“The opposite of New York,” Frank liked to say. “The only time it’s quiet on Central Park South is about three in the morning. But in Maine,” Frank liked to say, “about three in the morning is about the only time anything’s going on. Fucking nature comes to life.”
It was about three in the morning, I noted—a summer night, with the insect world teeming; the seabirds sounded fairly restful but the sea was no less determined. And I heard this peculiar creeping sound. It was at first hard to tell if it was outside my window, which was open—though there was a screen—or if the sound was outside my door, in the hall. My door was open, too; and the outside doors to the Hotel New Hampshire were never locked—there were too many of them.
A raccoon, I thought.
But then something much heavier than any raccoon shuffled across the bare floor at the landing to the stairs and softly padded down the carpeted hall toward my door; I could feel the weight of whatever it was—it was making the floorboards sigh. Even the sea seemed to quiet itself, even the sea seemed to listen to whatever it was—it was the kind of sound you hear in the night that makes the tide pause, that makes the birds (who never fly at night) float up to the sky and hang suspended as if they were painted there.
“Four?” I whispered, thinking that the dog might be on the prowl, but whatever was in the hall was too tentative to be Seeing Eye Dog Number Four. Four had been in the hall before; old Four wouldn’t be pausing at every door.
I wished I had Father’s baseball bat, but when the bear lurched into my doorway I realized there was no weapon in the Hotel New Hampshire powerful enough to protect me from this intruder. I lay very still, pretending to be sound asleep—with my eyes wide open. In the flat, blurred, flannel-soft light of the predawn, the bear seemed huge. It stared into my room, at my motionless bed, like an old nurse taking a bed check in a hospital; I tried not to breathe, but the bear knew I was there. It sniffed, deeply; and very gracefully, on all fours, it came into my room. Well, why not? I was thinking. A bear began my life’s fairy tale; it is fitting that a bear should end it. The bear shoved its warm face near mine and breathed in everything about me; with one purposeful sniff, it seemed to review my life’s story—and in a gesture resembling commiseration, it placed its heavy paw on my hip. It was quite a warm summer night—for Maine—and I was naked, covered by just a sheet. The bear’s breath was hot, and a little fruity—perhaps it had just been feeding in the wild blueberries—but it was surprisingly pleasant breath, if not exactly fresh. When the bear drew back the sheet and looked me over, I felt just the tip of the iceberg of fear that Chipper Dove must have felt when he truly believed that a bear in heat wanted him. But this bear rather disrespectfully snorted at what it saw. “Earl!” said the bear, and rather roughly shoved me; it made room beside me for itself and crawled into my bed with me. It was only when it embraced me, and I identified the most distinctive component of its strange and powerful scent, that I suspected this was no ordinary bear. Mixed with the pleasure of its fruited breath, and the mustard-green sharpness of its summer sweat, I detected the obvious odor of mothballs.
“Susie?” I said.
“Thought you’d never guess,” she said.
“Susie!” I cried, and turned to her, returning her embrace; I had never been so happy to see her.
“Keep it down,” Susie ordered me. “Don’t wake up your father. I’ve been crawling all over this fucking hotel trying to find you. I found your father first, and someone who says ‘What?’ in his sleep, and I met an absolute moron of a dog who didn’t even know I was a bear—the fucker wagged his tail and went right back to sleep. What a watchdog! And fucking Frank gave me the directions—I don’t think Frank should be trusted to give the directions to Maine, much less to this queer little part of the wretched state. Holy cow,” said Susie, “I just wanted to see you before it got light, I wanted to get to you while it was still dark, for Christ’s sake, and I must have left New York about noon, yesterday, and now it’s almost fucking dawn,” she said. “And I’m exhausted,” she added; she started to cry. “I’m sweating like a pig in this dumb fucking suit, but I smell so bad and look so awful I don’t dare take it off.”
“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.
I had to give Franny the usual report on how the rape crisis center was doing. Franny has donated quite a bit of money to the center, and Junior has helped us get good legal advice in our Maine area. Just last year Susie’s rape crisis center gave medical, psychological, and legal counsel to ninety-one victims of rape—or of rape-related abuse. “Not bad, for Maine,” as Franny says.