The Lonely Hearts Hotel(91)

Pierrot followed her. It made him nervous. He was generally very nervous when women called on him to help them. They usually asked him for something he couldn’t provide. He hoped she didn’t want him to lift anything heavy, or to fight off some terrible brute she had become involved with. Pierrot wasn’t good at that sort of thing.

To his surprise, she sat down on the edge of the bed in her room and spread her legs. On the mattress next to her was a tea tray with cups and a vase with wilty-looking mauve flowers in it. Poised on the corner of the tray were a spoon and a syringe atop a tiny bit of newspaper with last week’s headlines.

“Will you shoot this dope into my thigh? I can’t have anyone see marks on my arms.”

He was so surprised. He was in the room with heroin itself. It was as though heroin had taken on the form of a girl. He found the heroin was much more seductive than the beautiful woman. He hadn’t expected to confront it like this. Imagine answering the door and finding your ex-lover standing there, saying she had changed her mind and wanted to come back. How could you resist? What would it hurt to spend a moment more in the room and help this girl out? He liked the ritual of cooking dope. It made him feel important, like someone with an actual profession—a doctor, say. He took a stocking of hers from off the bedpost and tied it around her thigh. The instant he injected her, Pierrot felt high by proxy. They were curiously upside down. The bed was on the ceiling. The rug too was on the ceiling. The table, with its teacups and lamp, wasn’t crashing to the ground. Clever girl! What a way to decorate a home. She looked at him with her eyes closed and laughed.

Then abruptly Pierrot came to his senses and the room righted itself. He had to get out at once or he would succumb to the drug and live on ceilings, floating over life like a ghost, for the rest of his life.

When he flung open the door, a man stood there with a camera. It was the detective with the checkered hat, the one he couldn’t afford. Pierrot nodded to him, but the detective pretended not to notice and moved on.

? ? ?

HE ENCOUNTERED another odd woman a few weeks later when he stopped to look in a bakery window. Montrealers gathered around bakery windows as if the cupcakes on display made a sort of comic opera. You would look at them like you were looking at a Hollywood musical but it was even more marvelous, as it was right there at your fingertips. How could any Hollywood starlet compare to a vanilla cupcake topped with red candies in the shape of tiny stars?

In the window, he saw the reflection of a woman coming up behind him. It was as if she were a submerged body rising up in the water. She wore a man’s black wool coat and had on a sailor’s cap. She came up next to Pierrot and whispered into his ear.

“Tu me reconnais?”

“What’s your name?”

“I like to change my name every week. Once my name was Marguerite, but all I did when my name was Marguerite was get into trouble. I was such a bad girl when my name was Marguerite that I changed it to Natalie.”

Pierrot looked at the girl, his mouth hanging open, not sure what to say.

“We can call ourselves Lucille and Ludovic. We can do whatever we want. And then change our names to something else.”

“My name is Pierrot. I’m quite happy being called that.”

“T’aimes fumer? Do you like to smoke?”

“I like it more than anything.”

She opened her coat to reveal her completely naked body underneath. He wasn’t expecting that. The stretched lining of the coat made her look so skinny, a streak of lightning in a big black sky. She let her coat close and reached into her pocket for a long pipe with a glass bowl.

She lit up her pipe. Pierrot looked around. It was odd to light a glass pipe like that out in the open. The smoke swirled around, not like a dragon, as the drug was fancifully called on the street, but more like a tiny newt.

A light flashed at the corner of Pierrot’s eye. A man across the street with a camera was taking photos of them. He recognized the checkered rain hat. It was the same private investigator he had tried to pay to find Rose. Here he was again: he was following Pierrot! He popped up right after these lovely ladies tried to have sex with him. It was a setup! Brilliant! He realized that, of course, McMahon had hired him. He was the only person they knew who had money to afford this type of absurd luxury.

“Who do you work for?” Pierrot asked, wanting to make sure.

“Why do you think I work for anybody? I have no idea what you’re talking about. I’m flabbergasted. Est-ce que c’est le bon mot?”

“Can I ask one question?”

“Oui, mais . . . just one.”

“Is he, like, a really powerful black-haired mafia guy who runs the Roxy downtown?”

“Yes. But I won’t say anything else.”

As Pierrot walked home, reviewing what had just happened, he decided not to tell Rose. She lost her temper so easily these days, especially with the pressure of putting the show together. And since McMahon had visited, she seemed ready to kill someone at the drop of a hat.

As Pierrot was walking up the stairs he heard Rose yelling, “I’ll wring your neck, you lousy bastard! I’ll teach you to come up against a woman!”

He flung open the door to find her in the kitchen, struggling with a jar of jam. No, he would not upset Rose further.

? ? ?

MCMAHON HIRED a girl named Colombe to seduce Pierrot. She was the girl who worked in the brothels and most resembled Rose. She had the same build and the same short, dark hair. But the thing that most distinguished Colombe from Rose was the expression on her face. She always looked disgusted. She pouted and complained about everything. Her main topic of conversation was how she couldn’t stand other women. She thought she was better at making love than any of the other whores.