The Lonely Hearts Hotel(108)
“I don’t know. The owner gets on my nerves. He’s so in love with me. Everyone’s in love with me around here. But you can trust me. Right?”
“Right?” Pierrot answered hesitantly.
Pierrot felt very wary of anyone who insisted that they were trustworthy. People who really were trustworthy believed the attribute to be implicit and the assumed, normal way to be. Why was she feeling guilty?
“Would you like to maybe go to a movie with me?”
“Not right now. Let’s get up to my place and start on this stew. It’s really the most important thing.”
Yes, thought Pierrot. She possesses all the traits of a lovely spy sent by McMahon. But so what if she had been sent to ruin his life? So be it, he thought. He wanted his life to be ruined.
They stopped at the window in the lobby. An old lady with blue hair and dressed in a man’s coat handed Coco a key with a pink ribbon on it. There were a lot of stairs up to Coco’s room in the skinny Desire Hotel. It surprised Pierrot. The building hadn’t seemed so tall to him from the outside. Every time they got to a landing, he was sure they must have reached the top floor, but then there was yet another level.
An artist must live in one of the apartments, he concluded, because the walls of the stairwell were covered in oil paintings. They were all of different sunsets and were quite arresting. There was one that was just of a group of cumulus clouds. The others were of the sky being shocked by pink and yellow and orange streaks.
“There are a lot of stairs in this building,” Pierrot commented.
“If you’re an old person, you just stop going out. You just stay up on the higher floor for eternity.”
? ? ?
THEY FINALLY ARRIVED at the top floor. Coco opened the door to her room and Pierrot followed her in. There was nothing on the walls and, in the center of the room, a large bed whose mattress caved in the middle. Coco put the paper bag down on the counter in the small kitchenette, then rolled over the bed as a shortcut to the window. She swung open the blinds.
? ? ?
THE DETECTIVE SAT in an apartment in the building across the alley. He pulled a yellow armchair with a pattern of pink roses up to the window. He took his camera out of a medical bag with a broken clasp that had belonged to his father. He put a book, a copy of David Copperfield, on the radiator, placed the camera on it and parted the green curtains.
? ? ?
PIERROT WAS STANDING at the end of the bed, and Coco came up to him. They were practically nose to nose. She turned around and leaned her forehead over in a slight bow, as an indication that she wanted him to help remove her clothes. As Pierrot unzipped Coco’s dress at the back, the zipper got stuck on her lace undershirt. This took a lot of time to untangle, and Coco kept yelling at him to watch out because he was going to tear the best dress she had.
“Man oh man, would you watch it, buster,” she yelled.
However, in the photo the private investigator took, she appeared to be moaning in ecstasy.
? ? ?
COCO GOT ON ALL FOURS on the mattress and immediately let out a yelp. The mattress was so cheap and thin that her weight caused one of the springs to clang up against the bones in her knee. She had stretch marks on her breasts and her thighs, having gone from being a girl to a woman too quickly at some point. She was wearing plain white underwear, but they had slipped into the crack of her ass and her butt cheeks were sticking out. They were enormous and round and wonderful. And when he stuck his face into them, he was filled with desire that he couldn’t contain. On all the big screens, in all the tiny cinemas, there were gangsters pulling their machine guns out of their holsters. They were holding their handguns stretched in the darkness in front of them. They were crossing fields with shotguns straight out, heading toward their victims. Everyone had to face the fact that fate was coming. It was going to outsmart you. It was unforgiving. Pierrot stood up. He unbuckled his belt. He pulled down his pants.
She turned her head around. “Yes! Do it! Do it! Do it!” she cried.
He went deep into Coco. A mortar seemed to erupt inside him. And when he rolled off, it was as though he had tumbled into a mass grave.
Afterward he sat on the edge of the bed, inhaling a cigarette, no longer a married man. She turned off the light next to the bed and closed the curtain. She was sure that the detective had gotten enough of a show and she would get paid properly. She lit a candle next to the bed.
“Let’s get high,” she said.
“Sure thing, baby,” Pierrot answered.
“We could do it after the stew. But we should probably do it before the stew. Right? Because stew takes a while. And a lot of the time you are just standing around, waiting for things to boil.”
She sat on the edge of the bed next to Pierrot. She opened up the drawer on the tiny spindly-legged night table. Inside was a small pewter baby spoon. On the handle was a round image of a baby. Its eyes were squeezed shut, and its mouth was open wide in a scream. She didn’t even bother putting any clothes on before she started preparing to cook up the dope.
There was a teapot on top of a bureau. She grabbed it and poured some water into the spoon. She shook a tiny bit of dope into the liquid, stirred it up with the tip of the needle and then heated it over a candle. She took a tie out of her pocket and wrapped it around Pierrot’s arm. She injected the heroin, and he waited for the old sensations to come.
As he and Coco lay next to each other on the bed, the onions rolled out of the bag and off the counter. They landed on the floor like asteroids falling to the earth.