The Hotel New Hampshire

The man with the beard stared at the place where his table was supposed to be. He was really quite dignified, I thought, and I knew I was in a bad mood and wasn’t being fair; I was being a bully, and I felt ashamed. I gave the table back to the couple; nothing spilled.

“I see what you mean!” the girl called after me, as I was leaving. But I knew I had kept no one alive, not ever: not those people in the Opera, because sitting among them was surely that shape Frank and I had seen in the car, driven away between Ernst and Arbeiter, that animal shape of death, that mechanical bear, that dog’s head of chemistry, that electrical charge of sorrow. And despite what Trotsky said, he was dead; Mother and Egg and Iowa Bob were dead, too—despite everything they said, and everything they meant to us. I walked out on the Graben, feeling more and more like Frank, feeling anti-everything; I felt out of control. It’s no good for a weight lifter to feel out of control.

The first prostitute I passed was not one of ours, but I’d seen her before—at the Kaffee Mowatt.

“Guten Abend,” she said.

“Fuck you,” I told her.

“Up yours,” she told me; she knew that much English, And I felt lousy. I was using bad language, again. I had broken my promise to Mother. It was the first and last time I would break it. I was twenty-two years old and I started to cry. I turned down Spiegelgasse. There were whores there, but they weren’t our whores, so I didn’t do anything. When they said, “Guten Abend,” I said, “Guten Abend” back. I didn’t answer the other things they said. I cut across the Neuer Markt; I felt the vacancies in the chests of the Hapsburgs in their tombs. Another whore called to me.

“Hey, don’t cry!” she called to me. “A big strong boy like you—don’t cry!”

But I hoped I was crying not just for myself but for them all. For Freud calling out the names who’d never answer in the Judenplatz; for what Father couldn’t see. For Franny, for I loved her—and I wanted her to be as faithful to me as she had proved she could be to Susie the bear. For Susie, too, because Franny had shown me that Susie wasn’t ugly at all. In fact, Franny had almost convinced Susie of this. For Junior Jones, who was suffering the first of the knee injuries that would force his retirement from the Cleveland Browns. For Lilly who tried so hard and for Frank who’d gone so far away (in order to be closer to life, he said). For Dark Inge, who was eighteen—who said she was “old enough,” though Screaming Annie insisted she wasn’t—who before this year was over would run away, with a man. He was as black as her father and he took her to an Army-base town in Germany; she would later become a whore there, I would be told. And Screaming Annie would scream a slightly different song. For all of them! For my doomed Fehlgeburt, even for the deceiving Schwanger—for both Old Billigs; they were optimists; they were china bears. For everyone—except Ernst, except Arbeiter, except that wrench of a man, except for Chipper Dove: I hated them.

I brushed past a whore or two signaling me off the Kärntnerstrasse. A tall, stunning whore—out of the league of our Krugerstrasse whores—blew me a kiss from the corner of the Annagasse. I walked right by the Krugerstrasse without looking, not wanting to see one of them, or all of them, waving to me. I passed the Hotel Sacher—which the Hotel New Hampshire would never be. And then I came to the Staatsoper, I came to the house of Gluck (1714-87, as Frank would recite); I came to the State Opera, which was the house of Mozart, the house of Haydn, of Beethoven and Schubert—of Strauss, Brahms, Bruckner, and Mahler. This was the house that a pornographer playing with politics wanted to blow sky-high. It was huge; in seven years, I had never been in it—it seemed classier than I was, and I was never the music fan that Frank was, and never the lover of drama that Franny was (Frank and Franny went to the Opera all the time; Freud took them. He loved to listen; Franny and Frank described it all to him). Like me, Lilly had never been to the Opera; the place was too big, Lilly said; it frightened her.

It frightened me, now. It is too big to blow up! I thought. But it was the people they wanted to blow up, I knew, and people are more easily destroyed than buildings. What they wanted was a spectacle. They wanted what Arbeiter had shouted to Schwanger: they wanted Schlagobers and blood.

On the Kärntnerstrasse across from the Opera was a sausage vendor, a man with a kind of hot-dog cart selling different kinds of Wurst mit Senf und Bauernbrot—a kind of sausage with mustard on rye. I didn’t want one.

I knew what I wanted. I wanted to grow up, in a hurry. When I’d made love to Fehlgeburt I had told her, “Es war sehr schön,” but it wasn’t. “It was very nice,” I had lied, but it wasn’t anything; it wasn’t enough. It had been just another night of weight lifting.

When I turned down the Krugerstrasse, I had already decided that I would go with the first one who approached me—even if it was Old Billig; even if it was Jolanta, I bravely promised myself. It didn’t matter; maybe one by one I would try them all. I could do anything Freud could do, and Freud had done it all—our Freud and the other Freud, I thought; they had simply gone as far as they could.

Nobody I knew was in the Kaffee Mowatt, and I didn’t recognize the figure standing under the pink neon: HOTEL NEW HAMPSHIRE! HOTEL NEW HAMPSHIRE! HOTEL NEW HAMPSHIRE!

It’s Babette, I thought, vaguely repulsed—but it was just the sickly-sweet diesel breeze of the last night of summer that made me think of her. The woman saw me and started walking toward me—aggressively, I thought; hungrily, too. And I was sure it was Screaming Annie; I momentarily wondered how I would hold together during her famous fake orgasm. Maybe—given my fondness for whispering—I could ask her not to do it at all, I could simply tell her I knew it was a fake and it simply wasn’t necessary, not for my benefit. The woman was too slender to be Old Billig, but she was too solid to be Screaming Annie, I realized; she was too well built to be Screaming Annie. So it was Jolanta, I thought; at last I would find out what she kept in her evil purse. In the time ahead, I thought—shuddering—I might even have to use what’s in Jolanta’s purse. But the woman approaching me was not solid enough for Jolanta; this woman was too well built in the other way—she was too sleek, too youthful in her movements. She ran toward me on the street and caught me in her arms; she took my breath away, she was so beautiful. The woman was Franny.

“Where have you been?” she asked me. “Gone all day, gone all night,” she scolded me. “We’ve all been dying to find you!”

“Why?” I asked. Franny’s smell made me dizzy.

“Lilly’s going to get published!” Franny said. “Some publisher in New York is really going to buy her book!”

“How much?” I said, because I was hoping it might be enough. It might be our ticket out of Vienna—the ticket that the second Hotel New Hampshire would never buy us.

“Jesus God,” Franny said. “Your sister has a literary success and you ask ‘How much?’—you’re just like Frank. That’s just what Frank asked.”

“Good for Frank,” I said. I was still trembling; I had been looking for a prostitute and had found my sister. She wouldn’t let go of me, either.

“Where were you?” Franny asked me; she pushed my hair back.

“With Fehlgeburt,” I said, sheepishly. I would never lie to Franny.

Franny frowned. “Well, how was it?” she asked, still touching me—but like a sister.

“Not so great,” I said. I looked away from Franny. “Awful,” I added.

Franny put her arms around me and kissed me. She meant to kiss me on the cheek (like a sister), but I turned toward her, though I was trying to turn away, and our lips met. And that was it, that was all it took. That was, the end of the summer of 1964; suddenly it was autumn. I was twenty-two, Franny was twenty-three. We kissed a long time. There was nothing to say. She was not a lesbian, she still wrote to Junior Jones—and to Chipper Dove—and I had never been happy with another woman; not ever; not yet. We stayed out on the street, out of the light cast by the neon, so that no one in the Hotel New Hampshire could see us. We had to break up our kissing when a customer of Jolanta’s came staggering out of the hotel, and we broke it up again when we heard Screaming Annie. In a little while her dazed customer came out, but Franny and I still stayed on the Krugerstrasse. Later, Babette went home. Then Jolanta went home, taking Dark Inge with her. Screaming Annie came out and back, out and back, like the tide. Old Billig the whore went across the street to the Kaffee Mowatt and dozed on a table. I walked Franny up to the Kärntnerstrasse, and down to the Opera. “You think of me too much,” Franny started to say, but she didn’t bother to finish. We kissed some more. The Opera was so big beside us.