“I brought you dinner. I was worried about you at lunchtime today. Still am. You look sick, if you don’t mind my saying.”
“I’m fine,” he said brusquely. Now that he had the book, it was going to be harder to keep the bad thoughts at bay. “But I appreciate your kindness,” he added, trying not to look at her.
“My husband’s out with the boys tonight. They play cards once a week. Pinochle. Those games must be something.”
“Why do you say that?”
“When my husband comes home, he always looks like a freight train hit him.”
“Boys will be boys,” he muttered.
“Indeed.”
Lewis noted a quaver in her voice. Perhaps she understood more than she was letting on. Perhaps she needed a confidant, someone to pour her heart out to. He knew he shouldn’t let her in, for her own sake, but he didn’t want to disappoint her either.
“Would you like a cup of coffee?” he asked after a beat. It felt funny to ask — it was her house, after all.
“If you don’t mind — that would be nice.”
He’d been right: she wanted an intimate. She needed him — although not as much as he needed her. He guided her inside and motioned for her to sit in one of the wooden chairs that flanked the kitchen table. Primly, she adjusted her voluminous floral dress, her ample figure overflowing the seat. Lewis watched her intently. He had a sudden urge to sit in her lap, to feel himself engulfed in the soft, snug folds of her flesh.
When she caught him staring, Lewis turned away in embarrassment and started the coffee. He found the bottle of milk and the sugar jar, napkins, and spoons. He glanced at the stove, ashamed at how dirty it was, and at the greasy cast-iron frying pan he kept on one of the burner grates.
“The coffee will be ready in no time,” he said.
“Thank you, Lewis. You’re always very good to me.”
“I was about to say the same thing about you, Mrs. Russo... Doris.”
“We’re like family, you and I, aren’t we?”
Lewis realized that his hands were shaking again. In his fingers, the sugar jar trembled, its lid tinkling. He wished she hadn’t said that. It was hard enough to distance himself without hearing that kind of talk. Now that she was here, alone with him, he couldn’t stop thinking that the book might be a sign — a sign that the time had come.
“You said you thought you’d have half a dozen,” he blurted, a new coat of sweat covering his body. “What if you could still have one?”
“Pardon?”
“I could give you what you want.”
“What are you saying, Lewis?”
“Someone to hold,” he said. “I could give that to you.”
She scrutinized him, her warm eyes cooling. “You should eat your dinner, Lewis.”
“Don’t you see?” he said, gaining momentum, unable to stop. “Everything is coming together.”
“I think I need to wish you a good night, Lewis.”
She stood up quickly and clumsily, the thin fabric of her dress clinging to the thick, undulating ripples of her body. Staring at her unabashedly, he realized how close he was. Terribly close.
“Please,” he begged, “don’t leave.”
But she turned her back and snatched her purse, like she had finally caught a whiff of his freakishness. He set down the rattling sugar jar and stared at the stove. He hadn’t wanted it to come to this. But when he reached for the handle of the pan, he knew what he had to do.
Later, when the pan soaked in a sink full of sudsy red water, he realized that his foot had stopped hurting. It must be a miracle. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt such relief.
The heat wave was still in full force, and his apartment was sweltering. Even so, when Lewis crawled into bed, he slipped under the covers. With a satisfied sigh, he nestled against the pliant, ponderous body beside him. Still warm, it yielded as he maneuvered under the shelflike bosom. That spot had always been his favorite, the place he had preferred when his mother had read to him all those years ago. She couldn’t read anymore, of course, but he could tell her the story. The same book, the same pages, as close as he was ever going to get.
The Man in Room Eleven
by Michael Cunningham
Chapel Street
The tenant in room eleven of the Hotel Duncan on Chapel Street has a lifetime lease, paid monthly, agreed to by the hotel’s long-deceased original owner.
No one who is currently employed by the Duncan (a rigorously plain building of dun-colored brick) has seen the man in room eleven in at least twenty years, which is the tenure of the longest-employed of the maids. That sole remaining maid does, however, remember stories told by another of the maids, long gone, who claimed to have seen the man. She described him as courteous, reserved, and perfectly manicured, though he kept his fingernails longer than was the general custom among men. He sported a mustache so thin and precise it might have been drawn on over his upper lip with a pencil, and always wore a hat, even in the upstairs halls.
That older maid (who died of a heart attack while cleaning on one of the upper floors) had said as well that he was a perfect gentleman, and a generous tipper. She was puzzled by, but grateful for, his request that his room never be cleaned. It was that much less work for her, after all, and the guests of the Duncan occasionally left their rooms in states of rather extreme, if conventional, disorder: the dark stains on the sheets, the moldy pizza slice that somehow fell behind the bureau and went undetected for weeks.
The older maid (not long before she died) did claim to have been cleaning one of the rooms after its occupant had checked out, and to have found something too awful to describe. When pressed for details, she’d simply shaken her head, crossed herself, and said that it was gone, that she had gotten rid of it and that was the end of the story.
The Hotel Duncan is hardly luxurious. It is, however, respectable, and relatively clean. It still books rooms overnight, like any hotel, but has become more prone, over the years, to guests who stay for longer periods: weeks, months, or, occasionally, years.
They are mostly, but not exclusively, men. They often spend hours in the hotel’s lobby, which, though in need of renovation, is possessed of that timeless, neither-here-nor-there quality common to certain older, less prosperous hotels: the crepuscular eternity of deep armchairs among potted palms, Persian rugs that appear to be indigo and black in the dim light, the sporadic chiming of the bell as the elevator makes its extremely slow progress from floor to floor.
The guests who frequent the lobby are various, of course, and each has a different story to tell, but if you speak to enough of them, a certain overall theme does seem to emerge. They are, almost all, currently waiting out the period that extends from one life to another. They have, most of them, left (or been expelled from) marriages, jobs, homes, institutions, or, occasionally (as one dapper, if tipsy, gentleman put it) have simply run out of the patience required of them to live as they’d been living.
They are, almost all of them, waiting for a next era to begin. Hopelessness is rare among them, though few seem to have specific dates in mind, or to be possessed of a plan that extends beyond the vision of vaguely improved circumstances. They are waiting for a check to arrive or a divorce to be finalized; they are waiting for a niece or nephew to come for them; they are expecting a huge cash settlement from the company that rendered them unable to work.
They languish there, in the lobby of the Hotel Duncan, as one of the several desk clerks (they are alike-looking as brothers — mild-faced, bespectacled men who might be forty or might be seventy) tends to hotel business, seated in the lobby’s singular pool of bright light (from its lone overhead fixture), behind the imposing old mahogany front desk.