and olive juice at the bottom. She walked down the fleur-de-lis-printed runner to the elevators. As she neared, the doors opened, and Daniel emerged. Again he glanced at her, and again he did not recognize her. She moved past, heart pounding, into the elevator, rode it to her floor and then back down. He was just pushing through the large double doors at the end of the cavernous lobby. She trailed after him, low heels ticking on the marble floor, dimly aware of being watched by the bartender but not caring. The two martinis, the lingering grasp of thwarted sleep at this late hour, and Daniel’s inability to notice her had all combined to make her feel untouchable and disembodied. A ghost in her long coat, she swept through the doors and out onto the street.