But I would be full of sincerity. “You mean the magazines? I can pile those up in half a second, really. I think that you should have the room you were meant to have, since it’s my mistake. I haven’t even used the bathroom. Well, no — I did use it.” I would put my hand on my chest. “This is mortifying.”
Adele would reassure me. “Don’t worry about it, honestly. I’ll get a different room. You stay in that room, and I’ll get a different one. It’s fine.”
But I wouldn’t want that to happen, of course. I would hand her my key to her room, the one I borrowed from the office while in the Fold. “Here’s the key to your room,” I would say. You get your suitcase or whatever, and I’ll get the right key for my room, and then I’ll be out of your room in two seconds. Okay?”
She could so very easily not go along with this and insist on talking to the man in the motel office herself, and it would not be at all good for me if she did: I would have to use the Fold to escape, and I would have to abandon her while she was in the middle of telling the person at the desk that there was someone in her room, and then he would tell her that nobody was checked into room 24, and she would be left with a mysterious and disturbing sexual event that she could not; explain. The police would possibly get involved — awful to contemplate. But because I always mean well, despite my sneakiness, I would be flustered enough and genuine enough that she would believe me and accede.
I would check in at the office and request room 24 and get the key. Adele would be standing outside room 23 when I returned. The door would be ajar — I would have left it ajar — so she would have been able to glance at the arrangement of magazines and the washcloth on the end of the bed during my brief absence if she wanted to.
“There, all set,” I would tell her. I would noisily slap all the magazines in a big pile and cover the top one with the washcloth and carry them out to my new room. Again I would say, “I’m terribly sorry for the dreadful mix-up.”
“That’s quite all right,” she would say. She would be very unflappable and pleasant. We would wave good-night.
In my room, I would throw myself on the bed and sigh with relief — nothing bad had happened! I would think that I should ask her out for a bite to eat, since it was dinner time. I better ask her out right now, I would say to myself, before she gets undressed or has a shower, while we are both still in the ceremonially friendly mood-envelope. I would hop up — and then I would think better of it. The problem would be that I was right on the brink of being perceived as a threat by her, and I wouldn’t be able to risk seeming sinister or sleazy by making any advances now. And I wouldn’t have to. The fact that we were in side-by-side rooms would feel increasingly relevant as the evening progressed: time would be on my side. I would lie back on the bed with my hands on my forehead, listening to the sounds from her room. Despite the doors connecting us, her room would turn out to be surprisingly uneavesdroppable-on. I would hear her water run for a while — perhaps a very quick shower, more likely a face-wash and a toothbrushing. Fifteen minutes would pass. I would hear her unlock several locks and go outside. She would be on her way to dinner. I would wait and then Drop and hide behind a corner and watch her. She would decide to dine at the lugubrious woodgrain-Formica-and-waitresses-with-Early-American-bonnets restaurant that was linked to the motel, just because she was tired and it was close by. I would buy a local paper from a machine and go inside and take a menu and sit down somewhere, ignoring the PLEASE WAIT FOR HOSTESS TO SEAT YOU sign, and then I would stop meddling with time. I would be deep into menu-parsing when Adele walked in. There would be very few folks in the restaurant. The hostess would seat Adele at a nearby table. When Adele said, “Thanks,” I would look up with pleased surprise. I would say hello. She would be carrying a copy of Mirabella, still wearing the pink sweater. When she sat down, I would lean over and ask her, “After you’ve read your magazine and I’ve read my newspaper, will you join me for dessert?”
And of course she would say yes.
The two of us would pretend that we didn’t exist for half an hour. While I ate my pot roast, I would rattle the newspaper with a serious air and read it more thoroughly than I’ve read a newspaper in years. Finally there would come an indecisive moment after our dinner plates were removed. I would look up again and say, “Dessert time?”
She would get up and come over. “I shouldn’t, but I will,” she would say. “The list looks interesting.” We would discuss what an apricot crumble might in reality be, pretending to be more in the dark than we were. Then I would apologize again for the mix-up with the rooms. I would say that it was pure absent-minded stupidity on my part.
She would say, “It’s the second weird thing that has happened to me today.”
“Oh?” I would prompt. “The second?”
Yes, she would reply. She would tell me that she had been driving along the Mass Pike a few hours earlier, minding her own business, listening to a Suzanne Vega tape, when all of a sudden this voice had come on the speakers saying that he was someone in a car that she had recently passed and that he had used his powers to replace the tape in her cassette player with the one she was hearing. She would report that the tape had turned out to be, as you might expect, pornographic. “Really kind of strong stuff in places,” she would tell me. “Kind of disgusting, actually.”
“How very lurid and suggestive and mysterious,” I would say in reaction, making perplexed noises. I would question her further: did she have any idea how such an audiocassette could have made its way into her tape-player?
She would say that she had no idea. I would tell her that I was convinced that there were still one or more major phenomena in the universe that were as yet unknown or were radically misunderstood. “Are you a scientist?” she would inquire. I would say no, with a light laugh, and tell her that I was a temp in Boston, returning from seeing relatives in Pittsburgh. She would say that she was doing linguistics at the University of Chicago. She would be interested in language acquisition in children from bilingual families. We would talk quite happily about language acquisition in children from bilingual families for a long while, since I am interested in that subject myself. She would let me pay for her dessert.
Before we left, I would take a deep breath and say, “You have to forgive me. I’m desperately curious to know what sort of stuff was on that pornographic cassette. Was it just him huffing and puffing?”
“Nothing like that,” Adele would reply. “It was fairly elaborate. It was a whole story.”
I would lean forward, intrigued. “Really?” I would watch her think over what she remembered of it. I would notice her mentally putting aside the first images that came to her from it because she didn’t want to discuss them with me.
She would say, “It was about this woman who — well, there was a UPS man …”
“Figures,” I would say dismissively.
“And a neighbor boy,” she would continue, “and the boy’s girlfriend. And a lawn-mower.”
I would look alarmed. “Not something violent with a lawn-mower.”
She would shake her head.
“So just your standard porn, basically,” I would say.
She would think that one over. “I guess so. There were a great many dildos, which is fine, I guess — whatever. But then — I don’t know — golden showers? Actual out-and-out defecation?”
“Yuck,” I would exclaim.
“I don’t mean,” she would add, “that they were defecating all over the place. It was done with some taste and refinement. But still, there was a general overemphasis on the anal side of things, in my view.”