The Man Who Was Left Behind

by Rachel Ingalls

  “Well,” she said as we started up, “I hope you gave him the benefit of your vast fund of technical tips.”

  I ran my hand through the fronds of one of the plants. They had a pleasant feeling, not cold or sticky like many leaves, but dry and clean. When I brushed my hand across them they spread out like feathers.

  We came to the top and turned right, down the passage to the next flight of stairs. I touched a few of the palm trees as we passed. I was still a bit high. I looked at her, but her mouth had gone sour.

  “My God, he spends an hour necking with her and then he leaves her high and dry and says, ‘I’m happy just cuddling.’ That was never your trouble was it?”

  We’re not going to get into a fight again, I thought. Not if I can help it.

  “You just had to do it with everybody,” she said.

  I got the keys out of my pocket. She took hers out of my hand.

  “You can come in through my room,” I said. I opened the door. As soon as she stepped over the threshold she asked, “Do you want the bathroom first?”

  “No, you take it.”

  She opened the bathroom door. All the curtains blew out and the door on the other side of the bathroom, the one that led into her room, slammed shut with a loud, high crack like the sound that accompanies a direct hit by lightning. One of the shutters outside was banging.

  “Close the window,” she called, and leaned into the door.

  The rooms didn’t seem to be on a corner, but the draught couldn’t be explained in any other way unless for some reason, incomprehensible to me, two opposite air currents met just outside the windows. Even one window open in one of the rooms was enough to set the place rocking if a door to the bathroom was open. I suppose there was a certain amount of suction from the corridors outside, too. On the first afternoon, when we had come up from lunch, I had opened the bathroom door and for five minutes it had sounded like blasting exercises in a quarry.

  On the other hand, it was exhilarating, and while I was busy closing doors and windows, I regretted having to. I’d have liked to weight down everything in the room and open up the works. It would have been like being on shipboard, or even like flying, since we were just that much above the ground.

  I had no desire whatever to go to sleep. I started to pace the room, flipped through a few books, and smoked a cigarette. After a while I heard the bathroom door open and close on the other side and the water running. I gave it a few minutes and then opened the door. She was standing at the sink, brushing her teeth.

  The bathroom was like a vault. Marble basin, marble bathtub like a sarcophagus but bigger, and a tiled floor. Even at mid-day it was cool.

  “I’m sorry,” I lied. “I thought you were through.”

  “I’ll be finished in a minute,” she said, the toothbrush still going up and down. Nobody I had ever known could whip up so much foam from toothpaste or do it so fast. Maybe those early years taking piano lessons had created the perfect wrist muscles for brushing teeth.

  She rinsed out the foam and spat it into the sink and started to clear away the brush and glass and to roll the tube up from the bottom. She did it meticulously, knowing that I was watching her in her nightgown. When she had screwed it up to bursting-point, she looked up at me angrily.

  “That poor girl. She doesn’t know anything about it and now she’s married to that homo for life.”

  “He isn’t.”

  “Of course he is. You can see it a mile away. He’s queer.”

  She said it in an unpleasant way. We had several friends and a couple of relatives at home who were queer in one way or another, some in just the ordinary way, and it had never seemed to make a difference to her before. Now she was furious. She began to slap cold cream over her face.

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  “The best thing she could do would be to get an annulment right away.”

  “Is that what you advised her?”

  “You bet I did. And she can do it, too. All the proof is still there.”

  She finished with the cold cream and screwed the lid on.

  “There,” she said.

  I touched her arm with my fingers.

  “Jeanie——”

  “Oh, no. Not on your life. I am so very sorry, but I still do not think it should be just your nice way of ending the day with whoever happens to be handy.” She whipped around and left the bathroom through her door, saying as she closed it, “You can ring for the chambermaid.” I heard the bolt shoot home, and then nothing.

  If I’d thought I stood a chance of getting it, I would have rung for the chambermaid. Poor Butterworth, I thought, if you only knew. I ought to have offered to give his wife a fatherly heart-to-heart talk for a couple of days.

  I took the cap off the tube of toothpaste and squeezed some on to my toothbrush. Up and down, up and down. It’s so much easier to brush them sideways. Then I washed my face, used the toilet, and went back into my room. This time I remembered to close the door. She was always telling me that I left doors open. I had probably left the cap off the toothpaste again, and squeezed the tube in the middle, too.

  I paced the room. The wind roared up against the building, clattering the shutter. It cut out the sound of the sea.

  I sat on the bed and began to undo buttons. In the morning we would go down the stairs together to breakfast in that enormous dining-room where a dozen waiters stood against the wall like sentries and the sun filled the place, making the white tablecloths shine. And I would order a cheese omelette because the one I’d had that morning was one of the best omelettes I had ever tasted. It seemed a shame not to enjoy everything, everything it was possible to enjoy. But of course people can never enjoy enough, or at the right times, and certainly nobody ever learns.

  There was a knock at my door. The wind distorted the sound so that at first I thought there was someone at the door to the hallway. I called, “Come”, and the bathroom door opened.

  “I can’t find my murder mystery.”

  She still hadn’t put on her bathrobe.

  “I’ll have a look,” I said. “Come in and sit down.”

  “No, thanks. All I want is to find the book.”

  She frowned. Evidently the missing bathrobe hadn’t been deliberate. She fidgeted her hands together and apart.

  “You stay there. I can look for it. Where did you put the books?” she said.

  “There are some on the dresser. I don’t think it’s there. And then a pile on the windowsill right next to you.”

  I got off the bed and looked over the books lying on the lace cloth on top of the big chest of drawers standing next to the wardrobe.

  “Not here,” I said. She was bending over the windowsill; like the ones in the bathroom it was marble and massive. And she had her back to me. The nightgown was one of those long nylon ones made with two layers of material which make you think you can see more than you actually can, or sometimes that you can’t see as much as you imagine. They must hire sadists to design the things. Even the colour was indistinct and mysterious, a sort of creamy, bluish grey. She leaned back on one leg and held up a book.

  “Here it is,” she announced.

  And I couldn’t resist. I stepped forward and grabbed her from behind. And then it happened so quickly: she shrieked, “Oh!” and pushed me aside, and was out through the bathroom door, slamming it behind her, and I had tripped over the rug and gone headfirst into the marble edge of the windowsill.

  At first I thought that the sound of the door was the sound of my head cracking open. Then there was another slam, the other bathroom door, which she was probably bolting again.

  But I was sure that my head had split open. I fell back on my knees and looked at the stone edge. The whole of my head felt hot and searing and, at the same time, frozen. I was scared of trying to touch it, to see how badly I was hurt. Then I also had the feeling that my sight had gone. I knew I was looking straight at the windowframe above the sill, but something was wrong with my eyes. Then I
was sick, and for what seemed a long time I sat there looking at where I’d been sick.

  I got up and turned around, and felt very strange. Maybe I was bleeding, I thought. Or something else. My left leg buckled and I staggered where I stood. Then I thought something really must be wrong and I’d better get to the wardrobe over against the wall, to look at my face. The wardrobe door had a mirror on it. So I started off. The floor went up and down. The door began to move away. Everything started to go prickly and the light changed and broke up into pinpricks, and the room made a zinging noise. The door went away, the floor went away. Then I went away, too.

  When I came to, I wondered whether I might have been out for twenty-four hours. My head felt heavier and larger than I would have believed possible. First of all it felt as though someone had put a bowl over it, and secondly it was as if there was another projection of my head in a different place, about six inches in front of me, and that these two heads were joined by pain and I had to carry both of them with me.

  “I’ve got to do something,” I said out loud. It sounded peculiar, not like my own voice.

  And finally I managed to get up, clean myself up, find my wallet, put on my coat, get out of the room, lock the door and start down the hallway, holding on to things as I went.

  The whole place was deserted, of course. My watch said two-twenty.

  Once I almost passed out again, stumbling into one of the potted palms and bringing down two branches. At the top of the main staircase I sat down for a few minutes and then took the descent slowly, crossed the lobby, and got to the desk. There was no one in sight. I banged the little service bell.

  Nobody came. I thumped the bell less politely. Still no one. I was hitting the bell for the third time, a long series of pings, when footsteps started up.

  Two men came out of the back room: one small, dark bear-like man looking not very pleased, and behind him what I thought must be the bouncer. He was at least a head taller than the first man, but so unnaturally muscular that he was almost square. It was freakish. I’d never seen even a Japanese wrestler built on such a scale. I hadn’t seen him until he was actually standing behind his friend, and, looking at him I doubted that he could move. I felt a sort of pity at the sight of him, as though I were looking at a cripple whose magnificent, disproportionate torso had been caused not by his own intention but by some glandular ailment. Above the bull-like neck his face looked back at me with the absolutely placid, relaxed gaze of a baby.

  “Monsieur?” the smaller man said.

  “Fe cherche,” I panted. “I search for the hospital. A doctor, a medicine. I am bad.”

  “Ill? Monsieur is ill?”

  Oh God, I thought, they think I’m just a drunk who’s wandered in to the lobby. And my highschool French wasn’t made for this.

  I fished the key out of my pocket.

  “A dream malicious. An evil dream …” I wanted to say I’d had a nightmare and banged my nose against something. But I couldn’t remember the word for nightmare. The only word I could think of was one I vaguely remembered meant a mare’s nest. Then I realised that my mind had telescoped the words in English, not in French.

  “A dream, monsieur?” Then he said the word which must have meant nightmare.

  “Yes, yes,” I said. “In the dream, I battered——” I hit out with my arm to illustrate the nightmare battle. The bouncer looked at me with friendly interest.

  “And then, when I opened the eyes—crash! And my nose, the nose …”

  I’d forgotten the word for broken. All I could think of was couper, but that meant to cut.

  “The nose,” I said, pointing to it and being careful not to touch it, “the nose is destroyed.”

  “Ah?” the desk clerk said. He put his hand towards my face.

  “No, no. The hospital, doctor, medicine,” I said, and repeated, “the nose is destroyed, the nose is destroyed.”

  The clerk said something to his friend, who went behind the desk, got out a key, and moved out towards the front doors. He walked in an odd way, quite easily and yet slowly, so it looked as though it gave him pain, as though he really were musclebound. But perhaps it was my pain I was thinking about. And maybe he wasn’t a bouncer at all, in fact in such a respectable hotel he was probably just the other man’s brother-in-law or something, keeping him company on the night shift.

  Suddenly I had to sit down.

  “Is there a chair?”

  “But certainly, monsieur,” the clerk said. He took me by the elbow and walked me over to a chair. I put my head down in my arms and he stood beside me with his hands folded in front of him. I thought that when I finally got to a doctor I’d ask him to amputate. Not the nose. The head. I just wanted to be rid of the whole thing.

  The clerk started talking. His French didn’t seem at all perfect, but was certainly better than mine. He was asking me about the nightmare.

  “Oh,” I said, “I dreamed of the war.”

  “Ah, the war.”

  After a few moments he said, “But, monsieur is too young to have served in the war, is that not so?”

  “C’était une autre guerre,” I said. That was a different war. “Not here.” I made another hand signal, indicating far countries, and miraculously came up with the word outre-mer. “Overseas. Far, far. In Korea.”

  “Comment?”

  “The war against the Koreans.”

  There was a silence. He hadn’t understood. He didn’t believe it.

  “The war,” I said, trying to give a near substitute, “against the Chinese.”

  “Ah,” he said. “The Chinese. But yes, that is formidable.”

  “Yes, formidable,” I told him, and I think he said something about that being enough to give anyone nightmares. I wondered if I ought to explain that I hadn’t seen much active service and was in Tokyo and Hawaii a lot of the time, but the complexities of the French would have been too much for me, aside from the two heads, one like a bucket and the other one throbbing out in front of me.

  After a while I heard a car pull up outside. The night clerk helped me to my feet, saying something sympathetic and patting me lightly on the back, and he and his friend both got me into the taxi outside. We drove off straight away.

  “A l’hôpital?” I asked, and the driver said, “Oui, oui,” and added a lot in Greek, or perhaps it was Italian. I was too exhausted to know.

  It was a short drive and we pulled up by a building that looked like the goods depot back home. Not a soul around. Everything looked the vague almost-colour of moonlight, which makes your eyes strain after things and wonder what colour they would be in daylight. The taxi driver hammered on a door until a light went on and someone came to open up. Then he explained the situation in Greek.

  I thanked the driver, paid him, and tried to make him understand that he was to wait. But it was too difficult, and both men waved hands at me, telling me to forget whatever was bothering me and go inside.

  There were one or two bare lightbulbs in the hallway, and several turnings. I tripped over a stepladder as we came around a corner. The next corridor had just been painted cream-colour and there was paint-spotted canvas down on the floor. I couldn’t smell paint, but it must have been in the air, because though normally I like the smell of paint, I wanted to throw up again.

  “The physician,” the doorkeeper said, opened a door for me, and continued on down the hall. A thin, neat man with a goatee walked towards me, shook my hand, and took me into the room. He sat me down on a chair and himself on another. I pointed to my head and told him that the nose was destroyed.

  “Ici?” he said, and before I knew what he had in mind, grabbed my nose in his fingers. I fell backwards in the chair and screamed.

  The next I saw of him, he was washing his hands in a basin across the room, a different room, and I was lying on a couch, with a sort of mask across my face and over my nose.

  He gave me a bottle of pills and spent about ten minutes filling out forms, and I paid him on the spot and asked
how long the splints and bandages had to stay on. Then he wrote an extremely beautiful letter of explanation which, apparently, I would be able to present to a doctor in Athens. It looked just like the left-hand side of the Loeb Classics and I was fascinated by the speed with which it was done. He put it in an envelope, which I was to keep, and then he gave me change and settled the costs. It seemed quite reasonable.

  Going back in the taxi to the hotel I couldn’t believe it was the same night. I didn’t take the trouble to look at my watch. No time shown on it could match my impression of how late it was. To look at it would have given me the feeling of being cheated by reality, which I had had when I looked in the wardrobe mirror and did not see my head gaping open in front of me.

  The desk clerk and his bouncer friend were full of admiration for my changed appearance. I tried to look happy about it, too, and said thank you to them, and made my way up the stairs.

  The first flight was all right. The second flight was like the ascent of the Matterhorn. My eyes were beginning to get shell-shock from looking at so many palm trees and so many Persian patterns on the rug. But coming into the lighted, empty room was the worst of all.

  I took off my jacket, and remembering by the weight of it that the icon was still in the pocket, took it out and unwrapped it and stood it up against the window on the ledge, like a wayside crucifix where an accident has taken place. So much for a patron saint, I thought. Then I went into the bathroom and got something to clean up the floor. It hurt to bend down.

  I slept on top of the bed in my shirt and pants, not even bothering to take off my socks. I slept and woke and slept and woke again.

  One month to see if the pieces could be put back together again. And then if not, back to the court. “The expense!” she had said. But what did it matter? If it was going to be final, everything would be ruined anyhow. And afterwards the lawyers, and the price of two households, and when would either of us afford a vacation again?