The Lonely Hearts Hotel(34)

When he went down on her, she couldn’t believe how amazing it felt. It was like she had been thrown into a lake. She wanted it desperately. And she cried out in a pretty cry of joy when she came. And she hated herself for having sex with someone other than Pierrot. But then again, hating herself was part of what made it feel so good. The self-loathing that arrived right before you came was at the very extremes of feeling.

If this was how good sex felt with somebody you hated, what might it actually feel like with somebody you loved? she wondered. She’d always had an inkling that she was the type of girl who would love sex. But she had not realized she would enjoy it so much.

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MCMAHON WAS THAT BOY in the story who had to keep his finger in a hole in the wall of a dam. And he suddenly couldn’t stand the responsibility anymore. He just wanted to pull his finger out of the hole and go on to other activities in life. He was a prisoner to the hole. So finally he yanked at the finger and the flood came on. And it destroyed everyone around him and all of civilization, and everyone perished in the swoosh of the great waters.

And he was drowned for a moment and he experienced the euphoria that the drowned are supposed to feel just before life lets go of them, like a child letting go of the string of a balloon.

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ROSE WAS STILL THROBBING as she hurried down the hallway. She loved the feeling of McMahon oozing out from between her legs.

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AND WHEN MCMAHON got out of bed the next morning, he felt as though he were made out of ashes.

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THE NEXT DAY the maid was in the nursery and she saw the apple sitting there. How funny to find an apple just sitting there without an owner, without a history. She picked it up and bit into it. It was the most wonderful apple she had ever tasted.





19


    A SPOONFUL OF DREAMS



Pierrot had a dream that he was sitting in a room that had a thousand lightbulbs suspended from the ceiling. The electric light was so great that it was as if it were shining from God. Irving believed it was a sign. He invested heavily in GE. Irving had begun to make investments based on Pierrot’s dreams. His returns were paying off wonderfully. He rarely listened to his adviser but to Pierrot instead. He told Pierrot he would leave him some money because he had rightfully earned it.

Pierrot yelled, “Don’t talk about such things!”

But Irving was frail, and the years were hard on his health. Pierrot helped Irving into the bathtub one night, as was his custom. Irving sat with a little tumbler of brandy in his hand as Pierrot shampooed his hair. He poured a bucket of soapy water over his head to rinse it and Irving noted that his brandy now had a soapy taste.

Later Pierrot sat next to him in the large bed, underneath the purposeless enormous canopy, and spoon-fed him soup. He held a napkin close by, and he dabbed any spill from Irving’s chin.

Irving stopped going outside because he didn’t want anyone to see him this aged and this incapacitated. He could only bear for Pierrot to see him this way. Pierrot didn’t judge people. Their walks were now confined to the mansion.

Because it was wintertime, Irving was fretting that he would never live to see another summer and see his roses. Pierrot hired a landscape painter to come into the bedroom and paint roses all over the walls. Irving wept when he saw the beautiful mural, thinking that he had died and had found himself, to his surprise, in heaven.

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ONE MORNING Pierrot had taken off his fancy suit, and it was hanging from a coat hanger. He was wearing a green undershirt and a pair of the old man’s pajama bottoms that tied at the waist with a string. He walked into the bedroom, carrying a tray with a plate covered in cheese and bread and some peaches that had been left by the grocer outside the front door. When he saw that the old man was frozen in time and looking at the ceiling, Pierrot dropped the tray and cried out.

There was a chandelier above his head, made out of eight thousand glass beads, like pieces of ice from a hailstorm had all been frozen mid-fall.

Pierrot called for the undertakers to come. He sat next to Irving’s body, holding his hand, occasionally whispering, “There, there.” The undertakers came and took the old man away on a stretcher, stepping over sweaters and plates in the hallway. The house was so quiet and empty once the large front door thudded to a close. He wasn’t sure what he was supposed to do, but before he knew it, Irving’s son arrived.

Pierrot put his clothes on hastily, intimidated by the severe, middle-aged man. He pushed his wild, unwashed hair from one side to another, attempting to look normal. He shuffled through the papers on the night table. He was looking for an item of great importance for his future. He found it underneath a cup of coffee that was resting on a top hat that was on a pile of records that was balanced on an empty cake box that was on top of a copy of Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Pierrot had read the book three times to Irving. He showed Irving’s son the piece of paper, which was the amendment to Irving’s will.

The son threw the will immediately into the stove. Pierrot was left with not a cent at nineteen years of age.

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BUT EVEN WORSE, though he had been Irving’s closest companion over the past four years, Pierrot had to stand at the back of the crowd at the cemetery. The fat, middle-aged women were all dressed in black at the funeral, like a group of cello cases abandoned backstage during a performance. The fedoras on the men were like a cluster of snails. Irving’s children’s lives were to be enhanced by their father’s death because of their inheritance. Pierrot was the only one left out in the cold.