Steven Millhauser - Martin Dressler - The Tale of an American Dreamer

He became reluctant to leave the Grand Cosmo, as if the act of passing through its doors were a form of abandonment, of betrayal. The Grand Cosmo needed him, needed him far more than Caroline or Emmeline, who had married each other and shut him out. For really there was no room for him in that dark marriage of sisters, each deep-twisted into each. He imagined Emmeline sitting in his flowered armchair, stepping into a pair of his pajamas, slipping into his side of the bed. He saw his empty chair at the dining room table in the Dressler. Slowly it began to dissolve, to shimmer like a mirage — and suddenly it was gone, like Claire Moore’s chair, like the Bellingham Hotel.

One evening Martin was sitting in a small glass-walled alcove of the main lobby, where he could have the double pleasure of being alone and at the same time of participating in the movements of the too-peaceful lobby beyond the glass. He was about to rise when the sense of Emmeline’s absence came over him, came so suddenly and so completely that it was as if he hadn’t known before that she was gone. It wasn’t so much a sensation of missing her as of feeling her absence, sharp and definite as a presence — an absence that continued to fill him until he could feel it as a pressure in his chest and a tingling in his fingertips, as if he were being invaded by something, which streamed steadily into him through a little hole somewhere. It felt like a heaviness, this in-streaming of absence. And indeed he could feel himself bent a little awkwardly in his chair, like a man he had once seen who had suffered a stroke in a lobby armchair and continued sitting awkwardly upright and even smiling, despite the ferocious pain in his arm and chest. In the glass of the alcove he could see the faint reflection of his face, through the face he saw a few lobby chairs and a pillar, and the thought came to him, even as Emmeline’s absence began to recede, that he had in fact grown transparent, during the moment he had been entirely filled with her absence.

He took up shifting residence in the Grand Cosmo, living in unrented courtyard dwellings, an unrented cottage in the wooded countryside of the eighteenth floor, an unrented room in the resort hotel on the fourth and fifth subterranean levels. He waited for the public to come. It was bound to come. It had always come. He rode the elevators, strolled through the Pleasure Park and the Palace of Wonders, bought a bag of cherries in the Moorish Bazaar and spat the pits into a stream beside an artful oak tree on the eighteenth floor. He sat in lobbies, tearooms, reading rooms, gardens with weathered marble statues, lecture halls, mossy glades, public parlors — sat listening to residents and visitors, speaking with staff, pondering improvements, observing the change of weather through many windows: gray skies and heavy snow, a sudden blue day, sheets of snow. He had been prepared to operate in the red, two years wasn’t uncommon, but the Grand Cosmo was losing too much too fast. On March 5, six months after opening day, he was summoned to a meeting of management in the executive suite on the second floor. The manager, backed by the head of accounting, who kept tapping the ball of a heavy finger against a thick sheaf of pages, urged him to drop his insistence on long-term leases. They were losing nearly thirty thousand a week — a ruinous rate. Irritably Martin agreed. That afternoon he instructed Harwinton to initiate a new campaign of four-color posters and half-page newspaper ads aimed at transient residents. Within a month the ads brought an increase in rentals to seventy-two percent of capacity, but during the spring and summer the numbers gradually diminished, despite new ads in weekly magazines. By September 5, the first anniversary of the Grand Cosmo, rentals had fallen to fifty-five percent of capacity — a rate that could only spell disaster. The manager told Martin that the Grand Cosmo seemed to confuse people — it didn’t appear to be the sort of place they wanted to check into for a few days on a quick trip to the city. And Martin could only agree, for after all the Grand Cosmo was not a hotel, not a hotel at all, but something quite different. One day in a small park on the twenty-third floor he overheard a woman say to a friend, “I simply love it here. I wouldn’t live anywhere else in the world. And you never have to go out, if you don’t want to,” to which her friend replied, “I love visiting here, Julie, but I could never stay, it’s too, it’s too—” “Yes?” the first woman asked, but already they were passing out of earshot along a leafstrewn path. Martin followed them through the deserted park but could hear only murmurs, laughter. For the next two days he brooded savagely over the unfinished sentence as if it contained the secret he had been looking for; one night it struck him that his search for the unspoken words was an acknowledgment that the Grand Cosmo was failing.

Martin strode through the floors of his inexhaustible building, searching for flaws, imagining new enticements. Was it the sense of the limitless that prevented people from flocking to the Grand Cosmo as they had to the Dressler? In the largest hotels, vast spaces were divided neatly into small, repeated rectangles — could the secret of such places be monotony itself? Did the public, along with its craving for the up-to-date and the brand-new, also crave not simply the familiar, but the repetitive, the reassuring sense of boredom provided by multiple sameness? Did the Dressler and the New Dressler flourish not because of their innovations, but precisely because they failed to depart very far from the familiar pattern of the good old family hotel?

It occurred to Martin that perhaps he was being punished for something. The punishment, if that’s what it was, struck him as entirely proper, though he wondered a little about the crime. Was he being punished for marrying Caroline and not Emmeline, the pretty sister and not the plain? He had married the sister in dream, the princess asleep in her tower, ignoring the living sister by his side. Was it because he too was a dreamer that he had been drawn to her then, five hundred years ago? She had never woken up. He had stopped trying. Perhaps he was being punished for not loving Caroline enough. Or was it for not desiring Emmeline in the first place? Was that his crime? Or was it the knock on the door of room number 7, on his wedding night? But maybe he was being punished for something much different. When his father grew angry he would harden himself, as if he were holding in an explosion. Was Martin being punished for not stepping carefully among the cigar boxes? Was that it? For surely the Grand Cosmo was an act of disobedience. Or was he being punished for something deeper than crime, for a desire, a forbidden desire, the desire to create the world? For of course only God and Harwinton could do that. Anyone else was bound to fail.

On the first Monday in December the head of accounting met with Martin to urge cuts in staff and the elimination of all inessential services. He further proposed that the six top floors be closed to residents and rented as business offices after a thorough renovation. Removing a bundle of papers from a leather case, he smoothed it over and over with the side of a hand and pushed it toward Martin, who sat down wearily in a chair, began to bend over the papers, and stood up with a curt refusal. He took the elevator down to the laundry, where he walked with his hands behind his back, soothed by the rumble of machines, the heat and steam of winding passageways. The next afternoon he found himself sitting in a public parlor on the twenty-sixth floor, looking at the first snow falling lightly. The lightly falling flakes of snow seemed the dust of vanished buildings; he understood that the Grand Cosmo was a commercial failure and would vanish like the Bellingham.