The next afternoon I packed a bag and took a cab across town to the Hotel Milton, looking for that room where I could begin my illustrious life. They gave me a room on the second floor, looking out onto an airshaft. The room had not been made up. There was an empty whiskey bottle and two glasses on the bureau and only one of the two beds had been used. I called the desk to complain and they said the only other vacancy they had was a suite on the tenth floor. I then moved to this. I found a parlor, a double bedroom and a large collection of flower pictures. I ordered some gin, vermouth and a bucket of ice and got stoned. This was not what I intended to do and in the morning I moved to the Hotel Madison.
My room at the Madison was furnished with the kind of antiques Doheny had had in his consultation room. It only lacked the colored photographs of his three children. The desk, or some part of it, had once been a spinet. The coffee table was covered with leather that had been tooled, gilded and burned by many cigarettes. There were mirrors on all the walls so that I could not escape my own image. I saw myself smoking, drinking, dressing and undressing and when I woke in the morning the first thing I saw was myself. I left the next day for the Waldorf, where I was given a pleasant, high-ceilinged room. There was a broad view. I could see the dome of St. Bartholomew's, the Seagram Building and one of those yellow bifurcated buildings that has a terraced and windowed front and a flat, yellow-brick backside with no sign of life but a rain gutter. It seemed to have been sliced with a knife. Almost anywhere in New York above the fifteenth floor your view includes a few caryatids, naiads, homely water tanks and Florentine arches and I was admiring these when it occurred to me how easy it would be to escape the cafard by jumping into the street and I checked out of the Waldorf and took a plane to Chicago.
In Chicago I took a room at the Palmer House. This was on the sixteenth floor. The furniture seemed to be of some discernible period but the more I examined it the more it seemed to be an inoffensive improvisation and then I realized that it was the same furniture I had seen in my room at the Waldorf. I flipped open the Venetian blinds. My window looked out into an enclosure where I could see upwards, downwards and sidewise, a hundred, hundred windows exactly like mine. The fact that my room had no uniqueness seemed seriously to threaten my own uniqueness. I suffered an intense emotional vertigo. The fear was not of falling but of vanishing. If there was nothing in my room to distinguish it from a hundred, hundred others there might be nothing about me to set me apart from other men, and I snapped the Venetian blinds shut and went out of the room. Waiting for the elevator a man gave me that bland, hopeful gaze of a faggot on the make and I thought that he might have been driven by the sameness of the hotel windows to authenticate his identity by unnatural sexual practices. I lowered my eyes chastely to the floor. Downstairs I drank three martinis and went to a movie. I stayed in Chicago two days and took the Zephyr to San Francisco. I thought a train compartment might be the environment where I could begin my new life but it was not. In San Francisco I stayed two nights at the Palace and two nights at the St. Francis and then flew down the coast and checked in at the Los Angeles Biltmore. This was the furthest from what I wanted and I moved from there to the Chateau Marmont. I moved from there to the Beverly Hills and a day later took a plane to London on the northerly route. I tried to get a room at the Con-naught but they were full and so I went instead to the Dorchester where I lasted two days. I then flew to Rome and checked in at the Eden. My cafard had followed me around the world and I was still drinking heavily. Lying in bed in the Eden one morning with a pillow over my face I summoned up Kilimanjaro and its ancient village, the Elysian Fields and the fortified town. It occurred to me then that I had thought the town might be Orvieto. I rented a Fiat from the concierge and started north.
It was after lunch when I got into Umbria and I stopped in a walled town and had some pasta and wine. The country was wheat country, more heavily forested than most of Italy and very green. Like most travelers I kept stupidly observing the sameness of things, kept telling myself that on the evidence of what I saw I might be in New Hampshire or the outskirts of Heidelberg. What for? It was nearly seven o'clock when I came down the winding road into the broad valley that surrounds Orvieto.
I had been wrong about the towers but everything else seemed right. The city was high, its buildings seemed to be a variation of the stone butte and it looked like the place I had seen in fending off the cafard. It seemed to correspond to my vision. I was excited. My life, my sanity were involved. The papal cathedral, in its commanding position, excited, as it was meant to do, awe, admiration and something like dread as if some part of my memory was that of a heretic on my way to be questioned by the bishops. I drove through the lower town up to the city on the butte and checked in at the Hotel Nazionale where I was given a large, deluxe European room with a massive armoire and a glass chandelier. It was not the room I was looking for. I wandered around the streets and just before dark, in a building not far from the cathedral, I saw the lighted windows and the yellow walls.
I seemed, looking up at them from the sidewalk, to be standing at the threshold of a new life. This was not a sanctuary, this was the vortex of things, but this was a place where the cafard could not enter. The door of the building was open and I climbed some stairs. The pair of yellow rooms was on the second floor. They were unfurnished, as I knew they would be, and freshly painted. Everything was ready for my occupancy. There was a man putting up shelves for my books. I spoke to the man and asked him who the rooms belonged to. He said they were his. I asked if they were for sale or for rent and he smiled and said no. Then I said I wanted them and would pay whatever he asked for them but he went on smiling and saying no. Then I heard some men in the hallway, carrying something heavy. I could hear their strained voices, their breathing, and the object, whatever it was, bumping against the wall. It was a large bed, which they carried into the second of the yellow rooms. The owner explained to me then that this was his marriage bed. He was going to be married next day in the chapel of the cathedral and begin his married life here. I was still so convinced that the rooms were, spiritually at least, my property that I asked him if he wouldn't prefer to live in one of the new apartments in the lower town. I would pay the difference in the rent and was prepared to give him a large present for the wedding. He was impervious, of course. Like any groom, he had imagined so many hundreds of times the hour when he would bring his bride back to the yellow rooms that no amount of money would dislodge the memory from its place in his mind. I wished him well anyhow and went down the stairs. I had found my yellow rooms and I had lost them. I left Orvieto in the morning for Rome and left Rome the next day for New York.
I spent one night in my apartment during which I drank a quart of whiskey. The next afternoon I drove out to Pennsylvania to visit a classmate of mine-Charlie Masterson-and his wife. They were heavy drinkers and we ran out of gin before dinner. I drove into the little village of Blenville and bought a fresh supply at the liquor store and started back. I made a wrong turn and found myself on a narrow red dirt lane that seemed to lead nowhere. Then on my left, set back from the road and a little above it, I saw the yellow walls for the third time.
I turned off the motor and the lights and got out of the car. There was a brook between the road and the house and I crossed this on a wooden bridge. A lawn or a field-the grass needed cutting-sloped up to a terrace. The house was stone-rectangular-an old Pennsylvania farmhouse, and the yellow room was the only room lighted. The walls were the same color I had seen in Orvieto. I went up onto the terrace, as absorbed as any thief. A woman sat in the yellow room, reading a book. She wore a black dress and high-heeled shoes and had a glass of whiskey on a table at her side. Her face was pale and handsome. I guessed she was in her twenties. The black dress and the high-heeled shoes seemed out of place in the country and I wondered if she had just arrived from town or were just about to leave, although the size of the whiskey glass made this seem unlikely. But it was not the woman but the room I wanted-square, its lemon-yellow walls simply lighted-and I felt that if I could only possess this I would be myself again, industrious and decent. She looked up suddenly as if she sensed my presence and I stepped away from the window. I was very happy. Walking back to the car I saw the name Emmison painted on a mailbox at the end of the driveway. I found my way back to the Mastersons' and asked Mrs. Masterson if she knew anyone named Emmison. "Sure," she said. "Dora Emmison. I think she's in Reno."