The Lonely Hearts Hotel(114)
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AS ROSE TURNED UP the stairwell she stopped abruptly. There was McMahon at the top of the stairs, just around the bend. He’d come to kill her. He’d come to put her in her place. She almost dropped her suitcase, but then she realized it wasn’t McMahon at all. It was the curtain on the hallway window that had been puffed open by a breeze. She walked to the second floor. The lightbulb had burned out at the end of the corridor that led to her room. There was a black shadow lingering by the door.
It occurred to her that Jimmy might have betrayed her. How did she know that this was hers? Perhaps he had told McMahon her plan. Perhaps he had allowed McMahon to kill her. McMahon was still alive. Maybe Tiny had been put on the train to kill her. She hadn’t seen where he went after they arrived in Montreal.
As she approached the door her eyes adjusted to the darkness and she could see that there was nothing at all in the darkness. She stood outside the door of her room. She heard something inside fall to the floor.
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MCMAHON OPENED THE DOOR of the nursery very slowly and carefully. He thought he would have a vision of her in there. He was sure he would see her. She would be eighteen again. She would have no one else but him. She would be a virgin. With an apple balanced on her head. Waiting for him. Wanting him again.
“Rose,” he whispered.
The pug, looking like a butted-out cigar, tiptoed uneasily around the house.
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SHE OPENED THE DOOR to her room. She thought he would be there, sitting on a chair, waiting for her.
“Mac?” she whispered.
The poodle carefully looked into the room, as though it had come home late and was trying not to disturb anyone.
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THERE WAS THE SOUND of a gunshot.
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ON OPPOSITE ENDS OF THE CITY, McMahon and Rose clutched at their hearts. Each had arranged to have the other killed. Who had actually shot whom? Neither of them seemed to know. An act like that takes down both the victim and the aggressor. They both closed their eyes.
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ROSE OPENED HER EYES. She felt sick to her stomach. She could have sworn at just that moment that a bullet had entered her. She looked down, searching her body for the bullet wound.
She felt nothing. She wanted to feel the bullet hole. She needed to feel the bullet hole. She wanted to ascertain the gravity and reality of what she had just done. She wanted the bullet to kill her too. But she knew that it hadn’t. It would take a very long time for her to understand how she had done something evil like that.
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MCMAHON OPENED HIS EYES for the last time. As he lay on the floor, the last thought he had was, Thank God. Thank God I meant something to that lovely girl. And he looked up at the heavens and hoped, probably without any reason, that he would be going up there. And then he saw nothing ever again.
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THE POODLE BARKED at the rat on the shelf that had knocked over the vase. The rodent hurried out through the crack it had come out of.
Rose closed the door behind her. How had she abandoned all the men in her life? She felt the grandeur of being responsible for oneself. She was independent, and her actions had enormous consequences. What she did mattered. She had to get on with her path in life.
The pattern of red flowers on the carpet spread out around her like a pool of blood.
68
BALLAD FOR THE MOON IN C MINOR
Rose had a pink suitcase filled with money delivered to Pierrot at the Forget-Me-Not Hotel a few months later. She felt that he had earned it, after all. Rose treated everything in life as if it were a business now. She knew that Pierrot had helped her inestimably in her theatrical revue, so he was due his share of the profits.
Pierrot put the suitcase on the bed. The bedspread had a pattern of orange and brown autumn leaves and tiny red berries. He was reminded of a storybook for children, Babes in the Wood, in which two children were abandoned in the middle of a forest. He unlatched the suitcase and stared at the money. He had never been around this sort of money. He had hardly been around money at all, since it was Rose, and before that Poppy and before that Irving, who handled all the finances. He had preferred it that way. He sat on the edge of the mattress, the money next to him, and imagined the two of them abandoned together in the middle of the forest. It seemed to be the fate for orphans in fairy tales. He wanted to lie back on the quilt and imagine the sound of crickets and birds chirping.
But the money said, “Spend me, spend me, spend me.” That’s what money wanted. It wanted to be spent. And it really wanted to be spent on luxury items. Its greatest thrill was just to be gambled away. It wanted to change hands. It wanted to find itself at the racetrack, it wanted to be thrown into the center of the table at a casino. Money is a masochist.
He wondered whether Rose wanted to kill him by sending him all that money. But that would be assuming that she cared. Underneath all the money was their wedding photo.
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PIERROT HOLED UP in his tiny hotel room. The walls were a dingy off-white. He hung the wedding photo of himself and Rose from a nail in the wall to have something to look at while he lay in bed. He had no intention of even trying to fight the addiction now. He would wake up in the morning and shoot up. Occasionally he wandered outside, looking for some sort of human intimacy. Women wouldn’t come close to him. Sometimes when a woman walked by him, he would reach out his arms to her. She would shrink from him and hurry away. It wasn’t that he actually wanted to touch them. It was that he missed the feeling of reaching his arms out toward someone. He missed that tenderness.