Chapter Nineteen

“WHAT BRINGS YOU TO Trader’s?” a middle-aged man with a southern drawl called over to Charlie.

“We go every Labor Day weekend, for the boat and camper show,” said the man’s wife. “Are you here for the boat and camper show?”

“No, can’t say that I am. I’m here with my girlfriend. While she’s in the tub, I figured I’d cool my heels at Trader’s.” Charlie was trying to approximate their southernness.

“I hear you, partner,” said the man and raised a ceramic coconut. “I remember Bea’s first soak in the Plaza tub. Came out looking like Grace Kelly.”

“It was Jayne Mansfield,” said Bea. “You never get that story right.”

“Well, okay. Jayne Mansfield? Okay then.”

“I think I’m getting the egg rolls,” said Bea.

“Good choice, Bea.”

“We hail from Virginia,” said Bea. “Where are you from?”

“Oh, we hail from Pennsylvania. New Hope.”

The couple looked at one another, pleased with the young man’s choice of a verb.

“Originally, Bea hailed from Florida, and I hailed from Buffalo.”

They introduced themselves as the Mussens but garbled their surname. The Messes, thought Charlie.

“This is our fifteenth year making this trip,” said Mr. Mussen. “Every year we hit the trailer show, then spend the last night in the lap of luxury at the Plaza.”

“Although, I must say, it gets a little less luxurious each and every year,” said Bea.

“Women,” said Mr. Mussen. “Sure are hard to please.”

“This year, I started taking little knickknacks,” said Bea. “Like the swizzle sticks and the slippers, just in case the hotel goes under. Those things will be worth something, you know.”

“Plaza ain’t going nowhere, Bea, but if you want to take the souvenirs, help yourself.”

“It’s the Jews,” Bea continued. “The Jews in this town want to own everything. Turn everything into an office building or a mall.”

“Well, she has a point there,” said Mr. Mussen.

Charlie laughed nervously and looked into his Scorpion cocktail.

“Your table is ready, Mister and Missus,” said a grinning tiki statue of a man.

“Don Ho!” said Mr. Mussen. “We call him Don Ho.”

“Nice talking with you,” said Bea to Charlie. “Try the egg rolls, they’re divine.”

Don Ho led the couple into the bowels of the restaurant. Charlie could hear a faint drumbeat. He hoped that Don Ho would throw the Mussens into the mouth of a smoldering volcano. Once, at a diner with his brother and father, two beer drunkards in the booth behind went on about the fucking Jews. Jee-Jee turned around to face them and said that he was Jewish and so were his children, and that they should stop the way they were talking, or he would take them outside and break their jaws.

“Another Scorpion?” the bartender asked Charlie.

“Yes, please,” he said. “You know, I’m Jewish.”

“Not to worry. At Trader Vic’s, everyone is from the islands.”

*

She was in her robe, asleep on the bed, under the full blast of lamp and chandelier light. There were six light switches by the door. It took Charlie a minute to figure out how to turn off all but the reading light on his side. The bartender had promised, “The Scorpion will sting you now, but you won’t feel it till later.” Later was now, as he fumbled with the switches. It stirred Paula, and she spoke from her dream, “Twice struck by lightning.”

Charlie got on top of the bedcovers in his jacket and shoes. It was what you did here, he thought. You sleep in your blazer and shoes with the Toblerone bar, the Guest Informat, and the Trader Vic’s Scorpion buzz, next to the girl in the white robe. He bit off a Toblerone tooth and began reading. After every article, he’d check on her. Eventually, during a sidebar about Little Italy, he looked over and her eyes were open.

“I fell asleep,” she said.

“I know.”

“What time is it?”

“Still early. Barely seven.”

“How was Trader Vic’s?”

“I almost got into a fight with an anti-Semitic couple.”

“Screw them.”

“It’s not that great of a place, after all. The egg rolls suck.”

“I’d still like to go there tonight.”

“Or we could order room service, and just be in bed together. I’m a little tired, all of a sudden.”

“I’ll revitalize you.”

She threw the Guest Informat off his lap and turned off the light. She took off his shoes and socks, his pants and underpants, then there was the sensation of cold, perfumed lotion.

“I’m definitely stealing all these little creams,” she said. “Is it too cold?”

“No,” he whispered. His eyes adjusted to the darkness. The drapes were slightly parted, and some city light had found its way up to the chandelier and its light-trapping crystals. He wondered how many other men had been in this position, in this bed. The thought wasn’t helpful; she needed to work in more lotion, but then she brought her lips to his ear and shared her breath. Charlie couldn’t tell whether she was mimicking rapture or was excited herself. Regardless, the sensation was pure heat.

“Did you get it on my robe?” It was a rhetorical question. She darted to the bathroom and shut the door.

He felt dirty in his navy-blue blazer, naked from the waist down, and surveyed the room for the downhill signs that Bea Mussen had foretold. Charlie had overheard Don Ho tell another customer that Donald Trump was going to buy the Plaza and infuse it with cash, but the customer didn’t believe it. The customer said he liked the hotel just as it was: time-bleached and worn, which was just how Charlie felt. The moisturizer she’d used had made it onto his lapel and would leave a little white cloud there forever. The Scorpion buzz was ending. Drowsy, flaccid, stained, he got dressed and needed to get under the covers. It was cold enough to be an early winter’s night.

“Are you awake?” asked Paula from the bathroom door.

He pretended to be asleep.

“Men,” she said. She regretted having bathed instead of going down with him to Trader Vic’s. To have spent her only night at the Plaza stuck in the room made her sad. Mom’s right, I’m no Eloise, she thought, and considered throwing the emerald ring out the window into the streets.

“What are you doing up there?” asked Charlie, exiting his pretend sleep with a yawn.

“Gosh, the AC goes all the way down to forty-nine,” said Paula.

“It’s really cold in here.”

“Nothing I do is right.”

“That’s not true, you do a lot of things right.”

“Like hand jobs?”

“No.”

“Let’s go out. Let’s leave the room, come on.”

This was his third bed in four days. Four drinking days and his tank was empty. His body craved Mariella’s slices and the deep and certain sleep that only the salt and starch of Mariella’s could deliver.

“I thought we were going to order room service,” he said.

“If you want to keep me up here as some sort of, I don’t know, hand job slave, well, you’re with the wrong girl.”

“You’re being silly. Why don’t we just relax for a little bit and see how we feel, okay?” It was something an adult would have said to him over the years. Oh, how he wanted his Mariella’s slices and his own bedroom. Adulthood is lonely—a sentry who can never sleep, never retreat to Mariella’s heaven, in case the girl wants to go down to Trader Vic’s.

“Okay,” she said. “But if we feel like going out, we will.”

She plopped down heavily on the bed with her National Geographic. “I wish my dad had bought me a microscope when I was little. That could have changed everything.”

She proceeded to lament her single-parent upbringing, particularly her mother’s nonintellectual life. Her father had left Mrs. Henderson for his secretary, a bottle blonde with an astounding body and a cracked tooth that made her whistle when she spoke. Paula saw them once a year, usually for Easter in Pittsburgh, where he worked as a stockbroker.

“Just thinking about that whistling bimbo makes me so mad.” She tossed the magazine off the bed, then rose to retrieve it.

Charlie liked that she picked up after herself. Monica Miller would have left it there, while Paula put it back atop the Plaza’s house magazines.

“I can’t believe these walls are lined with fabric,” said Paula. “I think we should go out. I’ll get dressed, okay?”

“Okay,” said Charlie. “Or we could order Mariella’s.”

“What’s that, sweetie?” she asked from the bathroom. “I’m going to wear new perfume. I hope you like it.”

“I hope it’s pizza-scented,” said Charlie.

“I can’t hear you, honey.”

Sweetie and honey. Screw it, he’d fill the empty tank with Scorpion juice and the scent of her neck.

*

They drank from lava troughs for two and fought when her hair got coated with Scorpion blood.

“Don’t just sit there! Ask the waiter for a wet towel. I’m not some girl with a drink in her hair.”

“You actually are a girl with a drink in her hair.”

But they made up and made out in the gloom of the Trader Vic’s cocktail lounge, then fought again about whether Hawaiians originally came from China, or if emeralds were green diamonds.

They closed the place down, Don Ho’s huge hands on their shoulders, grinning maniacally, showing them the bamboo gates. Charlie had never been part of a sloppy couple. Famous drunks who can’t walk straight. It was exhilarating: Paula asking an old European lady what the hell she was looking at; Paula using the men’s room; Paula asking the doormen for their autographs. All along the sloppy ride, his hand was placed squarely just above her rear.

In the room, they ordered an unquantifiable amount of room service and made love for hours. The Scorpion haze had numbed Charlie, and he was able to remove himself from the sex and therefore last. They’d take breaks to feed on the room service carts, until the lovemaking and the eating blended, then a third ingredient of near sleep was added. In the moments before dawn all three happened at once, but they passed out just before recognizing the achievement.

When Charlie awoke, he could hear her in the shower.

The room service carts were two warring cities, both destroyed. One had bled ketchup, the other ice cream. He walked around the battlefield, looking for his clothes.

She emerged dressed, unscathed by the night except for the slightest circles under her eyes.

“I was thinking of getting some breakfast,” she said. “And I found a credit card in my purse with a little something on it, so I might go to the Gap.” She was moving quickly, folding things, packing a shopping bag.

“Quite a night,” she said in passing, tapping his shoulder on her way to retrieve her sandals. She’d thrown them at the curtain, attempting to trigger something on the wall that might make them close.

“I could meet you for breakfast, after I check out,” said Charlie. “Even though I thought we could have an early lunch, before possibly hitting—”

“I just really need to get out of this room,” she said, embarrassed to be so proximal to the bed. When they had checked in, it had been so well-made, so lovingly tight. Now she blamed her New Hope self for the tangle of sheets, the food stains, the pillows without their pillowcases. “Should we make the bed?”

“No, they have maids who will come in the second we check out.”

“I might write them an apology.”

“Okay, well, we could meet a little later? How about the St. Moritz? It’s another hotel, not as nice as this, but it’s close by and has this incredibly well-air-conditioned room that’s based on a place in Paris called the Café St. Moritz. We took Angelina there on a special—”

“Really have to get something in my stomach.”

“Okay, but the St. Moritz is on Fifty-Ninth and Sixth. Here, I’ll write it down. Maybe at noon? Are you okay? I, for one, loved last night. No regrets. I know it was a little on the drunken side, but when you’re young and at the—”

“I’m just really tired,” she said, holding back tears. “I guess I feel out of my league or something. You ever just need to be home in your bed, and cry?”

“This bed was our home. Wasn’t it?”

“I’ll never forget yesterday, but now I need to get back to New Hope and get prepared for work tomorrow.”

“I could come with you.”

“You go back to school and learn things for us both.”

“When will we see each other again?”

“You know where I’ll be.” She kissed him somewhere near his mouth and left.

The room buzzed with silence. Charlie hated silent rooms and their minuscule insects, gossiping about what was wrong with the blonde girl with the long kinetic curls, which today were imprisoned in a strictest ponytail. Everything’s fine, he told the room’s din, then flopped face-first into the bed, wallowing in her clean, girly scent. How could a few drops of L’Oréal shampoo—$1.99, he’d read on the bottle—blossom into acres of flowers? She was just here, and now she’s not. Beds aren’t homes, people are.