The Lonely Hearts Hotel(40)
A man came out of the soup kitchen, clanging a large pot with a big spoon. It made the sound of great thunder. He was announcing to the men that they could go inside now.
Rose saw a boy holding a newspaper. On the front page it described a horror story about the prairies. There were grasshoppers everywhere. They were eating all the crops. They were insatiable. They came in huge swarms.
She thought she would keep her eyes closed until she passed the street. As she cut through the park, she saw men sleeping under the trees and on the benches. She had wondered why there were so many men sleeping in the park. They wanted to nap through this part of history. If everyone just closed their eyes, did that make the world go dark?
Montrealers had spent the entire 1920s out partying, making money off the Americans who came up looking for legal liquor, and maybe the Great Depression was a punishment for that. All the women with short skirts had really enraged God.
Rose arrived at the doctor’s apartment building. The small lobby had red tiles. She rang his doorbell and then began the long climb up the spiraling stairs to the seventh floor. Rose knocked on the door. Dr. Bernstein answered. He was a middle-aged, sophisticated gentleman. He was wearing a suit, and his white pompadour looked like a wave about to crest. He gestured for Rose to enter. It was a small apartment, but it was quite amazing how much stuff was in there. Rose couldn’t help but gaze around the room as she stepped in.
There were framed ferns and flowers on the walls, and tiny butterflies pinned to corkboards. In addition, the shelves of his room were covered with all sorts of strange things. There were geraniums on all the windowsills. He had a shelf full of seashells that he had collected when he was young and full of adventure. What beautiful days those were when he had piled these things into a tiny blue tin bucket. He had thought he would figure out the world.
“You’ll notice I’m a bit of a naturalist.”
He had a tiny aquarium with a cocoon in it, as he liked to raise butterflies. They would flit and fly around the room. He would get stoned and watch them. The butterflies from warm places were truly magnificent. They had such beautiful wings.
“Ooooh my, you do have some exquisite bugs.”
“Thank you. I discovered my interest in insects at school while I was studying biology. I wrote a paper on the sex life of slugs that was widely read by students in universities.”
He sighed as he led Rose to his examination table.
“But my father encouraged me to enter medicine. He told me it was much nobler to worry about humans than about bugs. But you know, he was wrong. Because people are wicked. They are cheaters and liars and degenerates and drunks, and the science of medicine just keeps them alive so they can murder and commit even more sins. But I have yet to find anything about the workings of insects that has disappointed me.”
Rose sat down on the examination table. He pulled up a wooden chair that had once been painted pink and had once been painted blue and had once been painted white. The nature of its deterioration caused all the colors to show.
He handed her a pretty teacup. It was filled with hot water and a few seeds from when he had squeezed the dregs of a lemon into it.
“So I see you’ve been stricken by my old pal, Melancholia! Why is it that we never give sadness its due? Why do we insist on keeping so many things secret? Tell me about your relationship with sadness, please.”
“Even when I was a little girl I wanted to make everybody happy.”
When she spoke, phlegm cracked her voice. Since she hadn’t spoken in a while her words seemed to be covered in rust. She was glad to talk to the doctor. She always liked to have meaningful conversations. Sometimes you tried to talk to people and nothing worked. The words were all stiff and slow.
“I always had this gift. Even though we were in this big orphanage where we weren’t supposed to experience anything like happiness or joy, I was still able to see beauty every day. As a child, I existed in a strange, prolonged state of glorious rapture.”
“Nostalgia and Melancholia are thick as thieves. Old pals from grammar school, one could say.”
“There was only one other child in the orphanage who was able to do this. He was known by everyone as Pierrot. He could feel it too. That wonder. He was also a collector of beautiful moments.
“The times did not encourage such children to survive. The rest of them are all lying in tiny wooden boxes in the cemetery. Like packaged dolls to be opened on the final miraculous Christmas.
“I decided it would be wonderful to invite a great bear as a visitor to the orphanage. And he had a great big heart. He had a heart the size of ten of the mothers. He had such a big heart that he couldn’t help but be a pervert. Could he? He couldn’t help but be a little inappropriate. But wasn’t it better to have someone who was always gushing annoyingly about love than someone who was reserved with it? They had never had someone pinching their cheeks and squeezing them so hard that they could barely breathe. The big dirty philandering bear was a dream come true.”
“When we accept our perversion, we accept ourselves.”
“I wouldn’t have been able to express any of that then, of course. But I was a very complicated little girl. I think I was so interested in navigating these strange emotional seas that I became a pervert. Or I lack moral fiber. Either/or. But I would like you to know that I am trying to combat this . . . well . . . complicated aspect of myself. And can you deduce, doctor, what is wrong with me?”