The Lonely Hearts Hotel(53)
Mrs. McMahon had a dream that she was sitting next to Rose on the couch. They were discussing love affairs. Mrs. McMahon was telling Rose about all the different suitors she had when she was young. Rose was so impressed in the dream. That was one of Rose’s special qualities, her ability to be genuinely impressed by just about anything.
Mrs. McMahon buried her face in Rose’s hair and inhaled deeply. She opened her eyes to find herself lying in her bed. She noticed that she could still smell Rose, if only slightly. Then she sat up abruptly. She climbed out of the bed. She flung open the closet door. She started yanking down jackets and inhaling deeply. She pulled off the jacket he had been wearing that night. And at that point she was absolutely convinced of what she had been smelling. It was Rose. She was on all of his clothes.
He was so surprised when she confronted him. His pupils always dilated for a split second when he was confronted with the truth. Once she saw his eyes turn black, he had already confessed to her.
“You took her away from the children and me. I liked her, that’s why you went after her. She wasn’t even pretty. She listened to what I said. She made me feel inspired again. I want a divorce. I want everything too. And then I’ll burn it. You will never touch me again.”
She called the police and told them about McMahon’s crooked operations. The police were in McMahon’s pockets. What could they do other than have her committed? She needed to have a rest. Most women became excitable.
When the truck came for Mrs. McMahon, there was a pile of her husband’s clothes in the yard up in flames. The flames were fighting with each other. One flame grabbed another by the hair and shook it. The children were sitting around it like it was some sort of bonfire.
Her madness was a fact soon widely accepted as true. Although Rose never believed it.
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“HOW ARE THE CHILDREN?” Rose asked a couple of weeks later. It was always a taboo subject between them.
“They are fine. They’re both in boarding school, so they didn’t have to witness the whole regrettable fiasco with their mother. I think you should move into a bigger apartment. We can’t bloody well go back there together, can we? And I can use some fucking comfort. I’ve had it up to here with crazy women. All you have to do is be fucking pleasant and spread your legs, and you are taken care of. You don’t know how easy you have it.”
“So you would switch places with a woman, then?”
“Come on.”
“Dogs are happy with that life, not me.”
“There we go. I can’t listen to this shit, really.”
“Can I go see her?”
“Oh, fuck off, Rose. You’re such a piece of shit. I feel bad enough about it. What do you care? You slept with her husband.”
“I liked her. She was such a force. But she had been thwarted. She was meant to be on a horse riding into battle.”
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BUT ALTHOUGH he was paying for her whole life, McMahon still wasn’t sure whether he truly possessed her. To make certain that he did, he tried to make Rose miserable. This was the only real proof that a woman belonged to you. Anybody could make a girl happy. It was only when a girl was in love with a man that he could ruin her self-esteem. He knew he would have to get around to that. He only had her for now.
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ROSE WAS DRESSED to the nines that weekend. She was feeling optimistic waiting for McMahon’s response. They shuffled into the Roxy together, sitting down around the enormous round center table with McMahon’s associates and their girlfriends. In the middle of the dinner, McMahon got everyone’s attention.
“Here’s a question for you all. Rose wants to replace Antoine. What do you think of my girlfriend coming in as a business partner with me?”
Rodney Chesterwick, who owned the Toscadero Casino, looked up from his glass of whiskey, shook his head and stated, “Women ought to be at home. Otherwise, who prepares the food?”
“Can we just change the subject?” asked Harry Manuedo, who owned the Ravishing Hotel. “What movie are we going to see?”
They didn’t want to get involved in a domestic dispute. If they did, they would go home to their wives. They thought Rose was crazy. Didn’t she have any idea how good she had it, considering it was the Depression? She had a big plate of turkey in front of her. She had a little mountain of cranberries in front of her. They would turn her lips red and warm up her belly.
Rose realized that these men would never help her. She also knew that McMahon had made it clear to them that they were to treat her like an inferior. She was so humiliated, she couldn’t speak. She didn’t know how to talk back to a group of men like this. And she knew that if she tried to say even a single word, she would burst out crying, and that would somehow prove every point they had just made. So she sat there quietly through the evening. Everyone else went back to talking. All the molls went back to being delightful and screaming out loud in laughter.
McMahon wasn’t satisfied that he had hurt Rose. Once he had gotten a sniff of her pain, he had to have more of it. He wanted to hurt her more. He was all of a sudden enraged that he had ever been under her spell; now that the tables had suddenly turned, he was on her the minute they got back to the hotel.
“You think you’re good in bed, but you really aren’t. You’re ridiculous. Other women are more passionate. They smell better. They buy themselves perfumes and bathe in them.