'I keep Inge away from the men in the street,' she confided. 'But I don't want her thinking she's in love, or something. I mean, in a way, that's worse -- I know. That really fucks you up. I mean, I'm not letting anyone pay her for it -- not ever -- and I'm not letting you sneak in for free.'
'She's only my sister Lilly's age,' I said. 'To me.'
'Who cares how old she is?' Screaming Annie said. 'I'm watching you.'
'You
're old enough to get a rod, occasionally,' Jolanta told me. 'I've seen it. I got an eye for seeing rods.'
'If you get a hard-on, you might use it,' Screaming Annie said. 'And I'm just telling you, if you want to use it, don't use it on Dark Inge. Use it on her and you lose it,' Screaming Annie told me.
'That's right,' Jolanta said. 'Use it with us, never with the kid. Use it with the kid and we'll finish you. Lift all the weights you want, sometime you got to fall asleep.'
'And when you wake up,' said Screaming Annie, 'your rod will be gone.'
'Got it?' Jolanta asked.
'Sure,' I said. And Jolanta leaned close to me and kissed me on the mouth. It was a kiss as threatening with lifelessness as the New Year's Eve kiss, tinged with vomit, that I had received from Doris Wales. But when Jolanta finished this kiss, she pulled away suddenly with my lower lip trapped in her teeth -- just until I screamed. Then her mouth released me. I felt my arms lift up all by themselves -- the way they do when I've been curling the one-arm dumbbells, for half an hour or so. But Jolanta was backing away from me very watchfully, her hands in her purse. I looked at the hands and the purse until she was out of my room. Screaming Annie was still there.
'Sorry about the bite,' she said. 'I really didn't tell her to do it. She's just mean, all by herself. You know what she's got in the purse?' I didn't want to know.
Screaming Annie would know. She lived with Jolanta -- Dark Inge had told me. In fact, Dark Inge told me, not only were her mother and Jolanta girl friends of the lesbian kind, but Babette also lived with a woman (a whore who worked the Mariahilfer Strasse). Only Old Billig actually preferred men; and, Dark Inge told me, Old Billig was so old she preferred nothing at all -- most of the time.
So I stayed strictly nonsexual with Dark Inge; in fact, it wouldn't have occurred to me to even think of her sexually if her mother hadn't brought it up. I stayed strictly to my imagination: of Franny, of Jolanta. And of course my shy, stumbling courtship of Fehlgeburt, the reader. The girls at the American School all knew I lived in 'that hotel on the Krugerstrasse'; I was not in the same class of Americans that they were in. People say that in America most Americans are not at all class-conscious, but I know about the Americans who live abroad, and they are wildly conscious about what kind of Americans they are.
Franny had her bear, and, I suppose, she had her imagination as much as I had mine. She had Junior Jones and his football scores; she must have had to work hard to imagine him past the ends of the games. And she had her correspondence with Chipper Dove, she had her rather one-sided imagination concerning him.
Susie had a theory about Franny's letters to Chipper Dove. 'She's afraid of him,' Susie said. 'She's actually terrified of ever seeing him again. It's fear that makes her do it -- write to him all the time. Because if she can address him, in a normal voice -- if she can pretend that she's having a normal relationship with him -- well ... then he's no rapist, then he never did actually do it to her, and she doesn't want to deal with the fact that he did. Because,' Susie said, 'she's afraid that Dove or someone like him will rape her again.'
I thought about that. Susie the bear might not have been the smart bear Freud had in mind, but she was a smart bear on her own terms.
What Lilly once said about her has stayed with me. 'You can make fun of Susie because she's afraid to simply be a human being and have to deal -- as she would say -- with other human beings. But how many human beings feel that way and don't have the imagination to do anything about it? It may be stupid to go through life as a bear,' Lilly would say, 'but you'll have to admit it takes imagination.'
And we were all familiar with living with imagination, of course. Father thrived there; imagination was his own hotel. Freud could see only there. Franny, composed in the present, was also looking ahead -- and I was always, for the most part, looking at Franny (for signals, for some vital signs, for directions). Of us all, Frank was perhaps the most successfully imaginative; he made up his own world and kept to himself there. And Lilly, in Vienna, had a mission -- which was to keep her safe, for a while. Lilly had decided to grow. It had to be with her imagination that she would do this, because we noted few physical changes.
What Lilly did in Vienna was write. Fehlgeburt's reading had gotten to her. Lilly wanted to be a writer, of all things, and we were embarrassed enough for her that we never accused her of it -- although we knew she was doing it, all the time. And she was embarrassed enough by it so that she never admitted it, either. But each of us knew that Lilly was writing something. For nearly seven years, she wrote and wrote. We knew the sound of her typewriter; it was different from the radicals'. Lilly wrote very slowly.
'What are you doing, Lilly?' someone would ask her, knocking on her ever-locked door.
'Trying to grow,' Lilly would say.
And that was our euphemism for it, too. If Franny managed to say she was beaten up, when she'd been raped -- if Franny could get away with that, I thought -- then Lilly ought to be allowed to say she was 'trying to grow' when she was (we all knew) 'trying to write.'
And so when I told Lilly that the New Hampshire family included a little girl just her age, Lilly said, 'So what? I've got some growing to do. Maybe I'll introduce myself, after supper.'
One of the curses of timid people -- in bad hotels -- is that they're often too timid to leave. They're so timid they don't even dare to complain. And with their timidity comes a certain politeness; if they check out because a Schraubenschlussel has frightened them on the stairs, because a Jolanta has bitten someone in the face in the lobby, because a Screaming Annie has inched them closer to death with her howls -- even if they find bear hair in the bidet, they still apologize.
Not the woman from New Hampshire, however. She was more feisty than your average timid guest. She lasted through the early evening pickups of the whores (the family must have been dining out). The family lasted past midnight without a complaint; not even an inquiring phone call to the front desk. Frank was studying with the dressmaker's dummy. Lilly was trying to grow. Franny was at the desk in the lobby, and Susie the bear was cruising there -- her presence made the whores' customers their usual peaceful selves. I was restless. (I was restless for seven years, but this night I was especially restless.) I had been playing darts at the Kaffee Mowatt with Dark Inge and Old Billig. It was another slow night for Old Billig. Screaming Annie found a customer crossing the Karntnerstrasse and turning down Krugerstrasse a little past midnight. I was waiting my turn at the darts when Screaming Annie and her furtive male companion peeked into the Mowatt; Screaming Annie saw Dark Inge with me and Old Billig.
'It's after midnight,' she said to her daughter. 'You go get some rest. It's a school day tomorrow.'
So we all walked back to the Hotel New Hampshire more or less together. Screaming Annie and her customer a little ahead of us. Inge and I on either side of Old Billig, who was talking about the Loire Valley in France. 'It's where I'd like to retire,' she said, 'or go for my next holiday.' Dark Inge and I knew that Old Billig always spent her holidays -- every holiday -- with her sister's family in Baden. She took a bus or a train from a stop opposite the Opera; Baden would always be much more accessible to Old Billig than France.
When we walked into the hotel, Franny said that all the guests were in. The New Hampshire family had gone to bed about an hour ago. A youthful Swedish couple had gone to bed even earlier. Some old man from Burgenland hadn't left his room all night, and some British bicycle enthusiasts had come in drunk, double-checked their bicycles in the basement, attempted to be sportive with Susie the bear (until she growled), and were now, no doubt, passed out in their rooms. I went to my room to lift weights -- passing Lilly's door at the magical instant her light went out; she had stopped growing for the night. I did some forearm curls with the long barbell, but I didn't have much interest in it; it was too late. I was just lifting because I was bored. I heard the dressmaker's dummy slam off the wall between my room and Frank's; something Frank was studying had made him cross, and he was taking it out on the dummy -- or he was just bored, too. I knocked on the wall.
'Keep passing the open windows,' Frank said.
'Wo ist die Gemutlichkeit?' I sang, half-heartedly.