The Lonely Hearts Hotel(77)
“I am no longer a thief. I can’t be, they have my fingerprints.”
“Buy a pair of gloves and act like a man.”
“I’ve never had any idea what that means.”
The man took out a knife. Pierrot closed his eyes, accepting his doom or fate or whatever. He didn’t know how to fight back. All he knew was how to sacrifice himself. But nothing happened. There was a crashing sound and Pierrot opened his eyes.
The man looked stunned. His jaw dropped as though he were about to say something. He fell to his knees. At first Pierrot wasn’t sure what had happened. The man seemed to have been struck down by God. He was in the presence of a miracle. But standing behind the man was Rose, holding a broken chair in her hands. They both looked at the body as it slumped to the ground. Rose quickly squatted—her coat tucked underneath her buttocks—and she checked the pulse of the man lying there.
“Oh, he’s okay. Let’s move along, though. He won’t be in a good mood when he wakes up.”
They headed off toward the street. The alley was filled with furniture that had been thrown out after evictions. There was a mattress covered in blue violets—the color of the blue lips of corpses. An overturned crib looked like the carcass of a dead buffalo.
“I’m not ever going to let anybody hurt us again. I’m going to fight back.”
“You are so brave!”
“I’m not brave. I just can’t take it anymore. You have to smash people over the head with chairs and bottles in order to be taken seriously.”
Her hat flew off and her hair blew up in the air. Pierrot had never seen her look so dazzling, but he also found her quite mad. He wondered why she was even dating him. He was not ferocious. He wasn’t good enough for her. Rose would realize this any second and leave him. Pierrot was concerned about Poppy. Had he abandoned her? Did he have to help her if she was in trouble? He didn’t want to think of himself as the type of man who treated women badly. But was there any way to have sex with a woman without being unkind to her? Wasn’t sex always a vicious act of cruelty? He couldn’t go back to Poppy. He wanted to be with Rose. It was the only thing he had ever wanted. Would he end up hurting Rose next? Was his relationship to her unholy and unkind as well? He wanted to be true to Rose. He couldn’t be true to any woman but Rose.
She was walking down the street, ranting about how she wanted to bop everyone in the face. Pierrot had stopped in his tracks, and she was walking alone. She started walking toward him with both her palms up and out to the side, like an Egyptian who didn’t know which way to go. Asking, “What the hell?”
“Will you marry me, Rose?”
? ? ?
ON THE DAY of their wedding, they took a bath together in little pots of warm water they had to waste hard-earned coal to heat. They asked Mimi to be their witness when they got married at City Hall. They were twenty-two years old.
Rose had a tiny white veil pinned to her black hat. She wore a navy blue dress with discreet polka dots and a white collar. She held a bouquet of cloth flowers that Mimi had picked up from the costume room at the film studio. Pierrot was wearing his famous suit.
The lace of her wedding veil made it look like they were peering at each other through a window covered in frost.
“I don’t deserve you. If anyone wants to come up here and stop this, they most definitely should. I will do anything for you. I have never put anyone ahead of myself. And I have always wanted to. I want to devote my life to making you happy. After spending this past year with you, were you to leave me, I wouldn’t be able to survive.”
“You are my Napoleon. You have stuck a stake in my heart. You are my Alexander the Great.”
Pierrot shrugged, because he wasn’t anything like those guys.
“I don’t care if you are making the worst decision of your life,” Pierrot said. “Because I want you to belong to me so badly.”
It was very short. She liked that. They went into a door single and unmarried, and came out a couple. Just like a transformation that occurred in a magician’s box.
They had a dollar that Mimi had given to them as a wedding present. They had to decide what to do with it. They decided on getting their photo taken. When they each saw how nice and cleaned up the other one looked in the photo, they were delighted they had chosen to have their photos taken that day. It was a black-and-white photograph. For reasons he could not even be sure of himself, the photographer decided to add a touch-up to the photograph. He took a little paintbrush and added a dab of pink paint to both of Rose’s cheeks.
? ? ?
“LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, I am giving a toast to a girl I have known my whole life. We were left as babies at the same orphanage. We were put in cribs that were adjacent to one another. And the moment I turned my head and saw her on the other side of the bars, I said, I’m going to propose to that baby.”
At one point in the evening Pierrot sat beside the pianist. They engaged in a four-hand tune that sounded like a hundred pianists playing all at once. As the girls in the bar began to feel tired their heads sank forward, as though they were lost in reading novels on the train.
Pierrot had tied soup cans to the back of his bicycle. They made a rattling, clattering, wonderful sound, like a drunk party girl falling down the stairs with bottles in her hand. There was a nip in the air. Later that night they sat on the rooftop, wrapped together in a blanket, and looked up at the constellations in the sky. Rose knew what they were from looking through the telescope at McMahon’s house. But she decided to rename them all for Pierrot.