The earrings were a big mistake. “Oh, no,” she said, when she saw the box. When I finally got her to open it, she said, “You thought I’d melt with joy? You want me to crow with glee like a hooker?”
“You can exchange them for some you like better,” I said.
“I’m not a hooker,” she said. “You have everything all wrong.”
And so I did, it seemed. Anything I said made things worse. My speed in getting into bed with someone else — after we’d been married less than a year, she kept saying — was an insult she could not get over. In truth, we were both at an age before we’d learned to get over anything. And I was undergoing the shock of knowing myself (me, Anthony) as the callous and unspeakable creep who kicked his sweet wife in the teeth. Melanie, for Christ’s sake. If I had dreamed for a second that she might find out… (another argument that didn’t do much for me). I had never before been the villain of the piece and it made me feel abused by fate. I sputtered and fought, and when that didn’t work, I glowered and spoke in sad monosyllables.
I did everything I could to keep her from leaving, but I could see she only grew surer that her honor lay in disdaining me. At night, in my exile on the couch in our suite, I remembered how glad she’d once been to see me walking toward her on campus, how her face would suddenly open and change into toothy joy. It was pretty devastating to remember. All my feeling for her was as clear and strong as ever, but now I was like a man in love with a movie star who didn’t even know him. When she moved out with all her clothes and books and records and went back to her family, she said, “I don’t feel sorry for you. But I will.” She left behind her rings and an angora sweater with a fox collar that I’d bought her and the hi-fi I’d given her in college, which she said had always been crappy.
And I couldn’t stand to hear any music now, it turned out. If I set down the needle, I’d take it up in a few seconds. Every tune sounded blithe and inane to me. But in the afternoon, when most guests were out, I’d go back to my room and put towels against the door to muffle the sound and I’d play my clarinet. I hadn’t picked it up in a few years and my tone was terrible, breathy as a sick sheep. I kept playing the same simple tunes (“One for My Baby,” “Autumn Leaves”) until I was a little better. It was one of the few things I could stand to do.
And I gave Melanie almost as much alimony as she asked for, despite the brevity of our marriage and the fact that she had left my bed and board. I did this out of sheer desolation. My lawyer was disgusted with me. Even my father, who’d always liked Melanie, thought I was a patsy. Maybe everyone did. The whole town knew my story. When I sat at our hotel bar trying to pace my shots of Seagram’s so I didn’t get too blotto with guests around, people tried to be nice (“Sorry about your troubles”) and they commiserated about money. Men did. They’d say, “They soak you, don’t they?” or “Freedom has its price, oh, boy.” Women said, “You’re young. Time for a new start, when you’re ready.”
It was fortunate I could drink for free at the hotel, since my cash had to stretch much further now. The weekday bartenders, an ancient and discreet crew, became people whose faces I knew as well as my own. Women did hover around me at the bar — I’d become someone to be curious about, to ask personal questions, to offer comfort or more than comfort, and it made me feel somewhat elegant, to be a man who turned down luxuries.
The thing was not to drink too much. I could get too confident, could hold forth about how Rita Hayworth liked me or how divorce is a racket for lawyers. I’d tell any woman in the bar she was a member of the smartest sex by far, that men were just dopes compared to females. One woman told stories about how they measured the intelligence of dogs (were men as smart as dogs?) and the conversation got so jokey and riotous that I ended up going back to her room and having an entirely enjoyable fling. She was gone within a few days, back to her husband, but a friend of hers knew about me and liked to joke with me, as if we had a secret. Pretty soon (the steps were not that many) we began to have our own secret. She too was married — her name was Kitty, a breezy, languid sort of woman — and we had to be careful because the husband was sometimes about. She was not afraid of him but I was. “He’s a bluffer,” she said. “That’s what bankers are.” How spoiled I was, letting her tickle me under the covers. This was an odd time for me — my heart was clotted with pain, aching for Melanie, and I was somehow also having an almost genuine form of fun.
The house rule, explicitly stated to all hotel employees, male and female, was no fooling around with guests. Well, of course not. Think of the trouble, the lawsuits, the tawdriness. I understood the need to be careful. But one night I fell asleep and woke up to the stench of burning fibers — I was sleeping in a nest of flames! Kitty’s bed was on fire, from one of my cigarettes. I tried to keep myself from shouting at the mattress while I hit it with a blanket. Kitty had the sense to get wet towels, which worked better. By then the room was full of black smoke and we had to run out to the hallway. I was just getting my pants on when the other rooms emptied out. People blinked at me in their pajamas. The firemen coming up the stairs cursed me for being in the way just as I was getting the hell out of there.
I was back in my own room, safe and asleep, when my parents woke me sometime early in the morning. “This can’t go on,” my mother said. “You can’t live here and keep this up.”
“He knows that,” my father said. They had let themselves in and were standing by my bed.
“What did we work for?” my mother said. “What is this hotel, then?”
“Nobody says you’re not a bright boy, Anthony,” my father said.
“They might do this in France,” my mother said, “but not here.”
“You got to get out of here for a while,” my father said. “Go stay with your sister Gigi in Tampa. She’d love to have you. Dry out. You listening?”
My father used to run a speakeasy, and my mother was once the belle of Village radicals, to hear her tell it, before she left a husband and went off to mess around with my father. I wondered, not for the first time, where they had buried those parts of them. I was very, very thirsty and my head weighed four hundred pounds. “Is Kitty okay?” I said. The skin on my palm was oozing where I’d apparently burned it. My mother brought me a tumbler of water to drink. “Okay, okay, I’ll go,” I said.
I was in a secret rage at the hotel. It had been my ruin, that palace of quiet piggery. I knew this was a stupid form of blame, but every monogrammed towel, every sculpted brass faucet, every strain of piped music in the lobby now gave me the willies. Things I’d been around since birth seemed to me full of corruption. My parents were right: I had to leave.
But I certainly wasn’t going to Gigi’s in Tampa. Tampa and I didn’t seem like a good match. I began to think Paris was the right idea. My mother and Henry Miller had put this particular bee in my bonnet. City of liberté and chacun à son goût. I was fairly sure I would like it better without Melanie.
I had no money for a ticket, unless, of course, I skipped this month’s alimony. If a man happened to be behind on such a thing, was it illegal for him to leave the country? I had the feeling it was wiser to keep my plans to myself. The thing was to go soon and stay as long as I could. Not that I had any savings for such a move. But I was the one whose job it was to pick up the cash from the front desk, tally the accounts, and put all those greenbacks in the safe. When not all of it reached the safe, the ledgers (kept by me) didn’t show any such loss. I had some guilt about doing this, some edginess as I walked down the halls with a secret lump in my briefcase. I did it five times, and each time the thefts also made me a little high.