In the Night Room

cherished cliches. Bro, on the other hand, came from some other planet. Where the part about getting straight with God came from was no mystery.

“This girl seems to have had a tremendous effect on you,” I said.

“Why China’s willing to marry a dull old fogy like me I’ll never know, but I guess she saw something in me! And of course she pulled me out of the worst year I’ve ever had. After you went back to New York, I more or less fell apart. It was terrible. Nancy and Mark both gone. My life, wow, it was a smoking ruin. I reacted so badly to everything, I made the situation worse. I don’t know if you picked up on this, but I was very, very angry at Nancy.”

“That would have been hard to miss,” I told him.

“I’m sorry for the way I must have acted. I can hardly remember any of that time now. It was so dark! Was I awful to be with? I’m sure I was. Please, if you can, forgive me for being such a selfish pig.”

He had so astonished me that I hardly knew how to reply. All sorts of internal calibrations had to happen before words that seemed at least reasonably suited to the situation came to me. “Philip, you don’t need my forgiveness, but I find it very moving that you should ask for it. Of course I forgive you, if that’s what you want.”

“Thank you,” he said. “Now say hello to China. Here she is.”

Immediately, a warm alto voice seemed to fill the receiver. “Tim, is that really you? It’s such a pleasure to talk to you! And we’re both so happy that you’ll come to our wedding.”

“Well, I wouldn’t miss it,” I said.

“All your brother needed was for someone to look past the lobster act and find the real person in there,” she continued.

In the background, I could hear Philip shouting, “Hell, I hardly knew I was a real person!”

To which I can only reply, Hell, I hardly knew you were, either. For years and years I’ve been kind of going on faith that something like “a real person” was lurking under Philip’s terrible persona, but that faith had been eroded almost to the point of disappearance. If this China Beech can unearth the happier, more sensitive man I hoped lived within my brother, I’ve been misjudging her ever since the first time I heard her name.

Now to get to the other topic, the one I’ve been avoiding.

I fear I’m on the verge of letting the crazy events in my life leak into my fiction. Jasper Kohle, my sister, Cyrax . . . if I put this stuff into the book no one on earth is going to think it comes straight out of my life; the real challenge is to make it fit in with the material already present. Surely there would be some way to insert WCHWHLLDN and little Alice in Wonderland into my girl’s adventures, especially once she hits the road. Maybe that’s what I’m supposed to do!—feed the whole mishmash of e-mail from dead people, along with a pissed-off angel, pissed-off Jasper Kohle (the Dark Man?), and Cyrax into this flight-from-Bluebeard narrative. It wouldn’t be the book I set out to write, but I’ve begun to lose faith in that book anyhow.

When I look again at the chapter I finished last week, its information seems to come out in too great a rush —within a space of fifteen pages, two separate kinds of treachery are revealed. We have to get this information, it sets up her flight from the villain & her discovery of the truth behind what she imagines to have been her life, but I have the unhappy feeling that the download time is too fast here. The fault may lie in the presentation, which consists nearly 100% of conversation. How far can I push the conventions that automatically come into play when you have two people talking alone in a room? That is, how much of the scene has to be about them, and how much of it can it be stretched out to accommodate the information they bring into that room? Drag in too much exterior stuff, and you’ve got a soap opera on your hands.

Or maybe it’s just that the scene is inert, and I’ll have to go back and write the whole thing out in chronological order. The storm, the photos, the bank, the return to the house, the lost hours, and the arrival at the hotel. Then the conversation with Tom—but if we’ve already seen what our heroine has been through, why have the scene at all? The whole point of getting Tom into the hotel room was to set him up for the scene that comes immediately after this one. And there I thought I got things right, for a change.

The elements seemed to fall together in a way that created a lot of emotion, as well as tension, if I say so myself. We’ve established the love between Willy and Tom (and, in fact, for some reason I found myself noticing a little sexual attraction between them, a kind of spark that surprises the two of them only a little more than it surprised me), which I think adds something to Tom in our eyes, so that we are swayed by his opinions—or at least want his view of things to be accurate. Tom is generous, loving, attentive, he has a sense of humor, and—most important of all—he’s slightly skeptical when Willy goes into one of her rants about Mitchell.

At the same time, the possibility that Giles might have tracked her to the hotel quietly speeds up the pace while Willy and Tom wind up deciding to relocate to the hotel Tom had mentioned the previous night, the Mayflower, on Central Park West.

Another bit of unresolved business also keeps the scene taut—along with Willy, we’re wondering what this dire thing is that Tom says he has to tell Willy. It must be important, it must even be crucial, but Tom clearly feels that his message, to call it that, will have an unhappy effect on Willy, and he’s waiting for the proper moment. Tom was even hoping she had forgotten about this thing he wanted to say to her, but no such luck; at some level she’s wondering about this matter throughout their morning together, and therefore our reader wonders, too. What in the world is Tom being so cautious about telling Willy?

And I have to say that I am pleased with the way the sexual tension, also completely unresolved, plays through the scene. At first we think, Okay, they’re handling it very well, especially since it can’t really go anywhere. Anyhow, this hardly seems like the optimum moment for the kind of sexual exploration that would necessarily have to go on. But, aha, Willy is too wound up to fall asleep. She’s anxious and frightened, and she is quite aware that her pal Tom is only faking sleep, and, what’s worse, doing it for her sake. And how can she know that he is also having hours of time subtracted from his life unless she and Tom are more or less holding hands?

So they reach out and grasp each other’s hand, which immediately feels like a tremendous, almost shocking intimacy. And although Willy soon tells Tom that she is so frightened that she would like him to put his arms around her, if he wouldn’t object too much, that is, and Tom replies, “Oh, sweetie, no problem,” and slides across to meet her in the middle of the bed and folds her into his arms so that her lovely head weighs lightly on his chest, the moment when their hands first touched so greatly retains its startling erotic power that this greater, in fact far more intimate, contact seems merely an extension of that first moment of touching. They are both in their underwear, and cannot but be intensely conscious of each other’s body. Tom feels that his primary duty is to keep his beloved friend warm, for he believes that warmth will calm her fears, and he circles her small torso with his arms, her slim, straight left leg brushing his thicker, more solid right. From Tom’s body, which indeed is warm, Willy absorbs peace, comfort, quietude; the slow, measured quality of his breathing, the sweet rise and fall of his chest bring her a degree of relaxation indistinguishable from a slow, spreading, involuntary physical pleasure. What she had needed all along, it came to her, was not a sexual dynamo like Mitchell but someone capable of giving her what Tom Hartland was so wholeheartedly supplying right now: a purring sensation, a feeling of slow, gentle, rhythmic humming that begins in the pit of her stomach and radiates out in all directions, delivering little blessings wherever it goes.

(I have to go back and insert some of this. It belongs in the book, not my journal.)

Anyhow, after all of that, Tom’s murder in the next chapter should come as a real shock.

The reader should be anticipating some trouble at the Mayflower, I’m still not quite sure what, but I think it could begin with Monday morning and their exit from the new hotel. Tom H. is still present, of course. He wants to do everything he can to help Willy through what strikes him as a great, paranoid confusion, and if that involves shifting her from hotel to hotel, so be it, he’ll shift with her and hold her hand. Along the way he’ll do his damnedest to talk her into getting help.

They take the stairs, I think, although Tom says she’s being absurdly overcautious.

They make their way down to the lobby, carrying their bags (Willy’s bags), Willy starting at every noise and clutching Tom’s arm whenever a door opens or closes elsewhere on the staircase. When they reach the bottom, they patrol through the lobby and turn the corner to the cafe. Willy abruptly comes to a stop, grabs his arm, and nods her head back toward the lobby, where an arm encased in a plaster cast and a wide, straight back that could well belong to Roman Richard Spilka is vanishing through an arch.

So the first thing Tom does is walk her to the back of the cafe and through the service doors into the kitchen.