The Third Hotel Read online

  The rapist had been a student at a different high school, all the way down in Orlando, which seemed to reassure the parents. The danger was always out there, humming along the borders of the night. The dangers closest to home were not even discussed in whispers.

  In her senior year of high school, she discovered chat rooms, salacious conversations with boys that went deep into the night, and then she began meeting those boys—who sometimes turned out to be men—in shopping center parking lots and in malls and in parks. She lied to her parents, said she was going to a study group or catching a movie with school friends. She never had sex with any of these boys or men. She kissed them. She dry humped. She blew one on a blazing Saturday afternoon, in the far reaches of a Kmart parking lot (back then parking lots were something of a destination). She went skinny-dipping with another, one night in Crescent Beach, and in the water he brushed her wet hair from her face, so very tenderly, and said, I wish I could rape you right now.

  Then he laughed and splashed. He was just joking.

  The glint of his teeth in the night. Hands like pale fish breaking through the waves. What kind of person do you think I am?

  She left these men sweating and frustrated, her own body unscathed. She returned home feeling triumphant. It was not so dangerous out there after all. She had risked her body and she had not been punished.

  In Chicago, she looked back on that younger version of herself and felt sick for her.

  She’d had no sense of the world, less a mark of innocence than a very particular form of stupidity. She’d had no sense of the terribleness any of those boys or men could have visited upon her, the terribleness for which she would have been utterly unprepared. She almost felt grateful to them for not doing what they could have.

  In her junior year of college, in North Florida, her boyfriend picked a fight at a house party and shoved her down a flight of stairs. She could remember the air turning to sludge as his face reddened and contorted into something both unrecognizable and terribly familiar. She would never forget the dumb shock as she watched his hands fly toward her and the way she’d just stood there, frozen as a startled deer. She limped back to her dorm room alone, her bottom lip fat and slick with blood, ribs pulsing. She dumped him immediately and avoided him for the rest of her time on campus—he avoided her just as studiously; perhaps he was ashamed. All that time, the danger had not been out there; it had been walking her to class, studying next to her in the coffee shop, sleeping in her bed.

  She’d wanted to go home to her parents and ask, Why didn’t anyone tell me?

  * * *

  In Chicago, Clare liked to use the blood pressure machine at the supermarket. Her blood pressure was normal; she didn’t know why she enjoyed the strangling cuff so much, but she found the process meditative. At the machine, she sat so still that a woman once stopped and said she’d nearly mistaken Clare for a mannequin. She would think of that moment again the first time she saw Killer’s Kiss with Richard, the scene in the mannequin factory where two men fight with axes, hacking naked female mannequins to pieces in the process. She developed ideas about secrecy as armor, an essential privacy. Richard might have fallen into silence in the last year of his life, but certain silences had been embedded in her long ago. So it was not that she’d wanted the second, secret self—it was just that she had never figured out another way to live.

  * * *

  One summer she began to notice a man, tall and honey-haired, following her around campus—or was he? He would trail her for a few blocks and then turn a corner. Had she made him up? One afternoon, though, it was unmistakable: this man was following her. He followed her to a nearby coffee shop and lurked by the door and stalked her back toward campus. She remembered sweat between her fingers and toes. The clouds above were a neat grid of white.

  When she finally spun around, ready to scream and toss hot coffee in his face if that’s what it took to get away, he raised his hands like he was being held up and said, I’m so sorry, I’m acting like a possessed person, I’ve seen you around the library and I have been wanting to say something to you, to say hello, and I couldn’t figure out a way to do it and so now I’ve gone and done it in the wrongest way possible.

  It was his smile, lopsided and shy, that transformed the encounter, turning her nervous and warm and charmed. On the sidewalk, she started to laugh. It was an utterly unexpected moment, the kind that made her life feel a little bit larger.

  His irises were a soft chocolate, and soon she would learn that the color could change depending on the light and her vantage. Hazel, goldish.

  This has got to be the worst pickup of all time, she said, laughing so hard she had to put her coffee cup down. Like epically, historically bad.

  Oh my god, he said, hands dropping to his sides. I know it is. I know.

  She was still laughing, almost on her knees with laughter.

  It turned out he was in Chicago for a film studies Ph.D. He walked her back to campus. He gave her his number. The rest took care of itself, he would say years later, when telling their story. There were three sides to a marriage: public and private and who-fucking-knows, one lived and one performed and one a thundering mystery. She learned about the performed side because when he told their story he always failed to mention his eventual confession to Clare: that he had felt terribly humiliated by her laughter, even though the way he approached her was plainly ridiculous, even though she had every right to laugh or scream, and he had almost hoped she didn’t call and was further humiliated by his elation when she did.

  What was it about men and humiliation? Clare had wondered after this admission and would keep wondering as she watched killer after killer respond to humiliation with masks and knives. Was humiliation supposed to be any easier for women to take? She didn’t think so, even though the world kept insisting they were built for it.

  At two in the afternoon, Clare walked south on a broad avenida in Miramar, past the embassies of France and the Netherlands, mansions with tall gates and green hedges and windswept palms. The ocean was a blue lip to her left, close enough for her to hear the comings and goings of the tide. She had read that, all the way back in the 1900s, little rooms were carved into the walls of the Malecón, so visitors could bathe in the sea and remain cloaked in privacy, a fact that had called to mind the hotels in Florida that had laid claim to portions of public beaches, the particular luxury of being public and private, seen and hidden, at the same time. She passed a slumping hotel with a sun-bleached exterior and tiny, concrete balconies. On one of these balconies, a shirtless man smoked a cigarette, ashing onto the roof of the white Lada idling in the driveway, a yellow taxi sign nestled in the back window. She was in pursuit of the hospital, armed with her binoculars and her guidebook filled with notations. The structure was yellow and white, with a circular concrete overhang shading the front steps; tall windows stared out at a Cuban flag snapping in the breeze. She smelled smoke: a cigarette had been left burning in the gravel pool of a standing ashtray, the smoker long gone.

  In the soaring lobby, with fluorescent lights glaring down from the ceiling and hard brown chairs drilled into the floors, she found intake staffed by a single nurse in scrubs, reading glasses sitting atop her head like a crown. Clare took out her phone and scrolled through her photos. Here was Richard sitting across from her at a restaurant. Here was Richard at Grafton Lakes, standing on a rock. Had she seen him?

  The nurse was reading a magazine, though perhaps reading wasn’t quite the right word for what she was doing: with a black marker, she was circling faces, one or two on every page. She drew the circles studiously. She did not look up at Clare; perhaps her Spanish had not been accurate. Behind them an older woman with a white streak in her hair was pushing a boy around in a wheelchair. The boy had a tan patch over his eye, and if the wheelchair stopped for even a moment, he would unleash a cataclysmic scream.

  Finally the nurse looked at the photo of Richard at Grafton Lakes. She leaned forward and touched the image, zooming
in. She scratched her temple with the felt tip of the marker, leaving behind a smudge.

  Maybe, she said.

  That’s good news, Clare said. Do you know where I can find him?

  The nurse shook her head and returned to her circling.

  What are you doing with those faces? Clare asked.

  The nurse’s eyes snapped up. Now she was interested.

  I’m making my perfect face, she said. I’m building it from scratch.

  * * *

  When the detectives had asked Clare to describe her marriage, she had said that she and Richard were happy, though the truth was that she did not think of her marriage as having been happy or unhappy—she thought of it as unfinished. They had dated for two years and then married on a lark. This experiment in living had given way to a decade of feet brushing together in bed and bloodied dental floss in the trash and coffee mugs left in the sink and fucking spontaneously at dawn and then not fucking for a month and the pinch pot on the kitchen counter where they abandoned spare change, their joke about how every marriage needed a tip jar. Of following each other up and down stairwells and through parking lots and doorways and shoes crooked in the hallway and damp bath towels on the bedroom floor and hair on pillowcases and food poisoning in the middle of the night and stirring a saucepan on the stove while saying Why Must You Live the Way You Do? or I Would Be Like a Little Boat Cut Loose in a Storm Without You. She knew him as well as she had ever known any other person on earth. She knew all. She knew nothing. Her position depended on the hour or the year or the minute. When he ate green apples, his lips tingled. When distressed, he cleaned with a fervor she found frightening. When things were not going well, and for the last year they had not been going well, all the surfaces were blinding and the condo smelled of bleach; she could even taste the chemicals in their food. The last time she had a fever he lay beside her and dabbed her face with a soaked washcloth, delivering a spectacular cool. He pointed at the items on restaurant menus when he ordered. Once he noticed a man gawking at her on the street and said, A thing of beauty is to be admired, and she thought but did not say, I’m not a thing, I’m a person. At his college graduation, he lit a cigar as he crossed the stage; having never smoked a cigar before, he vomited in the bushes immediately after. He loved sunrises and Hitchcock and winter walks and licorice candy. She could go on into infinity, and yet she understood that knowing another person was not a stable condition. Knowing was kinetic, ineffable, and it had limits, but the precise location of those limits, the moment at which the knowing stopped and the not-knowing began, was invisible. You would know you had reached the border only after you had surpassed it.

  * * *

  She knew that sometimes her husband talked in his sleep. He would sit up, arms extended. He would stroke one forearm and then another, as though he were washing himself, and say, I’m almost clean, I’m almost clean. Why did she not ever shake his shoulder until he was freed from the landscape of sleep and ask, What is it? What are you talking about? What are you trying to get clean?

  Because she had believed in privacy, that most essential armor, and what could be more private than a dream.

  * * *

  Also: she was suspicious of too much honesty, too much openness. She thought couples who claimed to have not a single secret between them sounded deranged. Honesty was trotted out in the name of all kinds of awful things, including cruelty—too much of it could splinter a person.

  * * *

  Outside the hospital, she noticed two blue ETECSA public phones bolted into the concrete wall, surrounded by a scattering of flyers. Beneath advertisements for concerts she found a flyer with a photo of a woman in a tweed suit—unsmiling, round glasses, hair in a lacquered bun—who was offering a seminar at the university with a title that Clare understood to mean something along the lines of: quantum physics and the afterlife. The next session was to take place tomorrow afternoon. She took a photo of the address and the time.

  At the university, Clare found the woman from the flyer in a windowless classroom, standing at a chalkboard and scratching out a formula. From behind she recognized the tweed skirtsuit, the snug bun. The professor wore stockings, despite the heat, and black pumps. When Clare greeted her in Spanish, she dropped the chalk and whipped around, her palms a ghoulish white. She dusted her hands on her skirt, making a little cloud, and said, in English, I haven’t had a student attend this seminar in months. How on earth did you find me?

  Clare attempted to explain the flyer. The woman announced herself as Professor Berezniak. She stepped through the cloud of dust, straightened her glasses, and ordered Clare to never speak her terrible Spanish in front of her again; anything less than perfection with respect to the Spanish language was an affront to her ear.

  Clare looked at the tornado of equations on the blackboard; she didn’t see how they could make sense to anyone. She asked the professor why she kept holding the seminar if nobody ever comes, and the professor replied that the seminar was a kind of community service, and so while everyone thought she was serving the interests of the community, she was in fact serving the interests of herself.

  Former students have found my teaching methods strange and, in some instances, psychologically disturbing, said the professor. Or so I’ve been told.

  I’m already strange, Clare thought, and for all she knew psychologically disturbed too. She had the distinct feeling that Professor Berezniak wished she would conclude this seminar held no interest for her after all and vanish from the afternoon.

  Finally the professor sighed and said, Shall we go to my office?

  Clare followed her down the hallway to a door so narrow it had to have once belonged to a broom closet. The office was barely large enough for a little round table and two maroon butterfly chairs; it was lit by a lamp with a stained-glass shade. Every inch of wall had been converted into built-in bookshelves. A vintage cuckoo clock announced itself: a miniature door opened, a yellow bird with a red beak pecked the air.

  Professor Berezniak said the government had instructed the university to limit air-conditioning use to one hour a day, even in the summer, perhaps in the hope that the heat would root out disloyal academics and sweat them to death.

  People tell me I shouldn’t talk like this, she continued. But the time has come, I say. The time has come.

  Professor Berezniak removed her suit jacket and then her blouse. She did this with great deliberateness, one pearl button at a time, and when she was finished she draped the jacket and blouse over the back of her chair. Underneath she was wearing a white bra with heavy cups and straps. She sat down, flesh crinkling under her rib cage.

  I abhor wrinkles, Professor Berezniak said.

  Clare sat across from the professor, the library coiling around them.

  Well, then? Her tone made it clear that Clare was expected to supply the curriculum. The table between them held a collection of mugs with chipped rims and handles, the bottoms stained black by coffee grounds.

  The afterlife, Clare began, then paused. This was not a simple conversation to initiate.

  Where is the where? she said next.

  The what?

  The where.

  Is that a scientific term?

  Tolstoy.

  Ah, yes. Tolstoy. Anarchist. Spied on by the Russian secret police. Died in the very same station where he forced poor Anna Karenina in front of that train.

  Professor Berezniak spoke of Anna Karenina as though she had been a real person. Her stockings looked ancient; they sagged around her ankles and knees.

  A number of years ago there was a study, she said. A study of people who had been blind from birth and who, after near-death experiences, talked about all the things they had been able to see. Light, the entirety of the ocean, long-dead ancestors, the history of rocks and insects, their own bodies lying below them, devoid of life.

  Clare nodded, expecting her to go on, but she did not.

  Well, Clare said. I guess I’m not sure what that proves.
r />   Basic biocentrism! Already the professor was impatient. Perhaps she had not interacted with students in some time.

  Look, she continued, all possibilities in the universe are happening simultaneously, but because we, as human beings, are so limited, so very limited, our consciousness collapses all of these possibilities into a single one, which is called our life.

  Clare asked if this meant multiple versions of ourselves existed in different places at the same time, imagining a dozen doppelgänger Richards roaming different cities, each indistinguishable from the Richard she had known, the Richard who was no longer alive.

  Incorrect! Professor Berezniak said, plucking a tiny ball of lint from her skirt. We have to apply limits on time in order for our brains to make sense of such a concept. Death is one such limit.

  Richard had left behind no wishes in the event of his death. At the funeral home, the director had gone over the details of how his body would be prepared for burial: the body would be bathed; his fluids surgically removed; the embalming solution injected into the carotid artery; the body bathed a second time. His service had been held in a church they had never stepped inside, a homily delivered by a priest they had never met—his mother had insisted on this—a priest who told Clare that she should be grateful to God for her pain, because her pain was a sign of her love, and this had left her wanting to spit on the altar.

  Months ago, her father had made his wishes clear: cremation, ashes to be scattered in the California town of his birth, far away from Florida.

  Pulling a loose thread from the bottom of her skirt, Professor Berezniak went on to say that her mother was Cuban, her father Russian—she herself had spent three years studying physics in Moscow, when she was a young woman. The cold of a Russian winter, she hoped to never feel anything like it again. She had one older brother, who never left Cuba.