The Hotel Eden: Stories (3 page)

We got drunk. Porter grinned a lot and I actually made him giggle a few times with my witty remarks. The vodka evidently made me very clever. About nine o’clock we went up to the club car, a little snack bar, and bought some Scotch eggs. This was real life, I could feel it. I’d had a glimpse of it from time to time with Porter, but now here we were.

One long afternoon after we’d first met him, he took us on a walk through the Isle of Dogs. He’d had us meet him at the Bridge & Beacon near the foot of London Bridge and we’d spent the rest of the day tramping the industrial borough of the Isle. The pubs were hidden among all the fenced construction storage lots and warehouses. We’d walk a quarter mile down a street with steel sheeting on both sides and then down a little alley would be the entry to the Bowsprit or the Sea Lion or the Roman Arch, places that had been selling drinks for three hundred years while the roads outside, while everything outside, changed. They all had a dock and an entry off the Thames. For us it was enchanting, this lost world at once rough, crude, and romantic. Two steps down under a huge varnished beam into a long room of polished walnut and brass lamps, like the captain’s quarters on a ship, we’d follow Porter and sit by the window where the river spread beneath us. He’d call the barman by name and order three pints. I mean, we loved this stuff. We were on the inside.

“Do you know the opening of
Heart of Darkness
?” he asked. We’d never read it. “Right here,” he said, sweeping his hand at the window. “At anchor here on a sloop in the sea reach of the Thames.” And then he’d pull the paperback from his pocket and read the first two pages. “Geez, that makes a man thirsty, eh, Mark?” He’d bump me and we’d drink up.

It was a long tour. We left the London Bridge sometime after five and didn’t cross under the river in the tunnel at Greenwich until almost eleven. I remember scurrying through the long tiled corridor far beneath the river behind Porter as he dragged us along in a hurry because the pubs were going to close and we’d miss the last train back to Hampstead. We were all full of beer and Allison and I were dislocated, a feeling I got used to and came to like, as we came out into the bright cold air and saw the
Cutty Sark
moored there. This was life, it seemed to me, and I ran into the Red Cloak on Porter’s footsteps. I was bursting and so pleased to be headed for the men’s when he took my arm and pulled me to the bar. “Let’s have a pint first, just to savor the night,” he said. I wasn’t standing upright, having walked with a bladder cramp for half a mile, and now the pain and pressure were blinding. I gripped the glass and met his smile. Allison came out of the ladies’ and came over. “Are we being macho or just self-destructive?” she said.

“We’re playing through the pain,” Porter said. “We’re seeing if the Buddhists are right with their wheel of desire and misery.” I could barely hear him; there was a rushing in my ears, a cataract of steady noise. Disaster was imminent. Porter took a big slug of the bitter, and I mirrored his action. We swallowed and put down the glasses. “Excuse me,” he said. “Think I’ll hit the loo.” And he strolled slowly into the men’s. A blurred moment later I stood beside him at the huge urinals, dizzy and reclaimed. “We made it, mate,” he said. “Now we’ve got to pound down a thousand beers and catch the train.”

It had been a strange season in London for me. It was all new and as they say exciting, but I couldn’t figure out what any of it meant. Now on the train to the north coast with Porter, I actually felt like somebody else who had never had my life, because as I saw it, my life—high school, college, Allison—hadn’t taught me anything. For the first time I didn’t give a shit about what happened next. The little play dance of cause and effect, be a good student, was all gone.

“You’re not married,” I said. It seemed late on a train and you could talk like that.

He looked at me. “It’s not clear,” he said. “In the eyes of men or the eyes of God?” I must have been looking serious, because he added, “No. I’m not married. Nearly happened once, but no, it was the timing, and now I’ve got plenty to do.”

“Oh,” I said.

“It was a girl at Hilman,” he said. “I’d have done it too, but it got away from us. There’s a time for it and you can wait too long.” He pointed at me. “You and Allison talking about it?”

“No, not really. I mean, I don’t know. I guess we are, kind of, being over here together. But we’ve never talked about it really.” Now he was just smiling at me, the kid. That’s what I wanted to say: hey, I’m a kid here; I’m too young. I’m too young for anything.

Porter drank. He was the first person I’d met who drank heavily and didn’t make a mess. When the guys in the dorm drank the way he did every night we saw him, you wouldn’t see them for three days. “Well, just remember there’s a time and if it gets away, it’s gone. Be alert.” It sounded so true what he said. I’d never had a talk like this on a train and it all sounded true. It had weight. I wondered if the time had come and gone. I thought about Allison at thirty or forty, teaching art history at Holyoke or someplace. She’d be married to someone else, a man who appeared to be older than she, some guy with a thin gray beard.

“How do you know if the time is right or if the time is coming up? How do you know about this timing?” I held out my beautiful white coffee cup, and Porter carefully filled it with the silver liquid. My future seemed vast, unchartable. “Whose fault was it when you lost this girl?”

Porter rolled his head to look at me. He looked serious. “Hers. Mine. She could have fixed it.” He gave me a dire, ironic look. “And then it was too late.”

“What was her name?”

“It’s no longer important.”

“Was she a Lake?”

The window with the cabin lights dimmed was a dreamy plate of our faint reflection torn up by all the white and yellow lights of industrial lots and truck parks. “Yeah,” he said. “They all were. She wore her hair like Allison does and she looked that way.” He had grown wistful and turned quickly to me with a grin. “Oh, hell, they all look that way when they’re twenty-two.” After a while, Porter sat up and again topped my cup with vodka.

In Edinburgh, we had to change trains. It was just before dawn, and I felt torn up by all the drinking. Porter walked me across to our connection, the train for Cape Wrath, and he went off—for some reason—to the stationmaster’s office. Checking on something. He was going to make a few calls and then we’d be off again, north to the coast. I’d wanted to call Allison, but what would I say? I missed her? It was true, but it sounded like kid stuff somehow. It bothered me that there was nothing appropriate to say, nothing fitting, and the days themselves felt like they didn’t fit, like I was waiting to grow into them. I sat sulking on the train in Edinburgh station. I was sure—that is, I suspected—that there was something wrong with me. I hadn’t seen a fire or found a body or stopped a fight or
been
in one, really, nor could I say what was going to happen, because I could not read any of the signs. I wanted with all my teeth for something real to claim me. Anyway, that’s as close as I can say it.

When Porter came back I could see him striding down the platform in the gray light like a man with a purpose. He didn’t seem very drunk. He had a blue package under his arm. “Oh, matey, bad luck,” he said, sitting opposite me in our new compartment. It was an older train, everything carpet and tassels and wood in remarkably good condition. It was like a time warp I was in, sitting there drunk while Porter told me he was going back to London. “Have to.” He tapped the package. “They’ve overnighted all the data and I’ve got to compose the piece by tomorrow.” He shook my hand heartily. “Wish me luck. And good luck to you. You’ll love Cape Wrath. I once saw a submarine there off the coast. Good luck to you and your Gulf Stream.” He smiled oddly with that last, a surreal look, I thought from my depth or height, distance anyway, and he was gone.

Well, I couldn’t think. For a while I worked my face with my hands, carefully hoping that such a reasonable gesture might wake me, help me get a grip. But even after the train moved and then moved again, gaining momentum now, I was blank. Outside now the world was gray and green, the misting precipitation cutting the visibility to five hundred feet. This was part of a typical spring low pressure that would engulf all of Great Britain for a week. I didn’t really know if I wanted to go on alone, but then I didn’t know where I was going. I didn’t know if I wanted to get off the train, because I didn’t really know why I was on the train in the first place. I felt a little sick, a kind of shocky jangling that would resolve itself into nausea but not for about an hour, and so I put my feet on the opposite seat, closed my eyes, and waited.

Porter had been to our flat once. It was the day I had gone to the Royal Weather Offices in London, and when I came back, he and Allison were drinking our Whitbred at the tiny table. The place was a bed-sitter, too small for three people. I sat on the bed, but even so every time one of us moved the other two had to shift. Evidently Porter had come to invite us to some funky bar, the last mod pub off Piccadilly, he said. Allison’s face was rosy in the close room. I told them about my day, the tour I’d taken, and Porter got me talking about El Ni
o, and I got a little carried away, I guess. I mean, I knew this stuff. But I remember them exchanging glances and smiling. I was smiling too, and I remember being happy waving my arms around as the great cycles of the English climate.

Now I felt every ripple of every steel track as it connected to the one before it, and I knew with increasing certainty that I was going to be sick. But there was something more than all the drink rising in me. Something was wrong. I was used to that feeling, that is, that things were not exactly as I expected, but this was something else. That blue package that Porter had carried back. I’d seen it all night, the corner of it, sticking out of the blown zipper of his leather valise. He’d had it all along. What was he talking about?

It was like that for forty minutes, my stomach roiling steadily, until we stopped at Pitlochry. When I stood up, I felt the whole chemistry seize, and I limped to the loo and after a band of sweat burst onto my forehead, I was sick, voluminously sick, and then I was better, that is, just stricken not poisoned. My head felt empty. I hurried to the platform and wrangled with the telephone until I was able to reach Roger Ardreprice. I had tried Allison at home and at the museum, and then I called Roger at work and a woman answered the phone: “Keats’s House.”

“Listen,” I started after he’d come to the phone. Then I didn’t know what to say. Why was I calling? “Listen,” I said again. “I’m uneasy about something.…”

“Where are you calling from?” he asked.

“I’m in Scotland. I’m in someplace, Pitlochry. Porter and I were going north to the coast.”

“Porter, oh, for god’s sakes, you didn’t get tangled up with Porter, did you? What’s he got you doing? I should have said something.”

The phone box was close, airless, and I pressed the red-paned door open with my foot. “He’s been great, but…”

“Oh my, this is bad news. Porter, for your information, probably started the Lake fire. He was tried for it, you know. He is bloody bad news. You keep yourself and that young woman away from him. Especially the girl. What’s her name?”

I set my forehead against one of the glass panes of the phone booth and breathed through my mouth deeply two or three times. “Allison,” I said.

“Right,” Roger Ardreprice said from London. “Don’t let him at her.”

I couldn’t hear very well now, a kind of static had set up in my head, and I set the phone back on the cradle.

The return train was a lesson in sanity. I felt the whole time that I would go crazy the next minute, and this powerful about-to-explode feeling finally became a granite rock which I held on my lap with my traveling case. I thought if I could sit still, everything would be all right. As the afternoon failed, I sat perfectly still through the maddening countryside, across the bridges and rivers of Great Britain with my body feeling distant and infirm in the waxy shadow of my hangover. Big decisions, I learned that day, are made in the body, and my body recoiled at the thought of Porter.

From King’s Cross I took a cab to the museum. I didn’t care about the expense. It was odd then, being in a hurry for the first time that spring, impatient with the old city, which now seemed just a place in my way. Allison wasn’t there. I called home. No answer. I checked in the Museum Pub, where we’d had lunch a dozen times; those lunches all seemed a long time ago. I grabbed another taxi and went home. Our narrow flat seemed like a bittersweet joke: what children lived here? The light rain had followed me south, as I knew it would, and in the mist I walked up to the High Street and had a doner kebab. It tasted good and I ate it as I drifted down to the tube stop. There was no hurry now. Rumbling through the Underground in the yellow light, I let my shoulders roll with the train. Everyone looked tired, hungover, ready for therapy.

I’d never been to the Hotel Eden alone, and in the new dark in the quiet rain, I stood a moment and took it in. It was frankly just a sad old four-story white building, the two columns on each side of the doors peeling as they had for years on end. Norris was inside alone, and I took a pint of lager from him and sat at one of the little tables. The beer nailed me back in place. I was worn out and spent, but I was through being sick. I had another pint as I watched Norris move in the back bar. It would be three hours before Allison and Porter came in from wherever they were, and then I would tell them all about my trip to Scotland. It would be my first story.