Rose had a pink suitcase filled with money delivered to Pierrot at the Forget-Me-Not Hotel a few months later. She felt that he had earned it, after all. Rose treated everything in life as if it were a business now. She knew that Pierrot had helped her inestimably in her theatrical revue, so he was due his share of the profits.
Pierrot put the suitcase on the bed. The bedspread had a pattern of orange and brown autumn leaves and tiny red berries. He was reminded of a storybook for children, Babes in the Wood, in which two children were abandoned in the middle of a forest. He unlatched the suitcase and stared at the money. He had never been around this sort of money. He had hardly been around money at all, since it was Rose, and before that Poppy and before that Irving, who handled all the finances. He had preferred it that way. He sat on the edge of the mattress, the money next to him, and imagined the two of them abandoned together in the middle of the forest. It seemed to be the fate for orphans in fairy tales. He wanted to lie back on the quilt and imagine the sound of crickets and birds chirping.
But the money said, “Spend me, spend me, spend me.” That’s what money wanted. It wanted to be spent. And it really wanted to be spent on luxury items. Its greatest thrill was just to be gambled away. It wanted to change hands. It wanted to find itself at the racetrack, it wanted to be thrown into the center of the table at a casino. Money is a masochist.
He wondered whether Rose wanted to kill him by sending him all that money. But that would be assuming that she cared. Underneath all the money was their wedding photo.
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PIERROT HOLED UP in his tiny hotel room. The walls were a dingy off-white. He hung the wedding photo of himself and Rose from a nail in the wall to have something to look at while he lay in bed. He had no intention of even trying to fight the addiction now. He would wake up in the morning and shoot up. Occasionally he wandered outside, looking for some sort of human intimacy. Women wouldn’t come close to him. Sometimes when a woman walked by him, he would reach out his arms to her. She would shrink from him and hurry away. It wasn’t that he actually wanted to touch them. It was that he missed the feeling of reaching his arms out toward someone. He missed that tenderness.
He lived in the hotel for almost a year. When he got to the end of the money, he was not at all surprised. In fact, he was surprised that it had lasted that long and that he was still alive.
He sat in a diner, trying to eat a plate of eggs. He didn’t understand quite how he had come to find himself sitting at this table with a plate of eggs in front of him. He didn’t know how anyone could eat. He really didn’t have the ambition to eat anything else at all.
He had lost weight. He had always been slim, but he had never been quite this skinny. His tailor-made suit that had always made him look like a dandy, no matter what sort of financial situation he was in, now seemed loose and baggy on him. It had lost its magic charm. Or anyway, perhaps that was what he wanted to tell himself to justify trading in his suit at the pawnshop on Eighth Avenue.
The owner, a white-haired, older woman with a pair of glasses on a fake pearl chain, gave him enough money to get high for a couple of days. She also gave him an outfit to change into. It was a black suit. Because of its slim fit, it had been hard to sell. But Pierrot wore it well. Although when he looked in his oval mirror, he couldn’t help but notice that he looked as though he were preparing ahead of time for his funeral.
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HE WOKE UP in the morning three days later. But was the suit really his last possession? What else could he say belonged to him and nobody else? What else did he have the right to sell?
He wandered across the street to the library. There was a girl sleeping in one of the phone booths, Snow White waiting to be kissed. He pulled open the door of the phone booth next to her and sat down on the wooden bench. He asked the operator for the number to any recording studio. The phone swallowed the coin quickly, like a dog that doesn’t chew its treat. He could hear the nickel being digested by the telephone. The man on the other end of the line knew of the Snowflake Icicle Extravaganza. He had remembered the tune at the end of the show. He said that he was indeed interested in recording it.
“It was really the best thing about the show. I mean, it’s the part of the show that’s going to last. How come you never recorded it before?”
“I used to be worried about recording my music. Because I thought that other people would hear my melodies and steal them and get credit for them. I figured that they would be able to study my playing and get how to perform like me. And I wouldn’t be unique anymore. But that’s just fear giving me crazy reasons. I have no right to keep a good tune for myself. I have to let it go out into the world, man. It wants to have its own life in other people’s hearts.”