After Claude (15 page)

My left arm, from my fingertips to my soaking wet arm socket, was throbbing with the most excruciating shocks of pain. To imagine moving my arm was an act of indescribable heroism. My entire body, still clothed in its classic jeans-and-shirt outfit, was so drenched that I could have been treading blood in a pool of the same. An invisible serpent circled and crushed my heaving chest in a deadly cold wet grip. I could have kidded myself and pretended I wasn’t having a heart attack, that my arm had simply remained asleep, as though it were my habit to wake up in pieces. I preferred to face the gravity of my condition. I don’t have to tell you what a picnic interns have with unclaimed bodies. I chose to fight, to secure medical attention while still technically alive.

I refrained from useless cries for help. Why supply the sexual perverts in the adjoining room with a cheap thrill? I rose from the bed and hauled myself through the humid darkness that rushed about me like a swollen river. I dragged myself to the door, cradling my stricken arm in my good arm, which made opening the door an Olympic feat for which I expect no gold medals. God knows how I managed to do it, but I found myself dizzy and nauseous in the wide, ugly boulevard of a hall. The halls were unnaturally silent and empty, dimly lit, the air foul but less stifling than in my narrow cell. The walls were lined with tightly locked doors. I had the queasy feeling that I was the sole survivor of a radiation disaster, soon to join my fellow victims, or worse yet, that I had already succumbed and death was nothing more than a clever imitation of life, starring a cast of one. As these frivolous speculations were bombarding my aching head, one of the mute doors opened just wide enough to allow a thin figure to slip into the hall. I couldn’t determine its sex, but coronary cases can’t be fussy. The essential thing was to find help, not romance. Still, it’s nice to know if you’re appealing to a potential rapist-mugger or a void of female vanity.

The being before me was superthin and bleached as a Kleenex. Long black hanks of lifeless hair floated around a skeletal face. I was reminded of a Japanese horror movie that Claude had dragged me to, where the hero, a samurai of sorts, persistently makes love to an enchanting Oriental vision, who invariably transforms into a bag of bones topped by a hank of dead black hair, which drove me and the samurai out of our minds. Naturally Claude found it all beautiful and significant. You couldn’t torture enough Japs for his refined tastes.

I called to the apparition, “Hey, hey, you.”

Two large, illuminated eye sockets turned blindly in my direction.

“Come over here a minute, please.” If a cadaver can be said to have a facial expression, then you’d have to call this one frightened. My voice apparently intruded on whatever reveries visit ghosts in long, empty corridors. The specter sniffed nervously, its gossamer hair falling fine as a crepe veil over its emaciated face.

“Please,” I repeated, not too sure what I’d say if it decided to approach me. All I knew was that male, female, human, or spirit, I bad to make contact. By then I had established it was masculine, if you can use that designation for someone whose ten fingers are jingling a delicate tune made by countless tiny bell rings vibrating against each other. Even from where I stood, I could smell him; a heavy, heady, penetrating odor of incense and musk exuded from his unique garments. He was the most aromatic and decorated person I’d ever seen. Every square inch of his blue jeans was painted or embroidered or written on. He was so covered with buttons and messages, I guess he could have been sunk in a time capsule for future generations to interpret like the Dead Sea Scrolls.

“You talking to me?” His tinkling hand supplied the musical accompaniment. The expression of total alarm never left his face.

“Listen,” I said, “I’m not going to hurt you. As a matter of fact, it’s just the opposite. I need your help.”

“Victor sent you,” he said tonelessly, staying a good ten paces away from me. “Well?” he demanded, putting his musical hands on his narrow hips and doing some kind of imitation of an angry person. “What bullshit threats has he dreamed up now?” Then he seemed to become terrified at his aggression. “He can’t get me back,” he said, his voice going sour. “Tell him my parents know everything and they’re ready to go to the police if he or any of his lousy slaves hassle me. I just told that to Roger and he promised me,” his defense got thick with tears, “he gave me his word, his rotten fink word, that Victor loved me and was praying for the day when I would regain my health and voluntarily return to his table. His table,” he coughed out in a crazy brief laugh. “I like that.”

I attempted to end his monologue.

“Is that your room?” I cordially inquired. “Because, if so, we’re neighbors. That’s my room.” I thumbed the door behind me. “But it was so boiling hot in there, I made a narrow escape out here. Is your room as small and crummy as mine? Are all the rooms in this dump cubbyholes? You know, you won’t believe it, but I actually imagined I was having a heart attack. Luckily, it turned out to be just an attack of suffocation. Do you by any chance have an air conditioner in your room? You look very cool.”

“You know it’s not my room,” he said, stamping his sandaled foot and giving me another dose of his weird brand of mock anger. It was as though he had no expressions, aside from terror, but had practiced the others and could perform all the appropriate gestures.

“What’s your angle, Miss Innocence? I may be crazy,” he said triumphantly, with a proud sweep of his dandelion hair. “All the specialists in New York agree on that, but I’m not stupid.”

“I’m very sorry. I didn’t mean to insult your intelligence, but I really don’t know what you’re talking about. For instance, I never even heard of Victor or Roger before.”

“Oh, sure.” His skull grin stretched, doing strange things to his sharp nose. “It’s all coincidence. I come out from seeing Roger and just happen to find you cooling off in the hall at one o’clock.”

“One o’clock,” I repeated with horror. “You mean it’s only one o’clock?” I had hoped that at least it was the afternoon of the next day. At this rate, if each night of my life took an endless year to pass, my aging process was going to accelerate disastrously.

He backed off from me. “Go ahead,” he dared me. “Go report to Roger. Tell him I could not be bullied. Tell him Victor can send an army of harpies after me, the furies, but he won’t get me back.” With that he raced down the hall, smelling and sounding like an agitated harem.

It didn’t occur to me to follow, because one: I doubted my capacity to break through his obsessions, and two: the door, the same door, had opened, releasing another exotic creature. This time I heard the unmistakable sounds of an intimate party: low voices, soft bongos, subdued laughter. I almost had to refer to a previous life to remember the last soiree I’d attended, Claude’s idea of a pleasant evening being to sit around with a gang of refugees, rhapsodizing over their last home-cooked meal. In Paris, you don’t know if it’s a party till you see who’s stuck with the check.

From the evidence of the departing guests, I concluded that I was missing a fancy-dress ball. This one was so ludicrously female that I could have sworn she was a man. A frail man who had endured one face full of sand too many and had opted to go the other way, the Veronica Lake way.

A sheet of platinum hair covered one-half of her face, which was just as well, because if the hidden eye required the workmanship of the public eye, then please, lay me on my back and let me paint the Sistine Chapel.

Getting up close to her, I saw that she had decorated her eye with thousands of electric-blue tentacles, thereby turning one half of her face into an octopus. Still I retained my customary optimism and spoke as though to a normal person. I have found that some of the worst nut cases are so appreciative of my tolerance that they snap into momentary sanity.

“Excuse me,” I said politely, “but would you happen to know if someone named Roger is giving a party in that room you just came out of?” Her octopus eye gleamed at me. She struggled to separate her heavily coated lips.

“Party?” she said, making a small popping sound, due to air rushing into her vacuum. “Roger doesn’t give parties.”.

“But a friend of mine, whom I happened to meet recently, invited me to a party, and I know he said it was in Roger’s room.”

Veronica’s face underwent elaborate spasms, which caused me to believe that she was having a stroke, but it developed into a yawn, dangerously constricted by her self-seal mouth. Mortified by her social lapse, she stiffened her features into their previous immobility and marched away without so much as a goodbye. At least our limited exchange had moved me to the opposite side of the hall, and there I was, sick and friendless, before Roger’s door.

Since I am cursed with this British reserve when it comes to intruding on anyone’s privacy, I stood outside that door I don’t know how long, trying to choose between emergency and discretion. All of my symptoms had returned with such renewed vigor, you’d think they’d been out for a refreshing drink. I was sweating, nauseous, trembling, and my poor hyperventilating heart pounding in my chest involuntarily became my fist pounding on the door. The bongos stopped. I was amazed to hear myself sob, “Please, please let me in.”

By that time the door was opened, slowly, as if furniture were piled up against it, by a tall girl wearing Susan Hayward’s red wig and negligee. I noticed a tiny silver spoon hanging from her neck on a thin leather cord.

“It’s not Libby,” she said over her shoulder.

“Who is it?” I heard a man ask.

“Some chick freaking out.” She moved to slam the door in my face.

“Please,” I stopped her. “I must see Roger.”

“What do you want with Roger?”

“I’m sick. Call an ambulance.”

“She says she needs an ambulance.”

“Who is she?”

I can’t describe how impossible it is to pronounce the name Harriet to a hidden audience. When you say it, you need to deal on the spot with the listener’s reactions. To call a child Harriet is to condemn her to mediocrity.

My silence served me well. Roger, whose voice came closer, said, “Don’t stand there rapping. If she’s alone, let her in.”

The door opened wider, and I felt a draft of cool air. So the dump did feature air conditioning. Leave it to Claude to rent me the sweat box. Behind Susan Hayward a bonfire glowed, the effect created by a red light bulb hanging like a jewel from the center of the ceiling. Roger, stripped to the waist, wearing nothing but Levi’s held to his hips by a wide, silver, buckled belt, came forward with the grace of a god stepping out of the flames to welcome me into a new universe.

Even before I was privileged to partake of his exceptional personality, I recognized in Roger a soulmate, not to say a savior, which is unusual when you consider this childish prejudice I used to have regarding prematurely balding, soft-skinned, pale-eyed, fetus types; no, what I had was an unrehearsed revelation, an instantaneous appreciation of Roger’s highly evolved inner state. Of course, at the time, I was too sick to realize it.

He double-checked the hall and, when he’d satisfied himself that I wasn’t backed up by an army of Fuller Brush men, let me in. I stood mutely while all the locks and chains on the door were rebolted.

My room could have easily fit into one corner of what had to be the Royal Suite. There were three heavily draped windows, one of them the proud container of a softly humming air conditioner. I saw armchairs, tables, a kitchen unit, rugs, and in the far corner, I could hardly credit my eyes, a huge, old-fashioned television set, the sound turned off, the blue-gray tube a bright haze of spinning, zigzag, dismembered lines. Two low sofa beds, pulled out from the wall, were angled at the unfocused tube. Try the horizontal knob, I almost shouted, my grave condition aggravated by the painful sight. I can’t explain, but it was like watching an old friend writhing in agony.

There was a body sprawled on one of the beds, and Susan Hayward went and sat beside it, without bothering to adjust the set. The spacious room had a very lived-in, personal atmosphere, and I decided that Roger must be a permanent resident in the hotel. I was so busy taking inventory that I didn’t realize that my host was speaking to me. Roger’s voice is the original iron fist in the velvet glove, meaning that it is super soft but magnetically compelling. It may take a small effort to hear Roger’s inaudible speech, but in the end one is rewarded with such wisdom that I say, give me one of Roger’s inaudible sentences to all your collected works of William Shakespeare.

“What?” I said.

“I asked you, what’s your problem?”

“I can’t tell without the sound or picture.”

“Your problem. You were making a racket about needing a doctor.”

“Do you mind if I sit down?” I inquired, because I have a real phobia about standing around trying to explain myself.

“Watch, Roger,” the pervert called from the TV corner. “It’s just like going through the Holland Tunnel.”

He ignored her and guided me around a naked girl, lying flat on her back, to a large maple armchair. “Sit here,” he said. Mine was not to wonder why. I gratefully sank on the low cushions and proceeded to fall into the void I descended, head first. I was naturally horrified to be fainting in the midst of strangers. I observe the social niceties to the point of absurdity. You know the old wives’ tale about how the hanged man’s life flashes before his eyes? I felt as though I had sufficient time to recall in depth every single person who had failed me, while being swallowed into the abyss. That’s when I realized it was no simple swoon but Super Pig closing my account.

“I’m dying,” I cried and felt myself yanked forward by Roger’s powerful grasp. My impression of Roger will indelibly remain that of the gallant hero who snatched me out of the lion’s jaws, even though it developed that my awful descent was nothing more than me tipping backward in a recliner. Admittedly, the opulent furnishings should have prepared me for the luxury of a recliner. However, due to my European sojourn, I don’t expect an oversized armchair with mismatched cushions to turn into a roller coaster.