The Hotel Eden: Stories (2 page)

Allison’s mentor at Hilman, the famous Professor Julie Mills, had given us some telephone numbers, and after we found a flat in Hampstead and after Allison had established a routine with her work, we called the first guy. His name was Roger Ardreprice, the assistant curator of Keats’s House, and he had us meet him over there as things were closing up one cold March night. He was a smug little guy who gave us his card right away and walked with both hands in his jacket pockets and finished all his sentences with “well um um.” We walked over to the High Street and then down to the Pearl of India with him talking about Professor Mills, whom he called Julie. Evidently he’d met other of her students in former years, and he assumed his role as host of all of London with a kind of jaded enthusiasm; it was clear he’d seen our kind before. It was at the long dinner that we met two other people who had studied at Hilman with the famous Professor Julie Mills. One was a quiet well-dressed woman named Sarah Garrison who worked at the Tate, and the other was a thirtyish man in a green windbreaker who came late, said hello, and then ate in the back at a table by the kitchen door with two turbaned men who evidently were the chefs. This was Porter.

Of course, we didn’t talk to him until afterward. Roger Ardreprice ran a long dinner which was half reverential shop-talk about Julie Mills and half sage advice about life in London, primarily about things to avoid. Roger had a practiced world-weary smile which he played all night, even condescending to Sarah Garrison, who seemed to me to be a real nice woman. It was a relief when we finally adjourned sometime after eleven and stepped from the close spicy room onto the cold sidewalk. Sarah took a cab and Roger headed down for his tube stop, and so Allison and I had the walk up the hill. I remember the night well, the penetrating cold wind, our steps past all the shops we would eventually memorize: the newsdealer, the kabob stand, the cheese shop, the Rosslyn Arms. We were a week in London and the glow was very much on everything, even a chilly night after a strange dinner. Then like a phantom, a figure came suddenly from behind us and banked against the curb, a man on a bicycle. He pulled the goggles off his head and said, “Enough curry with Captain Prig then?” He grinned the most beguiling grin, the corners of his mouth puckered. “Want a pint?”

“It’s after hours,” I said.

“This is the most interesting city in the world,” he said. “Certainly we can find a pint.” He stopped a cab and spoke to the driver and herded us inside, saying, “See you in nineteen minutes.”

And so we were delivered to the Hotel Eden. That first night we waited in front on the four long white stone steps until we saw him turn onto the street, all business on his bicycle, nineteen minutes later. “Yes, indeed,” he said, dismounting and taking a deep breath through his nose as if sensing something near. “The promise of lager. Which one of you studied with Julie Mills?”

Allison said, “I did. I do. I finish next year.”

“Nice woman,” he said as he pulled open the old glass door of the hotel. “I slept with her all my senior year.” Then he turned to us as if apologizing. “But we were never in love. Let’s have that straight.”

I thought Allison was going to be sick after that news. Professor Mills was widely revered, a heroine, a goddess, certainly someone who would have a wing of the museum named after her someday. Then we went into the little room and met Norris and he drew three beautiful pints of lager, gold in glass, and set them before us.

“Why’d you eat with the cooks?” Allison asked Porter.

“That’s the owner and his brother,” Porter said. His face was ruddy in the half-light of the bar. “They’re Sikhs. Do you know about the Sikhs?”

We shook our heads no.

“Don’t mess with them. They’re merciless. Literally. The man who sat at my right has killed three people.”

I nodded at him, flattered that he thought I’d mess with anyone at all, let alone a bearded man in a turban.

“I’m doing a story on their code.” Porter drank deeply from his glass. “Besides, your Mr. Roger Ardreprice, Esquire, has no surplus love for me.” He smiled. “And you…” He turned his glorious smile to Allison, and reached out and took her shiny brown hair in his hand. “You’re certainly a Lake. We’ll have to get you a tortoiseshell clip for that Lake hair.” Lake was the prime sorority at Hilman. “What brings you to London besides the footsteps of our Miss Mills?—who founded Lake, of course, a thousand years ago.”

Allison talked a little about the Egyptian influence on the Victorians, but it was halfhearted, the way all academic talk is in a pub, and my little story about my degree in meteorology felt absolutely silly. I had nothing to say to this man, and I wanted something. I wanted to warn him about something with an exacting and savage code, but there was nothing. I wasn’t going to say what I had said to my uncle at a graduation party, “I got good grades.”

But Porter turned to me, and I can still feel it like a light, his attention, and he said, with a kind of respect, “The weather. Oh that’s very fine. The weather,” he turned to me and then back to Allison, “and art. That is absolutely formidable.” He wasn’t kidding. It was the first time in the seven months since I’d graduated that I felt I had studied something real, and the feeling was good. I felt our life in London assume a new dimension, and I called for another round.

That was the way we’d see him; he would turn up. We’d go four, five days with Allison working at the museum and me tramping London like a tourist, which I absolutely was, doing only a smattering of research, and then there’d be a one-pound note stapled to a page torn from the map book
London A to Z
in our mailbox with the name of a pub and an hour scribbled on it. The Flask, Highgate, 9 p.m., or Old Plover, on the river, 7. And we’d go. He would have seen the Prince at Trafalgar Square or stopped a fight in Hyde Park and there’d be a bandage across his nose to prove it. He was a character, and I realize now we’d never met one. I’d known some guys in the dorms who would do crazy things drunk on the weekend, but I’d never met anybody in my life who had done and seen so much. He was out in the world, and it all called to me.

He took us to the Irish pubs in Kilburn, all the lights on, everyone scared of a suitcase bomb, the men sitting against the wall in their black suits drinking Guinness. We went to three different pubs, all well lit and quiet, and Porter told us not to talk too loud or laugh too loud or do anything that might set off these powder kegs. “Although there’s no real danger,” he added, pointing at Allison’s L. L. Bean boots. “They’re not going to harm an American schoolgirl. And such a beautiful member of the Lake.”

Maybe harm was part of the deal, the attraction, I know it probably was for me. I’d spend two days straight doing some of my feeble research, charting rainfall (London has exactly fifteen rain days per month, year-round), and then, with my shoulders cramping and my fingers stained with the wacky English marking pens we bought, I’d be at the Eden bent over a pint looking into Porter’s fine face and it would all go away. He showed up early in March with his arm in a sling and a thrilling scrape across his left cheekbone. Someone had opened a car door on him as he’d biked home one night. The gravel tracks where he’d hit the road made a bright fan under his eye. His grin seemed magnified that night under our concern.

“Nothing,” he said of it. “The worst is I can’t ride for a week. It puts me in the tube with all the rest of you wankers.” He laughed. “Say, Norris,” he called. “Is there any beer in here?” I saw Allison’s face, the worry there, and knew she was a goner. And I was a goner too. I’d never had a scratch on my body. Porter was too much, and I knew that this is the way I did it, had crushes, and I’d fallen for two or three people before: Professor Cummins, my thesis chair, with his black bowl of hair and bright blue eyes, a cartoon face really, but he’d traveled the world and in his own words been rained on in ninety-nine countries; and Julie Mills, who worked so closely with Allison. I’d met her five or six times at receptions and such, and her intensity, the way she set her hand below my shoulder when speaking to me as if to steady me for the news to come, and the way there was a clear second between each of her words, these things printed themselves on me, and I tried them out with no success. I tried everything and had little success generating any conviction that I might find a personality for me.

And now Allison kidded me when we’d have tea somewhere or a plowman’s platter in a pub: “You don’t have to try Porter’s frown when you ask for a pint,” she’d say. “This isn’t the Eden.” And I’d taken certain idiomatic inflections from Porter’s accent, and when they’d slip out, Allison would turn to me, alert to it. I would have stopped it if I could. I started being assertive and making predictions, the way Porter did. We’d gone to Southwark one night, and after a few at a dive called Old Tricks, we’d stood at the curb afterward, arm in arm in the chill, and he’d said, “Calm enough now,” and he’d scanned the low apartment buildings on the square, “but this will all be in flames in two years. Put it in your calendar.” And when I got that way with Allison, even making a categorical statement about being late for the tube or forgetting the umbrella, she’d say, “Put it in your calendar, mate.” I always smiled at these times and tried to shrug them off. She was right, after all. But I also knew she’d fallen too. She didn’t pick up the posture or the walk, but Allison was in love with this character too.

One night in March, he met us at the Eden with a plan. I was a meteorologist, wasn’t I? It was key for a truly global understanding of the weather for me to visit the north Scottish coast and see the effects of the Gulf Stream firsthand. “Think of it, Mark,” he said, his face lit by the glass of beer. “The Gulf Stream. All that water roiling against the coast of Mexico, warming in the equatorial sun, then spooling out around the corner of Florida and up across the Atlantic four thousand miles still warm as it pets the forehead of Scotland. It’s absolutely tropical. Palm trees. We better get up there.”

Well, I didn’t have anything to do. I was on hold, taking a year off we called it sometimes, and I looked at Allison there in the Eden. She raised her eyebrows at me, throwing me the ball, and smiled. Her hair was back in the new brown clip Porter had given her. “Sounds too good to pass up,” she said. “Mark’s ready for an adventure.”

“Capital,” Porter said. “I’ll arrange train tickets. We’ll leave Wednesday.”

Allison and I talked about it in our flat. It was chilly all the time, and we’d get in the bed sometimes in the early afternoon and talk and maybe have a snack, some cheese and bread with some Whitbred from a canister. She came home early from the museum the Tuesday before I was to leave with Porter. There was a troubled look on her face. She undressed and got in beside me. “Well,” she said. “Ready for your adventure?” Her face was strange, serious and fragile, and she put her head into my shoulder and held me.

“Hey, don’t worry,” I said. The part of her sweet hair was against my mouth. “You’ve got the people at the museum if you need anything, and if something came up you could always call Roger Ardreprice.” I patted the naked hollow of her back to let her know that I had been kidding with that last, but she didn’t move. “Hey,” I said, trying to sit up to look her in the eyes, comfort her, but she pushed me back, burrowed in.

P
ORTER AND
I left London in the late afternoon and clacked through the industrial corridor of the city until just before the early dark the fields began to open and hedgerows grow farther apart. Porter had arrived late for the train and kicked his feet up on the opposite seat, saying, “Sorry, mate, but I’ve got the ticket right here.” He withdrew a glass jar from his pack and examined it. “Not a leak. Tight and dry.” He held the jar like a trophy and smiled at me his gorgeous smile. “Dry martinis, and we’re going to get
very
tight.” Then he unwrapped two white china coffee cups and handed me one. There was a little gold crown on each cup, the blue date in Roman numerals MCMLIII. He saw me examining the beautiful cup and said, “From the coronation. But there are no saucers and—in the finest tradition of the empire—no ice.”

Well, I was thrilled. Here I was rambling north in a foreign country, every mile was farther north in Britain than I’d ever been, etc., and Porter was dropping a fat green olive in my cup and covering it with silver vodka. “This is real,” I said aloud, and I felt satisfied at how it felt.

“To Norris,” I said, making the first toast, “and the Eden, hoping they’re happy tonight.”

“Agreed,” Porter said, drinking. “But happy’s not the word, mate. Norris is pleased, but never happy. He’s been a good friend to me, these English years.”

“We love him,” I said, speaking easily hearing the “we,” Allison entering the sentence as a natural thing. It was true. We’d often remarked as we’d caught the tube back to Hampstead or as we’d headed toward the Eden that Norris was wonderful. In fact he was one of eight people we knew by name in that great world city.

“Allison seems a dear girl.” Porter said. It was a strange thing, like a violation, the two of us talking about her.

“She’s great,” I said, simply holding place.

“Women.” Porter raised his cup. “The great unknowable.”

I thought about Allison, missing her in a different way. We were tender people, that is,
kids
, and our only separations had been play ones, vacations when she’d go home to her folks and I’d go home to my folks, and then we moved in together after graduating with no fanfare, tenderly, a boy and a girl who were smart and well-meaning. Our big adventure was going off to England together, which everyone we knew and our families thought was a wonderful idea, and who knows what anybody meant by that, and really, who knows what we meant at such a young age, what we were about. We were lovers, but that term would have embarrassed us, and there are no other words which come close to the way we were. We liked each other a lot, that’s it. We both knew it. We were waiting for something to happen, something to do with age and the world that would tell us if we were qualified, if we were in love, the real love. And here I was on a train with a stranger, each mile sending me farther from her into a dark night in a foreign country. I thought about her in the quilts of our small bed in Hampstead. The first martini was working, and it had made me large: I was a man on a train far from home.