The Third Hotel Read online

  After another visit to the Malecón and Plaza de la Revolución and Parque Central, where the luxury hotel was rising, she broke for a coffee on Avenida Lamparilla. She was sitting outside, in a wagon wheel of shade, when she saw Arlo on the sidewalk. He was carrying a rectangular cardboard box, the kind that might contain a small cake. She called his name and waved, inviting him to join her.

  What’s in the box? she asked.

  Nothing exciting. He sat down and slid the box under his chair, out of sight. I’m on an errand for the festival.

  A waiter came by and Arlo ordered a beer. His badge was tucked under his T-shirt, but she could see the plastic square pressing against the cotton and the black lanyard curving around his neck.

  I’ve noticed you’re left-handed, he said.

  He picked up a spoon and tapped her lightly on the back of her hand.

  My father says that if you’re left-handed it’s because once another infant lived in the womb with you, but you absorbed your twin and during that process everything about you became inverted. My father calls left-handed people twin-eaters. He says he wishes I had thought to absorb my sister when we were still in the womb.

  They were seated across from a building with a mural of a woman’s face, her hair a violet rope. A window opened, making a hollow space in the side of her head. Nearby a small white dog was curled tight under a streetlight, sleeping off the heat, the fur under its eyes stained copper.

  What are you writing? He nodded toward the open guidebook, the uncapped pen. When she told him she was writing about Yuniel Mata’s film, Arlo snorted.

  Horror claims to scare audiences, he said, when in fact it does just the opposite.

  I scare easy then, Clare said. She shivered every time she thought of Yuniel Mata’s eels.

  Arlo went on to say that people entered into a horror film expecting to be unsettled, which made a true unsettling near impossible, as a true unsettling could not be seen coming. The screaming was only pleasurable because the audience knew the terror had an end. Their fear was a commodity—fake and disposable. These qualities were, of course, what made the genre so profitable.

  Clare supposed this perspective shouldn’t come as a surprise given that Arlo was a documentarian. Her husband had once written that the ideal film existed between consciousness and unconsciousness, and it seemed to her that this was the true terrain of horror—it was the genre of the liminal, the in-between. She pointed out that any image could be manipulated, and that perhaps horror was just a very specific kind of manipulation, and Arlo replied that to film was to manipulate, the two acts could not be separated. There was nothing neutral about the lens, but the director’s aim should be to thin the membrane between the world of the viewer and the world of the screen. He quoted a Russian critic on the “shock of veracity” and said that he had no interest in seeing a film set in, say, the countryside if he did not leave the theater feeling as though he could taste the dirt on his skin. Horror, he continued, had the opposite goal. To bathe the reader in blood until they felt safe, to thicken the membrane.

  Documentary, on the other hand, Arlo said, documentary is the genre of persuasion.

  Now you have plans for a documentary on light fixtures or a documentary on suicides, Clare said. Which one is it?

  Who says the two subjects are unrelated?

  I don’t see the connection myself, Clare said. Maybe you could explain?

  Arlo replied that if the relationship between the two could be explained in a café then he would not need to make a film.

  Americans like straight answers, Clare said, intending to make a joke of her national character. We like simple stories.

  Her own vast and incurious country often felt alien to her, with its unimaginative pledges and toxic patriotism, its aversion to discomfort and complex thought (the death of her brother-in-law alone had been enough to instill in her a hatred of truisms—what was so impossible about saying, Right now our lives are fucked up and we don’t know exactly when things will get better?), its desire to be recognized as a beacon of justice without ever actually acting like one. At the same time, America was the only country she had ever lived in, and she understood it could be disingenuous, perhaps even dangerous, to allow herself to feel superior to the thing she had always lived inside, the thing that had made her.

  A Spanish family settled in next to them. The mother fanned herself with a menu, surrounded by three hot and uninterested teenage boys—all several heads taller than she.

  Where are you from in America? he said next. I never asked.

  Already she had told people she was from New York and was met with disappointment when they realized she meant upstate and not the City. When she tried Florida, she was met with disappointment when they realized she meant North Florida and that she knew little of Miami. This time, she did not hesitate.

  I’m from Nebraska.

  And what is Nebraska like?

  You want me to describe Nebraska?

  Yes, he said. Tell me a simple story about Nebraska.

  She had never been asked to describe Nebraska before, and now that the occasion had arrived she felt ill-equipped. Her travel schedule had been like a migratory pattern, a loop of hotels and airports and offices, little room for unmediated contact. She had met plenty of people who lived in Nebraska, but their conversations rarely strayed from elevators. She could, however, describe in vivid detail the smell of a certain hotel carpet in Lincoln. In Illinois, a strip of highway that she called World’s Largest: you’d pass signs for the world’s largest golf tee and wind chime and rocking chair. In a pinch, she had used credit cards and shoe heels to scrape ice off windshields. She had an internalized ranking of airport restaurants and bars. She knew the transient circuits of these places with intimacy, and even when these circuits were interrupted by weather or mechanical problems or a missing flight crew or a bomb threat, she knew the contingency plans. What lay outside those circuits, however, was a foreign land.

  A different America, she had told Richard many times over.

  Yet she had never investigated; her own country’s incuriosity had infected her.

  Arlo’s beer arrived. He took a drink.

  Well? he said.

  She began with the cornfields. The movement of the corn in the wind could be as beautiful as anything else on this earth. There were sunflower and wheat fields too. Silver grain silos dotted some of these fields like oversize bullets. Sorrel horses with rumps pressed against rounds of hay. There were prairies and dunes, depending on which part of the state you were in. She found the cities hunched and gray. The winters were very cold.

  I’ll pass, said Arlo.

  She picked up her coffee.

  I love Nebraska. It’s a beautiful place.

  If Nebraska is so beautiful, Arlo said, then what are you still doing here?

  The ceramic handle went hot on her skin. She put her coffee back down so quickly the cup rattled, nearly tipped.

  In the days after she abandoned her flight, she had considered the absence of her body on the plane, the absence of her face pressed to the window and her stampeding mind thinking desperate thoughts about the pilot’s intentions. The absence of the life where she did not break the circle, where she defied gravity and turned away.

  My husband is here, she said.

  Saying the words aloud made her feel like her head had been lifted clean from her body.

  Arlo leaned forward, eyebrows raised, like she had just uttered something mildly obscene. He made a steeple with his hands. Your husband is where?

  She told him that Richard was here, in Havana, and that she knew this was the first time she’d ever mentioned her husband, mentioned being married at all, and that she must sound very strange right now. Arlo turned his beer on the table. He started to say something but stopped short. A pause was a gap; too many in a conversation and the gap would widen into a canyon. Perhaps he thought she was playing another game, like the one where she had pretended to be a woman named Liesel.


  He finished his beer. He picked up the box and rose from his chair. He held it gingerly, with flat palms. Clare felt certain something delicate or dangerous sat inside. He stepped out of the wagon wheel of shade, a safe distance away. He looked her up and down and told her to not take what he was about to say next the wrong way. Or be offended. What did he care. But, if she was serious about her husband, she might want to consider a dress.

  * * *

  The following morning Clare took a long, cool bath. The tub was short and she kept her legs bent. She stared down at the small pouch of belly, the tangle between her thighs. Sometimes she liked to pet that dark tangle and imagine she was alive at a different moment in history. She shaved her legs and underarms. She followed Arlo’s advice and zipped herself into the only dress she packed, a yellow eyelet sundress with cap sleeves. The hemline fell midcalf, a small mercy, for she’d always believed herself to have ugly knees—plus thick wrists and a fat purple vein that bulged around her left anklebone; sometimes she thought it looked like it was going to break through the skin. She scrubbed the dirt lines from her fingernails. She rubbed lotion into her cheeks.

  In Plaza de Armas, she bought The Collected Poems of Hart Crane. She walked back into Vedado and then followed Linea all the way to the art factory, teeming at night and shuttered during the day, the entire block quiet.

  She stepped slowly across the river. She did not feel quite like herself.

  In Miramar, she went straight to the café, the small sea of midnight-blue umbrellas. Richard was there, reading the newspaper. She took note of the items arranged on the table: the silver pitcher of cream, the blue sugar bowl, the discarded sections of the paper. No detail could go unnoticed, even if he did not yet notice her, did not so much as glance up when she appeared on the patio in her eyelet dress, her fingernails clean, her cheeks fiery with lotion and sweat.

  She sat at the table next to him, in a bamboo chair. She opened the book. She read a line about the fabulous shadow the sea keeps and found the notion exquisite, the shadow the sea keeps, and wondered if she should start reading more poetry.

  A waiter came by, and she ordered a café con leche and a flan. On the opposite side of the patio, two women were arguing in French. Clare was not close enough to make out the particulars. They were facing each other, long, bronzed legs sticking out like spears. One woman smacked the table and a little dish fell, casting white splinters across the tile. The suited man with the flaxseed mustache stepped onto the patio, a newspaper tucked under his arm, and selected a table near the arguing women. Up close she could see his thin, downturned mouth; he had her father’s high forehead.

  The waiter returned. She put the book down. The coffee burned her tongue. The flan slipped down her throat like a sweet slug. She read a poem about a quick blue sky and a woman who dreams up a tree. Clare had no idea what the poem meant, but she could not release the image of a woman in a barren field, a tree sprouting up before her. The tree looked real, but was it? If she could climb it, was it real? If she plucked the leaves from the branches, was it real? What was the right test?

  Perhaps it was the arguing women who drew her husband’s gaze away from the newspaper, allowing the weight of it to rest like a bird on her shoulder. Clare did not move when she felt him looking. Every sound was amplified, but in Havana she could give nothing away. She told herself a killer had injected her with a paralytic drug and now she could not move so much as an inch.

  She turned a page, to a line that compared love to a burnt match skating in a urinal. The words merged into a dark mass and hovered before her like a swarm of flies.

  Hart Crane was born in Ohio. He committed suicide in the Gulf of Mexico. His father had invented Life Savers candy and how was that for irony.

  The waiter nudged along violet-throated pigeons with a broom. She turned to face Richard, using the book to shield the sun from her eyes.

  She could see the car hurtling toward him, the hot white ocean of light.

  You are dead, she thought. How could you have forgotten?

  She had heard of the syndrome that drove people to believe loved ones had been replaced by fakes, but perhaps an inversion existed, one in which the fake was mistaken for the real, and she was afflicted. Yet there was the faint dappling of freckles on his eyelids and the pale comma of a scar above his eyebrow, acquired in a childhood biking accident with his brother, back when they were both blind to their own destinies. The scar was lighter, and she had to admit there was something slightly different about his nose, or perhaps where his nose stood in relation to his face, as though incredibly subtle plastic surgery had been performed. Such changes might be enough to throw off an acquaintance—who would be relieved to confirm that the man who looked like Richard was in fact not, given that Richard was dead—but she would not be so easily fooled.

  On the patio, she sweated heavily under the eyelet dress. Hello sounded between her ears, she could feel the word rising up toward her mouth like a balloon into the sky, only to snag on the wet flesh of her throat.

  He squinted, as though he was trying to bring her into focus. The delicate whorls of hair on his chest had been lightened by the sun. In their former life, she had started to notice two different versions of her husband dwelling inside the single body. Sometimes she saw the young man, bright and athletic, and then sometimes the older self of the future stepped forward—the whitening hair at his temples, the small hike in the waistline of his jeans. She’d imagined Richard trying to elbow these past and future ghosts away, to make space for the present tense. On the patio, she searched for evidence of the two selves warring inside her husband.

  The women had made up and were now leaving the café, arm in arm.

  Clare, he said. The sound of her own name coming from his dead mouth made her feel as though her feet had just been severed at the ankles. A flick of his tongue, a sheen on his upper lip. A familiar tick, something he did when he was about to speak and had a difficult piece to say.

  She readied herself. A long pause. A canyon.

  What, he finally said, are you doing in Havana?

  The dreaded question. At long last it was here.

  You, she did not tell him. You, you, you. Her tongue stayed still in her mouth. Her arms turned leaden, her fingertips numb: someone had sunk her hands into buckets of ice. She slithered from her chair, and when she was able to look at the world again, she was lying on the patio, the eyelet dress bunched around her thighs, exposing the ugliness of her knees. The waiter was crouched on one side, fanning her with a menu. Her husband was a speck in the corner of her eye. She blinked, her eyelashes laced with sunlight, and two specks appeared in her periphery, her husband and the suited man. She let the waiter help her up. She went straight into the bathroom and vomited, and when she came out, rank and wild-haired, the suited man had returned to his newspaper and Richard was gone.

  In this life, that was how their first meeting ended.

  In their former life, this was how their first meeting began.

  Clare was living in Chicago, working in a university library and trying to understand what she wanted to do with her life. She had been attracted to the geography of Illinois because its landlockedness seemed like the opposite of where she was from, though soon she learned that the shores of Lake Michigan could feel like the brink of an ocean. She had a roommate with a snapping turtle and mold allergies. The toilet was a hysteric, her room subarctic in the winter. Despite these shortcomings the space had felt luxuriantly secluded. At the Seahorse, her mother had tacked a sign that read PRIVATE! to the front door of the attached apartment, and guests still came knocking. Once Clare had been startled to find a couple peering into the living room window; when they saw she was inside, they began to rap frantically on the glass. She had felt like a fish in a bowl.

  To be at once loathed and needed—that was the position of the tourist. Clare had often felt needled by the presence of all these strangers, and yet even as a child she understood that the foundation of
her life was built on their arrival.

  In Florida, she had come to think of her mother’s personality as being built of surfaces. Whenever she tried to look more closely, she was blinded by reflections, and when a surface momentarily cracked, the view was often frightening. When Clare was a child, her mother would sometimes slink into her room in the middle of the night and crawl into her bed and weep, their spines pressed together, Clare silent, as though what was occurring was a secret neither of them dared acknowledge—was this what it meant to be an adult woman? In Chicago, she was twenty-five and the ice cube she had pressed against her heart in childhood was proving slow to thaw, and though she longed for such a thawing, the notion also frightened her: she would imagine the pulsing red organ in her chest, warm and exposed. In the meantime, the library was the perfect place to cultivate a second, secret self, with all those hours spent shelving books in silence. She had started to notice people almost exclusively in fragments. An arm under a desk, reaching for a fallen pencil. A back bent over a water fountain. A hand frozen under the amber beam of a lamp.

  * * *

  Away from Florida for the first time, she began to think about the education she had received on being a young woman. How she had been trained to believe that if you risked your body, that most precious commodity, it was only a matter of time before you were punished. No one ever told her this directly, but the instruction was folded into her mother’s admonishment to never walk alone at night and the dress code her otherwise lax father suddenly enforced when she went on a date: no shoulders, no belly, nothing short. As though she suddenly did not live in Florida, where the weather demanded skin. As though the presence of skin could drive the boy who was taking her to the movies in the direction of the unspeakable. The way her cut-off shorts and bikini top were blamed when a guest solicited her by the vending machines. He offered her a hundred dollars for five minutes. The slutty girls who died first in horror movies. The girl in her own high school who was raped during prom. The instruction was there in the whispered comments about the dress she had been wearing—the flimsy spaghetti straps, the hem that barely covered her crotch—and how much she’d had to drink.