The Lonely Hearts Hotel(25)

“Yes, marvelous. The words are dancing about the page, but continue.”

“Love. Such an absurd idea. It’s worse than God.”

The truth was that the very last thing in the world Pierrot needed was to spend time with a half-mad, old millionaire. He was the only orphan being raised like a member of the very wealthy elite. Naturally this was problematic, given that he didn’t have a penny to his name. He really needed the constitution to work in a factory, or perhaps as a salesman.

Pierrot needed some order. He needed some sort of discipline. He needed to find a way to toughen up. This was ruining him. He would never be able to hold any sort of job after this. The Mother Superior had been right. Now, thanks to Irving, he had a life philosophy that he could not afford to have. This was a common denominator of most addicts, which Pierrot would become.

As it grew late into the night, the flowers dropped forward on their stems, like girls who had fallen asleep on a church pew.

? ? ?

PIERROT LEARNED to mimic Irving’s ways. After living in a rich household for two years, he was able to act in a hoity-toity manner. As he walked down the street in Westmount, if you did not know who he was, you would think he was a rich boy for sure. You would assume he had grown up on that street. That he had a mother who had adored him and tied absurd white bonnets onto his head. You would have assumed that he had had a governess, who would have counted his little fingers for him. She would have shown him a globe and traced her finger from Montreal all the way across the ocean, as if “across” were a place that a person could go.

Pierrot would read to Irving in the evening. Irving wanted the classics he had read as a boy recited back to him. Pierrot was such a good reader. Whatever new words he saw on the page one day would the very next day become second nature to him. They would be natural on his tongue. Because he could remember words intuitively without understanding them. He would glance over the newspaper and now all the words were in his pocket. His verbal dexterity increased over the years.

“Do you ever wonder about all the stars in the sky? Science is always saying the most peculiar things about the heavens. But I don’t think they are at all true. I think if you got yourself a tall enough ladder, you could get up to those stars and then just pluck them down and put them in buckets. And all you would need is just one single star to stick inside a stove, and it would heat up your whole house for the winter. All you need is two brave men. One man brave enough to build the ladder that goes all the way up to the heavens. And another man brave enough to climb it.”

“Well said, my wonderful child. Well said.”

Is there any difference between acting like a really intelligent person and being a really intelligent person? Who in the world, just by looking at him, would know that he had been raped? The further away he got from those events, the harder they were for him to deal with. He realized how abhorrent and weird they were, and he had no idea how a person was supposed to behave after surviving such a thing. He had no other choice but to act as though it had never happened. And if no one could tell, perhaps it hadn’t ever happened? Pierrot hoped this were true.

But deep down he knew, no matter how clever he seemed, that he was a creep.





14


    PORTRAIT OF LADY AT ODDS WITH THE WORLD



Some of the women in the neighborhood were quite satisfied with their roles as housewives. They would wave at Rose and the children. They would join garden clubs, drink iced tea and read books. Their hair would be mounted in an enormous bundle on their heads and sprayed until it stayed there. Mrs. McMahon could never bring herself to be one of those happy women. She seemed to be frustrated almost every day for the two years that Rose had lived there.

? ? ?

MR. MCMAHON’S WIFE WAS ALWAYS accusing her husband of cheating on her. She was miserable because of it. She took out her frustrations on everyone in the house. Her misery filled up all the rooms. If there were a teacup left on the table, it would be filled with unhappiness.

She stormed around the living room, throwing things onto the floor and against the wall. Her face could display every kind of different expression imaginable. It ran the gamut. Each of her expressions was like an opera of sorts. She had been raised to know that women were supposed to look blank and that it was inappropriate for them to show emotions in public. That to openly have emotions would be like being a prostitute hanging out a window with her breasts exposed for all to see. But she didn’t care.

She threw a vase at the wall and put a hole in it. Then she went over and tore the wallpaper off in great sheets.

She held up a cushion as though she were considering devouring it or something. And when she seemed to realize that there was really no damage she could do with a pillow, that a pillow could never be a cannonball, she looked defeated by the awareness of her impotence.

She sat down on the sofa, buried her face in the same pillow and wept. She sobbed—they were huge sobs that came from deep in her lungs, like someone bringing up a net of fish from the bottom of the sea. Her sobs were flung onto the deck, with all the contents of the deep flipping about, desperate and exposed.

The family lived in terror of these rages. They made Mr. McMahon miserable. The children would sit quietly and look pale, incapable of doing anything until the woman was done with her fit. But Rose wasn’t a part of the family and so she felt herself to be free of their misery. She sat reading a novel.