The Lonely Hearts Hotel(31)

That night five squirrels sat staring at the glowing red apple. They had no idea how in the world it had gotten there. It wasn’t edible. One of the smaller squirrels just kept looking at it. It was the closest that an animal had ever come to believing in God.





18


    ROSE AND THE APPLE



Rose found a strange book in Mrs. McMahon’s room, behind the bed. She hadn’t really meant to go snooping. But she was cleaning up the shards of a teacup Mrs. McMahon had flung angrily against the armoire by her bed. She had to move all the items to get at the shards, and then she noticed a small, dark red book. She was always magically, magnetically drawn to books. Even if she didn’t read them, she would want to smell them or to run her fingers over the pages or just flip through them. It had never occurred to her either that a book could be a secret. They were written for other people to read, after all. They weren’t personal. Another one just like it could be found in a shop.

She sat cross-legged on the floor and opened the book. It was filled with illustrated panels. They had onion paper that you peeled away as you would a curtain on a window to get a view of what was going on outside. Or that you pulled down like a sheet from a bed to see what body was lying underneath.

At first she thought she was imagining what she was seeing, that her eyes were playing tricks. But she continued to stare at the drawing and it did not change at all. The figures were obstinately naked. They were in an amorous position. They didn’t shout in alarm and scurry around the room, grabbing at their clothes, throwing them on and shouting out excuses about what they had just been doing. The woman’s legs were still spread. Her dress was still hiked up over her hips. Her head was still flung back in ecstasy. Her mouth was still open, and her eyes languorously shut. The man still had his tongue out. His head was still between her legs. He still had his pants off. He was still holding his penis.

Why hadn’t she just given Pierrot what he wanted? If it happened now, she wouldn’t be able to resist. She would have wanted him to touch her so badly that she would have made whatever promise he had wanted her to make. She always found herself going back to that moment in her mind and reliving it. Each time she would say, “Yes, I don’t care about anything in the whole world other than you.” And then she would have a different sexual fantasy in her head. Of what Pierrot would do to her.

? ? ?

SHE HAD URGES. Instead of trying to fight them, Rose let them play out in her mind. She let them unwind slowly.

They were like water seeping underneath a door and filling up a room. Desire flooded in. And all the cups and plates floated on top of it. And the chairs were knocked over. And the books began to open up as they spun around, wanting each of their pages to be read at once. And then finally her bed began to rise up off the floor, and there was nowhere for it to go but out the window and toward the moon.

She would look at different men, on the sidewalks, in the park, at the markets. If she was able to make eye contact and hold it for more than three seconds, she would know exactly what they wanted to do to her. Somehow knowing that she had gotten this information from them made them blush and look away. Every man thought he was dirtier than every other man. If we all knew that we were all perverts, we might all be a lot happier.

? ? ?

SHE DID THIS INSTEAD of having sex. She went around reading men’s minds.

She went inside them as though they were bureaus and she was opening their drawers. She looked underneath the folded articles of clothing. She found their dirty postcards. She pulled them out and had a look at them. And what lovely things she did find there.

She was on a trolley and she began to imagine what sexual fantasies were in the men’s heads. A man with an enormous mustache got down on his knees and lifted her skirt and began to lick her pussy. He wouldn’t wash his face for the rest of the day. He would go to sleep with the smell of pussy all around him like a cloud.

There was one who would have her lick whipped cream off his penis. She almost laughed at this. The poor fellow—it was what he wanted more than anything in the world and yet he was afraid to ask for it.

There was one who just wanted her to tell him that he was a filthy animal the whole time they were fucking.

She stared at one man, reading his mind, while her own desire was like a balloon, growing and growing and growing inside her. She just needed him to take a pin and pop it, so that it would explode, so that she would cry out.

Rose rang the bell on the trolley. She descended at her stop and walked off.

She imagined making the man feel understood. As though he had just made love in exactly the strange manner that he had always wanted. He had just met the woman who had fulfilled all his desires, and he wouldn’t need anything ever in the world again. And there she was walking off down the street, not even looking back at him. As if he were clothes in a changing room that she had tried on for size and then discarded.

? ? ?

MCMAHON CAME HOME early one night. When people come in from the cold, you can feel it all around them like a shawl of some sort. And when people return from doing something wicked, it also surrounds them. You get a shiver in their presence. Rose felt it one day when McMahon walked in, and she knew that the girls weren’t wrong about him. He had done something nefarious very recently. He had a cigar between his teeth, and the smoke coming out of it looked like a skinny girl pulling her undershirt down to her knees.