A Trip to the Stars (15 page)

Unable to eat, unable to sleep, I wandered the ship—the decks, the corridors below—every night for hours when I came off duty. I was more restless than ever. And so it was late one night, passing the seamen’s lounge, in a part of the ship I rarely visited, that I encountered again the incessant phonograph music I had heard through the wall of Room 9 at the Hôtel Alnilam. Since leaving Manila I had heard that music so often in my head that it took me a moment to realize it was also playing outside of me now. I stopped short and returned to the open door of the lounge. Inside it was dark. I saw the orange glow of a burning cigarette between the fingers of a sailor whose face I couldn’t make out. He was hunched over a portable phonograph against the wall. The record he was playing hissed with static: but it was the same jazz pianist, all right, improvising variations on that same theme.

“Excuse me,” I said. “Would you tell me what that music is?”

The sailor’s voice was low, and scratchy too, but even over the music I didn’t have to strain to hear it. “It’s called ‘Dead Man Blues,’ ” he replied.

“Jelly Roll Morton?” I whispered, and to my surprise he heard me.

“That’s right. Come in, if you like.”

But I was already running down the narrow corridor, my sandals slapping on the tiles as I swallowed the scream that was rising in my throat.

In their final communication with me on February 20, which happened to be my twenty-fourth birthday, the Air Force would no longer
confirm that there had even been such a flight as I was inquiring after, in any kind of plane, on January 18, out of Luzon or anywhere else. Information-wise, I was going backward, finally being told that there was no information at all, for, incredibly, they refused to confirm that Captain Geza Cassiel had been a crew member on a B-52, or even that he was stationed on Guam before December 24, though I knew full well that he had been shot down while on a mission out of there. I thought I was going out of my mind. His medical charts and the X rays I had taken were now on file at Subic Bay, and the only tangible proof I had that Cassiel existed was my gold bracelet with the stars forged from the shrapnel that had been removed from his back. Or maybe I had bought the bracelet, too, in Manila, all by myself, along with the red transistor radio and the pearldiver’s goggles, which I had kept. Rubbing the patch of concentric circles on my palm, I thought maybe he had never been in Manila with me. Maybe there was no Cassiel, and those four wonderful days at the Hôtel Alnilam had been a product of my delirium, courtesy of the
Ummidia Stellarum
’s venom. Or so I told myself, over and over again, to deflect my fears that he was really dead. But it was no consolation.

As in New Orleans I had begun to cry myself to sleep again. Often I took refuge on deck, under the stars, so as not to disturb the other nurses. It was on one such night, gripping the railing in rough seas until my fingers were white, with my father’s Silver Star in my pocket, that I finally began screaming, right into the teeth of the wind. A petty officer found me out there and took me down to the infirmary. One of the doctors gave me a sedative which had no effect. I didn’t understand what he was saying to me, or why he was saying it. All I knew was that, like Loren, Cassiel had disappeared off the face of the earth, and once again there was nothing I could do about it.

In the first three years that I lived at the Hotel Canopus I grew accustomed to the large floating population. I hardly bothered keeping track of the overnight and weekend transients, but I came to know the permanent residents, for better or worse, as well as one comes to know the members of a family. Even those who were most reclusive often indulged me, at least by their standards, because of my closeness to Samax. More permanent, even, than the permanent guests was the constellation of women around Samax, whose dynamics and tensions, I soon realized, were as complex as their individual relationships with him.

Dolores was the hotel manager. She was ninety years old at that time and never left the hotel grounds. She saw to it that every operational detail met Samax’s specifications and that the place in all respects ran according to his expectations. I seldom saw Dolores, who remained in her office most of the time, in the upper basement. On Wednesdays from noon to six she sat alone in the maze of the garden, in a nook where no one was to disturb her, ever, in a stiff rocking chair beside a glass table. This was her time off. And she drank gallons of chamomile tea, iced, from a tall glass, which she claimed to be an elixir for longevity—but only if consumed in vast quantities, without sugar. A thin, craggy woman, Dolores kept her white hair drawn back severely in a bun. Her eyes were still sharp, but she used a monocle, which hung from her neck on a red cord, to read by. Even with glasses, she said, her left eye could not focus close up on things.

In my first and only private meeting with her after my arrival, in her office, I fixed on the monocle’s flashing lens which spun slowly
when she leaned forward in her wooden swivel chair. Later, I would look back on this meeting as closer to a job interview than a cordial introduction. For one thing, I stood the entire time: no other chair graced the room, just a long hard sofa on the wall behind Dolores. Across the front of her desk—a formidable line of defense—there was a row of potted fishhook cactuses, long-needled and crowned with startling profusions of purple flowers.

Peering at me closely with her right eye, dark as blue ink, Dolores remarked enigmatically, “I see family resemblances.” Her thick, oily voice sharply contrasted with her desiccated features.

Since, so far as I could tell, I barely resembled Samax, I wondered what or who exactly she saw in my face. Did she mean my mother, Bel, I wanted to ask her; but more intimidated by her than I was by my uncle, I refrained.

“They tell me you picked up another name along the way,” she went on bluntly, her sole reference, wildly understated, to my entire history.

I nodded.

“So now we’ll be taking care of you,” she said. She sat back and the monocle rested flat on her thin black cardigan. “Even if I was blind, which I’m not, I’d know you were related to Junius. Like him, you don’t talk a lot, huh?”

I cleared my throat. “Only when I have something to say.”

She smiled thinly. “Proving my point, ’cause that’s exactly what he would say.” Cracking her knuckles, she turned over some papers on her desk by way of dismissal and said under her breath, “You’ll do. Keep your eyes and ears open and you could learn a few things around here.”

When I stepped outside her office, my face was hot and I felt as if all the breath had been sucked from my lungs.

Dolores’s daughters, Della and Denise, were the two women I had seen at the desk in the lobby my first night at the hotel. But I had spoken only with Della, the tanned one with the slate hair. Denise was the bleached blonde with the aquiline face. The sisters were responsible for the hotel’s day-to-day operations, under the firm—sometimes iron—hand of their mother.

Della and Denise seldom spoke to each other and made no secret of their mutual disdain. Denise was cool to me and indifferent, and
Della—as she had been that first night—friendly, solicitous, and as time passed, and we came to know each other, affectionate and loving. Certainly it was to her that I went when I had a cut or scrape to be tended; Denise, who nominally shared responsibility for taking care of me on a daily basis, would see to my needs, but not with Della’s genuine tenderness. This applied both to routine matters and emergencies. For example, when a pot of coffee spilled onto my arm in the kitchen one morning, it was Della who rushed to my side and took charge, icing the burn and applying a salve which prevented my incurring the faintest scar.

During my first year at the hotel, until my eleventh birthday, one of the sisters always spent the night across the hall from me in Room D. Because of the nature of my previous lives, loneliness in the wee hours was not one of my problems. And my grandmother had not been a touchy-feely person. Still, in that first year, in an environment as exotic and complex as the hotel, I had enough questions every week to fill a small notebook. Samax was often busy, his trusted aide and right arm Calzas traveled, and Desirée was otherwise absorbed, so Della was my primary source of information, especially for stuff with which I did not want to clutter my time with Samax. Not to mention those questions about him which I did not, or could not, ask Samax himself. For example, the specifics of his relationships with certain residents, highly intricate by definition since nearly all activities at the hotel radiated from him on some level. More to the point, when I first arrived, it was Della who expressed the most down-to-earth curiosity about those previous lives of mine. Whether at my bedside or in the upstairs kitchen over sandwiches and milk, she often asked me about my itinerant life with Luna and Milo, about Brooklyn and how I had adapted to a correspondingly sedentary life with my grandmother. Sometimes we spoke of Alma, and once in a while of my mother, Bel, whom Della had known when Bel was my age. I was intensely curious about Bel, for obvious reasons; and for her own reasons, Della was not as forthcoming as she was about other things.

“She loved animals, as you do,” Della remarked to me. “She loved music. And she read a lot. That’s how I remember her, propped up against a tree with a book in her lap and a transistor radio.”

“Did she like rock-and-roll?”

“I guess,” she said. “She always wore an earplug.”

“What did she read, then?” I asked.

Della furrowed her brow. “I don’t know,” she said, a pained expression crossing her face. “I can’t remember now. It was such a difficult time,” she added awkwardly.

Only later would I come to realize that the difficulty she referred to was a kind of retroactive one. That is, the apparent anguish Della and Samax suffered around Bel’s untimely death radiated backward and tinged their memories of her short life. Because of the way she had died, they could seldom speak of her life—which anyway didn’t seem to be a happy one—without anguish. And when I was young, especially, and new to the household, they were reluctant to transmit that anguish to me, even if at times this meant avoiding the subject of Bel altogether. The simple fact, which I absorbed with stark clarity from the first, was that my birth and her death were inextricably bound: Bel ran away from home, gave birth to me, and soon afterward died.

In age, Della and Denise were spaced two years apart. There had been a third sister, Doris, the eldest, but she had died some time ago. In bits and pieces, during my first year at the hotel, I had put together a few essential facts about Dolores and her daughters. Their history at a certain point—which I had yet to determine—had become inextricably tied to Samax’s. What I had managed to learn more than anything reinforced the fact that I knew very little. And much of that, on the surface, appeared contradictory. The three sisters each had a different father, and Dolores was a widow three times over: everyone agreed on that. And also on the fact, which I learned quite early on, that Samax had been married briefly to the late Doris—the only hiatus in his lifelong bachelorhood. No one—not the sisters, or Dolores, or Desirée, or other people at the hotel who must have known—would ever say much about this marriage. Nor would they discuss the circumstances of Doris’s death, and I was told in no uncertain terms (by Calzas) that these were two subjects which were not to be broached with Samax. Even Calzas himself wouldn’t touch these subjects if I brought them up—which told me a lot. So, inspired by a shortage of information, I wondered frequently about this late Mrs. Samax. I wondered why Samax had not married Della, about whom I felt so warmly. Desirée, who was twenty-three, was
Della’s daughter; even if it wasn’t Della who had been married to Samax, I still suspected, and wished, that Samax might be Desirée’s father. I had seen soon enough that he had an eye, undimmed by his age, for a pretty woman, yet I had never seen him look at Desirée—whom every man in the hotel looked at—with the slightest flicker of lust.

Though Desirée was Della’s daughter, I seldom saw them speak to each other. In fact, Desirée spent little time with either her mother or her aunt Denise. Sometimes she could be found at Samax’s elbow, doing intensive research on the antiquities he was interested in acquiring. But mostly she was a loner, sitting by the pool under an umbrella with her portable Olivetti perched on a footstool, wearing wraparound sunglasses and one of the bikinis from her inexhaustible collection. I never saw her wear the same one twice, and with her perfect figure, it wouldn’t have mattered to me if she had. Even before my formal adolescence began—my thirteenth birthday, on December 16, 1968—Desirée had become the object of my fantasies. Many times a day I undressed her, to the point where I was certain I knew how she would look, to the last detail, if ever I did see her naked. I knew she had lovers in town, but none of them ever came out to the hotel. And, while envying them—I had calculated that when I was twenty, she would still be only thirty, hopefully within reach—I was more curious about the contents of those pale yellow pages she piled neatly beside her as she typed effortlessly yet with great concentration for hours, days, at a time. To me, she was always kind, and could be warmly intimate—or so I fancied—while remaining spacily detached, gazing far beyond whomever she was looking at, even as she had the night I met her, on our flight from New York.

It was also in that first year at the hotel, on Samax’s orders, that Della or Denise always came to my room at bedtime to read to me from the
Arabian Nights
(thus we covered 365 of the 1,001 nights before I completed the entire work by myself, one night at a time, over the next two years). Denise was perfunctory, and cut me short when I asked her too many questions about the stories, until finally I stopped asking her any; the moment she shut the book, I turned on my side and she walked to the door and switched off the lamp, mumbling “good night” without looking back. Della, in addition to being the superior reader, stayed for as long as I wanted and often asked
me questions about what we had just read. When I was particularly lucky, Desirée would sit in for one of them—my very own Scheherazade, I thought—and, perched on the side of my bed, would read aloud in her low, velvety voice while I inhaled the perfume of her long hair, and studied the movements of her beautiful hands, and took enormous sensual delight in the fact that whenever she shifted her weight on the mattress, or moved at all, the subtlest ripples and tremors were wonderfully transmitted to me. In short, I was entranced by the illusion that, for even the briefest time, and by the loosest definition, Desirée was sharing my bed with me. And so it was that the “nights” which she happened to read to me would always be among my especial favorites, forever associated with her voice, her scents, and her body.