The Lonely Hearts Hotel(115)

He lived in the hotel for almost a year. When he got to the end of the money, he was not at all surprised. In fact, he was surprised that it had lasted that long and that he was still alive.

He sat in a diner, trying to eat a plate of eggs. He didn’t understand quite how he had come to find himself sitting at this table with a plate of eggs in front of him. He didn’t know how anyone could eat. He really didn’t have the ambition to eat anything else at all.

He had lost weight. He had always been slim, but he had never been quite this skinny. His tailor-made suit that had always made him look like a dandy, no matter what sort of financial situation he was in, now seemed loose and baggy on him. It had lost its magic charm. Or anyway, perhaps that was what he wanted to tell himself to justify trading in his suit at the pawnshop on Eighth Avenue.

The owner, a white-haired, older woman with a pair of glasses on a fake pearl chain, gave him enough money to get high for a couple of days. She also gave him an outfit to change into. It was a black suit. Because of its slim fit, it had been hard to sell. But Pierrot wore it well. Although when he looked in his oval mirror, he couldn’t help but notice that he looked as though he were preparing ahead of time for his funeral.

? ? ?

HE WOKE UP in the morning three days later. But was the suit really his last possession? What else could he say belonged to him and nobody else? What else did he have the right to sell?

He wandered across the street to the library. There was a girl sleeping in one of the phone booths, Snow White waiting to be kissed. He pulled open the door of the phone booth next to her and sat down on the wooden bench. He asked the operator for the number to any recording studio. The phone swallowed the coin quickly, like a dog that doesn’t chew its treat. He could hear the nickel being digested by the telephone. The man on the other end of the line knew of the Snowflake Icicle Extravaganza. He had remembered the tune at the end of the show. He said that he was indeed interested in recording it.

“It was really the best thing about the show. I mean, it’s the part of the show that’s going to last. How come you never recorded it before?”

“I used to be worried about recording my music. Because I thought that other people would hear my melodies and steal them and get credit for them. I figured that they would be able to study my playing and get how to perform like me. And I wouldn’t be unique anymore. But that’s just fear giving me crazy reasons. I have no right to keep a good tune for myself. I have to let it go out into the world, man. It wants to have its own life in other people’s hearts.”

Pierrot was quiet for a moment.

“I also have to get high.”

“I’ll pay you up front so you don’t have to wait around for royalties or nothing like that.”

He said he’d love to make it into a record. He asked Pierrot to bring a photo of himself.

All that Pierrot had was the portrait of him and Rose, which hung from a nail on the wall. He did feel rather sad about unhooking it. But at the same time, he felt full of pride that morning, for the first time in months. Because he had been reminded of two things. That he had once been married to a very beautiful woman, and that he had written this tune that everybody in the world seemed to like.

? ? ?

THE STUDIO WAS IN A narrow building. It was squeezed in between a church and a department store, like some skinny man on a bus at rush hour. The man who had spoken to Pierrot on the phone met him in the lobby and they took the elevator to the ninth floor. In the studio there was a great big microphone hanging down on a pole over the top of the piano. The floors were wooden. He looked at technicians on the other side of the glass. There were so many levers and knobs, like a city seen from up above.

He began to play the tune. It had been a while since he’d played it. To his surprise, the tune was slightly different from before. While he had sunk into oblivion, the tune had continued to work on itself. It had to get up in the morning and get itself dressed and take care of business. And so Pierrot listened to the tune that he was playing, instead of performing it. A work of art when it is good and completed exists independently of its creator. It is indignant, even—it doesn’t want to have an author.

All children are really orphans. At heart, a child has nothing to do with its parents, its background, its last name, its gender, its family trade. It is a brand-new person, and it is born with the only legacy that all individuals inherit when they open their eyes in this world: the inalienable right to be free.

The tune was a thing of great wonder.

? ? ?

ONCE PIERROT HAD FINISHED RECORDING, he knew that he had captured it. He had finished the elusive tune. The simple little number was his life’s work. He didn’t have it in him to spend the next twelve years of his life working on another fifteen minutes. There were great musicians who were capable of producing great and fantastic bodies of work, but he didn’t have that sort of tenacity or intelligence. Unlike him, those musicians had been raised to have the constitution to do great things. Artists from poor backgrounds couldn’t bear their own genius for very long.

He signed the first contract they put before him, not bothering to negotiate. He knew that he had to do it quickly and impulsively or he wouldn’t be able to do it at all.

A squirrel holding an acorn as though it were a tiny bongo drum stood up on a branch outside the recording studio and worriedly looked around.

When he stepped out into the shining street, he was a completely different person. He was walking around, but he knew that his story was over. His life story was written, and he was living in the extra blank pages at the back of a book. There was a beginning, middle, end to his life.