The Hothouse by the East River (10 page)

‘Yes,
what do you want?’

‘Be
reasonable,’ he says, and the sound of a police siren wails up First Avenue as
he listens to the silent telephone. He says, ‘Be reasonable. You said the man
was with you. Remember you said you were having sex with him to find out if he
was Kiel or not. That means you must have had sex with Kiel in 1944, doesn’t
it?’

‘Sex,’
she says, ‘is a subject like any other subject. Every bit as interesting as
agriculture.’

‘Have
you finished?’ says the operator.

‘No,
we’re still talking,’ Paul says. ‘This., is private.’ The operator disappears,
apparently, with a click. Nevertheless Paul adds, ‘Please don’t interrupt.’

‘After
all,’ says Elsa, ‘we’re paying for the call, aren’t we?’

‘I
know,’ Paul says.

‘There
are English tourists here en route to somewhere,’ Elsa says. ‘I passed their
table last night and heard one of them saying “Jonathan’s 0-levels …“ That
was all, but Christ, it made me want to be sick. The English abroad are so
awful and they always bring their own life with them. I mean, what’s the use of
going abroad if you don’t get new life from it?’

‘I
know,’ says Paul. ‘When are you coming home?’

‘Tomorrow,
I think.’

‘Your
experiment’s over?’

‘Oh
yes, the experiment. Well, I can complete it another time.’

‘Where’s
Kiel?’

‘He’s
dead, I think. You mean Mueller?’

‘Mueller,’
he says, ‘Mueller from the shoe store.’

‘Mueller,’
she says, ‘put on his trousers and went away somewhere.’

‘Be
careful on the phone,’ he says. ‘I don’t know what to believe, Elsa.’

‘You
never did,’ Elsa says.

‘What’s
the number of your flight, Elsa?’

‘I’ll
call you later,’ she says. ‘I’ll let you know. Then you can come and meet me,
Paul. See you soon. I want to finish breakfast now.’

‘You
won’t be coming back with Kiel? Will he be on the plane?’

‘Kiel
isn’t here.’

‘Don’t
travel back with him. You’ll get yourself in a mess and you’ll never be able to
shake him off.’

‘Well,
don’t come to meet me with Garven. ‘The operator comes on again. ‘Still
talking?’ he says, and cuts them off. Paul looks down on to the dark and quite
dangerous street. ‘Help me!’ cries his mind, with a fear reaching back to the
Balkan realities. He looks round the room, panicking for her familiar shadow.
He wants her back from that wild Europe, those black forests and gunmetal
mountains. Come back to Manhattan the mental clinic, cries his heart, where we
analyse and dope the savageries of existence. Come back, it’s very centrally
heated here, there are shops on the ground floor, you can get anything here
that you can get over there and better, money’s no object. Why go back all that
way where your soul has to fend for itself and you think for yourself in secret
while you conform with the others in the open? Come back here to New York the
sedative chamber where you don’t think at all and you can act as crazily as you
like and talk your head off all day, all night.

Come
back. He pours himself a whisky, sits down with it, and reflects that after all
she isn’t in any wild place but in a first-class hotel in Zürich. He takes his
drink, switches off the light and goes into a smaller room where papers litter
his desk. He switches on the television and gets the late-late show.

Garven,
however, bangs on the wall. Paul turns off the television, fetches himself
another drink, and goes to bed.

At
eleven. next morning Paul is sitting dressed by the telephone in the little
room waiting for his next call to Zürich to come through. He has been advised
of an hour’s delay and only a three-quarters of the hour has materialised. The
hand that marks the seconds on. his watch looks as if it is knitting a sock
stitch by stitch. Paul lifts the telephone impulsively and dials a number.

A
woman’s voice answers.

‘Annie,’
he says.

‘Halo,
I was just going to call you,’ she says.

‘Why?’
says Paul.

‘I
wanted to say halo, that’s why. Did you hear from her?’

‘Yes, I
did. She’s in. Zürich with the shoe salesman. He isn’t Kiel, she said. But why
should she go to Zürich? She had to sleep with him to find out, that’s what she
said. It means she cheated me in the past, do you realise? I don’t know what to
think. Why did she go to Zürich?’

‘She
would want to contact a new analyst,’ says Annie. ‘She would bring him back
home With her and start again.’

‘You
shouldn’t have got caught following her,’ says Paul.

‘Now,
listen,’ she says.

‘I can’t,’
Paul says, ‘I’m expecting a call from Zürich. I’ll talk to you later, Annie.’
He hangs up, unlocks a drawer in his desk, takes out a set of three keys on a
ring and, picking out one of the keys, crosses the room to a glass-fronted
bookcase, which he opens. He takes out a large green. leather, gold-worked book
in fine and shiny condition, closes the bookcase and takes the book under his
arm to the desk. He draws out the telephone on its long wire till it expands to
a small table by an armchair. Here he sits by the telephone, and opens the
book.

It
turns out to be a photograph album. The first photographs have a brownish look,
and are slightly cracked as if they belong to the first amateur Kodaks of 1888,
although the dresses of some of the people belong to the early
nineteen-twenties. All that the discrepancy means, in fact, is that the
photographs were taken in a country where everything was thirty years behind
the times. It is a family album. The family must have travelled abroad to buy
their clothes. The servants, like the camera which has introduced them, are the
old-fashioned ones, the women have long skirts, the men whiskers, and stand in
a countrified way around the family and their friends. The album is selective
in. the sense that one child, as Paul turns the pages, recurs in every
portrait. Now in a nurse’s arms, now with a group of tennis-playing uncles and
lipsticked aunts, now alone, holding a tennis racket. Me, thinks Paul, when. I
was eight months, me when I was nine, under-exposed.

It is the
next morning and he has failed to locate her. She has not telephoned from
Zürich to tell him her flight number. It is seven-thirty when he wakes up in.
his restless bed. Garven. is still asleep; he has made no pretence of being a
manservant all during Elsa’s absence. He comes and goes, he sleeps late or
early as he pleases, pushing the coffee-pot around the kitchen and clattering
his breakfast cup as if he owned the place. Paul tries not to coincide with
him.

He
reaches for the phone, puts in a call to Elsa’s hotel in Zürich, jumps out of
bed and hastens to his bathroom. Paul shaves and listens for the phone while
silence continues to break from Garven’s bedroom. He thinks ahead to her
arrival at the airport, her fuss with the porter and her luggage, while he
waits at the door beyond the Customs’ tables. She will have to tip the porter
very quickly at the point between. the luggage reception and the Customs. If
you want to tip me, Ma’am, tip me now, the porter will say, just as he is about
to wheel forward the piled-up trolley. Elsa will slip the note into his hand
which is already on the trolley handle. The hand opens and closes and the
porter murmurs ‘ain’t allowed’, cheerfully pressing on, with the passenger
following the luggage at the trot.

Paul
thinks ahead, with his ears open for the ring of the phone. She should arrive
some time around eight tonight. I’ll watch for her flight number on the board,
then stand by the arrivals gate, watching her, busy in her fur coat, through
the Customs, showing and explaining and ingratiating herself most suspiciously
with the Customs officers. Paul dresses and goes to make coffee.

A key
in the front door. Garven, he thinks. Not in his room at all, no wonder he was
quiet. At that moment he hears Garven’s bedroom radio begin to pour forth the
morning’s news. The step in the hall must be that of an intruder. It had to
happen, Paul thinks, it’s happened to everyone else. He hears a few more steps
along the corridor and he hears Elsa at the door of her bedroom. ‘Paul,’ she
says. ‘The hall porter’s bringing up my luggage. Let him in..’

‘Why
didn’t you call me?’ Paul says, rushing out of the kitchen.. He kisses her in
greeting and shouts, ‘You damn bitch, I was waiting up all night to hear the
flight number.’

‘You
haven’t been to bed?’ she says.

‘Yes,
well I went to bed. But you said, “I’ll call and let you know the flight number
and the arrival time.” I would have met you.’

‘Yes,’
she says, throwing her coat on the bed while her shadow, regardless of the
morning sunlight in front of her, makes the same gesture, hanging a moment
from her raised arm like a raglan sleeve. Dust motes dance in the light and her
shadow falls casually at a different tangent across the bed like the flung
coat. There is a ring at the service door and Garven can be heard plopping in
his bedroom slippers along the corridor towards it.

Elsa
says, ‘My room needs an airing.’

‘We
weren’t prepared for you,’ Paul says. ‘Why didn’t you let me know the flight
number?’

‘Not again.,’
she says. ‘Never again.’ She goes to open wide her hanging cupboard, making it
ready to receive her clothes. She says, ‘Remember the last time you met me at
Kennedy?’

‘The
last time?’ He makes an. effort of memory with his forehead, his eyes go
absent, all his energy concentrates on his forehead. He frowns and looks
towards her for help. ‘What happened the last time? So many meetings at
airports. When was the last time at Kennedy?’

She is
saying, ‘I’m going to have coffee. Then. I’m going to have a bath and change. I
slept on the plane, all the way. I’m going for a walk.’

‘Where
to?’ he says. And he wonders, what happened particularly the last time I met
her at Kennedy Airport? ‘Where are you going?’ he says, standing there.

‘Van
Cleef’s,’ she says.

“What
for?’

‘To buy
a present.’

‘Who
for?’

‘Myself,’
Elsa says.

‘Oh,’
says Paul. ‘Well that’s all right. What happened particularly the last time I
met you at the airport?’

‘It was
some years ago.’

‘Years?
What are you talking about? I picked you up at Providence last October. I met
you at San Juan, September. Then, July—’

‘No,
you haven’t been to Kennedy to meet me for years. When I’ve been to Europe
these last years somehow it’s happened you couldn’t meet.’

‘Well,’
he says, putting his memory straight as she unpacks her jewellery, piece by
piece. ‘Well, maybe you’re right. I can’t remember when I last met you at
Kennedy.’

‘It was
Idlewild then, 1960.’

‘It
couldn’t be so long ago. What happened?’

‘You
drove me straight to the clinic on Long Island and had me locked up.’

‘Now
look, Elsa,’ he says.

‘You
said you were taking me to Poppy Xavier’s. Instead I found myself being
expedited in the wrong direction.’

‘Elsa!’

‘And we
pulled up outside the main door of the clinic and I got hustled in by those
blue-robed horrors.’

‘Oh,
shut up, Elsa. We were only trying to help you.’

‘Who’s
“we”?’

‘All of
us,’ he says, limply.

‘That
means you alone. That’s what “all of us” means.’

‘Well,
I tried to help you. Pierre knows that. So does Katerina. ‘What’s the point of
going over it all again?’

‘Only
that I’m sure I wouldn’t let you meet me with the car at Kennedy Airport again.
I flew to Paris and chartered a jet from there. Here I am.’

‘I was
trying to help you. I always try to help you,’ he shouts.

‘You’ll
be charged with shouting and inveighing. Isn’t that a crime? I’m sure it is.
Anyway, the point is, I’d love you not to help me. The point is, I can help
myself, thank you.’

‘You’re
mad,’ he says, quietly.

She
closes her jewel case, smiling.

He
says, ‘Chartering a jet. You need help.’

‘Help
is a hindrance to me.’

The
hall porter pushes in the door with two suitcases. He is followed by Garven.

Garven
is wearing a bath-robe of pink-striped towelling. His hair, yellow-grey, stands
round his head like a lifted halo. He hasn’t had time to put in his contact
lenses and is wearing a pair of spectacles which make him look different from
usual.

Elsa
laughs. ‘Good morning, Garven,’ she says. ‘How’ve you been?’

‘Good
morning. How have I been? I’ve been about as usual. I’ve been waiting for you,
it’s been a worry. Why did you go away like that, without warning?’

‘Is
this place getting on your nerves, Garven?’ She turns to the porter. ‘Oh, thank
you, thank you. Mr Hazlett will…’