The Hotel New Hampshire

her madness—yelled out, “That’s a bear in heat!”

“That’s a bear that wants you,” I said to Chipper Dove.

When Dove looked at the bear again, he saw that Franny had her hand on Susie exactly where a bear’s private parts would be. Franny was rubbing the bear there, and Susie the bear got suddenly playful; she lolled her head around, she made the most disgusting noises. The West Village Workshop had simply worked wonders with Susie the bear; she’d been a smart bear before, but now she was a bear to be reckoned with.

“That bear’s so horny,” Ruthie said, “she’d even fuck me.”

“Hey, look,” said Chipper Dove. He was holding fast to the illusion that I was the only one among them who was sane. That was how he was reading it, now; I was his last hope. We had him right where Lilly wanted him when Scurvy, the maid, knocked on the door. I slung the barbell aside as if it weighed nothing at all. I yanked the door open so hard that Scurvy flew into the room in greater confusion and disarray than had marked Chipper Dove’s entrance. Susie the bear growled—not liking too much sudden movement—and the terrified maid stared up at me.

“It says DO NOT DISTURB, you moron!” I yelled at her. I pulled her to her feet and tore open the front of her little maid’s costume. She started to get hysterical right away. I held her upside down and shook her. Frank howled with delight.

“Black panties, black panties!” Frank shrieked on the bouncing bed.

“You’re fired,” I told the sniveling maid. “You don’t come in when the sign says DO NOT DISTURB. If you can’t learn that, you moron,” I told her, “then you’re fired.” I passed her, still holding her upside down, to Ruthie. Ruthie and Scurvy had been practicing this routine together all year, Susie had told me. It was a kind of apache dance. It was a kind of woman-raping-another-woman dance. Ruthie simply proceeded to maul Scurvy right there in front of Chipper Dove.

“I don’t care if you do own the hotel!” Scurvy was crying. “You’re terrible disgusting people and I won’t clean up after that bear again, I won’t, I won’t,” she moaned. Then she did an absolutely stunning job of convulsing under Ruthie—she gagged herself, she spewed, she gibbered. Ruthie left her in a ball, shriveled up and whining—with an occasional, absolutely chilling spasm.

Ruthie shrugged, and said to me, “You got to get a tougher crew of maids than this white trash, man. Every time the bear rapes someone, the maids can’t handle it. They just don’t know how to deal with it.”

And when I looked at Chipper Dove, I saw—at last!—that his ice-blue looks had left him. He was staring at the bear: Susie was more and more responsive, under Franny’s touch. Ruthie went up to the bear and took her muzzle off; Susie gave us a toothy smile. She was more bear than any bear; for this single performance of Lilly’s script, Susie the bear could have convinced a bear that she was a bear. A bear in heat.

I don’t even know if bears ever get in heat. “It doesn’t matter,” as Frank would say.

All that mattered was that Chipper Dove believed it. Ruthie started scratching Susie, cautiously, behind the ears. “See him? See him—that one, over there?” Ruthie said sweetly. And Susie the bear began to shuffle and sway; she started nosing her way toward Chipper Dove.

“Hey, look,” Dove started to say to me.

“Better not move suddenly,” I told him. “Bears don’t like any sudden movement.”

Dove froze. Susie, taking all the time in the world, started sniffing him over. Frank lay on the bed in the bedroom, exhausted. “I’ll give you some advice,” Frank said to Chipper Dove. “You introduced me to mud puddles, so I’ll give you some advice about bears,” Frank said.

“Hey, please,” Chipper Dove said softly, to me.

“The main thing,” Frank said, “is don’t move. Don’t resist anything. The bear does not appreciate resistance of any kind.”

“Just kind of go with it, man,” Ruthie said, dreamily.

I stepped up to Dove and unbuckled his belt; he started to stop me, but I said, “No sudden movements.” Susie the bear jabbed her snout into Dove’s crotch the instant Dove’s pants hit the rug with a soft flop.

“I recommend holding your breath,” Frank advised, from the bedroom.

And that was Lilly’s cue. In she came. It looked to Dove as if she just walked in with her own key from the door to the hall.

We all stared at the dwarf nurse; Lilly looked cross.

“I had the feeling you were up to this again, Franny,” Lilly said to her patient. Franny curled up on the couch, putting her back to us all.

“You’re her nurse, not her mother,” I snapped at Lilly.

“It’s not good for her—this lunatic raping, raping, raping everyone!” Lilly shouted at me. “Every time that damn bear is in heat, you just pull anyone you want in here and rape him—and I’m telling you it’s not good for her.”

“But it’s all Franny likes,” Frank said, peevishly.

“It’s not right that she likes it,” Lilly pointed out, like a stubborn but good nurse, which she was.

“Aw, come on,” I said. “This one is special. This one raped her!” I cried to Lilly.

“He made me fuck a mud puddle!” Frank wailed.

“If we can just rape this one,” I pleaded with Lilly, “we won’t rape anybody else.”

“Promises, promises,” said Lilly, folding her little arms across her little breasts.

“We promise!” Frank shouted. “Just one more. Just this one.”

“Earl!” Susie snorted, and I thought Dove was going to faint dead away. Susie snorted violently into Dove’s crotch. Susie the bear seemed to be saying that she was especially interested in this one, too.

“Please, please!” Dove started to scream. Susie knocked his legs out from under him and laid her weight over his chest. She put a big paw—a real paw—right on his private parts. “Please!” Dove said. “Please don’t! Please!”

And that was all Lilly wrote. That was where we were supposed to stop. Nobody had any more lines, except Lilly. Lilly was just supposed to say, “There will be no more rapes, no more—that’s final.” And I was supposed to pick Dove up and dump him out in the hall.

But Franny got up off the couch and pushed everyone away; she walked over to Dove. “That’s enough, Susie,” Franny said, and Susie got off Dove. “Put your pants back on, Chipper,” Franny said to him. He stood up but he fell; he struggled to his feet again and pulled his pants up. “And the next time you take your pants off, for anybody,” Franny told Chipper Dove, “I want you to think of me.”

“Think of all of us,” said Frank, coming out of the bedroom.

“Remember us,” I said to Chipper Dove.

“If you see us again,” big Ruthie told him, “better go the other way. Any one of us might kill you, man,” she told him, matter-of-factly.

Susie the bear took her bear’s head off; she would never need to wear it again. From now on, the bear suit was just for fun. She looked Chipper Dove right in the eye. The number one first-class hysteric named Scurvy got up off the rug and came over to look at Chipper Dove, too. She looked at him as if she was committing him to memory; then she shrugged, and lit a cigarette, and looked away.

“Don’t pass any open windows!” Frank called down the hall to Dove, as he left us; he walked away holding the wall of the hall for support. We all couldn’t help but notice that he’d wet his pants.

Chipper Dove moved like a man seeking the men’s room in a hospital ward for the disoriented; he moved with the feeble lack of sureness of a man who wasn’t sure what experience awaited him in the men’s room—as if, even, he wouldn’t be sure what to do when he arrived at the urinal.

But there was, in all of us, that initial sense of letdown that should be documented in any fair study of