The Lonely Hearts Hotel(61)

She took the trolley from the Darling Hotel down Saint Catherine Street to the red-light district. The narrow streets perpendicular to Saint Catherine were lined with lazy buildings that had let themselves go. They needed new windows and new steps and new paint jobs. They were cantankerous and moody. They refused to open or shut their windows. They let the cold in through the cracks in the doors, and mice into those in the walls. They acted as though they had been awoken from deep sleep when you turned on the faucet or tried to use the stove.

On the front arch of an old abandoned bank there was a gargoyle of an angel lying on its back, looking up at the clouds in the sky, having completely lost interest in the world.

Rose was moving to the area where girls like Poppy plied their trades. But she didn’t mind. She was tired of pretending she was anything other than an unfortunate young woman without a penny to her name—who fucked for a living.

One of the governesses had told her about a pawnshop in the neighborhood that would take your riches without asking questions. There it was, just like she had said. The pawnshop was dark inside and had a small cabinet filled with all the stolen jewels in the city. There was an expensive suit hanging from a coat hanger and a pair of fancy shoes. It was as if a man had sold his clothes and then walked out of the pawnshop naked.

On top of her jewelry, Rose sold all her fancy dresses. The pawnbroker told her that he would give her an extra dollar for the exquisite fur hat she had on as well. But Rose shook her head. She wasn’t going to give up that hat. It seemed like the only old friend she had. It had come all the way from the orphanage with her. She knew that it made no sense for her to wear it. It was as though she were walking around with a crown on. But that was why she liked it. She wasn’t about to give up a magical talisman at this point. Not when she was a girl alone in a land where everybody was a cross between the Big Bad Wolf and Puss in Boots.

Even though the pawnbroker had wildly underappreciated the worth of the objects she had pawned to him, she was still in possession of what was, to her, a small fortune. She intended to buy herself a holiday, time off from her life. She felt like spending some time in the city, the way a seven-year-old might.

? ? ?

SHE MOVED INTO A LITTLE ROOM at the Valentine Hotel on the corner of Saint Catherine and De Bullion. She told the woman that she could only afford the cheapest room they had. Her room was pretty, though. It was tidy. The tenant before her had lived in the room for twenty years and she had kept really good care of it. The wallpaper wasn’t torn off at all. The floor wasn’t scuffed. The washbasin looked like it had never toppled off due to some sort of drunken escapade. And the wallpaper was covered in yellow roses. There were white doorknobs with flowers painted on them.

The widow’s cat peeked its head in the window, asking Rose whether it would be okay if it continued to reside in that room. Rose held its head in her palms and said, yes, of course, of course, of course. The cat had gray and white stripes, as if it had just escaped from prison.

She ended up loving her little room, which she paid for all by herself. The floors were so thin you could hear somebody making love three floors up. A woman singing a lullaby to her baby could put a lonely junkie on the fifth floor to sleep. There wasn’t much secrecy in that building. If you saw one of your neighbors walking into the confessional, you already knew everything he was going to tell the priest. If you saw a man sleeping on the bench outside the building, you knew why his wife had kicked him out. His children kissed his cheeks on their way to school as they passed. The proximity of all these people made Rose feel less alone. She fell asleep listening to the voices of other people through the walls: it was what the world sounded like to an unborn child.

The windows were covered in frost in the morning when she woke up. She pulled on three pairs of stockings and two sweaters, then her overcoat on top. And she walked through the snow. She ran around with her hands out, catching snowflakes with the children.

She had time to see the neighborhood without worrying about getting home to the orphanage or McMahon. It was the first time in her life that she could do something like that. When she returned to the hotel, the concierge reached behind the wall and plucked off Rose’s key for her. All the keys hung in a row, like a very simple musical score for a child to play.





32


    PORTRAIT OF LADY WITH WHIP AND DONKEY



Despite residing in the world’s cheapest hotel room, after a time, Rose began to run out of money. Rose wasn’t sure how she would survive in the city on a day-to-day basis, however. McMahon had put out the word that she wasn’t to be hired at any of the city’s nightclubs. Since they were under his protection, the owners told Rose that they couldn’t let her in. It was as though all those years of learning the business and meeting people hadn’t even existed. They had all been a waste of time. She understood exactly how all those Americans had felt when they jumped out the windows of tall buildings in 1929. She was twenty-one years old. She amounted to nothing.

There weren’t any other sorts of jobs either. She went to the factories. She went to all the restaurants and knocked on the back doors. She went to the five-and-dime. She went to a spruce-beer manufacturer. She knew that they didn’t have any signs in the windows asking for help, but she went in just in case.

She was walking down Saint Alexandre Street, where there were prostitutes in cloches milling about on the sidewalk. You could only make out their pouty lips. They walked like hens with their chests stuck out. As Rose passed she saw a sign on the door of a narrow building. It said: Help Wanted: Seeking the Most Beautiful Woman in the World. There was a descending row of white doorbells, like the buttons on a dress. She went up the marble stairs to the third floor of the building, even though she knew it had to be a trap. She knew that telling a woman she was beautiful was almost always setting a trap.