Fat_Interior

Rosie watches someone else’s cigarette butt burn out orange then gray in the ashtray on her table. She is waiting for service. She is tired.

After Fat Man and Little Boy passed out on stage, the medium had stormed off, leaving the audience to fend for themselves. The hidden pianist played a few resounding chords as if to resolve the evening. An F, a C minor, a major C, and that was that. The crowd filtered out into the night like powdered sugar through a sifter, and Rosie went with them, jostled at every interval by strange men and beautiful women, the latter wearing stylish homemade dresses. As she walked through the streets, Rosie reflected on what the medium had told her. It was possible her father had spoken through the Oriental woman—she especially believed it after the medium’s climactic histrionics, and the smells that fogged the theater when the show was over. In her hotel room, after the medium, she had prayed for guidance, and apologized for idolatry, if that was what she had done. So far, God was keeping mum, but that was his way. The Lord was not a talker.

In any case, her father was wrong. Her husband is dead, she will not marry again, she will not have babies, she cannot have babies.

A waiter bustles by. She consults her dog-eared phrasebook for a firm way of saying, “No one has helped me yet.” There are no firm ways of saying anything in her phrasebook. The closest she can come is, “J’apprécie votre aide.” She looks up from her phrasebook and the waiter is gone. She lights a cigarette. The smoke tickles her throat and makes her eyes feel dry. She flips through the phrasebook, searching for things she might need to say soon. “How are you with a broom?” for instance. Can you cook? Do you keep a clean home? How is your English?

She tallies her expenses. The cigarettes come first as they are very guilty things. Then the room she has rented, which she will quit tomorrow morning. Then the meals she has eaten—which were more expensive before someone told her, with unnecessary surliness, that in France one does not usually leave a tip—and meals she will eat. The hat she bought herself, which she has since lost. The apple she snacked on, the orange, the bread she took to her room, and the soft brie. Every day she thanks the Lord she has already bought the land. A spendthrift like her would otherwise be short of money long before she arrived, she is sure. The cigarette is half-done, and so there is half of one eighth, a sixteenth, then, of the money she spent on the pack, burnt away. It’s all gone so quickly, and that’s just like her, to waste. She needs to keep a certain amount. She is afraid to look in her hotel safe to see if she still has that amount; she always runs through money faster than she thinks, and then she feels cold inside, and skips meals to close the gap between expectation and fact.

The waiter comes by again. She is resolved to ignore him unless their eyes meet. Of course their eyes do. She says, “J’apprécie votre aide.”

The waiter cocks his head. He asks her if she’s been helped, but she doesn’t understand.

She is not sure what this means. It doesn’t matter. “Un sandwich au rosbif,” she says, “et un café.” This too from her phrasebook, pages 25 and 28. She mentally deducts the sum of this lunch from the diminishing heap of her savings. She thanks the waiter in English.

A boy sweeps in the corner, corralling dust and crumbs. He has the slow, steady rhythm of someone who knows he will be sweeping the same spot clean the next day and the day after that. He collects it in his dustpan, disappears, and comes back before her lunch. He lifts a chair, propping it up on its forelegs against the table, sweeps out from beneath it, and sets the chair back down.

That’s him, she thinks, the boy from the night before. The one the medium called up. She hadn’t realized, sitting in the audience, how thin he was. He hadn’t looked so tired.

“Hello,” she says. “Come sit at my table with me.”

He startles at her flat, Midwestern English. His lips twitch.

He shrugs, saying, “No English,” affecting a mealy French accent.

She pats the seat beside her. “That’s a lie. Come on.”

“I’m supposed to clean.”

“I’m a respected hotelier. No one will punish you for doing what I say.”

Little Boy does as she asks, setting his dustpan on the table, holding his broom erect in the crook of his elbow. When she asks his name he answers “Matthew,” his voice a sullen croak. She snuffs her cigarette. He watches the last wisps of smoke, and then the tray. His bulging eyes are hesitant to meet her own. His hands fiddle in his lap.

Rosie asks, “Are you wondering if I recognize you from last night?”

“I was.”

“Well,” says Rosie. Her waiter approaches with sandwich and coffee. He leaves without acknowledging the boy. “See, I told you. The customer is always right. Is Matthew really your name?”

He nods.

“I shouldn’t ask you what the medium was on about,” says Rosie. “You’re too young to be guilty of anything, aren’t you?”

“I guess.”

“What are you afraid of? Are you hungry?”

“Yes.” He glances up.

She cuts her sandwich in imperfect halves and gives him the smaller portion. He keeps his broom upright as he takes his share.

“Do you drink coffee?”

“No.”

“I think what she did to you was awful. Very rude. You paid for a ticket the same as anyone else.”

“Yes ma’am.”

“Is your brother here?”

“I misspoke, ma’am. John is my uncle.”

“Of course. Is your uncle here? You are both American?”

“Yes. He washes dishes in the kitchen.”

“That’s perfect. But he speaks French?”

“Some.” He finishes the roast beef, licks his finger, collects breadcrumbs from the table.

Rosie asks if she can speak to Matthew’s uncle John. Matthew says no, John is washing dishes in the kitchen and he has to get back to sweeping. She asks him what about the sandwich half she gave him. He takes his dustpan from the table.

“I liked the half sandwich.”

She asks him if he goes to school.

“It’s mandatory.”

She sighs. “Can I speak to your uncle?”

“He’s doing dishes in the kitchen.”

“My husband died freeing this country,” says Rosie. “He was hanging by his parachute in a tree and they shot him full of holes. I came here to start an international hotel and learn four languages. If there were more international hotels and everyone knew four foreign languages my husband would still be alive today.”

“I’m sorry,” says Matthew.

Rosie is not convinced. The little boy goes back to his sweeping. She considers another cigarette but at that rate it would be four a day—two at lunch, one at six, one before bed—and though this inevitably will happen, and worse, she can’t afford that kind of habit now. She would have to go without breakfast.

“Well I can go to the kitchen,” she says.

Here is the fat man John at the sink. He attacks the dishes as if he means to grind them down to dust. He’s humming unfamiliar tunes in his deep rumble as he struggles not to bite his cigarette in half.

Rosie offers her hand. “Rosie Cummings. Hotelier.”

John’s eyes are darkly, deeply ringed, one side of his face marbled with bruises from his fall. “Good to meet you, Rosie. As you can see I’m occupied.”

She insists on her hand. He holds up his and says, “I’m filthy.”

“My husband was killed by Nazis freeing this country,” says Rosie. “He was hanging by his parachute in a tree and they shot him full of holes. I have come here to start an international hotel and learn four languages. If there were more international hotels and everyone knew four foreign languages my husband would still be alive today.” She pauses. “John, please shake my hand.”

He wipes a mitt on his apron, front and back, and again, and again. It’s the wrong hand—she changes hers to accommodate him, and they shake. His grasp is as loose and soft and warm as half-baked dough. His eyes are deep set, dark and sweet like raisins.

“My name is Rosie Cummings. Please listen to me.”

“Were you at last night’s séance spectacular?”

“I was. I told your nephew Matthew how I thought the medium was very rude to you.”

John shows her his hands again. This time she notes their blackness—apparently not a layer of grime, as she had assumed. “Well she accused that other woman of infanticide,” he says. “I guess it’s that kind of show.”

“To say nothing of what she said to me. Of course, as she conceded, sometimes the dead are wrong. In my case they would have to be, so I’m sure they’re wrong about you as well. You don’t look like a guilty man.”

He goes back to his dishes, scraping with his cloth and nails, turning up the water until steam rises in thick plumes. He takes the unlit cigarette into his mouth and pushes it back out, and chews. “Do you find yourself a good judge of character in general?” he says.

“You never know,” says Rosie. She fingers the zipper on her purse.

“Then I won’t take your word on it.” He turns down his eyes. The conversation is over.

“There’s a place called Gurs,” says Rosie. “You need to see it with your own eyes. I think you’re going to love it.”

“Gurs,” says John.

“It was a prison. But not the way you think of them—not like back home. More a lot of little huts, and this tiny fence you could jump if you wanted. You know, with razor wire and all that, not electrified, but I’m going to take that out. I’m going to make it a hotel.”

“A hotel.”

“Yes, my first international hotel in what will one day be a chain. If everyone learned four foreign languages, then my husband would still be alive. I want to make the prison into a hotel so people will be able to move past all the unpleasantness.” She whispers, now. “That’s where Vichy kept the Jews before they were shipped out.”

“Jews?”

“Before they shipped them out to Germany.”

“What happened to them? Were they hurt?”

“Well, they didn’t come back.”

Rosie explains that she has been eating at every reasonable restaurant and staying at every decent hotel she can find on her way south, where she is going to convert the prison into the first of many international hotels. She says there will be language classes, and everyone who stays there will learn four foreign languages, and then people won’t lose their husbands with such awful regularity. She explains she has been eating and staying at so many places because she needs to find staff for her first hotel, good staff with a command of several languages. At least two. Maybe he would like to work for her, she says.

“Which languages?”

“Four foreign languages should be enough, in the long term, to prevent the most bloodshed.”

“Which four?”

“For instance, we would need to learn Japanese, German, French, and Spanish.”

“Not Italian?”

“I don’t think we’ll have to worry about them getting into any more trouble. But there is always Mexico to consider.”

“Yes,” says John, puzzled. “Always Mexico.”

“So would you like to come work for me?” says Rosie. “I’m sure I can pay a little more than this café, and you would be able to do many interesting tasks, and not only wash dishes.”

John says that he can’t leave, that he has only just settled down, that he only knows one foreign language, not four. Rosie asks him is he sure he can’t be persuaded. She says he can do the dishes at Hotel Gurs if he likes it so much.

“No, no,” he says. “No, I’m sorry.”

She turns to leave. He grabs her shoulder with his muck hand. His raisin eyes shine brightly. “Wait. Is it true you’re barren?”