by Lorin Stein
Here is my letter to Paul Moore, my husband, in which there is more about Turkish women. Since I am writing this journal with a view to publication, I do not want to ramble on as though I had all the space in the world. No publisher will attempt printing an enormous journal written by an unknown woman. It would be too much of a financial risk. Even I, with my ignorance of all matters pertaining to business, know this much. But they may print a small one.
My letter: (written yesterday, the morrow of my drunken evening in the Blue Bonnet Room when I accosted the society salesman.)
Dearest Paul:
I cannot simply live out my experiment here at the Hotel Henry without trying to justify or at least explain in letters my reasons for being here, and with fair regularity. You encouraged me to write whenever I felt I needed to clarify my thoughts. But you did tell me that I must not feel the need to justify my actions. However, I do feel the need to justify my actions, and I am certain that until the prayed-for metamorphosis has occurred I shall go on feeling just this need. Oh, how well I know that you would interrupt me at this point and warn me against expecting too much. So I shall say in lieu of metamorphosis, the prayed-for improvement. But until then I must justify myself every day. Perhaps you will get a letter every day. On some days the need to write lodges itself in my throat like a cry that must be uttered.
As for the Turkish problem, I am coming to it. You must understand that I am an admirer of Western civilization; that is, of the women who are members of this group. I feel myself that I fall short of being a member, that by some curious accident I was not born in Turkey but should have been. Because of my usual imprecision I cannot even tell how many countries belong to what we call Western Civilization, but I believe Turkey is the place where East meets West, isn’t it? I can just about imagine the women there, from what I have heard about the country and the pictures I have seen of it. As for being troubled or obsessed by real Oriental women, I am not. (I refer to the Chinese, Japanese, Hindus, and so on.) Naturally I am less concerned with the Far Eastern women because there is no danger of my being like them. (The Turkish women are just near enough.) The Far Eastern ones are so very far away, at the opposite end of the earth, that they could easily be just as independent and masculine as the women of the Western world. The ones living in-between the two masculine areas would be soft and feminine. Naturally I don’t believe this for a minute, but still, the real Orientals are so far away and such a mystery to me that it might as well be true. Whatever they were, it couldn’t affect me. They look too different from the way I look. Whereas Turkish women don’t. (Their figures are exactly like mine, alas!)
Now I shall come to the point. I know full well that you will consider the above discourse a kind of joke. Or if you don’t, you will be irritated with me for making statements of such a sweeping and inaccurate nature. For surely you will consider the picture of the world that I present as inaccurate. I myself know that this concept of the women (all three sets—Western, Middle and Eastern) is a puerile one. It could even be called downright idiotic. Yet I assure you that I see things this way, if I relax even a little and look through my own eyes into what is really inside my head. (Though because of my talent for mimicry I am able to simulate looking through the eyes of an educated person when I wish to.) Since I am giving you such a frank picture of myself, I may as well go the whole hog and admit to you that my secret picture of the world is grossly inaccurate. I have completely forgotten to include in it any of the Latin countries. (France, Italy, Spain.) For instance, I have jumped from the Anglo world to the semi-Oriental as if there were no countries in between at all. I know that these exist. (I have even lived in two of them.) But they do not fit into my scheme. I just don’t think about the Latins very much, and this is less understandable than my not thinking about the Chinese or Javanese or Japanese women. You can see why without my having to explain it to you. I do know that the French women are more interested in sports than they used to be, and for all I know they may be indistinguishable from Anglo women by now. I haven’t been to France recently so I can’t be sure. But in any case the women of those countries don’t enter into my picture of the world. Or shall I say that the fact of having forgotten utterly to consider them has not altered the way I visualize the division of the world’s women? Incredible though it may seem to you, it hasn’t altered anything. (My having forgotten all Latin countries, South America included.) I want you to know the whole truth about me. But don’t imagine that I wouldn’t be capable of concealing my ignorance from you if I wanted to. I am so wily and feminine that I could live by your side for a lifetime and deceive you afresh each day. But I will have no truck with feminine wiles. I know how they can absorb the hours of the day. Many women are delighted to sit around spinning their webs. It is an absorbing occupation and the women feel they are getting somewhere. And so they are, but only for as long as the man is there to be deceived. And a wily woman alone is a pitiful sight to behold. Naturally.
I shall try to be honest with you so that I can live with you and yet won’t be pitiful. Even if tossing my feminine tricks out the window means being left no better than an illiterate backwoodsman, or the bottom fish scraping along the ocean bed, I prefer to have it this way. Now I am too tired to write more. Though I don’t feel that I have clarified enough or justified enough
I shall write you soon about the effect the war has had upon me. I have spoken to you about it, but you have never seemed to take it very seriously. Perhaps seeing in black and white what I feel will affect your opinion of me. Perhaps you will leave me. I accept the challenge. My Hotel Henry experience includes this risk. I got drunk two nights ago. It’s hard to believe that I am forty-seven, isn’t it?
My love,
Emmy
Now that I have copied this letter into my journal (I had forgotten to make a carbon), I shall take my walk. My scheme included a few weeks of solitude at the Hotel Henry before attempting anything. I did not even intend to write in my journal as soon as I started to, but simply to sit about collecting my thoughts, waiting for the knots of habit to undo themselves. But after only a week here—two nights ago—I felt amazingly alone and disconnected from my past life, so I began my journal.
My first interesting contact was the salesman in the Blue Bonnet Room. I had heard about this eccentric through my in-laws, the Moores, before I ever came up here. My husband’s cousin Laurence Moore told me about him when he heard I was coming. He said: “Take a walk through Grey and Bottle’s Department Store, and you’ll see a man with a lean red face and reddish hair selling materials by the bolt. That man has an income and is related to Hewitt Molain. He doesn’t need to work. He was in my fraternity. Then he disappeared. The next I heard of him he was working there at Grey and Bottle’s. I stopped by and said hello to him. For a nut he seemed like a very decent chap. You might even have a drink with him. I think he’s quite up to general conversation.”
I did not mention Laurence Moore to the society salesman because I thought it might irritate him. I lied and pretended to have been here for months, when actually this is still only my second week at the Hotel Henry. I want everyone to think I have been here a long time. Surely it is not to impress them. Is there anything impressive about a lengthy stay at the Hotel Henry? Any sane person would be alarmed that I should even ask such a question. I ask it because deep in my heart I do think a lengthy stay at the Hotel Henry is impressive. Very easy to see that I would, and even sane of me to think it impressive, but not sane of me to expect anyone else to think so, particularly a stranger. Perhaps I simply like to hear myself telling it. I hope so. I shall write some more tomorrow, but now I must go out. I am going to buy a supply of cocoa. When I’m not drunk I like to have a cup of cocoa before going to sleep. My husband likes it too.
*
She could not stand the overheated room a second longer. With some difficulty she raised the window, and the cold wind blew in. Some loose sheets of paper went skimming off the top of the desk and flattene
d themselves against the bookcase. She shut the window and they fell to the floor. The cold air had changed her mood. She looked down at the sheets of paper. They were part of the letter she had just copied. She picked them up: “I don’t feel that I have clarified enough or justified enough,” she read. She closed her eyes and shook her head. She had been so happy copying this letter into her journal, but now her heart was faint as she scanned its scattered pages. “I have said nothing,” she muttered to herself in alarm. “I have said nothing at all. I have not clarified my reasons for being at the Hotel Henry. I have not justified myself.”
Automatically she looked around the room. A bottle of whiskey stood on the floor beside one of the legs of the bureau. She stepped forward, picked it up by the neck, and settled with it into her favorite wicker chair.
Issue 56, 1973
Dave Eggers
on
James Salter’s Bangkok
“Bangkok” is a nine-page master class in dialogue from James Salter, whose command of the form is well established and rarely matched. There are many lessons in this very short story; here are just a few of them:
—Some of the best dialogue occurs when at least one of the two people talking doesn’t want to be there. In this story, Hollis wants nothing to do with an ex-lover, Carol, who visits his bookshop unexpectedly. He tells her to leave, repeatedly, but before she does, we get an explosive conversation that’s made all the more tense because Hollis is—or seems to be—an unwilling participant.
—Carol says a handful of nasty, sexually charged things to Hollis, and though Hollis gets his dander up, he doesn’t end the conversation. What Carol says about Hollis’s daughter and wife should be more than enough to provoke him to get up, usher Carol out of the shop, and lock the door behind her. But he doesn’t. This tells us a lot about their history, which must have been perverse, twisted, and full of similar provocations. He’s inured to her games, and maybe a little bit intrigued, too.
—Deep into the story, Carol calls Hollis by another name, Chris. It’s slipped into a soliloquy, and we barely notice it, but it matters. Until then, Hollis is the name we know him by, and Hollis is the name of a man who would have had relations with a tough and unsentimental predator like Carol. So for most of the story we’re in a universe bordering on noir. The two characters are well traveled, have lived romantic lives—in the midcentury ideal of romanticism, at least, lives of travel and drinking and porous sexual boundaries. But then there is this mention of the name Chris, a name that implies fragility and decency—it’s common, almost pedestrian. If we start the story thinking it’s about Chris and Carol, it alters our whole perception of their dynamic. But start the story with Hollis, and we picture a strong and confident guy not to be trifled with—a match for Carol (another strong name). But then, at the moments when Carol shows some vulnerability, when she wants to know whether he ever loved her, she uses this name, Chris. This is no coincidence.
—We don’t know where the story takes place, and we assume, for most of the story, that it’s Bangkok. That Hollis operates some kind of expat antiquarian shop. But when the word “Bangkok” finally appears, we know why Salter’s named the story thus. He doesn’t make a big show of it, but Bangkok represents all that Hollis has given up in favor of his wife and daughter, a life of routine and (to Carol’s mind) pedestrian pleasures. And here we find out that Hollis, though sure of his choices, is not without some lingering, or at least occasional, doubts. Thus Bangkok is like the gun at the beginning of the movie. You know it’ll go off, but you don’t know when.
—Finally, and maybe most importantly, Salter doesn’t tell us much about Hollis’s state of mind throughout the conversation. Here and there he indicates how he feels about something Carol’s said. We know he wants her gone, but then again, not so much. We get his state of mind only through what he says himself, and we assume Carol’s jabs and taunts are having little to no effect on him. But then, when she walks out, Salter lets us know that Hollis has been putting on an act. Suddenly the “room was swimming” and he realizes he should have kicked her out, that “He should not have listened.” Her words will be with him for a long time. She has great power over him, and she’s put into question the life he’s chosen. This method, of having the reader hold their breath just as Hollis does, waiting till she leaves to exhale, gives the story magnificent power. At the end, we’re spent, and are reeling just as Hollis is reeling.
James Salter
Bangkok
Hollis was in the back at a table piled with books and a space among them where he was writing when Carol came in.
Hello, she said.
Well, look who’s here, he said coolly. Hello.
She was wearing a gray jersey sweater and a narrow skirt—as always, dressed well.
Didn’t you get my message? she asked.
Yes.
You didn’t call back.
No.
Weren’t you going to?
Of course not, he said.
He looked wider than the last time and his hair, halfway to the shoulder, needed to be cut.
I went by your apartment but you’d gone. I talked to Pam, that’s her name, isn’t it? Pam.
Yes.
We talked. Not that long. She didn’t seem interested in talking. Is she shy?
No, she’s not shy.
I asked her a question. Want to know what it was?
Not especially, he said.
He leaned back. His jacket was draped over the back of the chair and his sleeves rolled partway up. She noticed a round wristwatch with a brown leather strap.
I asked her if you still like to have your cock sucked.
Get out of here, he ordered. Go on, get out.
She didn’t answer, Carol said.
He had a moment of fear, of guilt almost, about consequences. On the other hand, he didn’t believe her.
So, do you? she said.
Leave, will you? Please, he said in a civilized tone. He made a dispersing motion with his hand. I mean it.
I’m not going to stay long, just a few minutes. I wanted to see you, that’s all. Why didn’t you call back?
She was tall with a long, elegant nose like a thoroughbred. What people look like isn’t the same as what you remember. She had been coming out of a restaurant one time, down some steps long after lunch in a silk dress that clung around the hips and the wind pulled against her legs. The afternoons, he thought for a moment.
She sat down in the leather chair opposite and gave a slight, uncertain smile.
You have a nice place.
It had the makings of one, two rooms on the garden floor with a little grass and the backs of discreet houses behind, though there was just one window and the floorboards were worn. He sold fine books and manuscripts, letters for the most part, and had too big an inventory for a dealer his size. After ten years in retail clothing he had found his true life. The rooms had high ceilings, the bookcases were filled and against them, on the floor, a few framed photographs leaned.
Chris, she said, tell me something. Whatever happened to that picture of us taken at the lunch Diana Wald gave at her mother’s house that day? Up there on that fake hill made from all the old cars? Do you still have that?
It must have gotten lost.
I’d really like to have it. It was a wonderful picture. Those were the days, she said. Do you remember the boathouse we had?
Of course.
I wonder if you remember it the way I remember it.
That would be hard to say. He had a low, persuasive voice. There was confidence in it, perhaps a little too much.
The pool table, do you remember that? And the bed by the windows.
He didn’t answer. She picked up one of the books from the table and was looking through it; e.e. cummings. The Enormous Room, dust jacket with some small chips at bottom, minor soil on title page, otherwise very good. First edition. The price was marked in pencil on the corner of the flyleaf at the top. She turned the pages idly.
This has that part in it you like so much. What is it, again?
Jean Le Nègre.
That’s it.
Still unrivaled, he said.
