The Hotel New Hampshire

“But you’re not ugly, Susie,” I told her. “You just take a little getting used to,” I told her. “I think you’re really attractive, if you want to know.” And I did think so; I thought Susie the bear was a hero.

“You’re sick, then,” Susie said. “I got a face like a hatchet, like a chisel with a bad complexion. And I got a body like a paper bag,” she said. “Like a paper bag of cold oatmeal,” Susie said.

“I think you’re very nice,” I told her, and I did; Franny had shown me how lovable Susie the bear was. And I had heard the song Susie the bear taught Franny to sing; I’d had some interesting dreams concerning Susie’s teaching me a song like that. So I repeated to her, “I think you’re very nice.”

“Then you’ve got a brain like a paper bag of cold oatmeal,” Susie told me. “If you think I’m very nice, you’re a real sick boy.”

And one night when there were no guests in the Hotel New Hampshire, I heard a peculiar creeping sound; Father was as likely to walk around at night as he was likely to walk around in the daylight—because, of course, it was always nighttime for him. But wherever Father went, the Louisville Slugger trailed after him or searched ahead of him, and as he grew older his gait more and more resembled the gait of Freud, as if Father had psychologically developed a limp—as a form of kinship to the old interpreter of dreams. Also, wherever Father went, Seeing Eye Dog Number Four went with him! We were negligent about keeping Four’s toenails clipped, so that Father, accompanied by Four, made quite a clatter.

Old Fred, the handyman, had a room on the third floor and slept like a stone at the bottom of the sea; he slept as soundly as the abandoned weirs, ruined by seals and now sunk in the mud flats, now rinsed by the tide. Old Fred was a sundown and sunup sort of sleeper; because he was deaf, he said, he didn’t like to be up at night. Especially in summer, the Maine nights are vibrant with noise—at least when you compare the nights to the Maine days.

“The opposite of New York,” Frank liked to say. “The only time it’s quiet on Central Park South is about three in the morning. But in Maine,” Frank liked to say, “about three in the morning is about the only time anything’s going on. Fucking nature comes to life.”

It was about three in the morning, I noted—a summer night, with the insect world teeming; the seabirds sounded fairly restful but the sea was no less determined. And I heard this peculiar creeping sound. It was at first hard to tell if it was outside my window, which was open—though there was a screen—or if the sound was outside my door, in the hall. My door was open, too; and the outside doors to the Hotel New Hampshire were never locked—there were too many of them.

A raccoon, I thought.

But then something much heavier than any raccoon shuffled across the bare floor at the landing to the stairs and softly padded down the carpeted hall toward my door; I could feel the weight of whatever it was—it was making the floorboards sigh. Even the sea seemed to quiet itself, even the sea seemed to listen to whatever it was—it was the kind of sound you hear in the night that makes the tide pause, that makes the birds (who never fly at night) float up to the sky and hang suspended as if they were painted there.

“Four?” I whispered, thinking that the dog might be on the prowl, but whatever was in the hall was too tentative to be Seeing Eye Dog Number Four. Four had been in the hall before; old Four wouldn’t be pausing at every door.

I wished I had Father’s baseball bat, but when the bear lurched into my doorway I realized there was no weapon in the Hotel New Hampshire powerful enough to protect me from this intruder. I lay very still, pretending to be sound asleep—with my eyes wide open. In the flat, blurred, flannel-soft light of the predawn, the bear seemed huge. It stared into my room, at my motionless bed, like an old nurse taking a bed check in a hospital; I tried not to breathe, but the bear knew I was there. It sniffed, deeply; and very gracefully, on all fours, it came into my room. Well, why not? I was thinking. A bear began my life’s fairy tale; it is fitting that a bear should end it. The bear shoved its warm face near mine and breathed in everything about me; with one purposeful sniff, it seemed to review my life’s story—and in a gesture resembling commiseration, it placed its heavy paw on my hip. It was quite a warm summer night—for Maine—and I was naked, covered by just a sheet. The bear’s breath was hot, and a little fruity—perhaps it had just been feeding in the wild blueberries—but it was surprisingly pleasant breath, if not exactly fresh. When the bear drew back the sheet and looked me over, I felt just the tip of the iceberg of fear that Chipper Dove must have felt when he truly believed that a bear in heat wanted him. But this bear rather disrespectfully snorted at what it saw. “Earl!” said the bear, and rather roughly shoved me; it made room beside me for itself and crawled into my bed with me. It was only when it embraced me, and I identified the most distinctive component of its strange and powerful scent, that I suspected this was no ordinary bear. Mixed with the pleasure of its fruited breath, and the mustard-green sharpness of its summer sweat, I detected the obvious odor of mothballs.

“Susie?” I said.

“Thought you’d never guess,” she said.

“Susie!” I cried, and turned to her, returning her embrace; I had never been so happy to see her.

“Keep it down,” Susie ordered me. “Don’t wake up your father. I’ve been crawling all over this fucking hotel trying to find you. I found your father first, and someone who says ‘What?’ in his sleep, and I met an absolute moron of a dog who didn’t even know I was a bear—the fucker wagged his tail and went right back to sleep. What a watchdog! And fucking Frank gave me the directions—I don’t think Frank should be trusted to give the directions to Maine, much less to this queer little part of the wretched state. Holy cow,” said Susie, “I just wanted to see you before it got light, I wanted to get to you while it was still dark, for Christ’s sake, and I must have left New York about noon, yesterday, and now it’s almost fucking dawn,” she said. “And I’m exhausted,” she added; she started to cry. “I’m sweating like a pig in this dumb fucking suit, but I smell so bad and look so awful I don’t dare take it off.”

“Take it off,” I told her. “You smell very nice.”

“Oh sure,” she said, still crying. But I coaxed her out of the bear head. She smudged her tears with her paws, but I held her paws and kissed her on the mouth for a while. I think I was right about the blueberries; that’s what Susie tastes like, to me: wild blueberries.

“You taste very nice,” I told her.

“Oh sure,” she mumbled, but she let me help her out of the rest of the bear suit. It was like a sauna inside there. I realized that Susie was built like a bear, and she was as slick with sweat as a bear fresh out of a lake. I realized how I admired her—for her bearishness, for her complicated courage.

“I’m very fond of you, Susie,” I said, closing my door and getting back into bed with her.

“Hurry up, it will be light soon,” she said, “and then you’ll see how ugly I am.”

“I can see you now,” I said, “and I think you’re lovely.”

“You’re going to have to work hard to convince me,” said Susie the bear.

For some years now I have been convincing Susie the bear that she is lovely. I think so, of course, and in a few more years, I think, Susie will finally agree. Bears are stubborn but they are sane creatures; once you gain their trust, they will not shy away from you.

At first Susie was so obsessed with her ugliness that she took every conceivable precaution against a possible pregnancy, believing that the worst thing on earth for her to do would be to bring a poor child into this cruel world and allow him or her to suffer the treatment that is usually bestowed upon the ugly. When I first started sleeping with Susie the bear, she was taking the Pill, and she also wore a diaphragm; she put so much spermicidal jelly on the diaphragm that I had to suppress the feeling that we were engaging in an act of overkill—to sperm. To ease me over this peculiar anxiety, Susie insisted that I wear a prophylactic, too.

“That’s the trouble with men,” she used to say. “You got to arm yourself so heavily before you dare do it with them that you sometimes lose sight of the purpose.”

But Susie has calmed down, recently. She seems to feel that one method of birth control is adequate. And if the accident happens I can’t help but hope that she will accept it bravely. Of course, I wouldn’t push her to have a baby if she didn’t want to; those people who want to make people have babies they don’t want to have are ogres.

“But even if I weren’t too ugly,” Susie protests, “I’m too old. I mean, after forty you can have all sorts of complications. I might not just have an ugly baby, I might not even have a baby—I might give birth to a kind of banana! After forty, it’s pretty risky.”