The Hotel New Hampshire (49 page)

“You’re going to need an agent,” Frank said to Lilly. “That will be me.”

Frank
would
become Lilly’s agent; he would become Franny’s agent, and Father’s agent, and even my agent, too—in time. He hadn’t majored in economics for nothing. But I didn’t know that on that end-of-the-summer evening in 1964 when I left Fehlgeburt, poor Miss Miscarriage, asleep and no doubt dreaming of her spectacular sacrifice; her
expendable
nature was virtually all I could see when I stood alone in the Plaza of Heroes and recalled how Hitler had made so many people seem expendable to such a mob of true believers. In the quiet evening I could almost hear the mindless din of “
Sieg Heil
!” I could see the absolute self-seriousness of Schraubenschlüssel’s face when he tightened down the nut and washer on an engine-block bolt. And what else had he been tightening down? I could see the dull glaze of devotion in Arbeiter’s eyes, making the statement to the press upon his triumphant arrest—and our mother-like Schwanger sipping her
Kaffee mit Schlagobers
, the whipped cream leaving its pleasant little moustache upon her downy upper lip. I could see the way Schwanger braided Lilly’s pigtail, humming to Lilly’s lovely hair the way Mother had hummed; how Schwanger told Franny that she had the world’s most beautiful skin, and the world’s most beautiful hands; and I had bedroom eyes, Schwanger said—oh, I was going to be dangerous, she warned me. (Having just left Fehlgeburt, I felt not very dangerous.) There would always be a little
Schlagobers
in Schwanger’s kisses. And Frank, Schwanger said, was a genius; if only he would consider politics more thoughtfully. All this affection did Schwanger shower on us—all this with a gun in her purse. I wanted to see Ernst in the cow position—with a cow! And in the elephant position! With you know what. They were as crazy as Old Billig said; they would kill us all.

I wandered on the Dorotheergasse toward the Graben. I stopped for a
Kafee mit Schlagobers
at the Hawelka. A man with a beard at the table beside me was explaining to a young girl (younger than him) about the death of representational painting; he was describing the exact painting wherein this death of the whole art form had occurred. I didn’t know the painting. I thought about the Schieles and the Klimts that Frank had introduced me to—at the Albertina and at the Upper Belvedere. I wished Klimt and Schiele were able to talk to this man, but the man was now addressing the death of rhyme and meter in poetry; again, I didn’t know the poem. And when he moved on to the novel, I thought I’d better pay up and leave. My waiter was busy, so I had to listen to the story of the death of plot and characterization. Among the many deaths the man described, he included the death of sympathy. I was beginning to feel sympathy die within me when my waiter finally got to my table. Democracy was the next death; it came and went more quickly than my waiter could produce my change. And socialism passed away before I could figure the tip. I stared at the man with the beard and felt like lifting weights; I felt that if the radicals wanted to blow up the Opera, they should pick a night when only this man with the beard was there. I thought I’d found a substitute driver for Fehlgeburt.

“Trotsky,” the young girl with the bearded man blurted out, suddenly—as if she were saying, “Thank you.”

“Trotsky?” I said, leaning over their table; it was a small, square table. I was curling seventy-five pounds, on one arm, on each of the dumbbells, in those days. The table wasn’t nearly that heavy, so I picked it up, carefully, with one hand, and lifted it over my head the way a waiter would raise a tray. “Now, good old Trotsky,” I said. “’If you want an easy life,’ good old Trotsky said, ‘you picked the wrong century to be born in.’ Do you think that’s true?” I asked the man with the beard. He said nothing, but the young girl nudged him, and he perked up a little.

“
I
think it’s true,” the girl said.

“
Sure
it’s true,” I said. I was aware of the waiters nervously watching the drinks and the ashtray sliding slightly on the table over my head, but I was not Iowa Bob; the weights never slid off the bar when I lifted, not anymore. I was better with weights than Iowa Bob.

“Trotsky was killed with a pickax,” the bearded fellow said, morosely, trying to remain unimpressed.

“But he’s not
dead
, is he?” I asked, insanely—smiling. “Nothing’s
really
dead,” I said. “Nothing he
said
is dead,” I said. “The paintings that we can still see—they’re not dead,” I said. “The characters in books—they don’t die when we stop reading about them.”

The man with the beard stared at the place where his table was supposed to be. He was really quite dignified, I thought, and I knew I was in a bad mood and wasn’t being fair; I was being a bully, and I felt ashamed. I gave the table back to the couple; nothing spilled.

“I see what you mean!” the girl called after me, as I was leaving. But I knew I had kept no one alive, not ever: not those people in the Opera, because sitting among them was surely that shape Frank and I had seen in the car, driven away between Ernst and Arbeiter, that animal shape of death, that mechanical bear, that dog’s head of chemistry, that electrical charge of sorrow. And despite what Trotsky said, he was dead; Mother and Egg and Iowa Bob were dead, too—despite
everything
they said, and everything they meant to us. I walked out on the Graben, feeling more and more like Frank, feeling anti-everything; I felt out of control. It’s no good for a weight lifter to feel out of control.

The first prostitute I passed was not one of
ours
, but I’d seen her before—at the Kaffee Mowatt.

“
Guten Abend
,” she said.

“Fuck you,” I told her.

“Up yours,” she told me; she knew that much English, And I felt lousy. I was using bad language, again. I had broken my promise to Mother. It was the first and last time I would break it. I was twenty-two years old and I started to cry. I turned down Spiegelgasse. There were whores there, but they weren’t our whores, so I didn’t do anything. When they said, “
Guten Abend
, “ I said, “
Guten Abend
” back. I didn’t answer the other things they said. I cut across the Neuer Markt; I felt the vacancies in the chests of the Hapsburgs in their tombs. Another whore called to me.

“Hey, don’t cry!” she called to me. “A big strong boy like you—don’t cry!”

But I hoped I was crying not just for myself but for them all. For Freud calling out the names who’d never answer in the Judenplatz; for what Father couldn’t see. For Franny, for I loved her—and I wanted her to be as faithful to me as she had proved she could be to Susie the bear. For Susie, too, because Franny had shown me that Susie wasn’t ugly at all. In fact, Franny had almost convinced Susie of this. For Junior Jones, who was suffering the first of the knee injuries that would force his retirement from the Cleveland Browns. For Lilly who tried so hard and for Frank who’d gone so far away (in order to be closer to life, he said). For Dark Inge, who was eighteen—who said she was “old enough,” though Screaming Annie insisted she wasn’t—who before this year was over would run away, with a man. He was as black as her father and he took her to an Army-base town in Germany; she would later become a whore there, I would be told. And Screaming Annie would scream a slightly different song. For
all
of them! For my doomed Fehlgeburt, even for the deceiving Schwanger—for both Old Billigs; they were optimists; they were china bears. For everyone—except Ernst, except Arbeiter, except that
wrench
of a man, except for Chipper Dove: I hated them.

I brushed past a whore or two signaling me off the Kärntnerstrasse. A tall, stunning whore—out of the league of our Krugerstrasse whores—blew me a kiss from the corner of the Annagasse. I walked right by the Krugerstrasse without looking, not wanting to see one of them, or all of them, waving to me. I passed the Hotel Sacher—which the Hotel New Hampshire would never be. And then I came to the Staatsoper, I came to the house of Gluck (1714-87, as Frank would recite); I came to the State Opera, which was the house of Mozart, the house of Haydn, of Beethoven and Schubert—of Strauss, Brahms, Bruckner, and Mahler. This was the house that a pornographer playing with politics wanted to blow sky-high. It was huge; in seven years, I had never been in it—it seemed classier than I was, and I was never the music fan that Frank was, and never the lover of drama that Franny was (Frank and Franny went to the Opera all the time; Freud took them. He loved to listen; Franny and Frank described it all to him). Like me, Lilly had never been to the Opera; the place was too big, Lilly said; it frightened her.

It frightened
me
, now. It is too
big
to blow up! I thought. But it was the
people
they wanted to blow up, I knew, and people are more easily destroyed than buildings. What they wanted was a spectacle. They wanted what Arbeiter had shouted to Schwanger: they wanted
Schlagobers
and blood.

On the Kärntnerstrasse across from the Opera was a sausage vendor, a man with a kind of hot-dog cart selling different kinds of
Wurst mit Senf und Bauernbrot
—a kind of sausage with mustard on rye. I didn’t want one.

I knew what I wanted. I wanted to grow up, in a hurry. When I’d made love to Fehlgeburt I had told her, “
Es war sehr schön
,” but it wasn’t. “It was very nice,” I had lied, but it wasn’t anything; it wasn’t enough. It had been just another night of weight lifting.

When I turned down the Krugerstrasse, I had already decided that I would go with the first one who approached me—even if it was Old Billig; even if it was Jolanta, I bravely promised myself. It didn’t matter; maybe one by one I would try them all. I could do anything Freud could do, and Freud had done it all—our Freud
and
the other Freud, I thought; they had simply gone as far as they could.

Nobody I knew was in the Kaffee Mowatt, and I didn’t recognize the figure standing under the pink neon: HOTEL NEW HAMPSHIRE! HOTEL NEW HAMPSHIRE! HOTEL NEW HAMPSHIRE!

It’s Babette, I thought, vaguely repulsed—but it was just the sickly-sweet diesel breeze of the last night of summer that made me think of her. The woman saw me and started walking toward me—aggressively, I thought; hungrily, too. And I was sure it was Screaming Annie; I momentarily wondered how I would hold together during her famous fake orgasm. Maybe—given my fondness for whispering—I could ask her not to do it at All, I could simply tell her I
knew
it was a fake and it simply wasn’t necessary, not for
my
benefit. The woman was too slender to be Old Billig, but she was too solid to be Screaming Annie, I realized; she was too well built to be Screaming Annie. So it was Jolanta, I thought; at last I would find out what she kept in her evil purse. In the time ahead, I thought—shuddering—I might even have to
use
what’s in Jolanta’s purse. But the woman approaching me was not
solid enough
for Jolanta; this woman was too well built in the
other
way—she was too sleek, too youthful in her movements. She ran toward me on the street and caught me in her arms; she took my breath away, she was so beautiful. The woman was Franny.

“Where have you
been
?” she asked me. “Gone all day, gone all night,” she scolded me. “We’ve all been
dying
to find you!”

“Why?” I asked. Franny’s smell made me dizzy.

“Lilly’s going to get
published
!” Franny said. “Some publisher in New York is really going to buy her book!”

“How much?” I said, because I was hoping it might be
enough
. It might be our ticket out of Vienna—the ticket that the second Hotel New Hampshire would never buy us.

“Jesus God,” Franny said. “Your sister has a
literary
success and you ask ‘How much?’—you’re just like Frank. That’s just what Frank asked.”

“Good for Frank,” I said. I was still trembling; I had been looking for a prostitute and had found my sister. She wouldn’t let go of me, either.

“Where
were
you?” Franny asked me; she pushed my hair back.

“With Fehlgeburt,” I said, sheepishly. I would never lie to Franny.

Franny frowned. “Well, how was it?” she asked, still touching me—but like a sister.

“Not so great,” I said. I looked away from Franny. “Awful,” I added.

Franny put her arms around me and kissed me. She meant to kiss me on the cheek (like a sister), but I turned toward her, though I was trying to turn away, and our lips met. And that was it, that was all it took. That was, the end of the summer of 1964; suddenly it was autumn. I was twenty-two, Franny was twenty-three. We kissed a long time. There was nothing to say. She was not a lesbian, she still wrote to Junior Jones—and to Chipper Dove—and I had never been happy with another woman; not ever; not yet. We stayed out on the street, out of the light cast by the neon, so that no one in the Hotel New Hampshire could see us. We had to break up our kissing when a customer of Jolanta’s came staggering out of the hotel, and we broke it up again when we heard Screaming Annie. In a little while her dazed customer came out, but Franny and I still stayed on the Krugerstrasse. Later, Babette went home. Then Jolanta went home, taking Dark Inge with her. Screaming Annie came out and back, out and back, like the tide. Old Billig the whore went across the street to the Kaffee Mowatt and dozed on a table. I walked Franny up to the Kärntnerstrasse, and down to the Opera. “You think of me too much,” Franny started to say, but she didn’t bother to finish. We kissed some more. The Opera was so big beside us.

“They’re going to blow it up,” I whispered to my sister. “The Opera—they’re going to blow it up.” She let me hold her. “I love you terribly much,” I told her.

“I love you, too,
damn
it,” Franny said.

Although the weather was feeling like fall, it was possible for us to stand there, guarding the Opera, until the light came up and the real people came out to go to work. There was no place we could go, anyway—and absolutely nothing, we knew, that we should do.