The Lonely Hearts Hotel(8)

Putting the soap and washcloth on the side of the bathtub, she straightened up on her knees. She took his penis in her hands and leaned forward and put her mouth around it. She had just the tip of it in her mouth and was licking and sucking on it. His penis grew so quickly. He thought it would keep growing and growing. As if it were some magical beanstalk. He felt terrible, but so good.

He had the sudden urge to grab her head and ram his penis to the back of her throat. He tried to stop himself but his hands and fingers reached against his will. They just wanted to touch her silky hair with their fingertips. The moment he felt the hair, he couldn’t help himself. He took two fistfuls of it and pushed his penis deep into her mouth and it exploded. The feeling was so enormous that he didn’t know whether it was a good feeling or a bad feeling. It was more frightening than anything else. He also knew that it was something that he could easily spend the rest of his life doing.

His penis throbbed in her mouth. A tremor went through his whole body, as though he were a flag moving in the wind. She gagged and coughed. She pushed him back gently. She spit into the bath.

“You can go back to bed,” she said.

Pierrot climbed out of the bathtub. He dried himself off hastily and put his nightgown back over his head. He hurried back to bed, shivering now and on tippytoe. Freezing rain began to fall outside and it sounded like there were a hundred children running behind him. He had a chill and had to get under the covers so that he could go back to sleep and wake up out of this strange dream. He didn’t even know what they had done exactly. He hadn’t known what being sucked off was before then. But he knew it had to do with sex.

He was too young to be married to the nun. She was married to God! What would God say if He knew about this? And God knew absolutely everything, so He certainly would know about this. How could he have been so stupid, to go and upset God? He had been considering himself lucky of late, as he was no longer beaten like the other children.

He wept into his pillow. He didn’t know why he was weeping. The next day he began crying when he looked at his porridge. His big teardrops made the porridge tasty.

Sister Elo?se continued to wake Pierrot up in the middle of the night. It happened too many times for Pierrot to count. It continued to happen as the winter melted away outside. Once, he was concentrating so hard while Elo?se sucked him that it caused small buds to burst through the branches of the trees, and then the leaves unfurled when he came. The next day, he pulled his black turtleneck on to go outside. He had trouble getting it over his head and he sat on his bed and imagined he looked like a pawn in a game of chess. When he went outside, the spring wind had come back. It was telling the children about how it had gone in a ship to Paris, how it had taken a train to Italy. The children danced with the barefooted, carefree wind.

Pierrot didn’t tell any of the other children what was happening. It was as if the things that occurred between him and Elo?se were just dreams. It was rare that any of the children spoke of their dreams. What use was it to bring up a two-headed horse that had poked its head into the dormitory? At night the monsters under the beds begged him to come make love to them.

Sister Elo?se made Pierrot swear that he wouldn’t confess to the priest about what they had done. She said that what they had done was a secret, but it wasn’t a sin. And that being able to keep a secret was a sign of being in love. But the feeling of wrongness was there. Was that feeling proof of something? That there is a distinction between good and evil? But Pierrot didn’t dare tell the priest. And so, on top of everything else, Pierrot felt that he was going to hell.

? ? ?

OTHERS NOTICED a certain change in Pierrot. Whereas before he had always seemed to be an almost unfailingly happy child, he now was taken by great bouts of sadness. He would tell the others to leave him be, that he was afraid of death and needed to weep. He seemed to perform sadness.

He curled up into a little ball as though he were literally a ball of despair. And he rocked back and forth, until finally he rolled right around into a somersault. He would always act shocked when he rolled over, then he would stick out his limbs in all directions, startled. All the other children laughed.

He ran, threw himself up against the wall, smacked against it like a bird against glass and then slid right down again.

He was standing outside in the garden. He had taken the Mother Superior’s umbrella and was holding it over his head. The children asked what he was doing and he said he was waiting for it to rain.

The children ran up to Pierrot when he got into one of these moods. For some reason, his sadness made their own go away. Their unhappiness was something that could be very easily mastered. It made their bad moods seem like something silly. Sadness was nothing to be afraid of. You could laugh at it. It was as absurd as a sneeze. It lasted as long as the pain from the sting of a bee.

Pierrot just stood there, all alone under his umbrella. A hen walked by with its chest way forward, like a toddler learning to walk. All the children got tired of watching Pierrot and went off to have fun. Except for Rose. She was left staring at him. She tiptoed over, bowed her head and went under the umbrella with him. She held his hand and Pierrot felt better almost immediately, as though Rose were a solution to all great philosophical conundrums.

“I’m a terrible person,” Pierrot said to her.

“I’m quite wicked too,” Rose said, and she smiled at him.

Pierrot knew that Rose was punished every time she spoke to him. All her words were contraband, treasured items from the black market. A sentence from her was like a pot of jam during wartime.