The Lonely Hearts Hotel(39)

She didn’t want to make love to McMahon at first. She spurned his affections. She was so regretful of having made love to him in the first place that she supposed she wanted to reject him entirely now.

She had begged McMahon—if he was going to leave her in that hotel room to rot, the least he could do was to please get her some books. He asked her what kind she wanted and she said, “New stuff. Something adventurous.”

When McMahon told the bookseller he was looking for “adventurous stuff,” he interpreted it as meaning “dirty books.” He handed McMahon a little pile of books, including ones by the Marquis de Sade and Colette.

Poor Rose went wild as she read them. On every page there were loads of schoolgirls in enormous piles rubbing and rubbing against one another until they achieved orgasm. She was so wet that she trembled and banged her knees, trying to get through the story without tossing the book aside and touching herself. When McMahon walked in, Rose jumped into his arms. Her underwear was soggy up against him.

Rose smelled of roses. If she touched you, you would also smell like roses for days. The furniture in her room smelled like roses. The mattress in her room smelled of roses. Maybe it was because she was twenty and had just bloomed into a woman. They made love every afternoon after that.

? ? ?

ONE MORNING ROSE WOKE UP to discover that she had been crying in her sleep. She touched her cheeks and was surprised to find that they were damp with tears. McMahon played her a record. When a woman began to sing, Rose wept some more. McMahon said she should knock it off because it wasn’t a particularly sad song.

“I think there’s something odd happening to me. But it’s not like I’m sick or anything. I’ve just been feeling so odd. And I don’t think I can ignore it anymore.”

McMahon insisted she go see a Dr. Bernstein he knew. Bernstein was known to administer all sorts of drugs to himself. He was ahead of his time. He was treating himself for all sorts of diseases of the mind. He knew that these were the same as physical ones. He did not believe that anything was spiritual. All ailments were physical. He wanted to find a cure for melancholia.

He could only practice out of an apartment, and only covertly. It was not really clear how he had lost his license. He’d had a good practice. He had lived in a grand sort of house on the Golden Square Mile. Some people said that he had been on the front. He was shell-shocked, just like the patients he was supposed to be treating.

He was writing his own book, called An Interpretation of Sadness. He thought sadness was contagious. If you sat next to someone on the bus and they were sad, even though you didn’t speak to them, you would find yourself overcome by sadness later that night. It is a disease that parades as a mood.

“He treats irrational illnesses. He believes in diseases that nobody else believes in. He hasn’t found them in laboratories. He found them inside books. This new invention of sadness for sadness’s sake is going to have more damaging effects on the human psyche than modern warfare will.”

Rose put on her clothes to see this doctor. She was actually rather smelly. She was wearing the same underwear and undershirt as when she had run away from the McMahon house, and she certainly hadn’t made an effort to change them. She hadn’t had time to pack anything. She was stuck with only her maid’s outfit. When she put it on, it seemed as though it had shrunk. The maid’s outfit didn’t have very much strength left in it. The little stitches at the side snapped. The dress had just plain given up. It wasn’t as if she had gained any weight, because she really hadn’t eaten very much at all. Mostly her diet consisted of whiskey for breakfast, whiskey for lunch and whiskey for dinner. She put on her coat. The buttons seemed to have grown in her absence and didn’t want to squeeze into the holes.

? ? ?

SHE HAD THOUGHT that seeing other people would cheer her up, but the effects of the Great Depression were everywhere. Someone had jumped out a window the night before. The landlady was pouring a bucket of water over the dried bloodstain. The water turned red and rolled out onto the street. Rose leaped backward as the bloodied water spread out on the sidewalk and almost touched her shoes.

As she walked farther down the street a little girl ran by her with a jar with frogs. She released them into the sewers. “We’re being evicted,” the little girl told Rose. “And we can’t keep any of the pets.”

Rose wondered if the frogs would find a way to survive in the sewers. Perhaps they would multiply and be everywhere in the city in a year. You would go to your bathtub and find it filled with frogs that had climbed out of the drainpipe. Rose shuddered.

A group of boys passed her. They were wearing dirty clothes, and shoes that looked too big. One boy was barefoot. Their heads were shaved, surely because of lice. They must have slept in the same filthy bed, and the mites were contagious. Who knew what other vermin were in the houses. There were the remains of a burned mattress in the trash. The bedbugs had gotten to be too much. It seemed like everyone in the city was itchy.

A stray dog hurried by. It had once had a job protecting a family, no doubt. But now no one could feed it. It looked in the window of the butcher shop. They were selling all sorts of ghastly pieces of meat.

She passed the line for the soup kitchen. There were so many men, all in clothes that had become too big, making them look like circus clowns. A man in the line removed his hat, as though in deference to a pretty lady. His face was covered with boils.