Stanley Elkin - The Magic Kingdom

(She is dressed and out, not looking toward the drapes once, not looking anywhere, not even checking — as everyone does, as even Benny does, as even Mudd-Gaddis must do, tapping their pockets or looking into their purses, for gum, for keys or comb or handkerchief or change — the hotel room she is about to leave. Is gone. Totally collected and moving through the room and out of it, as through with and out of any indifferent space, as assured and confident and possessed as she might be passing from one room to another in her flat.

(And though in many ways it has been a great morning for him, a real eye-opener, the things he’s seen trapped in his head as on a photographic plate, Benny is nervous, jealous and convinced as he is — he’d looked at Mudd-Gaddis from time to time, even during her performance, glancing at him as much for confirmation that this was all happening as for the respect he felt was owed him for actually finding the place — that this, so new and exciting to him, was just old familiar stuff to his wise and jaded comrade.

(Who could at least — thank God for small favors — share the discovery Benny was busting with, temper that burden, at least, his spilled, cup-run-over excitement, but who wouldn’t remember, who couldn’t remember lunch and thus wouldn’t be able, the forgetful good front and past-it boulevardier, kid-ancient old boy, to ruin a good thing for him, something he would almost certainly want to look in on again and again, or to give him away.)

“Yes,” Charles Mudd-Gaddis said to Tony Word and Lydia Conscience on one occasion, and to Janet Order, Rena Morgan, and Noah Cloth on three others, “Mary Cottle. She’s taken a room in the hotel just for herself. Room eight twenty-two. Somewhat smaller than any of ours but quite well furnished. A deep, oblong affair with a dark olive-colored dresser, Danish modern, I think, with three long, faintly louvered drawers. A circular table of similar shade about one and a third meters in diameter stands in the southeast corner with two matching generic Scandinavian armchairs. There’s a somewhat larger chair off to the side of her Trimline Sylvania TV. The drapes are a patternless brown about the color of damp bark, and the rug is a soft acrylic and wool shag, treated with a somewhat glossy fire retardant. There are four ashtrays rather than the customary three: one on each bedstand and the others on the dresser and table. I suppose she may have taken the one on the dresser from the W.C., though my guess — you know how she smokes — is she probably asked Housekeeping for the extra. There were seven fag-ends in only two of the trays, two in the one on the dresser, and five in the one on the bedstand by the beige telephone to the right of the queen-sized bed. I liked her bedspread, incidentally, a sort of burnt sienna. Instead of the usual stylized map of Disney World that hangs in these rooms, there’s a quite nice portrait of the old Mickey Mouse. Black and white and from the early days when he was still Steamboat Willy.

“On my way out I happened to notice that the Orlando telephone directory on the dresser was turned to page forty-three.”

“Did you mention any of this to Benny?” Rena Morgan asked.

“Benny?” the little gerontological case said uncertainly.

Because everything has a reasonable explanation.

It was Janet Order who reported to Nedra Carp that Mary Cottle had taken room 822. She was still sore because Mary had been thoughtless enough to light that cigarette and caused her to cough and choke and wake from her dream the evening of their airplane ride to Florida. She still remembered the circumstances, the difficulty she’d had falling asleep in the first place — the little blue girl who welcomed sleep if only for the dreams, the disguises she found there, and who, forget special circumstances, forget need, had to wait right along with everyone else for the hour or so to pass before REM sleep came with its marvelously cunning camouflage solutions — and the even greater difficulty she had falling back asleep after she was awake, though she remembered dozing, fitful naps, and recalled, too, her lively suspicions, thinking, She’s seen my file, she knows my case, how it is with me. She did that on purpose. And thinking too, Now even if I do get to sleep again I’ll probably have to go to the bathroom. In any case I’ll have to be out just getting my rest a whole other hour or so, or hour and a half or so, before I ever get to dream again. And even if she didn’t do it on purpose, even if she just needed a cigarette, I know how smokers are. They’re addicted as alcoholics. She’ll wait an hour — isn’t that just what she did in the first place? — or an hour and a half or so, and then, when she thinks I’m sleeping deeply, just go ahead and light up again!

So that’s why Janet told on her.

And why she’d asked to be put in with Mr. Moorhead and the boys, even though she’d have preferred to stay with Rena and even with Lydia, so standoffish in the dream, and whose presence there, despite her neatness, picking and cleaning up after herself as she had, wiping away all she could find of her dead-giveaway spoor and all the traces of her prior tenancy, Janet had somehow suspected anyway. (All the dead-giveaway spoor she could find!) And why, of all the adults along on the holiday, it was to Nedra Carp she chose to spill the beans. Because the child, with her heightened awareness of other people’s aversion to her, could sense all aversion a mile off, had this gift the way certain animals were said to have an olfactory knowledge of fear. And why shouldn’t she? Wasn’t she blue? Wasn’t she the blue girl? (No wonder I knew she’d been there, she thought — in the dream. It was my doggy instincts.) And chose Nedra out of some still higher sense of the squeamish, not just the ordinary vibes of simple blue racism this time but even her peculiar sense of caste. Not only had she sensed that Nedra had no use for her, she sensed the reason too. It was simply because she inhabited a different room. It was simply because she was not officially her charge. Not because she was blue and disgusting but because she was not one of Nedra’s girls. As soon as she realized this she felt her heart buckle, the strange new symptom of love. So she chose Nedra, almost shy, almost nervous, bringing her the news — first checking the information by attempting to put a call through to 822 (if Miss Cottle answered she’d have hung up), only to be told by the hotel operator that the guest in 822 had instructed the hotel that she would accept no calls (“She,” Janet said, “ she?” “ The guest,” the operator replied coolly) — like a suitor. Sucking up, Janet thought, I’m sucking up. And didn’t mind at all, who wouldn’t have minded even if she hadn’t picked up all those other vibes as well, the sixth, seventh, and maybe even eighth senses that told her of Nedra’s antipathy to the other woman before she so much as mentioned her name. Or the other thing. That the woman she’d chosen to love did not love her back. And not only didn’t love her back but probably had an aversion to her greater even than the one she had for Mary Cottle, but whose aversion, whose squeamishness even, was not based on Janet Order’s blueness but only on that simple stupid business — her beloved nanny was stupid — that she lived across the hall with Mr. Moorhead and Noah Cloth and Tony Word and so was an affront to her.

“Oh, what a lovely room,” she began. “I do so wish I lived here with you and the other girls, Nanny,” Janet Order said.

Nedra Carp, knowing it would get back to her employer without her being the one to trouble the dear and troubled man, told Colin Bible.

Who was encouraged, almost buoyed, by the promising ease with which the fellow — Matthew Gale; his name was Matthew Gale — had been able to obtain the key. Turf, Colin Bible thought. The perks of turf. On mine, had I wished to, I could have witnessed the historic operations, met the famous sick, seen their charts and x-rays, the sheiks’ and prime ministers’ and movie stars’ who were always popping into the clinic with their secret under-the-table diseases. I could have had second helpings in the restaurant, access to the drug larders even.