The Lonely Hearts Hotel(90)

“What is reserved for this last act?” Pierrot asked. “Why don’t you have anyone’s name written down here?”

“That’s always the most important slot, isn’t it?”

“Indeed. I was wondering what you intended to put there.”

They smiled at each other.





52


    DETAIL OF WALLPAPER



His whole life, McMahon had been consumed with pride. He never let his guard down. He had always considered his actions carefully. Even when he was a little boy, he acted in a way that nobody could mock. McMahon sat leaning against the leather seat of his car. He couldn’t believe what he was doing. McMahon hated himself for following her around. But the minute Rose appeared, he forgot himself entirely and stared. Rose and Pierrot held hands and walked down the street.

Pierrot was an altogether different person when he was with Rose. He was wide awake and so alive. He swung his hands all over the place as he spoke. And he made her laugh uproariously. She looked at him with an unmistakable admiration. They whisked happily into the doorway of the Valentine Hotel and disappeared from sight.

McMahon sometimes felt that alcohol and drugs actually revealed the true personality of people. Rose hadn’t seen Pierrot stoned. That was a whole different man. That was who he truly was. Drugs scratched off people’s veneer. It made them abandon manners. Then you could see what was left of them, which was not much.

He couldn’t believe that she liked sex with Pierrot as much as she had with him. In fact, he couldn’t really bring himself to believe they were having sex at all. He didn’t want to get out of the car, but that’s what he found himself doing. He walked into the lobby of the Valentine Hotel and rented a room from the decrepit concierge. He gave her a two-dollar bill and she gave him the key to the room right next to Rose’s.

When he walked into the room, he felt like a giant. The room was exceptionally tiny. He felt as if he were trapped in the dollhouse in his daughter’s room. The wallpaper was green, with tiny brown birds. The bed frame was carved out of burgundy wood and had tiny roses on the back of it. The mattress was thin, and the bedspread had brown and pink flowers. He couldn’t imagine fucking on that bed. The weight of his body would break it.

He didn’t want to sit on a bed that so many people had had sex on. Instead he sat in the armchair, whose back was shaped like a shell. The legs of which were so thin, they were like those of very tall birds. He wondered how it held him up. Things that he had previously judged weak were now proving strong—to have no trouble supporting themselves and others. He was in an alternate universe, where skinny was fat, weak was strong, small was large.

There was a glass tumbler on the side of the sink. McMahon picked it up and put its mouth against the wall. He put his ear to its bottom, listening carefully to the movements in the other room. He wondered what colors the wallpaper was in Rose’s room. He wondered whether it was the same as that on his side. It was actually green and pink, but he could not know this.

Suddenly there were voices in the glass, swimming around like two fancy goldfish.

What he heard was the longest-running one-act play of all time, mounted in cities all over the world, interpreted by different directors, starring different actors but always sold out.

McMahon dropped the glass to the ground in horror. The words scurried around the floor like spiders. He threw on his coat. He opened the door and headed down the narrow, carpeted corridor of the Valentine Hotel, and didn’t breathe again until he was across the street.

He would have his revenge. He would end this love affair. He didn’t want to just kill Pierrot. That would be too easy. Then Pierrot would certainly be the love of Rose’s life. In his experience, dead men were the ones who fared the best in the opinions of women. Instead he wanted to break them up. He wanted Rose to be disgusted by love the way he was disgusted by love. He wanted her to look back on everything Pierrot had said and judge it to be a lie.





53


    STUDY OF GIRL IN A SAILOR HAT



McMahon sent a girl named Lily to seduce Pierrot. He would have been sleeping with her himself if his rage for Rose hadn’t rendered him impotent.

Lily was the opposite of Rose. She was pale. She had blond hair that she wore in a great bun heaped on her head. The bun always looked so messy, just on the verge of collapsing. It never did. Her green eyes were the color of marbles that any boy would go crazy trying to win. But she squinted. She’d had trouble with her eyesight when she was little but didn’t get glasses. Now her face was sort of permanently squinted up. She had the look of a Persian cat sitting in the sun.

Her legs were so long she made any dress she had on seem indecent. She always seemed naked. Businessmen paid ludicrous sums to have sex with her. They only slept with her because the price was so high. They could be sure that no poor man was able to afford her. They would be sticking their penises only where the best penises had gone.

Pierrot was on his way home from the hardware store. His pocket was filled with screws for a pulley mechanism being built to hoist up a two-hundred-pound clown into the air. Lily took Pierrot’s arm as he passed by. “Please, come upstairs with me. I need some help. Quick, it’s an emergency.” She scrunched up her face a little—like a rabbit sensing danger—and tried to convey her distress.