—
A MONTH or so after I’d turned thirty-three I learned that Mum had assured the hotel’s reclusive millionaire owner that I’d join the team before the year was out.
She broke this news to me over lunch.
“Where do you see yourself in ten years’ time?” she asked.
My answer: “Not sure, but maybe on a beach reading a really good mystery. Not a murder mystery, but the kind where the narrator has to find out what year it is and why he was even born . . .”
Would I have answered differently if I’d known that Mum intended this to be a proper talk about my future? Probably not.
Mum was livid.
“Sitting on a beach reading a good mystery novel? Sitting on a beach reading a good mystery novel?? If that’s the height of your ambition you and I are finished, Freddy.”
“Come come, Mother . . . How can we ever be finished? I’m your son.”
“I’m going to give you one more chance,” she said. “What are your plans for the next few years? What motivates you?”
I spoke of the past instead of the future; a past, it turned out, I had neither lived for myself nor been told about. I remembered a sign that read REBEL TOWN, but not in English. I remembered people striding around with cutlasses, and a nursemaid who was a tiger—her lullabies were purred softly, and the melodies clicked when they caught against her teeth: Sleep for a little while now, little one, or sleep forever . . .
“That was my childhood, not yours,” my mother snapped. “Yours is a pitiful existence. I had you followed for six months and all you did apart from turn up to play in a sandpit with infants was go to galleries, bars, the cinema, and a couple of friends’ houses. What kind of person are you? I spoke to your weed dealer and he said you don’t even buy that much. You are without virtue and without serious vice. Do you really think you can go on like this?”
“What shall I do then?”
“You’ll start working at Hotel Glissando next week.”
“Will I? Can’t somebody else do it?”
“No, Freddy. It’s got to be you.”
—
THIS WAS SEXISM; my younger sister Odette is much handier than me. I pointed this out, but my mother seemed not to hear and proposed that I shadow Dad at the hotel for a few months in order to acquire the skills I lacked. I told Mum that I wouldn’t and couldn’t leave Pumpkin Seed Class at this crucial moment in the development of their psyches. Mum told me her career was at stake. A bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, and unscrupulous woman who was just below Mum in the chain of command was gunning for her job, subtly and disastrously leaving my mother out of the loop so that she missed crucial directives and was left unaware of changes to the numerous hourly schedules and procedures that it was her task to oversee and complete. I could see my mother’s stress as she spoke: It was there in her hair, which usually looks thoroughly done to a state-regulated standard. But now there were knots in my mother’s hair. I’d never seen that before.
—
HAVING SAID I’d sleep on my decision I went over to my sister’s flat and we talked all night. We both like the Glissando well enough. Discretion is its main feature: You go there to hide. The furnishings are a mixture of dark reds and deep purples. Moving through the lobby is like crushing grapes and plums and being bathed in the resultant wine. There are three telephone booths in the lobby. Their numbers are automatically withheld and they’re mainly used for lies. Once as I was leaving the hotel after running an errand for my dad I saw a man in a trench coat stagger into one of those phone booths. He had what looked like a steak knife sticking out of his chest and must’ve trailed some blood into the booth and lost a lot more at quite a rapid rate thereafter, though I didn’t see much of this. Blood’s a near-perfect match for the color scheme—each drop is smoothly stirred in.
I lingered in order to provide assistance; the man with the knife sticking out of his chest picked up the phone, dialed, and explained to somebody on the other end that he was working late. “Heh—yes, well, save me a slice!” His voice was so well modulated that if I hadn’t been able to see him I wouldn’t have entertained even the faintest suspicion that there was a knife in him. Then he phoned an ambulance and collapsed. That man impressed me . . . he impressed me. As he waited for the paramedics his eyes darkened and cleared, darkened and cleared, but he gripped the knife and his grip held firm. He looked honored, extraordinarily honored, seeming to care more for that which tore his flesh than he did for the flesh itself, embracing the blade as if it were some combination of marvel and disaster, the kind that usually either confers divinity or is a proof of it. To the boy gawping through the glass it seemed that this man strove to be a worthy vessel, to live on and on at knifepoint, its brilliance enmeshed with his guts. If he was a man without regrets then he was the first I’d seen. And I remember thinking: Well, all right. I wouldn’t mind ending up like that.