The Hotel Neversink

by Adam O'Fallon Price

  “There still isn’t one. But I don’t see how this advances your case.”

  “Again, I have no case. My life has meaning.”

  She sighed. “Okay, fine. You win. I feel ridiculous talking about this anyway. I’m forty-three years old, this is stoned dorm-room stuff.”

  “On the contrary, this is the-deepest-essence-of-being-alive stuff.” He tilted his white eyes at her with utter sincerity, and she felt great affection for Linväld—Robert—at that moment. She would miss him. She found she was crying, and he was solicitously offering Kleenex and continuing to talk, thinking, she knew, that she was upset by the conversation. He said, “Alice, at any rate, I don’t believe these philosophical issues are what plague you. You are depressed, hence, your life has no feeling of meaning. Most people looking at your life would say it has a great deal of meaning, that you do something that touches people all over the world.”

  She blew her nose. “I’m not going back on medication.”

  “I don’t see any other course of action, frankly.”

  She almost said I do, but didn’t. “I can’t write on it. I wind up watching EastEnders upside down on my sofa twelve hours a day. You want to talk about there not being a point.”

  “Let’s discuss it next time. Consider it, please. If not, come in with an alternate strategy.”

  She rose. “I’m not sure I’m coming in again.”

  “Why not?”

  “I just think I need some time off.”

  He stood and positioned himself, she didn’t fail to notice, between her and the door. “That’s your choice, but I strongly disagree.”

  She moved around him, then leaned in for a hug that he returned with stiff surprise. “Thanks for everything,” she said, walking away before he could say anything else.

  The memory of that embrace now dissolved as a taxi blared by—she’d stepped too early into the street, hypnotized by her own thoughts and by the rain, which was falling harder every minute. To the right, it swept through Hyde Park, dampening the crazies at Speakers’ Corner, slicking the black paths of bikers in translucent macs, wetting the stoic ducks that bobbed in the Serpentine. Oil, drawn by the rain to the surface of the sidewalk, shimmered in greasy rainbows. Cross now, a woman’s voice said, in seeming agreement with the decision she’d come to in Linväld’s office: she would kill herself today.

  In July, she’d set a date: October 15, two days from now. It had been far enough away that she might be talked out of it, by the world or herself, but it wasn’t so far as to make the interim seem impossible to bear. And three months had been enough time to get her affairs in order, as the stock phrase went, though the surprisingly small number of affairs that needed ordering had been depressing in itself. Her parents were installed in an Arizona retirement community, and her sister, Elise, had excommunicated Alice for the sin of using family members in her last novel. In fairness to Elise, “Eliza” had been pretty close to the truth—a monstrous control freak whose primary joy in life was being shrill at and around her children, three boys she’d emasculated so thoroughly she might as well have just castrated them at the bris. There had really just been money stuff to settle, what to do with her savings—grown obese after two best sellers—and arranging for the sale of the apartment. Trust funds, charities, a few pen strokes and a handshake.

  That was it. No children, no partner. No phone, no pool, no pets, a voice sang idiotically in her head. Marie had left her two years earlier to start a restaurant in Melbourne, Australia. Alice marked Marie’s departure as the commencement of this, the Bad Time, as she thought of it, while knowing it wasn’t Marie’s fault, not really. She’d been depressive as long as she could remember, but there had always been things to fend it off—family, friends, school, partying, sex, her career, Marie. Marie, as it turned out, had been one of the last bulwarks. The other was writing, but that, too, was gone now, destroyed by the drugs Linväld had prescribed. She hadn’t written anything in almost three years.

  She trudged, head down, through the pissing mist. A takeout carton of curry lay where someone had tossed it, slumped against the brick wall like a drunk, its contents vomited out onto the sidewalk. Why not today? she’d thought at Dr. Linväld’s, and no good answer had come to mind. There was absolutely no reason why not today. The question was how.

  A pub called the Pig and Thistle appeared on the corner. She pushed in, shivering, suddenly aware of the cold. The place was empty, save, at a rear table, an old crone in a plastic rain bonnet, bent to her bitters. Football, inescapably, played on a TV over the bar. The signage of generic pubdom’s purveyors—Fuller’s, Taylor Walker—were plastered throughout. Over the last decade, Brits had gladly traded the eccentricities of their homey old pubs for corporate uniformity, the same bland menu in each one featuring fifteen-euro fish and chips.

  The barman came over, large and smiling through his red beard, a jovial type she would have written and immediately discarded as cliché. She ordered a Johnnie Walker: black, neat, double. He raised a red eyebrow as he poured, then set the glass down in front of her. “That’s twenty-seven.” She paid with a fifty and motioned for him to keep the change. “I can’t take that, miss.”

  “Take it.”

  “You American?”

  “I moved here ten years ago. Listen, I know about tipping. I’m not trying to demean you, just take it.” She didn’t know why she’d tried either giving him the money or explaining it, and she could see she’d invited further interaction. But of course, that must have been what she wanted on some level, coming into the pub. So full of shit. She took a long drink. The whiskey tasted good, warmed her chest, did all the predictable stuff.

  The bartender peeled off a five, stuck it in the till, and poured himself a small glass of the Johnnie Walker. “Staff discount,” he said. “Nice weather, huh?”

  “Yep.”

  “So why’d you move here?”

  She forced herself to give the spiel, like pushing a boulder into a sloping ravine. “You remember all those people who said they’d leave the US if Bush won again? I was the only one who actually did.”

  “No kidding.”

  “Well, yeah, but that was an excuse. I always liked London.”

  He continued staring out the window behind her, beaded with crawling drops of rain. “Sorry, but I can’t figure moving here. I’ve wanted to leave ever since I was a kid.”

  “So leave.”

  “Not so easy, though, is it?”

  “I don’t know.” Was it easy? What was easy and what wasn’t? Things that seemed easy sometimes turned out to be very difficult, indeed. The easiest thing in the world for her, previously—writing—was now impossible. And sometimes it worked the other way around, too: formerly unthinkable things became normalized. Self-extermination, for instance, an abstracted horror for much of her life, had in recent years become a subject of practical contemplation. The question was how. In her last book, one of the supporting cast, a spurned girlfriend of the asshole sculptor protagonist, slit her wrists (unsuccessfully) in the bathtub with a jagged piece of solder. This scene was written after a considerable amount of morbid Googling that revealed how often this maneuver was botched. It was just too hard to dig at those veins and really open them up—image searches turned up forearms and wrists that looked like meat hanging in a butcher’s freezer. So that was out. What, then? Living in England, guns weren’t an option—too bad she didn’t still live in America, where she might have picked up a twelve-gauge on the walk home along with some jean shorts and beef jerky. And she was too afraid of pills, of the possibility of brain damage, being locked inside herself forever—a fate truly much, much worse than death. She’d considered jumping from something high (London Bridge, falling down), but there was always the possibility of crippled survival, not to mention traumatizing onlookers.

  “Miss?”

  “What?”

  “I asked if you were feeling okay.”

  “Listen, no offense, but I just don’t feel mu
ch like talking. One again, single.”

  He poured it and scrupulously moved to the other end of the bar. In the space where he’d been standing, her reflection stared back at her from the lead-lined mirror beside the liquor shelves. She looked at herself as a stranger might, as the barman might have—middle-aged and darkly complexed, black hair and black eyes, with a faint scar running from temple to cheek. Marie, along with nearly every journalist who’d written her profile, had said it gave her character; it didn’t hurt that over time she’d allowed people to conflate the scar with the story of her childhood ordeal at the Neversink. The specter of trauma had affixed itself to her public persona, lending interest and weight to her novels. The scar’s actual story—Elise shoving her into a bike rack at their elementary school—was far less catchy. Again she said to the woman in the mirror, you are so full of shit.

  But it didn’t matter, she thought, averting her eyes, pushing off the stool, and moving back outside. She continued on her way, in a muddled state now that matched the atmosphere. The fuzziness didn’t help, though, just made her feel more feebly agitated. For some reason, she’d thought that once she decided to do it, ending her life would be easy, a kind of sighing and letting go. She was surprised to find this wasn’t the case. But of course it wasn’t. Of course some part of her, the animal part mainly (always more of yourself than you think it is), didn’t want to go. And not just the animal part, either. So don’t, she thought, cutting north through Hyde Park on Carriage Drive. Even in the rain, people were out trying to enjoy the day—a father and daughter stood together on the bank of the Serpentine, tossing hunks of bread to a jostling flock of geese. On the path above them, a man trembled in place on a unicycle, adjusting his earbuds. Why couldn’t this be enough for her? Just the world and its people, straining in their ways to make this moment, that moment, rich or exciting or happy or sad. This, after all, was existence, and if this wasn’t enough, nothing else would be.

  But it wasn’t, and the thought felt hollow and false, like Dr. Linväld’s singsong nostrum: it’s how you feel that makes it real. The thing was, to really love the world she had to be able to write about it, and she couldn’t anymore. The feeling that afflicted her movement through life—the fatigued sense of going through the motions—was singularly poisonous to her writing. In thirty months, she hadn’t had an imaginative thought—a character, plot point, setting, piece of dialogue, turn of phrase, or orphaned verb mewling in the wilderness of the white page—that didn’t feel cribbed from herself. It wasn’t that she couldn’t write anymore, exactly—she could have written a novel during this time, but it would have been an exercise, like the time in grad school that she’d handwritten Eliot’s “Prufrock” just to see what it felt like to put down the same words he had, in the same order.

  A year on Nardil had provided relief from the worst of the depression, but it had also soldered the writer’s block down at the edges, sealing off important neural pathways. Now she was off the pills, but it was no good. She was broken, alone, useless.

  She wiped off her face. Across the bridge, the path she was on curved behind a curtain of trees, after which would come the Bayswater Road, then home. What then? The thing was, the thought of not doing it was worse than the thought of doing it. Or: doing it would be hard, but not doing it would be impossible. That was the thing.

  Her phone rang and she stopped walking. It was her agent, Charlotte. Alice winced with guilt at the photo on the call screen as though Charlotte, through some kind of new technology, could see her where she stood in the park, trying to decide whether to answer. “Hello?”

  “Alice? Where are you?”

  “Out. Walking.”

  “Did you forget about the meeting?”

  “What meeting?”

  Charlotte sighed, long-suffering. As a general response it was both justified and irritating, considering the money Alice had made her. “With Mike and Lindsey, concerning your new project.”

  “Shit.”

  “Listen, you need to give them something. You can’t just string them along forever.”

  A nearby goose honked, and Charlotte said, “Where are you?”

  “The park.”

  “Can you pop in? We need to catch up, go over a few things.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Or tomorrow, if you have other plans.”

  A violent updraft, like an angry, careening ghost, hit the line of trees under which Alice stood, loosing a welter of fat droplets. “No,” she said. “I’ll come by now.”

  The cramped space and spartan décor of Charlotte’s office always surprised Alice. It looked more like the workplace of an uncreative middle manager in, say, textiles, than the office of one of London’s most successful literary agents. A withered succulent sat atop the file cabinet, and a framed Klee print hung at a slight angle behind the desk. Next to the print, a small window of thick tiled glass obliquely admitted the gray light of the building’s interior courtyard. When Alice had asked Charlotte why she didn’t move to a bigger, better place, Charlotte had shrugged and said it suited her fine; considering all she really did was read and talk on the phone, she’d debated just working from her Kensington flat.

  She smiled as Alice entered, and Alice smiled back, a reflex born of her good feelings for Charlotte and a childish desire to please her. Charlotte was ten years her elder, and hard not to regard as a fantasy older sister: smart, stylish, and infectiously profane. But as the smile melted off her face, Alice realized coming here had been a horrible mistake. Charlotte was far too intuitive, would probe her in ways she didn’t want to be probed, not now.

  “Jesus,” said Charlotte. “You look like fucking shit.”

  “Thanks.”

  “It’s not a compliment. You look terrible.”

  “It’s raining.”

  “Are you drunk?”

  “I stopped for one.”

  Charlotte’s phone buzzed. She looked at it and shut it off, placing it facedown. “Alice, I don’t know what’s going on with you, but you can’t get pissed while you’re supposed to be meeting with your editors.”

  “Well, I can, clearly.”

  “In case you really don’t take my point, I’m using can’t there to mean shouldn’t. That’s not something you should do. You obviously are capable of doing it—”

  “I’m sorry, really. I forgot.”

  “—as you are capable of many other things you shouldn’t do. For instance, taking a massive advance on a novel in the works and not delivering anything, not even an outline, for two years. That kind of thing.”

  “Did you really have me come by to berate me? You could have done that on the phone. Or by e-mail, really.”

  “No.” Charlotte shook her head. Shorn recently of its gray curls, the sheep’s wool now resembled a swim cap. “The reason I called was because your therapist, Lindbergh or whatever his name is, called me.”

  “What?”

  “He’s worried about you.”

  From their sessions, Linväld knew Charlotte was her agent, and he also knew she was one of Alice’s closest friends. The magnitude of this breach of doctor-patient confidentiality signaled the degree of his immediate concern. “I’m fine.”

  “You are most definitely not fucking fine. You are about as far from fine as I’ve ever seen someone be. I think you need professional help.”

  “I’m getting professional help. Dr. Linväld is a professional.”

  “I’m talking about hospitals. I’ve been researching them. There are some really nice places in the country. One in Middlesex that looks like a bed-and-breakfast. They give you a massage every night. I’d like to go there.”

  “The loony bin, you’re talking about.”

  “What is this, 1950? A mental health facility. For a little while.”

  Alice got up to leave and Charlotte followed. “Wait, wait. I’d anticipated this reaction, too. So the other thing is, if you wanted to come stay with us.” Us was Charlotte and her boyfriend, Stuart, a
talkative barrister and wine enthusiast. Alice pulled on her coat. It was the nicest, most unappealing offer anyone had ever made her.

  “Charlotte, no.”

  “I’m really worried about you, Alice. Everyone is.” Charlotte was following her down the hall now, talking and cajoling, following her out of the building and onto the crowded sidewalk, speaking in a strained, quiet tone about how many people loved her and how much she had to live for, and lots of other things like that. It was really quite dramatic, yet Alice still couldn’t shake the feeling of going through the motions, or playing something out that was already over. Everything felt like a copy of a copy of a copy. Charlotte’s voice faded behind her in a surge of pedestrians, then was blocked out entirely by traffic as Alice cut quickly across the road. She ducked down a side street, then another, and Charlotte was nowhere to be seen. But her phone rang again, and there was Charlotte’s face smiling up at her. She tossed the phone into a nearby waste bin. That was all it was, she thought, just a discarding, a throwing away of it all. When you got down to it, it really was simple.

  The simpler you could keep it, the better. That was her thinking, standing at her kitchen island, writing the note. She found herself mentally addressing it to Marie, whom she hadn’t spoken to in over a year. But that was who she had in mind when she apologized—not her parents, Elise, or her nephews, though they were there, watching in a morose semicircle as she executed the words in her looping cursive; and not Charlotte, who would be terribly upset, but whose ebullient toughness would carry her right through. It was Marie, Melbourne Marie now, bent over a salmon croquette en croute with a small blowtorch, as Alice had most recently seen her on Facebook. I’m so sorry, she wrote, picturing that Marie—I’ve tried to do better, but I’m just tired and don’t see any way forward. Everything seems over now. I hope you know, despite this, how really important to me you were, and that this isn’t your fault at all. Love, Alice.