The Lonely Hearts Hotel(107)

63


    LADY OF THE POND



Pierrot ran far away from the hotel and Rose. When he was out of breath, he slowed down and wandered for an hour, ending up on Forty-Second Street, with all its brothels and whorehouses. The street was filled with girls leaning against poles. They were tying their shoes in strategically provocative ways. They were opening and closing their coats. One girl opened up her cheap brown fur coat as he was passing by, revealing pale breasts, like two cognac glasses filled with milk. One woman wore lipstick that had been mostly kissed off, and eye shadow that had been smudged, making her resemble a watercolor. When she spotted Pierrot, she blew him a hazy kiss.

He had rather surprised himself by showing up here. He didn’t think he wanted to be with anybody but Rose, but here he was. He wanted to hear some compliments. Even though he knew they weren’t real. They were just a sample of what the women were selling, hors d’oeuvres before the meal.

“Hello, handsome. What a face!”

“Look at you. Nobody as good-looking as you should have to be lonely.”

“You want to call me names? Come upstairs and call me names.”

“I’m dying for your cock. I’m desperate.”

“I painted my toenails pink this morning. Want to come back to my apartment and take a look?”

It was probably a mistake to walk down the street in his very handsome suit. Because it was like holding out a rose to a bunch of starving bees.

“Poppy, Poppy, Poppy,” he thought, letting it sink in what she had done for a living while they were together.

“Oh, fine. Who cares, anyway? You’re just a skinny broke-ass loser. You can’t afford to pay for me. Go find yourself some form of employment, and then you can come back and afford to make love to me.”

? ? ?

PIERROT WANDERED INTO A PARK. There was a rock next to a pond, and Pierrot climbed on it and sat on its rounded edge, looking into the water. He had the sudden urge to walk into the pond with his shoes on. It was an impulse he hadn’t had since he was a little boy. A swan approached him from the middle of the pond. When it got to the pile of rocks, it walked out of the pond, looking like a bride holding up her dress as she stepped out of a car. He wondered for a second if it would approach him and declare its love.

“How you doing, huh?”

He was startled for a moment, thinking the swan had spoken to him. But then he spun his head around to see a woman standing next to him wearing a white dress under a navy overcoat. There was a row of buttons along the sleeve of her jacket like an octopus’s tentacle. She had light brown skin and short black hair that she seemed to have brushed all the kink out of. Her eyebrows had been drawn on her face expertly with makeup. She sat down next to him. There was something so relaxed about her face; she gave the illusion of having just been made love to. The swan turned and returned to the water.

“I’m all right, I suppose,” Pierrot answered.

“So what brings you to the edge of the pond?” she asked.

“I don’t know. I’ve wandered farther than you would think. I’m from Montreal.”

“I’ve heard of Montreal. I heard that the girls all have diseases and stuff like that. I’ve heard that it’s cold. Like, colder than here in the winter—and I can, like, barely stand that season here. My daddy went up there once. He told me allllll about it.”

She looked straight at him. She had this wonderful way of looking at people, Pierrot thought. So unafraid.

“What did your father do?”

“My daddy played the trumpet. He was always walking out on us. But then he would come back. And it was the most wonderful thing. Just when we thought that we would never ever see him again, the door would kick open and there he would be, in all his glory. He would have these presents from faraway places. Like, once he got me this hairbrush from Kansas. I was so in love with that brush. I took it with me everywhere that I went. I sang into it for hours.”

“How marvelous.”

“It was! It didn’t matter that we had to live in this tiny apartment with bugs creeping around under the wallpaper, or that we were hungry all the time, or that my mother made us scrub floors. That’s all you get in life—a childhood. And you get a mommy, and if you’re real lucky, you get to have a daddy. And that time is filled with all these feelings of love, even if you get the worst parents in the world. And then as an adult you always have to go around trying to find fake ways to get that feeling. You have to do the dirtiest, most lowlife things to find that feeling. That feeling is always in the strangest of places.”

Who was this philosopher? Pierrot wondered.

“You hungry? Want to come back to my apartment? I’m going to make stew.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, it’s a recipe my grandma taught me.”

“All right. I’m actually hungry.”

“My name’s Coco, by the way. You can trust me.”

? ? ?

THEY STOPPED AT A STORE so that Coco could get the ingredients for stew. She came out with a paper bag with some onions and a turnip it in.

“Is that all you need?” Pierrot asked.

Pierrot had never had anyone make him their grandma’s special homemade stew, but he knew it had to have more ingredients than what Coco had haphazardly stuffed into the bag.