“May I help you?”
“I don’t think so.”
“You’re not a guest?”
“No.”
“I’m afraid the dining room is closed. We serve our last meal at ten.”
“That’s all right, I’ve eaten.”
“Are you visiting someone in the hotel?”
“Yes.”
“May I ask if you’re expected?”
“I’m not expected.”
“It’s almost one. I’ll have to ring up and announce you.”
“Tell Crainpool Mr. Main is downstairs.”
The clerk shrugs, goes to the switchboard, plugs into Crainpool’s room and speaks softly into the thin prosthetic gear that runs from his ear to his chin. He looks up at Main and frowns. “I’m afraid I woke him. He says he’ll be down as soon as he can get dressed.”
“I’ll go up.” The clerk is about to protest, but Alexander has already turned and shaken the porter awake. “Five,” he says. He has to repeat himself to the groggy man. In the elevator he glances at the framed menus high on the wall, reads the cheerful Good Morning! from the closed coffee shop. It is old news.
The elevator door opens in a cul-de-sac. There is gray and faded floral carpeting, hard upholstered benches where the old people sit while waiting for the elevator. He turns left and left again and goes down the long corridor past the housekeeper’s closets and old-fashioned hollow metal doors that belly the hall. Crainpool’s room is at the far end of the corridor. There are hotel offices across from him and a housekeeping closet next door. He turns the knob on Crainpool’s door, but it is locked. He bangs on it with his fist.
Crainpool, already in his trousers but still in his pajama tops and an old blue bathrobe, opens it. “Mr. Main.”
“It’s after hours, Crainpool. We don’t have to be so formal after hours.”
“Has something happened? Have there been mass arrests on the campus? I was sleeping; I didn’t see the eleven o’clock news. Do we have to go downtown? Just give me a minute to put on my clothes.”
“Nice place you got here.”
“It’s comfortable.”
“Small, compact, but I expect it meets your requirements. Just get lost in someplace larger.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Rattle around.”
“I guess I would.”
“Yet your needs are taken care of.” He pounds the swollen metal door. “Hotel has a laundry and dry-cleaning service, I suppose.”
“It does, yes, sir, but it’s pretty expensive. I don’t often use it.”
“Wash out a few things in the sink each night, do you? Hang ’em to dry on the rod in the bath?”
“Well, yes, sir, I do.”
“Yes. I see. I see you do.” He has strolled into the small bathroom. Underwear swims in the sink; two shirts hang on hangers above the tub, dripping water half on the tile and half in the bath; handkerchiefs stretch over the radiators like canvas on Conestoga wagons; a pair of pajamas dry on a wooden rack in the corner.
Main unzips his fly and pees into his employee’s toilet. He does not close the door or raise the seat. “These pajamas,” he says.
“Sir?”
“I was saying these pajamas,” he calls over the splash of his pee, “what happened to the nightshirt I gave you for Christmas? Don’t you use it?”
“Well, I thought that was meant as a joke, sir.”
He walks back into the room. “A joke? Why would you think it was a joke? And the nightcap, did you think the nightcap was a joke, too?”
“Well, sir—”
“The trouble with you, Crainpool, is that you don’t take things seriously. Playful yourself, you assume that everyone else has your sense of humor. A joke! That was a business investment, Mr. Crainpool, a business investment. I took it off my taxes. I thought that nightshirt and cap would solidify your image, help put you in the proper frame of mind for what’s wanted. A joke indeed! Like the garters, I suppose. Like the quill pens and the high stool. I’ve taken a great many pains, Mr. Crainpool — and gone to considerable expense, too, I might add — to reinforce your clerk’s ambience, to clericalize you. Yet you persist in your taste for the newfangled. I suppose you’ve been thinking in terms of electric typewriters and Xerox machines. What’s next, sir, conference telephones, gadgets that take your calls? ‘Mr. Crainpool is unavailable right now. Your message will be recorded and played back for him when he returns. Please begin speaking when you hear the electronic bleep…Bleep.’ ”
“No, sir.”
“ ‘No, sir.’ You’re damned right, sir, no sir. And what happens to the thick ledgers with the careful rulings inked down the center of the page? The big gray and black cardboard boxes with their snaps and clasps and their colors running like a melted zebra? To the huge checkbooks like a family album? What do we do, throw them all out, I suppose?”
“I’m sorry, sir,” Crainpool says, trying not to giggle.
“Yes, sir. I should think you would be. It isn’t as if I’ve tried to trespass in your private life…Well, have I?”
“No, sir.”
“No. You didn’t see the eleven o’clock news, you said. That implies that you have a television. Television is provided, is it not? You needn’t answer; I see it. Television is provided. Three networks and an educational channel at your disposal. There is the telephone. I see an air-conditioning unit. I rode up here in an elevator.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I was under no obligation to provide you with such lavish mod cons. None of the advantages you enjoy — there’s the electric light, there’s the flush toilet — were actually coming to you.”
“No, sir.”
“My first thought was to set you up in a boardinghouse. Such places still exist, you know, though admittedly they are scarcer now than when you first came into service.”
“Yes, sir.” Crainpool is trying very hard to keep a straight face.
“Go on, go on, continue dressing.”
“Then we’re going downtown?”
“Then I thought, no, though a boardinghouse would be the proper place for you and would go a long way towards bringing out those qualities in you which I was looking for, it might have certain drawbacks. You might not have liked your neighbors — or you might have liked some of them too much, fallen in with the wrong sort, made yourself vulnerable at the dinner hour or in the lounge on Sunday. You’d have had to share a bath, don’t forget.”
“Yes, sir.” Crainpool is buttoning his shirt.
“You wouldn’t have had your own phone. You’d have been roused at all hours to take other people’s messages. The walls in such places are paper thin. A fellow roomer’s radio could have kept you up half the night.”
“Yes, sir, I suppose that’s true, sir.”
“Then I found this place for you, didn’t I?”
“You did.”
“Yes. Then I found this place for you. A quiet residential hotel. Genteel. Yet with all the latest up-to-the-minute features you could possibly wish. Say, I like that carpet in the hall. Do all the floors have it?”
“Some do, but the patterns vary, I think.”
“You think. Only what you see when the elevator opens to take on a passenger. I take it, then, that you have no close friends in the hotel. Only the odd nodding acquaintance in the lobby and coffee shop.”
“That’s about it, sir.” He has begun to put on his tie.
“So I thought. No, don’t bother about the tie.”