frost on the water spigot. I tried to turn it on, but the metal handle stung my fingers. My mother moved hurriedly because she wasn’t wearing a coat. She was taking the shirts down from the clothesline, the sleeves frozen into odd, grand gestures, and she piled them in a basket beside her.
There was that musky smell of dead leaves, and the frost made the grass blades crumble like glass. I was pretending to fly. Running as fast as I could, I leaped into the air and threw up my hands, so that I felt temporarily weightless (that feeling I had in elevators, swimming pools). As I came down, the grass splintered under my feet. When my mother called, I looked back and laughed. I kept running until the air looked watery, as if the light had melted, and I was coughing and suddenly warm and falling.
When I couldn’t sleep, it was as if my body had to call me back to it, arms and legs tensed up and sore from the effort. In the morning the sheets would be kicked to the bottom of the bed and tangled around my ankles.
P aul started work in November. Each hour he made the rounds of the hotel, checking the locks and windows, often stopping THE FIRES / 81
at the desk to ask me a question. “What’s the word in English,”
he asked, “for a point like this in a building?” He drew a roof in the air with his finger, curved tendrils on each side.
“Alcove.”
He nodded. “There’s an alcove over the soda machine outside.
It would be easy for someone to climb up on it to reach a window.” His accent was rich and polished like a piece of antique furniture. “I’ll check that on my next round.”
I wasn’t worried. “Fine.”
His heavy, careful footsteps and the strict click of the locks as he checked them made me feel watched, studied, and what I liked most about working at the Linden Hotel was that I could often lose myself in the anonymity of strangers. Many times, I would have to go into their rooms to deliver towels or check on a com-plaint, and if no one was there, I’d sometimes go in and study the suits and dresses hung on the hangers in the bare closet, the scatter of pills and coins on the dresser, the rumpled look of the bed, and the scents caught in the curtains and sheets, and I could enter another life for a while in those vacant rooms. But now that Paul was there, of course, it was impossible.
“The door’s ajar in Room Nine,” he said. “Is there a guest there?”
I explained that it was a signal to the housekeeper that this should be the first room she cleaned in the morning.
“It’s not safe,” Paul said, straightening his collar. “Anybody could walk in. Why not put a note up for her?” There was something so earnest about him, as if he were trying hard to make up for something he’d lost—money? a girl?
He put a stick of gum into his mouth, and despite the desk between us, I could smell the spearmint caught in the white of his teeth. I wanted to tell him to relax, that it was nice of him to 82 / RENÉ STEINKE
try so hard, but he didn’t need to prove himself to me, and we didn’t really need a security guard anyway. “What did you do before?” I asked.
“In Poland? I was a messenger. I delivered things on a bicycle.”
He was used to worrying about being on time, doing exactly what someone told him to do. That was the problem—he wasn’t used to walking up to a door and finding no one behind it, he was used to urgency. But I wanted him to stop asking me so many questions.
When he left the lobby to check the grounds outside, I took out my plastic-covered library book, a biography of a schoolteacher in Africa, but couldn’t concentrate on the black lines floating in the yellowed pool of the page. It happened sometimes that the very act of looking at a page abstracted me, took me someplace else. I started thinking about Hanna, how she had a habit of drumming her fingers on her lips as if to make sure her mouth was still there. She’d once come back home with a geisha doll for me
There was that musky smell of dead leaves, and the frost made the grass blades crumble like glass. I was pretending to fly. Running as fast as I could, I leaped into the air and threw up my hands, so that I felt temporarily weightless (that feeling I had in elevators, swimming pools). As I came down, the grass splintered under my feet. When my mother called, I looked back and laughed. I kept running until the air looked watery, as if the light had melted, and I was coughing and suddenly warm and falling.
When I couldn’t sleep, it was as if my body had to call me back to it, arms and legs tensed up and sore from the effort. In the morning the sheets would be kicked to the bottom of the bed and tangled around my ankles.
P aul started work in November. Each hour he made the rounds of the hotel, checking the locks and windows, often stopping THE FIRES / 81
at the desk to ask me a question. “What’s the word in English,”
he asked, “for a point like this in a building?” He drew a roof in the air with his finger, curved tendrils on each side.
“Alcove.”
He nodded. “There’s an alcove over the soda machine outside.
It would be easy for someone to climb up on it to reach a window.” His accent was rich and polished like a piece of antique furniture. “I’ll check that on my next round.”
I wasn’t worried. “Fine.”
His heavy, careful footsteps and the strict click of the locks as he checked them made me feel watched, studied, and what I liked most about working at the Linden Hotel was that I could often lose myself in the anonymity of strangers. Many times, I would have to go into their rooms to deliver towels or check on a com-plaint, and if no one was there, I’d sometimes go in and study the suits and dresses hung on the hangers in the bare closet, the scatter of pills and coins on the dresser, the rumpled look of the bed, and the scents caught in the curtains and sheets, and I could enter another life for a while in those vacant rooms. But now that Paul was there, of course, it was impossible.
“The door’s ajar in Room Nine,” he said. “Is there a guest there?”
I explained that it was a signal to the housekeeper that this should be the first room she cleaned in the morning.
“It’s not safe,” Paul said, straightening his collar. “Anybody could walk in. Why not put a note up for her?” There was something so earnest about him, as if he were trying hard to make up for something he’d lost—money? a girl?
He put a stick of gum into his mouth, and despite the desk between us, I could smell the spearmint caught in the white of his teeth. I wanted to tell him to relax, that it was nice of him to 82 / RENÉ STEINKE
try so hard, but he didn’t need to prove himself to me, and we didn’t really need a security guard anyway. “What did you do before?” I asked.
“In Poland? I was a messenger. I delivered things on a bicycle.”
He was used to worrying about being on time, doing exactly what someone told him to do. That was the problem—he wasn’t used to walking up to a door and finding no one behind it, he was used to urgency. But I wanted him to stop asking me so many questions.
When he left the lobby to check the grounds outside, I took out my plastic-covered library book, a biography of a schoolteacher in Africa, but couldn’t concentrate on the black lines floating in the yellowed pool of the page. It happened sometimes that the very act of looking at a page abstracted me, took me someplace else. I started thinking about Hanna, how she had a habit of drumming her fingers on her lips as if to make sure her mouth was still there. She’d once come back home with a geisha doll for me
Similar Books
