The Lonely Hearts Hotel(45)

Poppy had a million other ways of making money too. She had become quite well known in the neighborhood for reading tarot cards. She made baked beans with black-market brown sugar over a hot plate in their room and sold them in the neighborhood. If you ate a bowl, all your problems in the world seemed so insignificant. You might have a bellyache the next morning, of course. Poppy was the type of girl who provided temporary solutions. Perhaps that was why the teeth had rotted out of her head. She was the personification of dessert, wasn’t she?

She pushed a baby carriage all around the city. Every time she got back to the hotel and pulled it clinking up the stairs, the carriage would be filled with all sorts of amazing things. But never a baby, of course. She had some perfume bottles that she got from the dumpster of a beauty parlor that was going out of business. She filled them with gin she’d made in the bathtub. She gave people a one-cent discount when they brought back the old bottle for her to refill.

She went door to door selling old clothes. She once got into a fistfight with another Jewish peddler who was also going door to door selling clothes in the same neighborhood. She was so mad at him that she stayed up all night cursing him, until Pierrot suggested she stop. She showed Pierrot some of the baby clothes she was trying to sell. There was even a tiny black suit for a little boy to wear to a funeral. This was the closest they had ever got to romance. They slept in the same bed but didn’t have sex.

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THEY LOOKED LIKE A COUPLE. They both had the harried look of people who had come of age during the Depression. Their youth was the only thing that was keeping them from being total bums. Their youth was like the last dollar in their pockets. They were fairly attractive. Or, they would have been attractive if they had more to eat.

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POPPY HAD some very appealing qualities. For instance, she could bend forward at the waist at a ninety-degree angle while saying silly pleasantries to you.

“I’m not going out tonight,” she said one evening.

She sat on the side of the bed. She had on a bustier to prop up her small breasts. She had on some garter belts. She had on a pair of old underwear. She spread her legs. She tilted her head. She was trying to pose in a suggestive way.

She had washed all her underclothes by hand with soap so they would smell nice. And she had put some effort into her hair as well. A lot of people said she had an unusual color of hair. She washed it and fixed the curls around her face.

She wasn’t going to be paid for this. What was she doing it for, then? She was taking the very dangerous and risky move: exchanging her time for love. She wanted Pierrot to love her.

She and Pierrot had a good thing going on because they were surviving. She was worried that he would leave because the relationship wasn’t consummated. She thought he would owe her something if she let him sleep with her.

Pierrot stared at Poppy’s provocative outfit, which didn’t excite him in the least. There were so many holes in her stockings that they looked like oil paint on water. And her blue bustier was missing buttons up the front. She winked at him saucily, like a doll with an eye that didn’t close properly. He sort of felt he should act more like a man. He asked her to bend down and show him her ass.

He kept a little postcard tucked away behind the cupboard in the bathroom. It was of a pair of naked ladies and a man locked in a ménage à trois. It always gave him a hard-on. He looked at it and then wandered into the other room with his eyes shut, looking in the darkness for those two women.

He closed his eyes tight and pushed his penis into Poppy. She yelled out in surprise and delight that it was finally happening.

Pierrot was thinking of flying foxes. He was imagining peeking into peepholes at girls changing out of wet bathing suits. He imagined they were the Dionne quintuplets and he was making love to all of them. They would fight for their chance to go first. They would yell at Pierrot that he had already made love to that particular quint and that she was actually coming back for seconds.

Poppy thought about all the gin in the bathtub. She had been thinking about what they would eat for dinner. She was thinking about who owed her money. She was thinking about a little gosling she had chased around the backyard in her rubber boots when she was little, for just a moment, and then she went back to thinking stressful thoughts. It’s sort of impossible to be absentminded and vacant and daydreamy during sex. You are either enjoying it intensely or you are in a state of high stress.

Pierrot had a fantasy about making love to a housewife up against the meat counter. She held her little number in her hand. He was trying to come before the butcher got to that number and called it. Because she would be distracted and tell him to get the hell out of there. He wasn’t even sure what that fantasy meant. It had something to do with the Great Depression, though. For whatever reason, it made him burst inside Poppy before he could withdraw.

When he was done and lying next to her, he did take a long look at her face. There was something so affable about it that he gave her a big kiss on the cheek.

When he was making love to a girl, in his mind he made love to about thirty-three girls on average. He felt guilty that he had to do this with Poppy. She didn’t cross his mind once while he was having sex with her. Although he hadn’t been with any woman since they had met, he felt as though he were cheating on her now. He felt terrible.

But when he was done, he shot up and stopped caring. He closed his eyes and fell asleep in the chair with a cigarette in his hand. The ash of the cigarette grew and resembled the trunk of an elephant.