Paul Theroux - The Stranger at the Palazzo D'Oro

“I know she—”

“Don’t refer to your mother as ‘she,’” he said. “So this hotel isn’t good enough for you?”

“Louie snores.”

Louie was three, a little kid, and my sharing the bedroom with him made me feel like a little kid, too.

“Quit your bellyaching.”

That night, like every other night, I made a tent of my blanket and read Campcraft with my flashlight. How to purify water, how to cook wild plants, how to notch trees in the wilderness so that I would never get lost when I was out trapping animals, how to tie a sheepshank, how to tramp in snowshoes, how to read a compass and orient a map, how to smoke venison, how to identify poison sumac. I wished for a gun.

And the next day, like every other day, I lay in my pup tent that was pitched in the far corner of the yard, near the part of the fence with the missing pickets, and I read comic books.

I was in my tent reading Weird Fantasy —another bad marriage, another henpecked husband and cruel wife with a beautiful body. He stabbed her during an argument and dismembered her, cutting her into chunks, wrapping each piece in paper and taping it, and putting the whole pile of little parcels into his refrigerator. Then he was called away.

His poor relatives, stuck for a place to stay, used his house one weekend and raided his freezer. You saw them feasting as the phone rang. We ran out of food! Hope you don’t mind our eating that meat in the freezer! You saw the man in the last panel holding the phone, his cheeks blown out, saying Yech.

“Andy?”

I stuffed the comic under the ground sheet.

“Can I come in?”

I was lying on the lump in the ground sheet as Evelyn Frisch crawled in on all fours, biting her tongue from the effort and pushing at her skirt. When she lay down I sat up, squirming, so that we wouldn’t touch.

“So what's up?”

“Nothing.”

She pretended to yawn and said, “I'm going to take a nap.”

Holding her hands together across her white blouse, she closed her eyes, faking sleep, while I watched the way the pleated hem of her skirt was rucked against her thigh. I wanted it to twitch higher, to get a glimpse of her panties.

“I might not be able to stay too long,” she said, but kept her eyes closed.

“How come?”

“I might have to go to the bathroom.”

I did not recognize my pinched and strangled voice as I said, “Maybe you could do it here, behind the tent.”

She sniffed and said, “If you promise not to look.”

I promise.

Sitting up and snatching at her skirt, she got onto her hands and knees again and poised herself like a monkey and scuttled out of the tent. When I stuck my head out I could not see her, but when I looked behind the tent she was squatting, her panties stretched across her knees.

“You promised not to look,” she said in a grunting voice.

So I lay and listened to the low notes of dribbling music, her spattered leaking onto dry leaves, not a stream but a songlike sound I had never heard before in my life, which bewitched and aroused me.

“Bye.”

She went into the half-dark of dusk, and I was glad she was gone. Alone, I could think about her, what she had said, what she had done. She came the next day. I was happy when Evelyn Frisch visited, and I liked it when she left. The same things happened: the same words, even “Don't look,” as if she had not said them before, though the second time, when I lay in the tent listening, she said “I'm tinkling” just before the patter and dribble came.

No one else knew our secret. Yet for me something had changed. At first I had needed only the pup tent, and I had been free and happy; but Evelyn Frisch had taken an interest. Her visits had been an intrusion. Then I had counted on seeing her. I wanted her to slip through the gap in the fence and visit me in the pup tent. I wanted her to tease me. I began to think that I would never be a fur trapper or a Mountie.

Now, in the tent I saw as my freedom, I lay feeling restless, waiting for Evelyn to show up, wanting to be near her, afraid to touch her.

Still I dreamed of sleeping out, of staying in my pup tent all night, not coming in: living in it as comfortably as I did under my blanket in bed.

“Louie keeps coughing.”

But it was worse than that. I hated sleeping in the same room with him.

“Your poor little brother's got a cold and you don't even care.”

“I do care, but his coughing wakes me up.”

“He can't help it,” my father said, shaving at the kitchen sink, scraping the razor down one cheek, filling the blade with whisker-flecked foam.

“I wouldn't hear him if I slept outside.”

“Red sky in the morning, sailors take warning.” My father wiped the blade of his razor and said, “It's going to rain to beat the band. You’d come into the house as soon as it got dark.”

It was a dare, I could see, my father swiping at his face with the razor and chuckling. I pretended to be unsure, so that he would feel confident in his bullying me.

He said, “Then you’ll appreciate what we do for you,” seeing my sleeping out in the pup tent as a sort of punishment.

“Tonight?”

“It’s a school night.”

The following weekend I slept out. It was harder than I had expected: the ground was stony and flat under my back, and after a few hours the air was cold, the dew settled on the tent cloth and wetted it and made it sag, and I could hear the wind.

I lay in the stifling dampness of dusk, the stones pressing into my back through the wadded ground sheet, my head against a knotted bath towel, the oily smell of the pup tent’s canvas in my nose. I was tempted to crawl out and hurry into the house. But I held on, I stopped smelling the smells, I stopped feeling the discomfort of folds and stones, and I slept. Around midnight, the rain came down, pattering on the pup tent, dribbling down the canvas, puddling on the ground, a pleasant water song that made me drowse in the humid interior of the tent. When I woke in the darkness, feeling heavy against the ground, I smiled and turned over and scratched and slept like a dog until sunup.

“Look who’s here,” my father said that first morning at breakfast. He was at the sink, stropping his razor, working the blade on the leather, a white beard of soap foam on his face. His voice was rueful. He began to scrape at the foam, holding his razor with his fingertips like a musical instrument. His voice was toneless, for he was shaving and tight-faced. “Wash your hands.”

He knew that he had lost me, that I had another life. I liked the pup tent best when it truly sheltered me and looked used, when birds shat on it, streaks of green-flecked white, when neighborhood cats were baffled and repelled, when it was scattered with twiglets from the overhead trees, with blown leaves from the Frisches’ poplars, when it shed rain, when it concealed me. I was free there.

Evelyn Frisch came back, always in her short skirt and tidy socks, half pleading to be let in, half mocking when I hesitated, offering me fudge or bull’s-eyes, penny candy she’d bought at the corner store.

No one saw her come. No one saw her leave. We were hidden in the pup tent.

“My mother would kill me if she knew I was here. Wouldn’t yours?”

I hadn’t thought of it, I never thought of such things here.

But we did nothing except sit, or lie down — not touching; marveling at our boldness, being in this place apart.

“I’ve got new panties,” she said one day, and lifted her skirt. I was stirred by the sight but pretended not to be. Clasping her close, they were purple, trimmed with white lacy tape.

“I have to tinkle,” she said another day, and I was flushed and went breathless as she slipped out of the tent, and I listened, pretending to read Weird Fantasy, wondering at the word “ghouls.”