Trying to Float

by Nicolaia Rips

  We all started to sink: Lola (a baby), myself (a five-year-old, who, due to the good-natured negligence of her parents, did not know how to swim), and a forty-year-old woman, who, owing to a few cocktails and a blow to the head, dropped quickly to the bottom of the pool, all the while dreaming of a beach in Tahiti with someone other than her husband.

  Maybe the drowning of an infant would have gone without much notice, but certainly not an infant, a child, and a middle-aged woman. No, it was too much—plus the gasping and splashing and crying.

  The party ran to the pool, shouting all sorts of things.

  I would like to report that I heroically forced the baby’s head above water before dragging baby and mother to shore, all to the amazement of the family and their guests, but this is not what happened.

  It went more like this:

  After struggling to keep my head afloat (by, yes, standing on the baby), I shouted at the crowd: “IT’S A BABY! IT CAN FLOAT! SAVE ME.”

  The crowd reeled the infant out of the pool and then hauled her mother up onto the cement, where one of the guests performed mouth-to-mouth. Soon, Lola’s mother began to make low moaning noises, suggesting that she was still in Tahiti.

  With Lola and her mother saved, the crowd discussed leaving me to drown, but their goodness won out, and I was pulled from the water.

  Greta’s father, the man whose birthday party I had ruined, is a good and generous man, who showed no sign of holding the incident against me. Not so Lola’s mom. And especially not so Greta.

  I had humiliated her, ended her father’s party before she could bring out the birthday cake, which she had spent all day baking, and, of course, I nearly drowned her infant cousin and beloved aunt.

  Shortly after the party, Greta intimated that I was no longer her best friend (who could blame her), or even her friend (ditto), and that her new best friend was Anastasia (“Ana”) Penny. But this was not the end of it, for Greta would become (as we climbed through school together) someone whom everyone liked and wanted to be with. And if there was one thing which Greta made known to everyone, it was that there was no place in the tribe of Greta for me, the drowner of infants.

  THE CRAFTIES

  WITH NO FRIENDS, I returned to spending my afternoons in the lobby of the hotel.

  It probably hadn’t changed since the building was built in 1884. The walls and high ceilings were a mustard-yellow color and were lined with paintings by residents and former residents. On one wall hung a Joe Andoe painting of a white-and-gray horse. Swinging above the brown-and-white marbled floors was an obese pink woman on a swing, her plump legs dangling mischievously, inviting us into the world beneath her legs.

  The greatest thing about the lobby was that you were never alone. Residents and guests continuously buzzed in and out, as did starstruck visitors who would show up to take pictures of the famous and outrageous. Perhaps the residents gathered in the lobby to take a break from their small rooms (many were without bathrooms). Or perhaps they gathered because it was the only place in the hotel with Wi-Fi.

  One of the first people I met in the lobby was an attractive man in his forties. He had recently moved to New York from Paris, where he had lived for many years, taking photographs for fashion magazines. He was charming, with graying hair and a sharp jaw.

  By chance, my mother knew him from Paris, where she’d lived and worked as a model in the 1980s. Now they had both given up their jobs in fashion and were painting in the Chelsea Hotel.

  Shortly after my mom’s friend moved to the Chelsea, he was followed by someone he had known since childhood. The friend wrote brilliant stories, and the two of them would sit in armchairs, talking, arguing, and insulting each other. Their conversations soon drew others.

  Once, when my mom’s friend, the painter, referred to the screenplay writer as “Mr. Crafty,” the writer responded that the painter was much worse—“Uber-Crafty.” As two others took sides in this debate, they were given names: “Crafty Number One” and “Crafty Number Two.”

  Mr. Crafty, the writer, had a pointy beard and glasses with thick black frames and blue lenses. Everything he did was slow and deliberate. Next to him was his wooden cane.

  Mr. Crafty was also partially paralyzed owing to a stroke, which had left him, for two days, hallucinating facedown on the floor of his room in the hotel. He would have died there had he not been discovered by a bellhop—a story which he told often.

  By the time I arrived at the Chelsea, the story had stretched: Mr. Crafty was including other people’s stories as if they were his own, the joints between them so expertly welded that it was impossible to tell whether it was Mr. Crafty who had fought his way out of Cambodia or the fellow on the ninth floor; whether it was Mr. Crafty who played with the Vienna Philharmonic or the woman whose picture he had seen in the paper that morning.

  No one complained about this because everyone understood that the stroke had dried up Mr. Crafty’s memory and that by repeating his story, however distorted, he was watering it back to life.

  Without fail, the Crafties reclined in the tired chairs of the lobby each day. In my mind, I was “Little Crafty,” the junior addition to their team, and they didn’t care about my past as a baby drowner just as I didn’t care about their own damaged histories.

  HALLOWEEN

  SOME OF MY favorite memories of the Chelsea Hotel are of Halloween.

  People in the Chelsea spent months assembling their costumes. Because there were designers, dressmakers, and actors in the hotel, the daily outfits of the residents were colorful—a young Asian man, for example, regularly walked the halls with large wings glued to his back, multicolored makeup, and what could best be described as a Victorian-era diaper. Halloween took things to a whole new level.

  My godfather, Tom, a hearty man of six feet two with thick graying hair, would make my costumes with all the mastery of a professional tailor. As my parents would nurse their postparty hangovers on November 1, Tom and I would sit in my tiny bedroom plotting next year’s costume. We would spend the year designing costumes that were original, scary, and, as I got older, pretty. In October, my mom would enter the picture, using the makeup and hair skills she had developed as a model to transform me.

  When I was in first grade, I decided to dress as my idol, Groucho Marx. I wore one of my dad’s old suits, which Tom tailored to fit me, and my mom slicked back my hair with gel and painted on thick eyebrows and a mustache. The Marx Brothers were introduced to me through a boxed set found in the Chelsea Flea Market. Neither of my parents believed in cable (similar to others not believing in the moon landing), but they did own an ancient TV and VCR player. I would sit for hours in front of the TV watching tapes of Lucille Ball, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rodgers, Abbott and Costello, and, of course, Groucho Marx. As a present, my parents took me to visit the house where Groucho lived in L.A. (they were tearing it down when we arrived) and a bar where Groucho drank (my dad’s idea). My obsession with Groucho blossomed when I discovered that he had passed away on my birthday. I comforted (and flattered) myself with the thought that his soul had wandered for years until finally coming down, on the anniversary of his death, into the body of a little girl, me.

  In the days leading up to Halloween, the relative normal of everyday life was abandoned. In preparation for the many themed parties thrown each year—Dead Royals, Silent Screen Stars, and the Circus—hemlines grew shorter, haircuts choppier, and makeup wilder. The hotel was abuzz, a feeling that for one night of the year its residents would be praised for what had typically isolated them.

  Hotel residents would leave their names with the front desk if it was okay for the children of the building to trick-or-treat at their door. At a designated time, kids would gather in the lobby and wait for a Chelsea employee to lead them through the building. The amount of candy we received fluctuated with the changing economic times, but it was usually bountiful.

  On that
Halloween, the hotel’s residents were feeling particularly generous and our bag filled quickly. At one apartment, though, we knocked but no one answered. When we knocked harder, the door opened slowly.

  The room was dark but for a small lamp in the corner. Beneath the lamp was a giant bowl of candy. We made our way across the apartment toward the Milk Duds, Mars bars, and Hershey Kisses. Halfway there, we noticed something sticky on our shoes.

  We had stepped in a puddle of thick dark liquid. We stopped.

  We then noticed that the liquid was dripping from above. Staring up, we saw a man—upside down, and hanging from the ceiling. His throat was slit.

  We screamed.

  His mouth dropped open into a toothy grin.

  We ran back down the corridor.

  There we passed an old woman who was sitting in a wheelchair. She was once a beautiful artist, who had very early success, but who’d lost control of herself. She lived in a tiny studio apartment crowded with every piece of artwork she had ever created. Every day a different personality popped up inside her. She would speak in a murmur. During the evening she sat outside her apartment, guarding the door, growling at those who passed. By the time my family moved into the Chelsea, she was on medication and would hold a lit flashlight beneath her face, as if to announce that after a long and terrible journey, she was back.

  We called her Smiley.

  On that Halloween, with the lights in the hotel dimmed and her head glowing from the beam of the flashlight, her face floated bodiless through the hallways.

  MY STEED

  A COUPLE OF weeks after Halloween I was sitting at home when there came a knock at the door.

  “Who’s there?”

  “El Capitan!”

  I opened the door.

  There before me was a man in a white uniform, with gold buttons, silk braid, and white gloves. His hair was black, slicked back, and for a man in his fifties, he was striking, with a strong but jowly chin.

  “Young lady of the house, since I have passed you in the hallways of this esteemed, though decrepit, inn but have not had the pleasure of introducing myself, allow me to now do so.”

  With that he began an exhausting list of his titles and offices which, but for the arrival of my mother, he would have continued until dusk.

  “You are looking exceptionally handsome tonight, Capitan.”

  “I come directly from an affair at the consulate for His Majesty.”

  To all questions, the Capitan answered with either too many details (his list of titles, for example) or too few (“the consulate” and “His Majesty”), making it impossible to learn anything about him. He lived in an ornately furnished apartment on the eighth floor with an imposing, buxom woman whom he referred to as Lady Hammersmith.

  —

  The next night there was a knock on the door.

  “Who’s there?” I asked.

  “Der Hauptmann!”

  I recognized the voice.

  “Capitan?”

  “Ja, and Johnnie.”

  I opened the door. Before me was the largest, blackest, and most magnificent drooling beast I’d ever seen.

  “I have come to take the lady of the house for a ride.”

  After climbing on the back of Johnnie (a Newfoundland), who was over twice my size, the Capitan led me around the Chelsea and then outside onto Twenty-third Street. At the end of our trip, the Capitan walked Johnnie and me into the Aristocrat Deli, where we dined on sorbet.

  —

  The Capitan was only one of many who would drop by our apartment for a meal, to look at my mother’s art, to show off their own art, play a new song, or borrow money. Like the others, the Capitan would reciprocate by having us over to his place. We would walk up the stairs to the seventh floor and announce our arrival with the bull-shaped brass door knocker.

  After a minute the Capitan would appear at the door in full nautical attire. With a flourish of his dehydrated hands, he would usher us into his one-bedroom apartment. He often told us to hurry to avoid the “evil stepsisters” that lived across the hall (Donald and Travis, interior decorators). Although stately, the Capitan was nearing mummification, since gin was the only liquid he drank. Mom described him as “self-­pickled.” My father described him as “well preserved.”

  The Capitan’s home had the aura of an opium den. His bed was the centerpiece; a low rectangle with four wooden posts across which hung thick embroidered curtains and tapestries. Rugs and pillows in dark colors were scattered across the floor. Like his home, his meals were more elaborate than anyone else’s in the Chelsea.

  Cassoulets, Indonesian stews, and roasts of lamb and pork. Although I was too young to drink, I looked forward to the strange concoctions with which he greeted my parents. Stranger still were the Capitan’s friends, who dressed in turbans, silk dressing gowns, and jewels. They would entertain me for hours with stories of life in foreign lands: Morocco, Mongolia, India, and New Jersey.

  The most common meeting place in the hotel, however, was our home. The Capitan and his friends were as likely to drop by at midnight as they were in the afternoon. No matter when they arrived, they were always welcomed with a pitcher of gin.

  —

  My parents had moved into a one-bedroom in the Chelsea after they married. My father had studied at various prestigious universities well into his thirties. Arriving late to the concept of adulthood, he had decided that the most comfortable course of action would be to live in hotels. When my parents first met, my father was living at the Regency and my mother was living in an apartment she had bought with her modeling money. My father had a friend already living in the Chelsea Hotel, and the friend agreed to introduce them to the landlord, Stanley Bard. Stanley and my parents worked out a deal on a small apartment.

  The apartment had old wood floors that had once been beautiful, and my mom’s and her friends’ artwork covered the walls. Before dinner parties my mom would get on all fours to hammer down the nails that had sprouted up through the floorboards from old age. There was also a nineteenth-century door from Morocco propped against the wall (to give the illusion of another room) and an Edwardian chaise longue from the Chelsea flea market. The paintings, furniture, food, and ­people resided harmoniously.

  When my mother returned from Uzbekistan and it became clear that I was going to need a place to sleep, my parents created a space for me in the living room, the size of a walk-in closet. Because the size of my room prevented me from having drawers, and because there was no closet within the closet, getting ready in the morning was a four-stage process:

  First, to the bathroom, which meant going through my parents’ room. Second, retrieve my undergarments from a cabinet in the living room. Then, back to my parents’ bedroom for my clothes, and, finally, a search for shoes under my bed. I usually did this naked in the dark of the morning, but if by chance my parents were up, I would announce, “Avert your eyes,” to which my dad would respond by politely looking away. My mom refused, claiming that having birthed me gave her the right to forgo such etiquette.

  My room had one huge window that overlooked Chelsea and the Village. It fit my Victorian cast-iron bed, an antique wooden chest that I filled with books, and a leopard-print rug.

  I was born in the year of the tiger and the month of the lion, so my mom decided that everything I wore should be feline-themed. I had tiger-print coats, leopard leggings, and lions dancing on my dresses.

  Photographs and paintings by my mom and her friends adorned the walls. Above my door hung a painting by my father’s friend Andre. Under his brush, the subject of each of his portraits morphed into the face of Andre himself. Since the painting above my door was of me, I looked like a five-year-old who had just been released from rehab.

  My room was beautiful and homey. A carved wooden window, smuggled by my mother out of Yemen, allowed me to see into the kitchen, where my mo
m would whirl around creating meals, incorporating ingredients she had brought back from her trips abroad. No matter how many people dropped by, meals prepared in the tiny kitchen expanded miraculously. My mother loved her neighbors and because of this our apartment had joy.

  In the living room was a wooden end table that, when company came, agreeably opened to accommodate the crowd. Dinner was always by candlelight. When sent to bed, I always left my door open a crack so the light could flood in and I could see the silhouettes of our guests laughing.

  PIPPI

  FROM THE EARLIEST I can remember, Mom sang to me. As soon as I could stand, she danced with me. Also, my godfather, Tom, who had a career in musical theater, and his boyfriend Jim, an opera singer, were often at our apartment, and would waltz with me through the hallways of the Chelsea. I had no idea what songs like “Is That All There Is?” or “Dulcinea” meant, but I knew the words and would sing them badly as I stumbled out of time.

  So when I was told that my elementary school would begin each day with a dance class, I was thrilled.

  It is certain that I had no talent, but I thought that I did, and, like many girls, dreamt of a career as a ballerina. My original plan was to be a jockey, but I grew tall and chubby, and was allergic to horses.

  For the dance teacher to take me seriously, I would need a tutu and matching slippers. My parents indulged me.

  As our teacher entered the room, she was exactly the person I’d imagined—tall, with a thin, athletic body. Her strawberry hair was pulled into two braids, one hanging over each ear, and bangs that covered her forehead. She wore high stockings, a black leotard, and what looked like an apron. When Mom saw her, she mumbled, “Pippi Longstocking.”

  Surveying her new class, Pippi stopped when her eyes reached me.