(She is quickly done, shivers all along her body, and bounds from the bed. In the bathroom — she leaves the door open; they can see part of her reflection in the full-length mirror — she sits to pee, pulls a few sheets of toilet paper from the roll, and wipes herself. She washes her hands, slaps water on her face, and, when she returns to the room, she seems completely restored. Even her eyes seem restored too, returned to some neutral condition of peace.
(“I’ve heard of this,” Benny Maxine mouths to Charles Mudd-Gaddis, explaining. “World-class, champion speed sleep.”
(The old gnome frowns at him. The entire time they watch her dress she is still businesslike, still efficient, but now, putting on her clothes, it is almost as if she is posing. As she is, though Benny doesn’t realize this. She is posing for the clothes themselves, moving her body into perfect alignment with her apparel, adjusting straps and cups, seams and undergarments to all those unsuspected boluses of flesh. They get an eyeful. They see her from the side, from the rear, from the front. As she rests a leg on the bed and leans forward to leverage a stocking up along her thigh, they get a brief, unobstructed view of her sex, of her bunched and weighted breasts. But she moves too rapidly.
(Benny doesn’t know where to look first and, worried about any telltale arthritic creaks, glances at Mudd-Gaddis, meaning to steady him, to forestall the chirping of his old companion’s joints, the snap and crackle of his burned bones. But even Mudd- Gaddis’s eyes barely move, his fierce old countenance as absolved of desire and edge as Mary Cottle’s own.
(Which was when he first thought slyboots, crafty bastard! And when he first formulated the questions he did not even know yet he would ever get to ask. Not only the one about how long it lasted, when he might reasonably expect surcease, relief, to be disburdened of what he already knew and recognized was to be just one more additional symptom of his life, but the one about preference too, especially the one about preference, offering pelt as he might ante a chip in a game of chance and despising Mudd-Gaddis, the old roué lech and sated boulevardier, who did not even have to trouble to crane his neck or even to move his eyes about, who’d already seen and presumably done it all in his time, who’d had only to wait there in ambush for something wondrous and delicious to come into view, the old bastard sedate and smug as an assassin behind his cross-hairs, settled in his sexual nostalgia — not having to choose, maybe not even having a preference, because the old fart knew that choice was a mug’s game — as that woman in her own arms on the bed, and only poor fifteen-year-old virgin Benny burdened forever by his fifteen-year-old turned-stone maidenhead, not knowing the odds but having to place his bet down anyway, the red or the black, declaring for quim, declaring for tush, declaring for boobs or pelt, and hoping, though he knew better, that tush or boobs would come up winners because, let’s face it, if he was ever going to get in the game it could only be by copping a feel. When he knew all along. When he by God knew all along where he had to be, where — for him — the real action was, but until this morning hadn’t even known the geography existed: the darning eggs, those elliptical hollows, those two discrete dark shadows, the twin burns, those stinking stains inside the fold of each buttock!
(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!