The Hotel New Hampshire

If Lilly had grown only a little (as the result of creating Trying to Grow ), Frank had grown double time—for all of us (as the result of selling Lilly’s effort). It had been no little effort for Lilly, we knew. And we were worried about how hard she was working, how much she was writing—how grimly she was trying to grow.

“Take it easy, Lilly,” Frank advised her. “The cash flow is fast and furious—you’re terrifically liquid,” said Frank, the economics major, “and the future looks rosy.”

“Just coast for a while, Lilly,” Franny advised her, but Lilly took literature seriously—even if literature would never take Lilly quite seriously enough.

“I know I’ve been lucky,” Lilly said. “Now I have to earn it,” she said—trying harder.

But one day in the winter of 1964—it was just before Christmas—Lilly was out at a literary lunch and Franny told me it was now or never. There were only about twenty blocks and a very small zoo between us. Any good middle-distance runner can get from Central Park South to Fifth Avenue and Eighty-first in a very short time. It was a winter day, brisk but gray. The New York City streets and sidewalks were cleared of snow—good footing for a fast, wintry run. The snow in Central Park looked old and dead, but my heart was very much alive and pounding in my chest. The doorman at the Stanhope knew me—the Berry family would be welcome at the Stanhope for years and years. The man at the reception desk—the alert, cheerful man with the British accent—said hello to me as I waited for the elevator (the elevators at the Stanhope are rather slow). I said hello back to him, scuffing my running shoes on the rug; over the years I would watch that man grow a little balder but no less cheerful. He would even deal cheerfully with the complainers (the European Lilly and I saw in a rage at the reception desk one morning, for example—a portly man in a barber-pole-striped robe; he was beshitted, head to toe. No one had told him about one of the Stanhope’s features: their famous upward-flushing toilets. You should beware of them if you ever stay at the Stanhope. After you’ve done your business in the toilet, it’s advisable to close the lid and stand well out of the way—I recommend kicking the flush handle with your foot. This portly European must have been standing directly over his mess—he must have thought he’d observe it all going away, when it suddenly was flung up, all over him. And the ever-cheerful man with the British accent, behind the reception desk, looked up at the beshitted guest who was raging at him and said, “Oh dear. A little air in the pipes?” It was what he always said. “A little air in the pipes?” the portly European bellowed. “A lot of shit in my hair!” he howled. But that was another day.).

The day I was there to make love to Franny, the elevator couldn’t get there fast enough. I decided to run up to the fourteenth floor. I must have looked awfully eager when I arrived. Franny opened the door just a crack and peeked at me.

“Yuck,” she said. “You’ll have to take a shower!”

“Okay,” I said. She told me to hold the door open just a crack and give her time to get back to bed; she didn’t want me to see her—not yet. I heard her bound across the suite and leap back into bed.

“Okay!” she called, and I went in, putting the DO NOT DISTURB sign on the door.

“Put the DO NOT DISTURB sign on the door!” Franny called to me.

“I already did,” I said, in the bedroom, looking at her; she was under the covers, looking just a little nervous.

“You don’t have to take a shower,” she said. “I like you all sweaty. At least I’m used to you that way.”

But I was nervous and I took a shower, anyway.

“Hurry up, you asshole!” Franny yelled at me. I took as fast a shower as I could and used the potentially upward-flushing toilet very cautiously. The Stanhope is a wonderful hotel, especially if you like to run in Central Park and enjoy watching the Met and its floods of visitors, but you have to watch out for the toilets. Coming from a family used to strange toilets—those toilets fit for dwarfs in the first Hotel New Hampshire, those tiny toilets used by Fritz’s midgets to this day—I tend to be generous in my feelings toward the toilets at the Stanhope, although I know some people who say they’ll never stay at the Stanhope again. But what’s a little air in the pipes, or even a lot of shit in the hair, if you have good memories?

I came out of the bathroom, naked, and when Franny saw me, she covered her head with the sheet and said, “Jesus God.” I slipped into bed beside her and she turned her back to me and began to giggle.

“Your balls are all wet,” she said.

“I dried myself!” I said.

“You missed your balls,” she said.

“Nothing like wet balls,” I said, and Franny and I laughed as if we were crazy. We were.

“I love you,” she tried to tell me, but she was laughing too hard.

“I want you,” I told her, but I was laughing so hard that I sneezed—right in the middle of telling her that I wanted her—and that broke us up for a while longer. It was like that as long as she kept her back to me and we lay together like the stereotypical love spoons, but when she turned to me, when she lay on top of me with her breasts against my chest when she scissored her legs around me—everything changed. If it had been too funny when we started, now it was too serious, and we couldn’t stop. The first time we made love, we were in a more or less conventional position—“nothing too Tantric, please,” Franny had asked me. And when it was over, she said, “Well, that was okay. Not great, but nice—right?”

“Well, it was better than ‘nice’—for me,” I said. “But not quite ‘great’—I agree.”

“You agree,” Franny repeated. She shook her head, she touched me with her hair. “Okay,” she whispered. “Get ready for great.”

At one point, I must have held her too tightly. She said, “Please don’t hurt me.”

I said, “Don’t be frightened.”

She said, “I am, just a little.”

“I am—a lot,” I said.

It is improper to describe making love to one’s sister. Does it suffice to say that it became “great,” and it got even greater? And later it grew worse, of course—later we got tired. About four o’clock in the afternoon Lilly knocked discreetly on the door.

“Is that a maid?” Franny called.

“No, it’s me,” Lilly said. “I’m not a maid, I’m a writer.”

“Go away and come back in an hour,” Franny said.

“Why?” Lilly asked.

“I’m writing something,” Franny said.

“No, you’re not,” Lilly said.

“I’m trying to grow!” Franny said.

“Okay,” Lilly said. “Keep passing the open windows,” she added.

In a sense, of course, Franny was writing something; she was the author of how our relationship would turn out—she took a mother’s responsibility for it. She went too far—she made love to me too much. She made me aware that what was between us was all too much.

“I still want you,” she murmured to me. It was four-thirty in the afternoon. When I entered her, she winced.

“Are you sore?” I whispered.

“Of course I’m sore!” she said. “But you better not stop. If you stop, I’ll kill you,” Franny told me. She would have, too, I realized later. In a way—if I had stayed in love with her—she would have been the death of me; we would have been the death of each other. But she simply overdid it; she knew exactly what she was doing.

“We better stop,” I whispered to her. It was almost five o’clock.

“We better not stop,” Franny said fiercely.

“But you’re sore,” I protested.

“I want to be sorer,” Franny said. “Are you sore?” she asked me.

“A little,” I admitted.

“I want you a lot sore,” Franny said. “Top or bottom?” she asked me grimly.

When Lilly knocked at the door again, I was on the verge of imitating Screaming Annie; if there’d been a new bridge around, I could have cracked it.

“Come back in an hour!” Franny yelled.