IN CHARLESTON, South Carolina, he decided to call it a day. For the past three or four hours driving rain had pelted the car, the jagged patches of light between clouds narrowing until early darkness erased what Sonja would have called “the fill-in parts of the puzzle”—the maddening, uniformly toned blue pieces of the one puzzle they owned, which depicted a small, colorful desert below an enormous, even-blue sky. The puzzle had been a gift from Gordon and Beth several Christmases before. Usually they sent a carton of grapefruit and oranges, but that year they had sent the desert, the orderly little desert with its one prairie dog peeking from its hole and its red-flowered cactus blooming. More than he wanted to, he had thought for much of the ride about McCallum, imagining scenarios in which Cheryl’s mother raced into McCallum’s arms, or, alternatively, the woman’s husband taking exception to his presence, going after him the way McCallum’s wife had. He thought that maybe he had gotten addicted to McCallum’s life the way other people got addicted to soap operas, though instead of being allowed to tune in to watch, he had been given constant synopses of what had happened, as if McCallum were reading from outdated issues of TV Guide. It was nothing he and Sonja would have watched on TV, he was sure of that. The jigsaw puzzle had been such a novelty, and they’d been snowed in just after getting it. But other people’s despair and ongoing confusion? It didn’t seem titillating, didn’t figure in their lives.
He stopped outside a small building with a canopy above the entranceway, using McCallum’s shirt to cover his head as he made a mad dash for the front door.
Inside, a man in a three-piece suit was talking to a young woman behind the counter. The counter was flanked by potted palms aglow with tiny coral lights. A woman in a long black raincoat stood peering out the window. It was as different from the motel in Buena Vista as anyone could imagine, which meant that it was exactly where he wanted to stay. When he heard a room was available he didn’t ask the price. He said, “Good,” and waited while the man went behind the counter and got a registration form and put Xs in the two places where Marshall was to sign. The man wore a silver signet ring on his third finger and, on the other wrist, a Rolex. He feigned interest in the young woman’s paperwork as Marshall filled out the form. “We have complimentary continental breakfast in the lobby or in your room between the hours of seven and nine,” the man said. “There is a hot tub in the courtyard I don’t think you’ll be using tonight, and there should be a duvet in your armoire, which also contains the television. I’ll be happy to provide you with a list of complimentary movies you might view on the VCR. Alicia will show you to your room.” He placed an index card of movie titles on the registration desk. “I believe there should be a duplicate list in your room, but you might want to glance at this now so you could take one with you.”
He selected Betrayal, which he’d never heard of, because it starred Jeremy Irons and Ben Kingsley.
“May I help with any luggage?” Alicia said.
“No, no,” he said. “I’ve got a duffel bag in the car I can bring in. I can take the key and find the room myself.”
“I’ll be happy to accompany you. House rules,” Alicia said.
“We don’t want anything not up to standard when you enter the room,” the man said.
“Of course,” Marshall said. “I’m parked right outside. I’ll get my bag.”
“You’re checking in after turndown, so let me give you a Godiva mint also,” the man said.
“Thank you,” Marshall said. He felt as if he were doing a kind of charade: a reenactment of Halloween, from an old-fashioned gentleman’s perspective. There he had been, knocking at the door, and here were these civilized people, offering him mints and movies.
“Please place this inside your windshield in order to avoid parking penalties,” the man said, handing him a laminated card with the hotel’s name on it.
“Certainly,” Marshall said. “Thank you.”
He turned and went outside, reluctantly. It was raining harder, and McCallum’s already damp shirt was almost no protection. He quickly got the bag and locked the car, slightly embarrassed to be reentering the lobby looking like a drowned person.
“There will be chamber music tomorrow at twelve-fifteen,” the man said. “Checkout time is one p.m., which we would be happy to extend.”
Marshall felt the foil-wrapped mint in his pocket, jiggled it like a good-luck charm. Maybe I could live here the rest of my life, Marshall thought. To the man he said, “I’ll have a better idea in the morning.”
“Please,” Alicia said, holding out her hand for his bag. She wore a thick silver cuff bracelet between two narrower gold bracelets. Though he was reluctant to hand a woman his bag, he extended his arm.
“Sir,” the man said, “it would be possible to have your shirt laundered and returned by checkout time.”
He looked at McCallum’s shirt, feeling as if he’d carried in a grease rag. “No, no,” he said. “Thank you very much.”
“Please follow me,” Alicia said, opening a side door. The building, two tiered, stretched behind them. Just outside the overhang, two redwood tubs held palm trees with something flowering at their bases. Pansies? Purple pansies in April? The elevator was about twenty feet away; the doors opened immediately when Alicia hit the “up” button. They rode in silence to the second floor. When the doors opened, she said, “Please turn left,” then came up beside him and overtook him just outside room 44. Before the key turned in the door, he felt sure that room 44 would be as close to heaven as he could imagine. He saw it in advance, felt the carpeting beneath his feet, almost drank in the pale light from the table lamp Alicia switched on. It sat on a lacquered chest just inside the door. As she switched on two more lights, he looked at the cherry armoire, saw the large bed with its enormous bedposts and scalloped back. On a brass tray were a digital clock, a flashlight, a thick black pen, and the request form for the morning’s breakfast. He reminded himself that he was not an unsophisticated person: he had stayed in other good hotels, seen these things before. But tonight it was as if velvet were replacing sandpaper. He realized the extent of his exhaustion. It was the strain of being with McCallum, not only the days of driving, and in that large bed he could lie spread-eagled, dreaming it all away. Maybe he really would stay for the chamber music. Maybe he would extend his stay, recuperate, use this extremely nice place as the springboard for reentering the world.
“Thank you,” Alicia said, as he slipped his billfold from his back pocket and tipped her.
She left, telling him to call the desk if they could provide anything further. She had already lifted the duvet from the armoire and placed it at the bottom of the bed. As she closed the door, he poked it with the heel of his hand, watched the down cover sink and slowly rise. McCallum’s shirt was draped over an arm of the chair. His bag sat on a luggage rack. Over the bed, flanked by sconces, was a framed Audubon print of a flamingo. For the first time, he felt he had truly left New Hampshire behind. Something indescribable about the room, which was at once comforting and impersonal, relaxed him. He decided to take a hot shower and stretch out on the bed, to decide then whether it seemed the right moment to call Sonja, or whether he felt more inclined to watch Betrayal. He ate the mint, rolling the foil between thumb and finger, dropping the little ball into the trash basket in the marble bathroom. On a tray he saw cotton swabs, small bottles of lotion and shampoo, a Bic shaver, a small sewing kit, a shoeshine cloth. Above those things, in the long rectangular mirror, he saw his face: haggard; showing the signs of the skipped morning shave; a small red pimple or bug bite on his temple; his sideburns, now almost completely white. It had been a while since he’d scrutinized himself in a mirror. He’d developed a way of more or less looking through mirrors, so he didn’t consciously register what he was seeing. Who would love a person who looked so ordinary? he wondered, smoothing his rain-matted hair. Not that Tony Hembley was any movie star. Not that he looked this bad every day. Not as though you have to keep looking if you’ve seen enough, he told himself.
A thick white terrycloth robe hung from a hanger suspended from a hook on the back of the bathroom door. He removed the robe and draped it over the top of the shower door, spent a few seconds figuring out how the faucet worked while admiring the heaviness of the brass. The bath mat was rolled and placed in a deep, chrome-plated basket attached to the tile at the back wall of the shower, along with a back scrubber enclosed in plastic. Standing under the strong force of the shower, he unwrapped the soap, tossing the wrapper sideways, over his head. The soap smelled of roses and cloves, he decided after some thought; it smelled like something that might be ingested. Tempted to put the tip of his tongue to the heavy oval bar, he touched it instead with the tip of his nose, then smeared it over his cheeks and forehead before placing it in the soap dish and spreading the soap with his hands. If he had brought the razor into the shower he could have shaved, though he was glad he’d left it on the counter because he was enjoying the sybaritic shower. He washed his hair with the soap—something Sonja deeply disapproved of, saying it made his hair look like it had been struck by lightning—then massaged each shoulder as he dialled the showerhead clockwise, increasing the force of the water. What if he looked for another job? What if he went into business with Gordon, assuming Gordon wasn’t retired himself? What if he and Sonja had an adventure? What if this time they bought a more expensive house, one with a marble bathroom, the floor matte-black tile, a brass hook on the back of the door strong enough to haul Moby Dick out of the water? What if he got out of the shower transformed, combed his hair straight back in the fashionable European style, put on fresh clothes and went down to the lobby and charmed Alicia, lured her back to the room to spread herself on the bed beneath the impossibly long, swooped neck of the pink flamingo. Maybe instead of being an artistic exaggeration, the flamingo’s neck had grown like Pinocchio’s nose, responding to all the lies told beneath it, all the breathless I love yous. Cynical, cynical, he thought. McCallumesque.
He stepped carefully from the shower, turning off the water after he got out. He reached for a towel, ran it over himself lightly before pulling on the robe and tying the sash. With a serious expression he faced the mirror again, considered shaving lightly while his skin was still wet, decided to grow a beard. He opened one of the small bottles and squeezed, discharging a tiny slug of bright yellow lotion into the palm of his hand, swiping it over his cheeks and down his neck. It felt strange, as if it were about to sting, though it did not. He massaged it in with awkward delicacy, went to his duffel bag, and rummaged for his comb, taking it into the bathroom and combing his hair back, stepping back from the mirror to look at himself a second time. He turned up the robe’s thick collar, then became suddenly self-conscious, as if this middle-aged man might presume to be Humphrey Bogart in his trench coat. Instead of telling Ingrid Bergman she should leave him, though, he would be urging Sonja to stay. He thought: We’ll always have New Hampshire.
Sitting in one of the two overstuffed, flame-stitched armchairs, he tucked the robe between his legs and flipped through a magazine that described tourist highlights of South Carolina. He looked at a close-up of a peach, flipped to another page that showed a close-up of a wrinkled black hand holding a puff of cotton. On another page, Marla Maples, Donald Trump, and Marla Maples’s mother stood in a line, Marla smiling, Donald either trying to look enigmatic or else dragged down by the weight of his extra-long tie, Marla’s mother in profile, no doubt telling the photographer to hurry up before Donald jumped out of the frame. Another page gave recipes for étouffée.
He stretched out on the bed and looked at the ceiling. White, unmarred, a round, unilluminated lightbulb hanging from the center of the ceiling fan. He thought again of Casablanca. A couple, arguing, walked down the corridor past his room, their Southern drawls mitigating the seriousness of what they were saying. He seemed to be objecting to her only liking expensive restaurants; she seemed to be objecting to his objecting. They were thin shadows cast ceilingward, the white enamel fan paddles briefly beheading them.
Dorothy Burwell, he thought. She had been the first girl he had ever argued with. She had said she’d go to a school music concert with him, and then she’d cancelled. Evie had gone with him instead, and there Dorothy Burwell had been, on stage with the sopranos, dressed in a pink dress with pinker flowers, right up there on stage as part of the performance she’d said she’d attend with him. He had said afterward, driving home with Evie, “How could it ever have been possible that she’d be my date when she was part of the choir?” and Evie had tried to make light of it, saying that probably Dorothy had wanted to be with him so she’d practiced a bit of self-deception, pretending until the last minute that it was a real possibility. It hadn’t seemed very likely to him at the time, but now he thought perhaps Evie had been right. He had not had any experience with conflicted people at that point, or run into many people who responded to things in terms of the way they wanted them to be instead of the way they were. Though there was still the chance Dorothy Burwell had said yes because she didn’t know how to say no. Dorothy had spent the first ten years of her life in Savannah, Georgia; she had a Southern accent some of the other kids made fun of, but he had loved it, the way she’d drawn out words as if sentences were a taffy pull.
He looked in the phone book, but Savannah wasn’t listed. He rolled over, picked up the phone and called Savannah information. Dorothy’s mother had left Dorothy’s father when she moved north, but he remembered how proud Dorothy had been of her father and how much she’d missed him. Her father had run the Ford dealership there. Maybe he still did, if he hadn’t retired. Or the Ford dealership would be closed; he would think better of calling Dorothy the next morning; the idea could be dispensed with in one quick call. Information gave him the number, the recorded voice telling him to “Please hold for your num-burrr.” He wrote it on the pad by the phone, then looked at the phone, wondering if he really wanted to do this. He dialled. He reached a recording, giving the hours when the shop was open. When the beep came to leave a message, he said, “Mr. Burwell, this is a friend of Dorothy’s from high school. I remembered that you ran the—”
“Hello?” a man’s voice said.
He hadn’t expected that. “Hello,” he said. “I’m trying to reach Mr. Burwell.”
“Speaking,” the voice said.
“Hello, sir,” he said, becoming again an adolescent. “We’ve never met, but I went to high school with your daughter Dorothy—”
“Graduated with honors. Very proud of her. Seems like yesterday,” the man said.
“Yes,” Marshall said. “I was wondering if you knew how I might get in touch with her. To discuss old times,” he added lamely.
“Got a few dollars, I hope.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“You’ll have to call Frankfurt, Germany. She’s married to a German fellow and has two German children, one sixteen years old this month, the other one adopted. Just born.”
“Oh, I see,” he said.
“About the way I look at it. What can you say? She fell in love with a German at the University of Santa Barbara.”
“She’d love to hear from you,” the man said. “I don’t have the number at the shop. I’ll give you my home phone number and you can call me. I’ll be bowling until ten p.m.”
“Thank you,” Marshall said. He would never call the man. He would hang up and forget all about it.
“Speaks perfect German,” the man said. “Talk fast. Don’t let them hang up on you.”
“No, sir,” Marshall said.
“Here’s my number,” the man said.
Marshall wrote it down and drew cross-hatches beneath the number.
“Reminds me of the time I looked up an old army buddy. Took about twenty phone calls and when I got him, you know what he said? He said, ‘I thought you’d call.’ Thirty years later, that was his reaction.”
“Did you get together?” Marshall said.
“Meant to, but didn’t.”
“Uh-huh,” Marshall said.
“Not impossible. Don’t have but one toe in the grave so far, and I’m not wiggling that one, as they say.”
“I’ll call you later,” Marshall said. “Thank you.”
“No problem,” the man said. He hung up.
Marshall replaced the phone and rolled over on his back. It had only been a strategy not to call Sonja, he decided. He had no real feeling for Dorothy Burwell. He had not felt disappointment when he heard she was married; he had felt relieved she was out of the country.
He got up and opened the armoire, studied the VCR, opened the box, and slid in Betrayal.
By the time it was over, he had decided he could not possibly speak to Sonja. The movie was gripping, a love story that went backward in time, Ben Kingsley the mischievous but calculating husband, wiser than he seemed, revelling in the pain he inflicted. Jeremy Irons was Ben Kingsley’s friend as well as his wife’s lover, outdone in his game of pretense by Kingsley, the master gamesman. A spectacular scene in a restaurant in which Kingsley, coming apart in Irons’s company, speaks about another issue, his voice careening out of control like a runaway car. Marshall was transfixed, admiring such acting talent, in awe of Pinter’s script, but also personally rebuked. The woman had fallen in love with Jeremy Irons, at least. But what would he prefer—that his wife have an affair with someone interesting and handsome: Jeremy Irons? Still, it was annoying and slightly puzzling that she had selected Tony Hembley. Even Sonja felt dismissive of him now. She really did; he had seen it in her eyes. He was grateful that she had had the affair with someone who wasn’t a personal friend of his. Though, to be honest, he had no personal friends. He thought about McCallum writing on the white bag that Livan Baker had been his friend. He doubted it, though maybe McCallum had felt that, in which case McCallum must have been willing to settle for very little. Even he did not say Livan Baker had depths that were not apparent.
He stood on the bed and pulled the fan’s chain, which set it gently spinning. More people passed by, murmuring. He got up and closed the shutters, went back to the bed and thought again of Alicia, not really desiring her, but desiring to desire her. Sort of like Eliot’s “distracted from distraction by distraction.” What he really desired was something to eat. He closed his eyes, imagining himself dressing, walking out the door, asking at the desk for a recommendation of a good restaurant. He awoke an hour later, the ceiling fan stirring warm air that came through the ceiling vent, the duvet he must have pulled over himself unconsciously shed, the thermostat apparently set for heat without his knowledge. The previous occupant, or Alicia’s idea of the perfect temperature?
He decided to forget about dinner, because the rain was still pounding. The problem was, he would probably never fall asleep again, and all he had in the room was the guide to South Carolina. He got up, turned off both the fan and the heat, pulled the duvet back up on the bed, rechecked the drawer in the bedside table: the magazine and the Bible. He picked up the Bible, read randomly for a minute, then found the 121st Psalm and read it. It was inseparable from the context in which he’d heard it years ago, his mother quietly reading, the long time he and Gordon had sat in the room, and then the rainfall that had finally driven their father in from his pacing, Evie holding out a closed umbrella to him, he now remembered—Evie’s assumption he would be going back out into the rain, his mother’s struggle to take the umbrella away from him, though that wasn’t it, she had been trying to take away the bottle in the deep pocket of his coat, saying to him that he was more like her than he admitted, he accusing her of being drunk, Gordon’s sliding closer as if the two of them might meld to intensify their strength for the battle that was about to break out. He and Gordon as still as stones, Evie snatching the bottle away from their father, opening it, and pouring the contents out, the stench of alcohol as strong as the smell of vomit as it slushed into the sink. So many things passed from hand to hand, as if a mad version of hot potato were being played; the umbrella first in their mother’s hands, then grabbed by Evie; their father reaching for it and stumbling over the table; more paperdolls and coloring books spilled; the ripping off of the paperdolls’ arms, and their mother staring, suddenly still and staring, saying, “Is that what you’d really like to do? Don’t you think you’ve done enough to destroy us all already?” He had destroyed them, their mother had said, and Evie had tried to quiet her. The umbrella had flown open, and then their father was gone, the wind blowing in the front door as Gordon sat with his leg pressed against Marshall’s. Marshall had stopped watching. In the darkness he heard the rain, heard their father cursing, and then the sound of his car, motor racing, then tires skidding on wet pavement, followed by Evie’s deep sigh that seemed to have absorbed much of the outside wind, her exhaled breath a barely registering whistle as she collapsed on the sofa and turned to them, looking through them instead of meeting their eyes, saying to their mother, who had rushed to the window to watch the car disappear, “My God, they’re terrified.” He remembered their mother turning toward them then, coming back toward the center of the room but then stopping to carefully pick up the paperdolls and put them back in the box, the mother and father, son and daughter, dog and cat paperdolls she had helped him carefully cut from the pages, tucking the torn pieces in the side pocket of her white nightgown, leaving to Evie the job of comforting them and getting them to bed. The umbrella lay on the carpet, and Evie had muttered something about how absurd it had been to care if he got wet, why should either of them care that he had rushed off in a senseless fit of anger, what did it matter if a person got wet? In bed, they had heard their mother quietly crying, Evie whispering, their mother’s crying abating. Gordon had whispered, “I don’t think they want him to come back,” and Marshall had nodded silently in the dark, thinking: if someone had to go, best that he was the one. He had been sure he would never see his father again. His presence would be extraneous to their family, like the little girl paperdoll, the dog and cat paperdolls. “He was drunk,” Gordon had whispered. “Maybe she was, too,” Gordon had said. “I’m not sure she’s going to die.” But that turned out to be wishful thinking. Like a shred of paper disappearing into a pocket, she had died the following year.
All his life, Marshall had connected rain with death.