He looked at McCallum’s shirt, feeling as if he’d carried in a grease rag. “No, no,” he said. “Thank you very much.”
“Please follow me,” Alicia said, opening a side door. The building, two tiered, stretched behind them. Just outside the overhang, two redwood tubs held palm trees with something flowering at their bases. Pansies? Purple pansies in April? The elevator was about twenty feet away; the doors opened immediately when Alicia hit the “up” button. They rode in silence to the second floor. When the doors opened, she said, “Please turn left,” then came up beside him and overtook him just outside room 44. Before the key turned in the door, he felt sure that room 44 would be as close to heaven as he could imagine. He saw it in advance, felt the carpeting beneath his feet, almost drank in the pale light from the table lamp Alicia switched on. It sat on a lacquered chest just inside the door. As she switched on two more lights, he looked at the cherry armoire, saw the large bed with its enormous bedposts and scalloped back. On a brass tray were a digital clock, a flashlight, a thick black pen, and the request form for the morning’s breakfast. He reminded himself that he was not an unsophisticated person: he had stayed in other good hotels, seen these things before. But tonight it was as if velvet were replacing sandpaper. He realized the extent of his exhaustion. It was the strain of being with McCallum, not only the days of driving, and in that large bed he could lie spread-eagled, dreaming it all away. Maybe he really would stay for the chamber music. Maybe he would extend his stay, recuperate, use this extremely nice place as the springboard for reentering the world.
“Thank you,” Alicia said, as he slipped his billfold from his back pocket and tipped her.
She left, telling him to call the desk if they could provide anything further. She had already lifted the duvet from the armoire and placed it at the bottom of the bed. As she closed the door, he poked it with the heel of his hand, watched the down cover sink and slowly rise. McCallum’s shirt was draped over an arm of the chair. His bag sat on a luggage rack. Over the bed, flanked by sconces, was a framed Audubon print of a flamingo. For the first time, he felt he had truly left New Hampshire behind. Something indescribable about the room, which was at once comforting and impersonal, relaxed him. He decided to take a hot shower and stretch out on the bed, to decide then whether it seemed the right moment to call Sonja, or whether he felt more inclined to watch Betrayal. He ate the mint, rolling the foil between thumb and finger, dropping the little ball into the trash basket in the marble bathroom. On a tray he saw cotton swabs, small bottles of lotion and shampoo, a Bic shaver, a small sewing kit, a shoeshine cloth. Above those things, in the long rectangular mirror, he saw his face: haggard; showing the signs of the skipped morning shave; a small red pimple or bug bite on his temple; his sideburns, now almost completely white. It had been a while since he’d scrutinized himself in a mirror. He’d developed a way of more or less looking through mirrors, so he didn’t consciously register what he was seeing. Who would love a person who looked so ordinary? he wondered, smoothing his rain-matted hair. Not that Tony Hembley was any movie star. Not that he looked this bad every day. Not as though you have to keep looking if you’ve seen enough, he told himself.
A thick white terrycloth robe hung from a hanger suspended from a hook on the back of the bathroom door. He removed the robe and draped it over the top of the shower door, spent a few seconds figuring out how the faucet worked while admiring the heaviness of the brass. The bath mat was rolled and placed in a deep, chrome-plated basket attached to the tile at the back wall of the shower, along with a back scrubber enclosed in plastic. Standing under the strong force of the shower, he unwrapped the soap, tossing the wrapper sideways, over his head. The soap smelled of roses and cloves, he decided after some thought; it smelled like something that might be ingested. Tempted to put the tip of his tongue to the heavy oval bar, he touched it instead with the tip of his nose, then smeared it over his cheeks and forehead before placing it in the soap dish and spreading the soap with his hands. If he had brought the razor into the shower he could have shaved, though he was glad he’d left it on the counter because he was enjoying the sybaritic shower. He washed his hair with the soap — something Sonja deeply disapproved of, saying it made his hair look like it had been struck by lightning — then massaged each shoulder as he dialled the showerhead clockwise, increasing the force of the water. What if he looked for another job? What if he went into business with Gordon, assuming Gordon wasn’t retired himself? What if he and Sonja had an adventure? What if this time they bought a more expensive house, one with a marble bathroom, the floor matte-black tile, a brass hook on the back of the door strong enough to haul Moby Dick out of the water? What if he got out of the shower transformed, combed his hair straight back in the fashionable European style, put on fresh clothes and went down to the lobby and charmed Alicia, lured her back to the room to spread herself on the bed beneath the impossibly long, swooped neck of the pink flamingo. Maybe instead of being an artistic exaggeration, the flamingo’s neck had grown like Pinocchio’s nose, responding to all the lies told beneath it, all the breathless I love yous. Cynical, cynical, he thought. McCallumesque.
He stepped carefully from the shower, turning off the water after he got out. He reached for a towel, ran it over himself lightly before pulling on the robe and tying the sash. With a serious expression he faced the mirror again, considered shaving lightly while his skin was still wet, decided to grow a beard. He opened one of the small bottles and squeezed, discharging a tiny slug of bright yellow lotion into the palm of his hand, swiping it over his cheeks and down his neck. It felt strange, as if it were about to sting, though it did not. He massaged it in with awkward delicacy, went to his duffel bag, and rummaged for his comb, taking it into the bathroom and combing his hair back, stepping back from the mirror to look at himself a second time. He turned up the robe’s thick collar, then became suddenly self-conscious, as if this middle-aged man might presume to be Humphrey Bogart in his trench coat. Instead of telling Ingrid Bergman she should leave him, though, he would be urging Sonja to stay. He thought: We’ll always have New Hampshire.
Sitting in one of the two overstuffed, flame-stitched armchairs, he tucked the robe between his legs and flipped through a magazine that described tourist highlights of South Carolina. He looked at a close-up of a peach, flipped to another page that showed a close-up of a wrinkled black hand holding a puff of cotton. On another page, Marla Maples, Donald Trump, and Marla Maples’s mother stood in a line, Marla smiling, Donald either trying to look enigmatic or else dragged down by the weight of his extra-long tie, Marla’s mother in profile, no doubt telling the photographer to hurry up before Donald jumped out of the frame. Another page gave recipes for étouffée.
He stretched out on the bed and looked at the ceiling. White, unmarred, a round, unilluminated lightbulb hanging from the center of the ceiling fan. He thought again of Casablanca. A couple, arguing, walked down the corridor past his room, their Southern drawls mitigating the seriousness of what they were saying. He seemed to be objecting to her only liking expensive restaurants; she seemed to be objecting to his objecting. They were thin shadows cast ceilingward, the white enamel fan paddles briefly beheading them.
Dorothy Burwell, he thought. She had been the first girl he had ever argued with. She had said she’d go to a school music concert with him, and then she’d cancelled. Evie had gone with him instead, and there Dorothy Burwell had been, on stage with the sopranos, dressed in a pink dress with pinker flowers, right up there on stage as part of the performance she’d said she’d attend with him. He had said afterward, driving home with Evie, “How could it ever have been possible that she’d be my date when she was part of the choir?” and Evie had tried to make light of it, saying that probably Dorothy had wanted to be with him so she’d practiced a bit of self-deception, pretending until the last minute that it was a real possibility. It hadn’t seemed very likely to him at the time, but now he thought perhaps Evie had been right. He had not had any experience with conflicted people at that point, or run into many people who responded to things in terms of the way they wanted them to be instead of the way they were. Though there was still the chance Dorothy Burwell had said yes because she didn’t know how to say no. Dorothy had spent the first ten years of her life in Savannah, Georgia; she had a Southern accent some of the other kids made fun of, but he had loved it, the way she’d drawn out words as if sentences were a taffy pull.