Chapter 9: Hotel Deuil

The Hotel Deuil was home for the next two weeks. Exhaustion kept the lovers in bed the first few days; leaving it to find the nearest, cheapest places to eat was an effort made with tunnel vision.

Their listless comings and goings were noted early on by the hotel's suspicious owners, an aged and hunched couple from Alsace. The propriétaire and his wife dressed round the clock in mourning attire, greeting their long working days with even longer faces. Maintaining order at the hotel was the next best thing to death. They worked hard keeping the books, supervising the cleaning staff, scanning new clients for evil intentions, and posting the latest warnings in the corridors and WC's. At the Deuil everything was interdit.

The hotel made no provisions to feed its clients. Hunger was to be appeased elsewhere, and signs were posted on every available space forbidding entry to the slightest morsel of food. This regulation set up a thrilling cold war between transients and owners. As the Hotel Deuil boasted only one star, the clients tended to be mindful of expenditures, and soon adapted themselves to the art of smuggling in the makings of a nightly repast. For their part, the owners spent many intense hours working out strategies to catch the offenders red-handed. Cunning and suspicion abounded with the relish that thrives among humans near the edge of meaningful lives.

In accordance with the hotel's chief regulation, tenants were required to drop off their keys when leaving. Each of Olney's and Maggie's excursions into Paris, and especially their returns, were blessed by the accusatory eyes of one or both of the owners. Evening sorties in search of food usually put them against a keenly suspicious monsieur. He wore a slight smile at these times, the kind of smile that implied, "If I am correct in my assumptions--that you are bringing food smuggled in drugs into my hotel--you will be turned over to the authorities and imprisoned forever on each count." His wife cooked in the kitchen just next to the office, keeping one eye on his transactions and the other on the reassuring suppertime images of TF 1, Antenne 2, or FR 3. The aromas of choucroute and saucisses Strasbourg permeated kitchen, office, and foyer with further assurance.

The front doors were locked at midnight with prison-like punctuality. The owners took pleasure in turning a deaf ear to the poundings and pleadings of undesirable clients who transgressed the rule. In the morning, they remained impervious to outraged demands for refunds. Law and order was on their side, and since the only clients who missed the curfew were North Africans and other foreigners, they could sit back, confident and secure, with a hand on the hotline to police headquarters in case things got out of control.

These and a toilet roll's worth of other rules were the raison d'être of one star hotels. Pathological spotlessness shown everywhere, as did hostility and distrust. The Hotel Deuil was a tight but lonely little ship, isolated, like all of its kind, between hotels with no stars--where the same rooms were cheaper and messier and travellers had to beg for heat--and hotels with two stars--where the rooms were more expensive, had no character and travellers had to beg for heat.

But our heroes were happy enough. Their room was big and old and full of the magic of Paris. During those first few days, they rarely left the ornate old bed. They made love for hours on end before sleeping for hours on end, and when they woke up, made love all over again. In the evenings after dinner, they hopped back in, propping themselves against fat tubular pillows and made plans to sightsee just about everything. Olney smoked his way through a dozen brands of French cigarettes, trying them out for flavour and punch, while Maggie squinched her nose and tried to counterattack with blonde tobacco from England. And they drank expensive wine.

"Tonight's grand cru is a Romanée-Saint-Vivant, from the estate of the late Charles Noëllat in Vosne Romanée," lectured Olney the oenophile. "I happen to know this is a good wine because I helped harvest the grapes au domaine de monsieur the very year of this vintage. 'Twas on the fossil-embedded vineyards of the sacred pinot noir that I accidentally snipped a smidgen of finger with the sécateurs. Who knows, there may be a little bit of me in this very bottle. At any rate, there's a great deal of your money went into the buying of it."

"Hey, how much?" exclaimed Maggie, crashing through her bubble of contentment.

"Wait. Before you protest, let us try the famous Organoleptic Evaluation."

"Eh?"

"I mean, let's drink first and complain later. You'll have to agree that any price is worth the rhapsody of perfumes issuing from the noble nose of this wine of the gods. Detect you not the scent of violets, truffles, raspberries and--"

"Here's lookin' at ya, gigolo," Maggie cut in. She didn't care about the price; money was no object for awhile.

"Unfortunately, this wine is too young. It's a crime to drink it so soon, but it's now or never." It was the best wine they'd ever tasted. "Not as good as Romanée Conti," he grumbled happily. "I tried working for them, too. Wouldn't give me the time of day." After the Saint-Vivant was gone, they opened a lowly VDQS.

The days passed serenely. Neither squabble nor squall fractured their suddenly gushy love for each other. Although the femme de chambre was forever trying to get in and clean the room, it remained a happy mess. Maggie could throw her clothes anywhere without fear of tyrannical bombast from Olney. Without him on her back all the time, she managed a brief interlude of self-confidence she'd never known. And he relaxed in a way that, if continued, would have added years to the end of his life. They were alone in a new world with enough money to forget about survival, at least until the Dutroncs handed them the keys to responsibility. It was the best few days they ever had.

The sounds coming from the courtyard beyond their window intrigued them. The vast, open space seemed to be a joint refuse dump for the square block of buildings backing onto it. The hotel, a boulangerie next door, a milliners, a boucherie, a driving school, a wine store, an umbrella shop, and an immense apartment building all shared the central mass of debris.

The lovers soon got used to the routine of noises issuing from its various corners. Every sound was amplified, even now in winter, and toward midday they picked up. Around eleven, someone--an elderly man from one of the apartments, no doubt--would burst into a vibrato-enriched whistling that worked tunelessly up and down the meagre pentatonic scale. Although the melody was never clear, the trilled feeling came across the expanse of the cour d'ordure with great force.

Whatever the Whistler's moods of the morning, his warbling was always cut short at precisely the same moment; they could have set Maggie's watch by it. They imagined his stout wife sitting him at table in accordance with the rules of her world, upon whose axis clung the Whistler's subservience.

As the days went by, Olney took turns with Maggie in translating his musical moods to forthcoming meals. When the Whistler was happy, life became a parrot-strewn tropical paradise of Dagwoodian bliss: lunch going to be a plump garlic sausage with onions, a ripe Camembert, and a good wine. When he was morose, life became a thicket of thorns from which no escape was possible: lunch was an unripe Camembert with plonk and yesterday's baguette. When he was wistful, life lay behind him with glimmering, tear-diffused memories: lunch was a childhood feast of Crème de Marrons with fromage frais and freshly buttered rolls. When the Whistler was angry, life became an injustice only the return and indiscriminate use of the guillotine could rectify: lunch was a few cubes of bouillon de poulet, a few crusts of bread, no cheese and no wine.

Pigeons landed outside their window at designated times as well, to frolic--in Olney's opinion--loathsomely. Maggie loved their cooing presence. She would have fed them the crumbs of leftover food if she could have gotten the windows open.

Olney hated pigeons. "They're too fat," he complained. "The thought of touching one makes me sick to my stomach. They're gross and clumsy with their stupid manoeuvring for position, and I can't imagine a worse sound than that dumb clucking and cooing. Don't encourage them, for God's sake, shoo them away."

Every afternoon they returned to their room to hear the touching sounds of human existence--ordinary and banal--greeting them from the courtyard. As they fell into bed for a rest, and the afternoon became twilight, the mélange of sounds became indistinct, falling over one another like cascades of urban history. At the edge of sleep, they were lulled by a blend of whispers, shouts, giggles, crying babies, flushing toilets, breaking glass, roaring vacuum cleaners, birds chirping in cages, mothers screaming at children, and eventually the shouting of fathers: "Oh, la barbe! Ça suffit, non?"

At midnight the boulangerie next door fell to with a passion. The energetic bakers slapped, pounded, and ploughed their dough. "Christ!" Olney yelled, sitting bolt upright at one a.m. one night, "what's the quota? Five thousand pains before dawn?" Then at four the mouthwatering aroma of baking bread would act like succubi on their stomachs, often waking and driving them, hyenalike, to devour the remaining scraps of the night's smuggled dinner. "No wonder the Whistler is haunted by food," said O. on the first occasion, as he gnawed on a fragile breast of cold roast chicken.

Every day, as they were getting ready to leave, the chambermaid stationed herself just outside their door, busily sweeping the already clean corridor. Olney had forbidden her entrance to the room. Was she then spying through the keyhole? Had the ill-made propriétaire slipped her a few extra centimes to get the goods on the foreign drogués?

She was a bony woman in her late thirties. The patron called her Madelaine, which caused Olney to scoff: no "Madelaine" in his fevered fantasies had never looked that scrawny as she slipped onto his strutting cock. "By the looks of her," he whispered to Maggie one leave-taking morning, "she hasn't been porked in years." He contrived to give her a peep show by bending Maggie over the bed and entering her coarsely from the rear, in line with the door's keyhole. Maggie refused, of course. "Compassionless wench!" he cried, his lewd zizi dangling in air.

They visited Les Dutronc every couple of days in hopes a departure date would tumble from the ample lips of Subji, but the apartment only seemed more chaotic. Gaston had gone to Lille on assignment. A leading magazine was doing a feature article on the opening of a new industrial complex. "He is photoing the legs of beautiful factory girls, si tu me demande," assessed Madame Dutronc. The dinner invitation was never repeated, to everyone's relief.

The Dutroncs children, two girls aged eleven and eight, were stunning little creatures. Olney trembled before the eldest, Kalima, whose large almond eyes were several shades darker than her butterscotch skin. She was courtesan material and surely the moguls and rajahs of old would have given her a prominent place in their chambers of silk. The youngest, Mirabai, was a butterball of cuteness who moved in her sister's sensual, calculating shadow.

At eleven, Kalima already showed signs of being a world-class dominatrice. The sultans better get her soon, thought Olney, before she grows up to destroy them. She was spoiled rotten and her temper was vile. She would have her way and anyone who interfered was levelled by a wrath befitting her namesake, Kali, the goddess who ate offenders for lunch. Her loud, shrill voice silenced her sister, intimidated her mother, and forced Gaston to treat her as an equal.

Olney wanted to help. If only he had introduced himself as an eminent doctor or a world-famous acupuncturist. He could then have examined her body at length, poking here and there for release points to ease the poor thing's aggression. Maybe he would do this anyway.

Kali and Baibai, as they were called, ran rampant through the apartment, playing gagnez la montagne over the heaps of clothes and pre-voyage debris that erupted everywhere. During one visit, Kali begged Olney to play with her. "Joue avec moi, Olney. S'il te plait, Olney." She held her hands out, telling him she wanted to run up his legs and backflip. "J'veux pas," he said weakly, trying to put her off. "Olney-y-y, s'il te plait, s'il te plait." Kali would have her way. After the twentieth backflip, Maggie grew alarmed. Her intuition for danger had been alerted when she noticed Olney going rigid each time Kali pushed off his legs, the rotating cascade of her white panties captured by his fixed, glazed eyes. But the gradual closing of distance between the little girl's sock-clad foot and the advancing, avuncular bulge on his thigh called for action. She grabbed him by the arm. "We gotta go now," she said to the ever-distracted mother. "See you in a couple of days." "Non!" wailed Kali, stamping her feet. "On joue encore. Olney, viens, Olney. Maggie, t'es bébête!"

"Ouais," Olney said as they went out the door, "c'est elle."

In the elevator, Maggie punched his arm: "Olney, you've got to curb that kind of extracurr'cular activity or someone's gonna lock you up."

"What'd I do? L'ilgirlwandaplay'sall."

"Stop mumbling. You look flushed. Is your blood pressure up? You're no spring chicken, y'know."

"My blood pressure's the best in town. Leave me alone." They were stepping briskly down the Rue de Foutre now, destination unknown.

"And just who is this Fredareek, anyway," she asked, reaching back to a moot point. "You never told me about her."

"Frédérique? Freddie is Gaston's sister."

"I know that, dummkopf."

"Frédérique is the wife of Xavier Boudin."

"I know that too. So how come she loves you so much?"

"Because . . . because . . . I dunno. Because I was a foreigner and a tad cinglé to boot. She was blown away by my life style."

"Do you mean 'single'? A hot bachelor on the loose?

"Cinglé means screwy, cracked, nutty."

"Uh-huh. Well, did you 'singlay' with her?"

"Pootie," Olney said, stressing the second syllable with gentle impatience. "I met the Boudins, along with Théophile and Loulou--I've told you about them--in the Beaujolais a few years ago."

Maggie screamed; well, they were in public, so it was a tiny little scream. "I can't stand it. All these impossible French words and names. You never told me about Whoozitsfeel and Lulu. Do they love you too? And what about 'Ex-savior?' Is he your lover as well?" She stressed no syllables in particular with sibilant pique.

"Hey, what's got into you? These people are a kind of family to me. I'll admit things got a bit inces--"

"Don't say it. Don't tell me, after all. Oh, Olney, I'm scared. Paris is too much for me. I never know what anybody's saying."

"What do you mean? Subji and Gaston speak to us in English all the time."

"But no one else does. I can't even say 'bonjour' any more because it's practically the only word I know, and everyone knows it. I feel stupid with my limited vocabulary. I feel vulnerable too, Olney, and . . . we really don't have enough money. That scares me more than anything."

"When is there ever enough money?"

She groaned. "I knew you'd understand."

"I try my best."

"Well, I don't know what we're going to do for it. And you, you're your usual haywire psychopathic self. Trying to get lynched with that little girl."

"'You-you're-your?'"

"Don't make fun of me. And stop looking at other women and playing pervert with little girls, y'big sex maniac." She suddenly burst into tears. "Olney. I'm really scared. Please don't make things so difficult. Watch yourself. I couldn't live without you." Wait a minute, did she really mean that?

"Pootita-mia, I couldn't live without you either." Did he? She stopped and threw her arms around him. On second thought, he added: "Well, I suppose I could, but--"

"Don't ruin it."

"I mean, simply as a pure abstraction, you'll have to admit we could both live without each other. The trouble is, if we did, the bottom would fall out of my life."

"But I don't want to be at the bottom of your life."

"No, no, I mean that without you . . . acting as a sort of . . . I mean, you're kind of like the plug that keeps my life from bottoming out."

"Are you saying I'm the plug in your life as a tub?" A mounting hysteria notwithstanding, her boots, so made for stamping, strongly rapped the pavement as she too was unable to resist the further clarification of farce. "Olney Garkle, you're the worst man I've ever known. Take me back to the Doyle and make love to me. Don't you understand, I'm scared to death." She burst anew into the tears so often anointing her cheeks in gay Paree.

At the hotel, they collected the key from the propriétaire's wife, who stared at them with the clinical paranoia of an American intelligence agent. They climbed the stairs to their big fifteenth arrondissement room. As they fell into bed, the touching sounds of human existence--ordinary and banal--greeted them from the courtyard. Comforted by the company of their kind, Olney and Maggie made love through the waning of the day.

§§§

Chapter 10: Edith and Olney

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