She Is Me (18 page)

She walked up to the desk. There was an enormous and hideous flower arrangement on it.

“I need a room for tonight,” she said.

The desk clerk had scrupulously combed and gelled hair. Wide tooth marks had been left behind by the comb. He had light brown hair and a thick pink neck. He asked for her credit card.

“I lost my wallet,” she said. “I’ll have to pay cash.”

The clerk said nothing and punched something into a computer. Greta gave her name as Gretchen Bernhardt, carefully reciting the incorrect spelling.

“I don’t have any,” she said when the clerk asked her for ID. “I lost my wallet. So I don’t have any.”

Stupid charade, she thought. I’m a grown woman. Give the man your credit card. Give the man your name.

The clerk looked at her for a minute with bored blue eyes, then shrugged.

Greta had dressed with care, choosing her least matronly undergarments, the silk sweater Elizabeth had given her for her birthday, a pair of tight-fitting pants and sandals her mother had forced her to buy at Barneys. She had gotten a pedicure and had her legs waxed, too.

“I haven’t had my legs waxed in years,” she told the woman who was ripping the strips of fabric off her burning legs. “Now I remember why.”

The woman had given her a smirky smile, which could have been interpreted in a number of ways, one of them being a suspicion that her client was about to embark on a love affair.

The silk sweater was too heavy. Greta was hot. She noticed a mousy person on her way to a conference room. I’m wearing the same sandals as that dowdy woman, she thought sadly. She stood, sweating, worrying over her shoes and wondering what she would say if someone she knew walked in. I could leave, she told herself. I could still leave, walk out of here with my virtue and dignity intact. But she wouldn’t leave. Nothing could make her leave, as she well knew. She had taken a leap and could see the ground coming at her faster and faster, and as far as she was concerned, it couldn’t come fast enough. Even the appearance of Tony himself would not have stopped her.
And what would he be doing here, anyway?
she said to herself, outraged at the thought of her husband arriving for a sleazy, illicit assignation in a hotel lobby.

The clerk handed her a key.

“Luggage?” he said.

Greta, still fuming about Tony, thought again that she could simply walk out. She had handed the man $250 in cash, but she really could leave, right now. The lobby blurred a little. She mumbled something and headed toward the elevator.

In the room, she pulled the curtains and sat on one of the queen-size beds. This will be my bed, she thought. Daisy can have the other. Like Ozzie and Harriet. If Daisy even shows up. She imagined the door handle turning. Daisy’s sweet, plump hand would turn the knob. Above Daisy’s hand was her wrist and her smooth curved arm. Greta saw Daisy’s bare shoulder, felt the warmth of her shoulder beneath her own hand.

She opened the drawer on the bedside table, wondering if there would be a Bible there. Sure enough . . . She opened it and looked for the Song of Solomon. I’m a cliché, she thought. A woman in a hotel room, about to have an affair. Would she have felt better if she were more of a cliché, if she’d been waiting to have an affair with a man instead of a woman?

“Behold, thou art fair, my love; thou hast doves’ eyes within thy locks: thy hair is as a flock of goats . . .” Greta smiled, picturing a flock of goats on Daisy’s head. “Thy teeth are like a flock of sheep that are even shorn, which came up from the washing . . .” Woolly teeth. Didn’t it also say somewhere that the beloved smelled like Lebanon? Greta lay down on the bed, her questionable shoes still on. She reached into her bag for her reading glasses so she could stop squinting. She heard her mother’s voice.
Stop squinting. You’ll get wrinkles in your forehead.
She put on her reading glasses. “Thy belly is like an heap of wheat set about with lilies.” The thought of a belly made her suddenly self-conscious. She was not twenty years old. She’d had two children. She imagined Daisy finding her like this, a middle-aged woman in spectacles with wrinkles in her forehead, stretch marks on her heap of wheat, and the same sandals as a dowdy woman in the lobby. And she wondered why she didn’t care, why she knew it didn’t matter. “Thy two breasts are like two young roes that are twins,” she read, “which feed among the lilies.” Greta could feel the book’s binding in her hands, the bumpy black cover, as if it were skin. “Thou hast ravished my heart, my sister, my spouse. How fair is thy love, my sister, my spouse! How much better is thy love than wine! and the smell of thine ointments than all spices! Thy lips, O my spouse, drop as the honeycomb: honey and milk are under thy tongue . . .”

The telephone beside her rang.

“Daisy coming up,” said the clerk.

Greta closed her eyes. Honey and milk are under thy tongue, she thought.

The immense silence of the room released a small knock on the door and Greta let Daisy in. They stood facing each other. Greta, so bold in the bar, could not move. Should she read to Daisy from the Bible? A garden enclosed is my sister, my spouse. She could read that. A spring shut up, a fountain sealed. She was feeling dizzy, her desire surely audible.

“Hello,” she said.

“Hello,” Daisy said.

Daisy looked so pretty. Her shoulders were bare beneath a rather bright yellow tank top. How could anyone wear that color and get away with it? Thy navel is like a round goblet, which wanteth not liquor, she thought, in spite of herself.

Daisy put her hand on Greta’s cheek and moved closer.

You look so pretty, Greta wanted to say. You are so pretty. Like two young roes set about with lilies and liquor, like a goblet heaped with wheat, like soft white sheep and deep red pomegranates, like everything sweet and full and fragrant and abundant.

“You’re . . . I’m . . .” she said instead.

Daisy nodded in agreement.

Greta knew she was putting her arms out, knew her hands closed around Daisy’s wrists, knew she pulled this woman to her. She understood that she and Daisy were lying on the bed, that she was in the ridiculous position of undoing a bra like a teenage boy. But there was nothing ridiculous about it. She was not a teenage boy. Her belly was not an heap of wheat. Daisy’s breasts were breasts, not roes, and no metaphors were needed. No metaphor would do.

At last, she thought, and it was as if her entire life had been leading her here.

“At last,” she whispered.

“So,” Volfmann said, standing up from the table to greet her. “You’re late.”

He ordered oysters and champagne.

“You’ve been married, right?” Elizabeth asked, the champagne going to work immediately.

“Many times.”

“I think marriage leads to adultery,” she said.

“Yes. Look at poor little Emma.”

“Yes. Look at her.”

They were silent for a few minutes.

“I almost got arrested for shoplifting,” she said. He definitely wasn’t going to fire her. Not with oysters.

“What did you take, Winona?”

Elizabeth looked at him in dismay.

“Nothing!” she said. “It was a mistake!”

Volfmann took her hand in his and tried to calm her.

“Okay, okay. It was a mistake . . .”

She noticed his watch. It was one she had seen in an ad and admired. It cost many thousands of dollars.

“Don’t lose that,” she said, tapping the watch face.

“I’ll try not to,” he said.

Elizabeth listened contentedly to the ringing in her ears. She ate oysters. They seemed to glide down someone else’s throat. Volfmann was watching her silently, which was a relief. Better than having him holler at her for writing trash. He was oddly attractive, with his manicured nails and jowly, masculine face. That frightened her. I’m an employee, she reminded herself. But did that make her safer or less safe? And did she want to be safe? Or had she come here to be dangerous? She couldn’t remember.

“What did you want to talk to me about?” she said.

He leaned forward in his sudden, avid way. “You’re the only one,” he said, “the only one who would understand . . .” He almost snorted in his intensity.

Elizabeth was trembling. She felt his knee brush hers beneath the table. She was paralyzed by the heat rushing through her body. She watched his lips as they moved, slowly, in slow motion, sliding over his teeth, making the shape of an O, then sliding back, then again into an elongated O. She felt herself leaning forward to kiss him even as she deciphered his words.

“Joseph Roth!” he had said.

She stopped, her mouth an inch from his. Joe Roth? Wasn’t he a producer?

“I’d only read
The Radetzky March,
” Volfmann was saying, “but this new translation of his stories . . .” Volfmann was bobbing up and down in his excitement. “Joseph Roth, man, he is great . . .”

Rote, she almost said, once she understood he meant the Austrian writer, correcting his pronunciation. Joseph
Rote.

Her face was so close she could taste his breath as he spoke. She closed her eyes.

“‘Stationmaster Fallmerayer’ . . .” he was saying.

“Yes,” she murmured. “‘Stationmaster Fallmerayer.’ Delicious . . .”

Greta was awakened by the phone. Panicked (who knew she was here?), she picked up the receiver of the hotel phone and listened to the dial tone in guilty confusion until she realized the ringing came from her cell phone.

“Hello?” she said. She tried not to sound as if she had just been asleep, her face pressed into a woman’s belly.

“Darling, at last. Josh finally gave me this number. You’re still out? I was so worried. All day I’ve been looking for you, you have no idea . . .”

Greta listened to her mother and marveled at the young woman beside her. She stroked Daisy’s hair and kissed her back just below her nicotine patch.

“Mama, I’m sorry you had such a bad day . . .”

Then, because the patch was a silent offering and she knew it was, Greta kissed the patch itself.

“Never mind that now. It’s too late for that. I found the doctor myself. I took care of it. I don’t like to take too many medicinals, but Kougi’s here, so I’ll try them, but imagine if I were alone . . .”

“I’ll stay there tonight,” Greta said. “I’ll stay there every night if you need me, Mother.”

She watched Daisy walk naked to the bathroom.

“You? With your flu?” Lotte said.

“Me with my flu?” Greta said, noticing the dimple at the small of Daisy’s back. She had stopped listening to her mother.

“Who else?” Lotte said. “
I
don’t have the flu.”

“You don’t?”

“Cancer is not enough? When are you coming?”

Greta watched Daisy approach from the bathroom, her body so unfamiliar, so familiar. Daisy held her arms out.

“What time?” Lotte asked.

“Greta,” Daisy whispered. Her voice was sleepy. She kissed Greta on her neck.

“This is not Spain,” Lotte was saying. “We go to bed at nine.”

Daisy slid into bed beside Greta, holding her, whispering her name over and over.

“And the food?” Greta heard her mother’s voice as she hung up. “
Very
salty in Spain.”

Lotte heard the bell. She didn’t even try to get up. She was taking pills, the size of them! For
horses,
they were so big. They made her sleepy. The pain was still there, in her jaw, in her neck, in her head when she took the horse pills. She just didn’t mind as much.

“Darling,” she said when Greta came in. “The cell phones, they always cut you off, they should drop dead with that kind of service.” Her daughter kissed her and held her hand and spoke to her softly. There was no one like blood. Kougi was wonderful. But blood was blood.

“Don’t cry, Mama,” Greta said.

“I missed you,” Lotte said.

“I missed you, too.”

“I want to die,” Lotte wailed. She didn’t mean to wail. She didn’t want to die, either. But the touch of her daughter’s hand, the gentleness of her voice, the sight of her . . . “You look so nice,” Lotte said. “You had a date?”

Greta looked startled, then laughed.

“I don’t want to die,” Lotte said. “That’s the goddamned problem. I must be crazy, the pain I’m in, they should call Dr. Karoglian.”

“Kevorkian. Mr. Karoglian was the Spanish teacher who accused me of cheating.”

“That bastard.”

“You’re a good mother, Mom. Going into school and fighting for me like that.”

“You’re so lucky,” Lotte said. She was crying again. “You
have
your mother.”

Greta got up to get her some Kleenex.

“I don’t have a mother,” Lotte said through her tears. “I miss my mother.”

“I
am
lucky,” Greta said. She patted Lotte’s tears carefully.

Lotte grabbed one of Greta’s hands. She kissed it and kissed it. She held on to the hand with all her strength. “Very lucky,” she said. “Very, very lucky.” Greta gave a little laugh, and Lotte wondered if Greta thought she was still talking about Greta’s good luck. But Lotte was too tired and too weak to correct her.

Over the Pacific Ocean, the sun lowered itself, slow and magnificent, and Elizabeth watched the color it left behind. Volfmann’s head was silhouetted, framed by red. It was beautiful. He was beautiful. It was passionate. He was passionate. The red turned to lavender. The air was cool. “Stationmaster Fallmerayer” was a story about falling in love, he said. About marriage, about adultery, yes, but really about love. She nodded in agreement. She said, “Yes! Yes!” He grabbed her hand, squeezing it, using the other to pound the table to make a point about Chekhov. The translator of the Roth had compared the story to “Lady with Lapdog.” “Yes!” Elizabeth said. “Falling in love. They fall in love. Like a thunderbolt.” No, Volfmann said, his voice rising. “Lady with Lapdog” was full of hope. Desperate hope. “Stationmaster Fallmerayer” had a cheap ending. A journalist’s ending. There was another bottle of champagne. They argued about endings. They argued about Henry James. Cheap ending, he said about
The Spoils of Poynton.
She disagreed with him. She forgot he was beautiful and passionate and thought, No, you’re wrong, that’s an undergraduate’s argument, and pressed her point. He capitulated. She rejoiced. The moon left a silver shadow on the Pacific Ocean. They returned to “Lady with Lapdog.” Love. Desperate hope. They agreed. He paid the check. She was exhausted. It was two
A.M.
Hours and hours past when she said she’d be home. She wanted to be in bed. She was too old to stay up all night discussing literature.