The Lonely Hearts Hotel(79)
“I love when you talk about taking over the world. How are you going to put this together?”
“I don’t know. I can see it now clear as anything. We’re going to have an army of tap dancers. If only we had some money to invest. What are our options? Rob a bank? Ransom a millionaire? Find a patron?”
They both laughed.
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PIERROT KNEW, like every young man in every bedroom in every apartment in every building on the block, that it would be an idiotic move to get your wife pregnant. They would never be able to afford anything that married couples in the past were able to afford—like a house or food for the baby.
He always made certain to withdraw after they had sex. It felt so good. Each time, he was certain that he would mess up and that he would never be able to pull out on time. He pulled out his dick like it was a frying pan taken off a fire. It always put into stark relief just how ludicrous the actual act of sex was. If you weren’t having sex to have a baby, then it was a really ridiculous and absurd endeavor, wasn’t it?
Rose logically had no desire to have a baby, but she wanted one just the same. Every time they made love, there was nothing on earth she wanted as much as to be impregnated. Everything in her body wanted it. She never said so, though.
Pierrot was afraid to even think of the possibility. And because he was afraid to think of having a baby, he ended up thinking about having a baby. And it was with the thought of the baby looming in his mind that he came inside her that night. He couldn’t tell for the life of him whether he did it on purpose. And he was wondering whether she would think he had done it deliberately and be furious with him. To his surprise, she leaned over and planted dozens of kisses on his face.
Their baby began to slowly exist, like a tiny little footnote kicking at the bottom of a great physics text. A cashew at the bottom of a glass dish.
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ON A MONDAY MORNING, Pierrot went to wait in the unemployment line. This was an acceptable way to spend your day. There weren’t any jobs available. So, instead, life had evolved into these sad rituals. If you didn’t engage in these rituals, you were less of a man. It revealed what a sham dignity was.
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THIS TIME, ROSE WAS PREGNANT longer than before. She had more time to think about it, wonder about it, reflect upon it. For a time, she hadn’t dared to think about the thing inside her as an actual baby that might one day leave her body and inhabit the world. But he began to grow in her imagination. She didn’t have any say in it. The little boy in her mind had a life of his own. She gave up fighting and joined the child in her imagination.
She pictured them sailing together on a boat on the Saint Lawrence River. He was dressed in a little sailor’s suit and hat. They leaned out the side of the boat and they saw that the water was absolutely swarming with belugas. The belugas were like slabs of marble that had not yet been carved into angels.
She imagined the two of them in safari hats in a jungle in Africa, with binoculars around their necks, waiting to spot wildlife. She imagined them at the Eiffel Tower, wearing berets and eating baguettes. She imagined them in London with pigeons on their heads, sipping tea.
As Rose walked home she noticed a little girl putting a mirror up to her doll’s mouth to see if it was alive. She smiled.
Pierrot began to imagine the baby also. He imagined a tiny little girl with black hair. She would always be asking him questions about the natural world and the universe. He quite liked that. Little Rose asked him whether it was possible to travel into outer space and shake hands with aliens. Little Rose asked him whether it was possible to travel back in time to see dinosaurs. Little Rose asked him if it was possible to have a zebra as a pet. Little Rose asked him whether it was possible to find a genie in a bottle. Little Rose asked him whether it was possible to find a flying carpet in Chinatown.
And to all these questions, he answered yes.
There was a statue of an Iroquois warrior that he always passed on the way home. Today there was a crow on its right shoulder, its beak a piece of charcoal. He hoped it was a good omen.
46
THE HEARTBEAT OF A RABBIT
Rose couldn’t really be a performer now that she was pregnant. To be a performer, you had to be reckless. You risked your life and security and the safety of your body to make the audience laugh or feel sublime. Therein lay so much of the beauty. The sacrifice was beautiful. But now she didn’t feel that way. Now the baby came first. She didn’t care to do a cartwheel or anything like that. Even the idea was horrific to her.
Rose was so sick in the morning it was difficult for her to get out of bed. She was exhausted all the time. She felt as though she would die if she weren’t able to take an emergency nap. And her lower back felt like someone had come up behind and stabbed her.
She had trouble looking for work. She lined up at a factory but fainted on the street.
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THERE WAS A KNOCK ON the door one afternoon during that time. When Rose opened it, she found a girl who looked no more than thirteen standing there and holding up a dead rabbit by its ear, as though it were Exhibit A.
She informed Rose that the rabbit was for sale. The little girl had a rabbit-skin jacket that she had probably sewn all by herself out of the furs of rabbits she had eaten. Rose asked her for a live rabbit. The girl said she’d have to follow her back to her apartment.
They only had to go around the corner, to the skinny triplex that the Rabbit Girl lived in, on the top floor. There was another bedroom at the very back of the apartment, where the big rabbit cage was. There were patterns of poppies in the molding along the top of the walls. And the wallpaper was a very pretty blue. She had made a cage out of an old armoire. She had replaced the glass on the doors with chicken wire. A rabbit lived on each shelf as if the cage were an apartment building. It was really rather ingenious.