“It is slightly interesting to wonder where these jokes come from,” he wrote. “The ‘farmer’s daughters’ jokes, ‘a guy walks into a bar’ jokes? Nobody knows who creates dirty jokes, nor why such categories evolve and remain. How do the jokes survive in the world? How do they become popular enough to be repeated? Why do these appeal to people, appeal to them enough that they are memorized and stored? They spread like the most proficient virus. Why?”
In the chapter, he tells of an experiment. He made up a joke, told it to a friend when they were on a hiking trip on Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula (picture a woman in a tent). “I told my English-speaking friend the joke on top of a volcano,” he wrote. “It was funny, if I say so myself. I told no one else the joke, and I will not write it here. This is about what spreads among human beings by shear desire to have this superficial contact with other human beings. I hope to one day hear my joke repeated to me somewhere far away from Kronotsky.”
I woke in the phone booth the next morning, sat blinking my eyes to a new, dull-gray day dawning through the hotel, and I was surprised to see Elizabeth get out of the elevator at that moment, fully dressed in a navy business suit. I started to fold the door open but Elizabeth’s speed of walking made me stop to see what the hell was going on. She was looking at someone. He was in the direction of the bank of courtesy phones on the opposite wall, and as soon as I saw the rounded Bob Cratchit posture I knew it was Charles.
CHAPTER 30
Charles wore a big blue arctic parka and a knit cap. He still had on sunglasses like he was a movie star, and the heavy coat couldn’t hide that stooping posture. They went toward each other like a bad movie, Van Raye with his arms open, Elizabeth moving too fast, not even caring if anyone saw her. She hit him with an embrace that knocked him slightly off balance, then took his cheeks between her hands and stretched her neck forward to kiss him on the lips.
He appeared mildly shocked.
I rose awkwardly out of the booth, stood with the help of my cane and the doorframe.
I walked to them and said, “Elizabeth?”
She let go of him and kept his elbow in her grip and simply said, “Charles is here!”
“Look who’s here!” he said, eyes behind the glasses. “Me!”
“Charles,” I said. He came and hugged me, pinning my arms so that I could only touch his elbows. “It’s really you,” I said. “Thank God. Charles, let me go. You’re squeezing me.”
He did and said, “We’re all here!” He took in the sight of Elizabeth, down to her gold shoes. “I’ve never had a greeting like that! Darling, look at you, you look fantastic! I look horrible. It really took too long to get here. It wasn’t supposed to be this long. And the storm.” His parka squeaked as he moved. He had on black pants and boots with zippers.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “You’re here.”
The waterfall ran in the fake rainforest. The Air of Liability was clear. Guests pulled their luggage by us. Everything was quite normal except the girlish look of delight on Elizabeth’s face.
“I’ve got a lot to tell you,” I said. “I don’t know where to start.”
“Well, we have plenty of time.” He clapped his hands. “You look fine,” he said to me. “I love the getup,” he pointed to my red tracksuit. “Very urban.” He took Elizabeth’s arm, me with the other, moving us along as if we were guests in his hotel.
“My God. This is just like you to call when you are already here,” Elizabeth said. “I wasn’t even dressed. I could have used some warning.”
“We had to beat the storm.”
“Have you had breakfast?” she said. “Do you want a room? Of course you want a room. There’s an extra room, Sandeep’s old room. I could see what else is available. I’ll book you something.”
“Elizabeth, slow down,” he said. “I’ve got some things.” He pointed toward a gold luggage cart where a homeless woman sat on a pile of cheap bags that included two garbage bags and a drawstring laundry bag. The woman’s hair had recently been sheared off. She wore sandals, her legs spread so that hairy shins were revealed.
He herded us to the cart and said, “This is Ruth Christmas.”
The woman didn’t attempt to get off the cart. She had an unlit cigarette in her fingers and she had the expression of careful, objective observing.
“This is Elizabeth Sanghavi, and this is Sandeep.”
She only nodded and reached up and hooked her hand around the top bar of the cart and let it hang there as she took an imaginary drag of the unlit cigarette in the other. She was clearly deranged. My thought was, Where had he picked her up?
“This is. . ” Elizabeth said, “this is your luggage? I mean, this is it?” Elizabeth was staring at the woman, but then tried to occupy her eyes with scanning the bags. “I thought you were bringing your horn.”
“My horn?” he said.
“I don’t see your horn.” Her voice had changed.
“Elizabeth, I haven’t played my horn in years. Ruth did most of the driving. I’m starving.”
“You don’t have your horn?” Elizabeth said again, and I wanted her to stop repeating herself. She’d told me a thousand times that only dullards repeated things in order to give the dullard time to think about what was going on.
“I haven’t played a horn in years. You know that.” He smiled.
“You mentioned starting back,” she said.
The bellhops in their maroon uniforms wore ushankas that made them look like ice fishermen in band uniforms.
“Ruth and I were wondering,” Van Raye said, “if we might see the hotel’s roof.”
“The roof?” I said, being the dullard now.
“We’re searching for a certain type of dish antenna—”
My phone chimed and Charles looked at it as though it were a turd.
A message from Ursula said:
Dubourg is here
“What?” I mumbled.
Van Raye maneuvered Elizabeth and me by the arm again as if to talk to us in private.
Elizabeth glanced over her shoulder. “She’s with you?”
“Now, sweetheart, before assumptions are made. .” He turned slightly back at the other woman—“Ruth is. . ”—who still sat on the bags on the cart and out of earshot. She put the cigarette in her mouth and drug on it as if it were lit; she even squinted through nonexistent smoke.
I saw Elizabeth’s focus in the distance, and her eyes became sleepy the way she did when she was playing a particular difficult piece of music. She refocused on Charles talking about driving, and she slowly lifted her hand and tucked her fingers, and I saw the meaty paler part of her palm rise, and I had a flash memory to the executive self-defense course we’d taken in Trenton, New Jersey, years ago, and that meaty part of her hand traveled on a path toward Van Raye. He could only flinch before it struck him on his cheek, half slap and half fist.
He stepped backward, mouth open. “My God!” He still had those horrible sunglasses on.
Travelers stopped walking, stopped talking on their phones to see this spectacle.
The woman sitting on the luggage began to laugh.
Elizabeth covered her mouth. “Dear God, are you okay?”
“Violence?” he said. “Seriously?”
“He’s okay,” I said. “You’re okay, aren’t you?”
“NO!” He leaned away from me.
Elizabeth recovered and dropped her hands. “Go find another hotel! Get out!”
“Elizabeth, darling. . ”
“Elizabeth,” I said, “wait a minute, okay?”