The Lonely Hearts Hotel(102)
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AFTER EVERYONE LEFT, Jimmy and Rose walked down the street to the boardwalk. The ocean was right there in front of her. She’d never seen the ocean before. It was so vast compared to the rivers she’d seen. The sand resembled brown sugar. The seagulls leaped up and down as if they were at the ends of yo-yos. The waves made the sound of someone biting into an apple. When they crashed, they were a hundred thousand chorus girls raising up their dresses at once. And then the water receded again like the train of a jilted bride walking off into the distance.
Jimmy couldn’t stop glancing at her. Her hair immediately seemed to curl. Her cheeks, which always seemed to turn bright pink when she was out in the cold for too long, were suddenly all rosy. While he was looking, his eyes turned a brighter blue. It was something the ocean did to blue eyes. It turned them on as though they were lightbulbs.
They were both dressed more formally than everybody else on the beach. Their careful outfits looked absurd. The sand kept trying to get into her shoes. And the wind kept trying to knock her hat off.
A woman walked by in a long green wool coat, a striped headband tied around her forehead with a big bow at the back. She looked as though she were off to fight a dragon, Rose thought. She resembled a warrior. Her four children followed her at an increasing distance. She turned and called back to them by their absurd nicknames: Cricket and Frog and Booboo and Bird. They all laughed and hopped and skipped, but didn’t really hurry up at all. When we were free and easy, that was when we felt like ourselves. That’s what children with mothers feel like, Rose thought: free and easy.
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JIMMY AND ROSE SAT AT the counter of a hot dog shack on the boardwalk and ordered pints of beer. After taking a sip of her beer, Rose had a white mustache on her lip. She felt a hundred pounds lighter. She wondered how that could be, and then she realized that it was because she had very temporarily lifted her business concerns and efforts off her shoulders. The beer was making them happy, like children at a birthday party. The beer made their words come out of their mouths like carbonated bubbles.
Jimmy kept looking to Rose for some sort of encouragement. She hadn’t come out here with him to discuss love. He knew that. He had just been trying to convince himself that the situation was otherwise. Jimmy handed Rose the petite briefcase. It wasn’t the ordinary kind of briefcase that a man might be in possession of. It was a dainty, thin black briefcase with a black handle in the shape of a swan biting its tail. Two clasps on either side of it made the swan’s golden wings.
It was a briefcase that only a girl would feel comfortable toting down the street. Jimmy had bought it especially as a gift for Rose. As a subtle indication to Rose that he wanted their relationship to be more than a business one.
Rose opened the briefcase. She looked at the deeds to the hotels. She read the names on the papers. She imagined what she was going to do with each one. How she would make it wonderful.
She closed her eyes and imagined the Valentine Hotel. Chandeliers sprouted down from the ceiling. The floors grew fantastic carpets. Magnolias and tulips and violets sprouted on the wall. Statues of nude girls climbed onto the empty plinths in the lobby. She opened her eyes again and smiled. She was in a good mood.
Jimmy had always been incapable of making a connection between sex and love. Sex was something that you purchased, like an Italian ice. He noticed how Rose stuck her thumb in her mouth to suck off a drop of beer. He noticed the way she shooed away a pigeon that was walking toward the shack, using just the tip of her toe. He noticed she smiled at a fat baby passing in a stroller. He was surprised at just how much her smiling at a baby got to him. She twitched her nose when she drank the beer. She crossed her ankles under the stool.
He just had to look at women and tilt his head at a certain angle and they would always blush—and it would make them have a dirty thought in their heads. And after that, getting them into bed was downhill. Many other gangsters had tried to figure out the exact degree of this angle, but they never could.
He tilted his head at Rose just to see what would happen. The sun reflected off her wedding ring and stabbed him in the eye, and for the moment he had to turn away from looking at her.
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THERE WAS A LITTLE GIRL with black hair standing out at the edge of the water. The ocean kept casting a wave like a net at her feet to try to pull her in—but failed each time. She wore a white coat and a scarf with red polka dots. She was waving at someone. It seemed to Rose that she was waving at her, though she knew that this couldn’t possibly be the case.
The driver of Jimmy’s limousine was reading a newspaper that described the Night of Broken Glass. He had spent the entire time that they were at the beach reading about how in Germany a few nights before, Jewish shops and synagogues had been raided, and tens of thousands of Jews had been rounded up. Jimmy ran the shipyards—the advent of the war was going to make him even richer than he was before. The war was frankly about to make a lot of people very rich. But nobody knew that right then, except perhaps the limo driver.
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JIMMY LOOKED FOR AN EXCUSE to meet her backstage the next night. He came with a bottle of wine that he had been given as a gift by a politician. He said there were some details about their plan he needed to clarify. They drank the wine together. She said that she couldn’t concentrate on the numbers now that she was tipsy. Her thoughts were like corks that couldn’t stay below the surface of the water. He said he couldn’t remember the name of the street he lived on. She smiled and her teeth were purple. He was keenly aware of the fact that he was making another man’s wife laugh.