Howard Norman - Next Life Might Be Kinder

“Am I in the way here?” I said. “There’s a lot of empty tables.”

We had the best time that night. I’ll never forget it. We sat there until well after closing time. Marie brought out a nice bottle of wine. At about three-thirty A.M. she made us each an espresso. I knew we’d pay for it all in the morning, but who cared? It must have been about five A.M. when Marie finally locked up. To my great surprise, she came back to the hotel with us. “When you were in the men’s room,” Elizabeth said, once we had taken aspirins, gotten into bed together, and turned out the two bedside lamps, “Marie asked if she could sleep on the chaise longue, just this once, and I said sure, why not?” In the morning I made omelets and coffee. Marie announced that she had to open Cyrano’s at ten A.M. and would sleepwalk through her shift. Sitting in the kitchen the rest of the morning, talking with Elizabeth about nothing in particular, I don’t think I was ever happier. It all felt like just regular life.

SO, WHAT DID Elizabeth finally tell me?

That night at about nine o’clock, she lined up her books. Then she looked at me. “You’ve asked me in so many ways to tell you what happened that day, Sam,” she said. “I’ve come to believe it’s wrong for me not to tell you. But it’s the last thing in the world I want to tell you. The thing itself — being shot and the physical pain of it — was over quite quickly. Maybe that’ll put your mind at ease a little. I hope so.

“What feels so good, darling, is when you come up behind me, say when I’m sitting on the chaise longue reading, or half asleep. And you unbutton my blouse, say the tangerine-colored blouse with the light scalloped pattern. The pattern you can hardly see at first but if you look closely, you can. I’ve stood up now, next to you. But facing away. Then you lean back, just so I lean back too, and you touch my nipples. That feels so nice, Sam. I reach down. And I can already feel — I don’t mean imagine, either. I can already feel you inside me, even though we still have all of our clothes on. Know what else?”

She stared out over the cove; I thought she might leave. But she said, “The day it happened. That morning — let me start there. I’d left our apartment before you’d woken up. I went to the library. Later, I went and got a coffee at Cyrano’s. Marie wasn’t working. I thought I might run into you there. I was hoping to. And then, when I got back home, you were already out. Off to the CBC, I think. I spent the rest of the morning at my typewriter, straight through to lunch. Getting at that paragraph. Getting at that one paragraph in The Victorian Chaise-Longue: ‘It is the ecstasy that is to be feared, she said with shuddering assurance, it is a separation and a severance from reality and time, and it is not safe. The only thing that is safe is to feel only a little, hold tight to time, and never let anything sweep you away as I have been swept — and perhaps that is how, only how I can be swept back.’

“I guess swept back is how I feel. It’s how I feel every night I meet you here, Sam.

“All that morning I had some sort of premonition. I think it was a premonition, though I didn’t know how to credit it at the time. It was just a feeling. Like you think you’re coming down with the flu or a bad cold. You just feel it in advance. You feel sort of hapless or something.

“Anyway, for lunch I had tomato soup, left over from the day before, and a cheese sandwich with a little mustard. Waiting for the soup to heat up in the saucepan, I picked up a pen and wrote out the paragraph on a napkin. Why would I do that? It was a cloth napkin! But that’s what I did. I said to myself, when I started my soup, ‘Elizabeth, don’t rush.’ Because remember how fast I used to eat when we first met? Like I had an alarm clock next to the plate, remember? I knew it surprised you. We’d be out at some restaurant and just get started talking, and you’d look at my plate and it would already be empty, and you’d get a kind of surprised look on your face. But you know, from the start it never had anything to do with not wanting to sit for hours talking. It was just a habit from childhood, I suppose. But that changed, didn’t it, and I eventually ate dinner more slowly. Sometimes more slowly than even you, who are the slowest slowpoke at eating dinner in all the history of eating dinners. And you’re always so famished!

“So I was thinking about the paragraph and eating lunch. After lunch, I took a walk back over to Cyrano’s. Just to walk and think some more and see if Marie was working, which this time she was. Oh boy, was Marie ever in a sour mood. You know how she gets. It was the boyfriend, naturally. The high school teacher, what’s his name again? Oh yeah, Michael Roncier. So, Marie’s on her high horse: ‘Michael wants me to act more like I’m in love with him, but I’m not an actress. He doesn’t care if I’m really in love with him. But he’s got this theory that if I start acting like I am, I might actually get there. I give him high marks for coming up with that, even though it’s lame.’ All sour and worked up like Marie gets. The thing is, when I said goodbye to Marie, she told me I seemed jittery and worried. ‘I’m not,’ I said. But she noticed something.

“When I got back to the hotel, Max, the florist from down the block — you know, who delivers a bouquet to the lobby twice a week — he was there, short of breath. Derek Budnick was standing off to the side. Max was wheezing, gasping, and pale as paper. So Derek walked right over. Max kept saying, ‘I’m fine, I’m fine, I just need to sit down, catch my breath.’ So Derek sat down with him on the sofa. The bouquet was lying on the reception counter. I didn’t start to go upstairs yet, and pretty soon Max got his color back and was on his way. Everyone seemed to feel okay about him going back to the flower shop, and you know that Derek wouldn’t have allowed that, had he thought there was something to worry about.

“I suppose just an average day in the hotel lobby, right? The comings and goings, the suitcases. You know how I seldom take the lift, but I decided to take the lift this time. But I failed to notice — just wasn’t paying attention — that it was going down to the basement first. Too late, so down it went. And when it got to the basement, on stepped the creep Padgett himself. Creep creep creep. In the two steps out of the lobby and into the lift, I’d already gone back to obsessing about the paragraph from The Victorian Chaise-Longue, can you imagine? The scummy creep steps in next to me and right away says a creepy thing: ‘Well, Mrs. Lattimore, we can’t go on meeting like this.’ He’s dumb as dishwater, so what else would you expect from the creep? Everything he says has ‘creep’ written all over it. Plus, he reeked. Of what? Probably some cheap whiskey, I don’t know of what. I should have pushed past him out into the basement and flown up the stairs to the lobby. Should have. Should have. Should have, darling. But up we went.

“In the lift I closed my eyes and tried to get lost in the paragraph again. But that didn’t work. The creep was breathing hard. And when we got to our floor and I got out, Padgett got out too, and he said, ‘Mrs. Lattimore, I’m afraid I’m going to have that nice long talk with your husband. You know, the kind of talk house detective Budnick had with me. Yeah, I think it’s time. Since you aren’t being nice to me in the ways I want you to be nice to me, eh?’ Which is when right there in the hallway I started shouting at the top of my lungs, ‘You sick creep! You think you’re in a movie, sicko!’ He reached out for me and I shouted really, really loud, ‘You even touch me, I’ll tear your eyes out! I’m going to get Derek Budnick and then I’m going back to the police.’ And that’s when, at the mention of police, he got down on his hands and knees and said, ‘If you pray, pray now.’ He was on his knees like he was praying. Suddenly he had a gun in his hand, and then he shot me, Sam, and I felt a terrible pain. It was really bad, terrible pain right here.” She touched near her heart. “I just looked at the Beelzebub. It’s all such a nightmare, Sam. Right in our sweet little hotel. Right in our home. To try and take me away from you like that. Did he think he could take me away from you?