John Irving - The Hotel New Hampshire

“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.”

“Nonsense, Susie,” I tell her. “We’ll just get you in shape—a little light work with the weights, a little running. You’re young at heart, Susie,” I tell her. “The bear in you , Susie, is still a cub .”

“Convince me,” she tells me, and I know what that means. That’s our euphemism for it—whenever we want each other. She will just say, out of the blue, to me, “I need to be convinced.”

Or I will say to her, “Susie, you look in need of a little convincing.”

Or else Susie will just say “Earl!” to me, and I’ll know exactly what she means.

When we got married, that’s what she said when she came to her moment to say “I do.” Susie said, “Earl!”

“What?” the minister said.

“Earl!” Susie said, nodding.

“She does ,” I told the minister. “That means she does.”

I suppose that neither Susie nor I will ever, quite, get over Franny, but we have our love for Franny in common, and that’s more to have in common than whatever thing it is that’s held in common by most couples. And if Susie was once Freud’s eyes, I now see for my father, so that Susie and I have the vision of Freud in common, too. “You got a marriage made in heaven, man,” Junior Jones has told me.

That morning after I’d first made love to Susie the bear I was a little late meeting Father in the ballroom for our weight-lifting session.

He was already lifting hard when I staggered in.

“Four hundred and sixty-four,” I said to him, because this was our traditional greeting. Recalling that old rogue, Schnitzler, Father and I thought it was a very funny way for two men living without women to greet each other.

“Four hundred and sixty-four, my eye!” Father grunted. “Four hundred and sixty-four—like hell! I had to listen to you half the night. Jesus God, I may be blind, but I can hear . By my count you’re down to about four hundred and fifty-eight. You haven’t got four hundred and sixty-four left in you—not anymore. Who the hell is she? I’ve never imagined such an animal !”

But when I told him I’d been with Susie the bear, and that I very much hoped she would stay and live with us, Father was delighted.

“That’s what we’ve been missing!” he cried. “That’s really perfect. I mean, you couldn’t ask for a better hotel. I think you’ve handled the hotel business brilliantly! But we need a bear. Everybody does! And now that you’ve got the bear, you’re home free, John. Now you’ve finally written the happy ending.”

Not quite, I thought. But, all things considered—given sorrow, given doom, given love—I knew things could be much worse.

So what is missing? Just a child, I think. A child is missing. I wanted a child, and I still want one. Given Egg, and given Lilly, children are all I am missing, now. I still might convince Susie the bear, of course, but Franny and Junior Jones will provide me with my first child. Even Susie is unafraid for that child.

“ That child is going to be a beauty,” Susie says. “With Franny and Junior making it, how can it miss?”

“But how could we miss?” I ask her. “As soon as you have it, believe me, it will be beautiful.”

“But just think of the color ,” Susie says. “I mean, with Junior and Franny making it, won’t it be an absolutely gorgeous fucking color?”

But I know, as Junior Jones has told me, that Franny and Junior’s baby might be any color—“I’ll give it a range between coffee and milk,” Junior likes to say.

“ Any color baby is going to be a gorgeous-colored baby, Susie,” I tell her. “You know that.” But Susie just needs more convincing.

I think that when Susie sees Junior and Franny’s baby, it will make her want one, too. That’s what I hope, anyway—because I am almost forty, and Susie has already crossed that bridge, and if we’re going to have a baby, we shouldn’t wait much longer. I think that Franny’s baby will do the trick; even Father agrees—even Frank.

And isn’t it just like Franny to be so generous as to offer to have a baby for me ? I mean, from that day in Vienna when she promised us all that she was going to take care of us, that she was going to be our mother, from that day forth, Franny has stuck to her guns, Franny has come through—the hero in her has kept pumping, the hero in Franny could lift a ballroom full of barbells.

It was just last winter, after the big snow, when Franny called me to say that she was going to have a baby—just for me. Franny was forty at the time; she said that having a baby was closing the door to a room she wouldn’t be coming back to. It was so early in the morning when the phone rang that both Susie and I thought it was the rape crisis center hot-line phone, and Susie jumped out of bed thinking she had another rape crisis on her hands, but it was just the regular telephone that was ringing, and it was Franny—all the way out on the West Coast. She and Junior were staying up late and having a party of two together; they hadn’t gone to bed, yet, they said—they pointed out that it was still night in California. They sounded a little drunk, and silly, and Susie was cross with them; she told them that no one but a rape victim ever called us that early in the morning and then she handed the phone to me.