The Lonely Hearts Hotel(106)

“You can make anything sound splendid, Rose. But we have an opportunity also to go on tour. That could also be successful.”

“It won’t be, not if you look at the details of the contract, which I did with Fabio. We’ll be living an existence that is just short of starvation. We’ll be getting such a small percentage of the door. We’ll never be able to put anything away. We’ll be staying in fleabag hotels. It’s a trap if we sign it. We’ll be exploited by the producers. We won’t run our own show.”

“But the tour is an opportunity that we earned legitimately. We got it because of our own talent and not because of wheeling and dealing. I don’t think we should be involved in anything corrupt.”

“Pierrot! Don’t be a fool. Don’t be naive!”

“Stop talking to me like I’m an idiot, Rose. I can’t stand it. Whatever happened to us making decisions together?”

“I’m bringing it up to you now.”

“But McMahon will never let you run those clubs. He’ll fight back. So I don’t even know how you’re considering it. I mean, just tell me, what do you intend to do about McMahon?”

Rose didn’t say anything. He looked at Rose’s face. The black lace veil over her eyes gave him the impression that he was speaking to her through a screen in a confessional. The answer to that question wasn’t the sort of thing one could speak out loud. It was something that was insinuated. Something that just became known.

A sickening feeling came over Pierrot. It was that strange feeling you get when you realize you’ve missed out on something that’s been under your nose all along. He almost felt high; the realization sent a flood of adrenaline through his body. She meant to have McMahon executed.

Rose was terrified as she watched Pierrot figure this out. Her heart beat desperately in her chest, a frog newly trapped in a jar. She didn’t know how he would take it. She was afraid he would leave her. She knew that she had risked their marriage for this enterprise.

“Of course,” Pierrot said. “It’s the only way that your plan will work. It’s so obvious. But I didn’t realize it because I couldn’t imagine that such a thing was possible. It’s monstrous. Diabolical.”

The dogs began viciously barking at each other. Rose was angered by Pierrot’s accusations. She raised her voice to talk over the ferocious barking and snarling.

“I was an orphan, Pierrot. My body never belonged to me. You must have felt that too. If someone wanted to beat me, they could beat me. If someone wanted to lock me in the closet, they could. They didn’t even have to have a reason. Childhood is such a perverse injustice, I don’t know how anyone survives it without going crazy. But I have a chance to turn the tables. I have a chance to run the streets and be a very wealthy woman. No one is ever, ever, ever going to treat me with disrespect again.”

Rose’s eyes had grown large and dark as she spoke. Pierrot looked at all the men around him. They were yelling and waving their hats up in the air over their heads. She was right. Maybe there was a certain amount of aggression that a person needed in order to get by. He had felt much more at ease in the children’s hospital with all the broken children.

“I can’t go with you, Rose.”

“I can’t go back without you, Pierrot.”

At that moment he was seized by such a terrible sense of loss that he thought he might begin to weep. He was alone and bereft. Because he knew what Rose said wasn’t true. Whether or not she was aware of it, she had begun to imagine her future, and he was not in it. She had already left him behind.

And if he did manage to make her stay, it would only be out of guilt and an old promise they had made when they were younger. He was standing in her way. She was meant for great things; he was not. Perhaps he was just a fool who couldn’t grow up and understand the world.

Pierrot straightened up and held Rose’s chilly cheeks in his hands.

“My darling cynic. You were always the one for me. You were the only one I ever loved. You’ve been breaking my heart since I was fifteen years old,” Pierrot said. “I only wish that I had known.”

“Known what?”

“That you hate McMahon more than you love me.”

Just then the sound of a dog weeping and whining, as though fatally injured, emerged from the ring. Pierrot began to retreat, backing away from Rose. Men who had been standing behind Rose now rushed toward the ring to see the dogs. The fight was reaching its final throes: its apotheosis, its climax, its denouement. They got in between Rose and Pierrot. She reached her hands out between their bodies to get Pierrot’s attention. There was a wall of men separating the two of them.

“Oh, where are you going? Pierrot! Pierrot! Pierrot! Come back! Come back.”

When Rose finally got through the men, Pierrot was nowhere to be seen.

The sounds in the ring abruptly abated. There was a terrible crunch, almost certainly that of a neck being snapped. And it was followed by a terrible silence. The dogs stopped making noises. A quiet came over the hall. The crowd quieted down too, as if they were ashamed of their own violent natures. They couldn’t believe that moments before they had been desperate for something terminal and tragic: for a dog to die. In fact, now they were struck by the brevity and sweetness of life, which only death can make sense of.

Rose turned to the ring. She was terrified to approach. She couldn’t bring herself to view what she knew everybody else was looking at: the tiny gray poodle, its beautiful limbs still, its neck snapped and its head backward, its big dreams having got the creature nowhere. She began her walk over to see it for herself.