The Lonely Hearts Hotel(12)

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THE PATRONS would ask Pierrot and Rose questions. They would try anything to get them to talk. Because wasn’t it amazing that even though they were orphans, they sometimes had things to say, and clever things at that.

Sometimes the patrons would even ask them really sad things. It wasn’t, of course, particularly kind to ask them such sad questions—and they wouldn’t ever ask an ordinary child about something that would no doubt upset them. But Rose and Pierrot were orphans. There was something magical about hearing them talk about their tragic circumstances in such high-pitched voices. They were metaphors for sadness. It was like someone playing a requiem on a xylophone. It wasn’t something you heard every day. They especially liked to ask about the children’s origins.

“My mother was very sick,” Pierrot said. “She coughed all the time. I would put my hand on her back, hoping that it made her feel better, but I’m afraid that it didn’t make her feel better at all. Une nuit, elle toussait à mort.”

“My parents both worked in a hotel, and it caught on fire,” Rose explained. “They panicked and shoved me down the garbage chute. I ended up outside in the trash. They would have got into the garbage chute too, but they were too big.”

“My papa went to war and he died,” Pierrot sadly admitted. “A grenade landed near him and it blew him into a million bits. And my mother was so upset that she jumped out the window.”

They made their beginnings up. They had no intention of wearing their hearts on their sleeves. They kept their hearts neatly tucked away in their chests.

“My father was hanged for murdering my mother.”

Everyone in the room gasped. Rose looked over at Pierrot to indicate that he had gone too far.

“I wanted to kill them both off in one sentence,” Pierrot said when they were outside.

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BECAUSE THEY TRAVELED TOGETHER, they developed intimacy. This was something other orphans didn’t have. Intimacy makes you feel unique. Intimacy makes you feel as though you have been singled out, that someone in the world believes you have special qualities that nobody else has.

“I bet there are all these people just like us on other planets,” Rose said whimsically one evening. “I bet people are alive up on the moon.”

They both looked up at the moon. It was like a child’s face that needed to be wiped clean with a rag.

“What do you think it’s like up there?” Pierrot asked.

“It’s probably just like this planet except everything is lit up. Like if you have a glass of milk, it lights up. And when you drink it, you look down at your belly and you can see it shining through.”

“And the apples look like they’re made out of silver, but you can bite into them.”

“And the white cats glow so much, you can use them as lamps for your room.”

“And everybody has white hair just like old people—even the babies.”

They found out just how funny they were by hanging out with each other. They began to develop a new language. They had a different dictionary and every word had a slightly different meaning for them than it had for anyone else. No one else could understand what they were saying to each other. Every word they spoke was a metaphor.

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SINCE THEY WERE BOTH very good with sleights of hand and magic tricks, it was easy for them to steal. One day Rose slipped a load of sugar cubes into her sleeves and then shook them out into her pocket. When she got back to the orphanage, she held out her palm, which now gripped a stack of sugar cubes, shaped like an igloo. The children opened their mouths like baby birds and she dropped a sugar cube into each one. This way the other children were not jealous of her and Pierrot’s escapades. They began performing as a duo for the children as well.

They performed their more experimental numbers for the other orphans, different from the ones they put on in the living rooms of the elite. They were both able to pretend to weep. They wept so hard that it began to appear ludicrous. The children all began to laugh. Rose held up a rag to her face to absorb her tears. Then she held it out in front of her and wrung it, to hear water splash all over the floor.

One afternoon in the common room, Rose and Pierrot placed their chairs next to each other’s. They shook up and down as though they were trembling on some train tracks. It was such a simple pantomime and yet it was so delightful that all the children found themselves laughing and laughing. They were surprised that something so simple could be so humorous. They kept rumbling on their little train seats for about half an hour.

Rose imagined that she saw, out the window of the train, places she had seen in books. She imagined that she was in Paris. She had seen a drawing of it in a children’s book. The hero of the book, a goose that carried a suitcase in his hand, declared that it was the most beautiful city in the world. She passed crowds of people, all wearing berets and striped shirts, with baguettes under their arms and cigarettes between their lips.

Pierrot wasn’t even imagining what was going on outside the train. He was imagining the suitcases all stacked on top of their heads and the stewards coming and going with little trays of sandwiches. He was imagining that he and Rose were rich and they were able to afford the sandwiches.

Finally a nun came in and swore she would beat the two of them if they didn’t knock it off. What would she have to do in life to be on one of those trains and to see those amazing things? Rose wondered as she marched off to bed.