The Lonely Hearts Hotel(78)



“There’s the Unicorn. See its long magical horn?”

“Oh yes!”

“There’s the Pony with the Broken Leg.”

“Don’t look at that constellation. It’ll make us too sad.”

“Look at the Cartwheeling Girl.”

“That one’s my favorite.”

“I like the Girl Who’s Puking over the Toilet after the Orgy.”

“She needs to slow down!”

“The Boy Blowing Out His Birthday Candles.”

“Oh! How old is he?”

“Eleven,” they say at the same time.

“All I want, Pierrot, is for you to be happy. I can’t make myself happy. Nobody can really make themselves happy. But they can make other people happy.”

“Don’t say that! Don’t ever worry about me. If ever I’m standing in the way of your happiness, I swear I will throw myself right off a roof. All I want is for you to be happy. I’m broken, and you’re perfect. You come first.”

“No.”

“Yes, I insist. Please. It will make me so happy if we just agree on that.”

“Okay. I love you, Pierrot. You’re the only thing and person I’ve ever loved.”

“What did I do to deserve someone as wonderful as you? If I knew I was going to die tomorrow, I wouldn’t mind, because this is the perfect feeling. It doesn’t get any better than this in the entire universe.”

Rose’s white undergarments were all over the floor—like eggshells on the ground. They felt silly because they both began to cry.





45


    NOCTURNE IN PINK AND GOLD



On Saturday night, sometime after closing, there was a fire on Saint Catherine Street. The Savoy Theater went up in flames, like a page in a book. Its fuse box had exploded. It was as if the building had had a heart attack. Perhaps it was just the building’s time to go. The fire trucks came, but there was nothing anyone could do. Pierrot was now out of work, like most of the pianists and just about everybody else in the city, it seemed. On top of that, Rose was also unemployed.

The landlady came right into their room on Sunday. She begged them for rent. She took Pierrot’s trousers and shook them upside down to see if any money came out. They wouldn’t get out of bed to stop her. They were too hungry and tired.

People were being evicted everywhere. Pierrot and Rose stopped on the street to allow movers to pass in front of them. The possessions of an apartment were being loaded onto a cart pulled by a white horse. There were black spots on the thighs of the white horse that looked like the footprints of children in the snow.

The movers were carrying a dusty red couch. There was a green piano among the possessions. The sound the piano made when jostled by the couch was curious and soft and lovely. Pierrot hadn’t played a piano in weeks, so there was no way he was going to pass by this one without playing it. He had resisted heroin, but there was no way he could resist this piano. He leaped onto the back of the truck and scrambled over the furniture before anyone could stop him. He sat on a kitchen table and began to play the green piano. It played so gentle and sweet.

One of the movers hurried out to tell Pierrot to knock it off, but the playing stopped him in his tracks. He had an instant change of heart and wished that Pierrot would never stop playing, that he would play for the rest of their lives.

Rose also felt like letting go of her problems. She began to dance to the piano tune, and her breath made puffs of clouds come out of her mouth. Some children peeped at her. The tone of the piano was so coquettish that it made Rose bat her eyelashes and hop lightheartedly from toe to toe. Then Rose pretended she was being blown violently by a gust of wind. She held on to the pole of the street lamp and lifted her body until she was hanging horizontally, as though she were trying to resist the pull of a hurricane. She had been working at that trick for a week. Some children ran across the street to see. It was truly wondrous.

When Pierrot stopped and Rose took a bow, the small crowd began to applaud. A child threw a handful of bottle caps into the jacket that Pierrot had laid on the ground. A man tossed in a rolled cigarette.

Rose and Pierrot stood in front of the window of the butcher shop. There were links of sausages, and the head of a pig was suspended from a hook like a mask. The meat was making Rose ravenous.

“I’ve been all over the city. No one performs the way we do. We’re just as good as any of the acts coming in from European cities. I know we can be stars. Those people are starving to death, and yet they would’ve parted with their pennies if they had any.”

“We got a cigarette out of it,” said Pierrot, lighting it up.

“We need to get the rich people to pay for expensive tickets to see us,” Rose said. “They don’t like anything unless they have to pay huge amounts of money for it. They want what other people can’t afford. It reminds them that they are rich. We need to get their money. They want to see experience and pain up on display—we have heaps of that.”

Rose reached over to take the cigarette Pierrot extended toward her. She exhaled a row of smoke rings that looked like a row of ballerinas in tutus spinning by.

“We’ve got to get ourselves into a big theater,” she continued. “We have to advertise ourselves as a rarity. Expectations are all part of a performance. We have to get everyone worked up. Telling people who will like it is half the work of any show.”

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