The Lonely Hearts Hotel(112)
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WALKING BACK TO the Honeymoon Hotel the next morning, Rose passed a hotel that had a paddy wagon parked out front. Police officers came down the stairs single file, each with a girl in handcuffs. They were being loaded into the police van like a group of stray dogs that had been rounded up by the dogcatcher. The last girl to go in had on an orange-flowered cotton dress and dark blue high heels with the felt scratched off the toes. Rose could see the bump under her dress from her round potbelly. She was probably four months pregnant.
Rose thought about the time she had spent with McMahon. What had she been other than a prostitute? She had worn her white fur hat around to all sorts of fancy places and ordered great meals in restaurants, acting as if she were a member of an empowered class. While the only females in society who had any real bargaining power were the dopey little virgins with rags safety-pinned to their underwear, filling up with blood the color of fallen dead rose petals. The minute they gave themselves up, they really had no agency whatsoever.
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ROSE COULDN’T put her finger on what had happened to her. But she had fallen from grace. That was the most surprising thing. Because she had not realized that she had been in a state of grace. She had at least figured that as an orphan she had been born with nothing to lose. When you fall from grace, time passes quicker. Time begins to make sense. It moves in a linear fashion. It begins to trickle through the hourglass. It no longer belongs to you.
Her cheekbones seemed higher when she looked at herself in the bathroom mirror. Her teeth were yellowish. They were the color of a wilting white rose. She was wilting. She realized for the first time that she had a face that could age. Was actually aging. Now that Pierrot had left, she was no longer young.
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SHE LEANED UP to the reflection in the mirror. Her lips were almost touching her reflection’s lips. Her reflection was seduced despite herself—despite the fact that if she were to enter into this relationship, she would be dominated and told what to do all the time. The reflection closed its eyes and puckered its lips, waiting for the kiss.
Rose whispered, “Whore.”
The reflection’s eyes shot open and she bolted back.
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ON HER WAY HOME, she had noticed an abandoned skipping rope lying on the sidewalk like a chalk line around a dead body.
66
PRIMER FOR A REVOLUTION
Fabio knew what had happened the night before. Everyone knew what had happened the night before. News of such a coupling spread in the underworld quickly. Fabio assumed that Rose would want to postpone leaving again. On some level, she had bought herself some time.
He went down to the lobby to talk to the clowns, who were standing around there, to tell them that they might not be going anywhere that day. They had given up their hotel rooms and packed their bags. Their trunks were piled in the lobby all in a row. A clown sat on top of one of the stacks of suitcases, smoking a cigarette.
As Fabio explained the situation to said clown, the clown squinted and pointed behind Fabio. Fabio turned his head to see.
There was Rose. She was coming down the stairs in a black dress and a coat, perfectly composed.
She had done something with her rage and her anger. She knew that exhibiting it was a sign of weakness. She knew that she didn’t have to show it anymore. She didn’t have to engage in ridiculous, over-the-top displays of rage. It was already obvious how angry she was. Her rage permeated her entire body. There was a feeling that she was dangerous. You felt it intuitively. Even people who had just walked into the hotel that moment averted their eyes and moved out of her way. The way that every creature in the jungle gets quiet when a jaguar is passing.
People would no longer address her in a familiar way. She had closed the door on her private life. Whereas before it was something she had paraded onstage for everyone to mine, now she would have people enact her rage for her.
A bellhop followed behind her. He was carrying all her extra baggage, as she had purchased so many clothes while she was in New York.
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THE GANGSTERS CLIMBED onto the train with all the dancers. They mussed up their hair and fidgeted with their ties and dabbed a little bit of alcohol behind their ears so they could more properly pass themselves off as traveling clowns.
Rose oversaw each member of her entourage as they stepped onto the train. She saw a black car pull up, the back door open and Jimmy Bonaventura step out. He approached with another man beside him. He looked up and down at the train with the mixture of incredulity and amusement that he maintained for all things Snowflake Icicle Extravaganza related. He walked over to Rose and stood on the steps opposite her compartment.
“This is Tiny,” Jimmy said. “He’s going with you.”
Rose looked at Tiny. He looked like a gangster, not a bohemian, like the rest of the men traveling with her. She took hold of the front pocket on his jacket and in a swift motion tore it off. Then she mussed up his hair.
“Here,” she said.
She handed him a book of poems by Baudelaire for him to peruse on the train. He needed some practice in introspection in order to pass as a tormented clown.
Tiny opened the book at random and read out a line. “An artist is an artist only because of his exquisite sense of beauty, a sense which shows him intoxicating pleasures, but which at the same time implies and contains an equally exquisite sense of all deformities and all disproportion.”