The Hotel New Hampshire

she did it the way she usually marked her place in Moby-Dick—uninterestedly.

“I should go after?” I asked, undressing myself.

“If you want,” she said. “I mean you should go from the Hotel New Hampshire. You and your family. Leave,” she said. “Leave before the fall season.”

“What fall season?” I asked her, completely naked now. I was thinking about Junior Jones’s fall season with the Cleveland Browns.

“The Opera season,” Fehlgeburt said, naked herself—at last. She was as thin as a novella; she was no bigger than some of the shortest stories she had ever read to Lilly. It was as if all the books in her room had been feeding on her, had consumed—not nourished—her.

“The Opera season will start in the fall,” Fehlgeburt said, “and you and your family must leave the Hotel New Hampshire by then. Promise me,” she said, halting me from moving farther up her gaunt body.

“Why?” I asked.

“Please leave,” she said. When I entered her, I thought it was the sex that brought her tears on, but it was something else.

“Am I the first?” I asked. Fehlgeburt was twenty-nine.

“First and last,” she said, crying.

“Do you have anything to protect you?” I asked, inside her. “I mean, you know, so you don’t get schwanger?”

“It doesn’t matter,” she said, in Frank’s irritating fashion.

“Why?” I asked, trying to move cautiously.

“Because I’ll be dead before the baby’s born,” she said. I pulled out. I sat her up beside me, but she—with surprising strength—pulled me back on top of her; she took me in her hand and put me back inside her. “Come on,” she said, impatiently—but it was not the impatience of desire. It was something else.

“Fuck me,” she said, flatly. “Then stay the night, or go home. I don’t care. Just leave the Hotel New Hampshire, please leave it—please make sure Lilly, especially, leaves it,” she begged me. Then she cried harder and lost what slight interest she’d ever had in the sex. I lay still inside her, growing smaller. I felt cold—I felt the draft of coldness from under the ground, like the coldness I remembered feeling when Frank first read to us from Ernst’s pornography.

“What are they doing on the fifth floor at night?” I asked Fehlgeburt, who bit into my shoulder, and shook her head, her eyes closed tightly in a violent squint. “What are they planning?” I asked her. I grew so small I slipped completely outside of her. I felt her shaking and I shook, too.

“They’re going to blow up the Opera,” she whispered, “at one of the peak performances,” she whispered. “They’re going to blow up The Marriage of Figaro—something popular like that. Or something heavier,” she said. “I’m not sure which performance—they’re not sure. But one that’s full-house,” Fehlgeburt said. “The whole Opera.”

“They’re crazy,” I said; I didn’t recognize my voice. It sounded creaky; it was like Old Billig’s voice—Old Billig the whore or Old Billig the radical.

Fehlgeburt shook her head back and forth under me; her stringy hair whipped my face. “Please get your family out,” she whispered. “Especially Lilly,” she said. “Little Lilly,” she blubbered.

“But they’re not going to blow up the hotel, too, are they?” I asked Fehlgeburt.

“Everyone will be involved,” she said ominously. “It has to involve everyone, or it’s no good,” she said, and I heard Arbeiter’s voice behind hers, or Ernst’s all-embracing logic. A phase, a necessary phase. Everything. Schlagobers, the erotic, the State Opera, the Hotel New Hampshire—everything had to go. It was all decadent, I could hear them intoning. It was full of disgust. They would litter the Ringstrasse with art –lovers, with old-fashioned idealists silly and irrelevant enough to like opera. They would make some point or other by this kind of everything-bombing.

“Promise me,” Fehlgeburt whispered in my ear. “You’ll get them out. Your family. Everybody in it.”

“I promise,” I said. “Of course.”

“Don’t tell anyone I told you,” she said to me.

“Of course not,” I said.

“Please come back inside me, now,” Fehlgeburt said. “Please come inside me. I want to feel it—just once,” she added.

“Why just once?” I asked.

“Just do it,” she said. “Do everything to me.”

I did everything to her. I regret it; I am forever guilty for it; it was as desperate and joyless as any sex in the second Hotel New Hampshire ever was.

“If you think you’re going to die before you’ll even have time to have a baby,” I told Fehlgeburt, later, “why don’t you leave when we leave? Why don’t you get away before they do it, or before they try?”

“I can’t,” she said, simply.

“Why?” I asked. Of these radicals in our Hotel New Hampshire I would always be asking why.

“Because I drive the car,” Fehlgeburt said. “I’m the driver,” she said. “And the car’s the main bomb, it’s the one that starts all the rest. And someone has to drive it, and it’s me— I drive the bomb,” Fehlgeburt said.

“Why you?” I asked her, trying to hold her, trying to get her to stop shaking.

“Because I’m the most expendable,” she said, and there was Ernst’s dead voice again, there was Arbeiter’s lawnmower-like process of thought. I realized that in order for Fehlgeburt to believe this, even our gentle Schwanger would have had to convince her.

“Why not Schwanger?” I asked Miss Miscarriage.

“She’s too important,” Fehlgeburt said. “She’s wonderful,” she said, admiringly— and full of loathing for herself.

“Why not Wrench?” I asked. “He’s obviously good with cars.”

“That’s why,” Fehlgeburt said. “He’s too necessary. There will be other cars, other bombs to build. It’s the hostage part I don’t like,” she blurted out suddenly. “It’s not necessary, this time,” she added. “There will be better hostages.”

“Who are the hostages?” I asked.

“Your family,” she said. “Because you’re Americans. More than Austria will notice us, then,” she said. “That’s the idea.”

“Whose idea?” I asked.

“Ernst’s,” she said.

“Why not let Ernst be the driver?” I asked.

“He’s the idea man,” Fehlgeburt said. “He thinks it all up. Everything,” she added. Everything, indeed, I thought.

“And Arbeiter?” I asked. “He doesn’t know how to drive?”

“He’s too loyal,” she said. “We can’t lose anyone that loyal. I am not so loyal,” she whispered. “Look at me!” she cried. “I’m telling you all this, aren’t I?”

“And Old Billig?” I asked, winding down.

“He’s not trustworthy,” Fehlgeburt said. “He doesn’t even know the plan. He’s too slippery. He thinks of his own survival.”

“That’s bad?” I asked her, brushing her hair back, off her streaked face.

“At this phase, that’s bad,” Fehlgeburt said. And I realized what she was: a reader, only a reader. She read other people’s stories just beautifully; she took direction; she followed the leader. Why I wanted to hear her read Moby-Dick was the same reason the radicals had made her the driver. We both knew she would do it; she wouldn’t stop.

“Have we done everything?” Fehlgeburt asked me.

“What?” I said, and winced—and would wince, forever, to hear that echo of Egg. Even from myself.

“Have we done everything, sexually?” Fehlgeburt asked. “Was that it? Was that