The Oblivion Arms - Part Four
Act Three: The Third Partition: 'Love-Melancholy'
Phoebe rose to take a tour around the room. Her back was giving her problems. It was the weight. She was regretting the apple -- what kind of diet didn't let you eat fruit? She felt like a chump.
Her finger, trailing across the wall, gathered a heap of dust that fell, with a dreamy slowness, to the floor. She found herself looking at a scrap of the underlying wallpaper, most of which had been painted over in a graying white. The paper was patterned with the hotel's emblem: embedded letters, an A within an O, the latter composed of three bolts of lightning, the former a serpent that looped to bite its own tail.
Phoebe stepped back, as if fearing voltage or venom. There was a motto, in Greek, which was simply a transliteration of the English word "Oblivion." The snake's back, or rather the lowest point of its loop, rested on a heap of tiny coins, from which shot a spray of short lines, representing glitter.
Boston held nothing but rain. After some effort he secured a room, or half of one, at the Friends of Brazil Society. His fellow boarder was an old gent who spent his waking hours manipulating tiny screws on a device resembling a typewriter, which he called, somewhat mysteriously his tradutor. Armando thought him addled.
During a deceptively dry portion of the afternoon he set off for the address on the lost letter (he had sensibly memorized it before the voyage) and discovered, to his dismay, that the shingle no longer hung. Three weeks ago, the kindly Brahmin had succumbed to scarlatina. The small firm he headed had broken up almost as rapidly as that letter, sounding the soundless deep, had been turned to nothing by currents and curious fish.
The storm began in earnest. A crestfallen Armando plotted, fantastically, a return to Spain. He would fight valiantly for...ah, he would decide when he got there. Upon entering his room, he found the old man and the translation machine gone -- as well as the gold pieces stupidly left in the not-so-false bottom of his steamer trunk.
What happened next is not abundantly clear, but it might be called the second of Armando's slips of the tongue. The club's secretary claimed no knowledge of the absconder's whereabouts, and soon Armando changed tacks, seeking a loan rather than revenge. At which point the secretary changed tacks, offering a possible address rather than money. Back in Rio, Armando had found his Portuguese leave him during spans of flusterment, forcing him to use Spanish; now the Spanish seemed to have deserted him as well, and all that remained was a sputtering, ludicrous, impressionistic version of English. In the ensuing chaos, involving a cleaning lady, a porter, and a rotating cast of roomers, a pen was procured, an umbrella offered, and various instructions were noted. Whether the old man with Armando's money had actually fled to Penumbra, or whether that town's name was conjured simply by a careless proximity of the words pen and umbrella, it is impossible to say. (Though Armando never found the traitorous tradutor, years later he would design the deliberately drab office building of a Penumbran translation agency called Interlingua.) The secretary bundled Armando into a waiting landau, which whisked him off to the Vermont Institute, across town. Here he ate sandwiches of gray meat and listened to a brief lecture on the history of Penumbra. In the past, Vermont had minted its own money, separate from the national legal tender; and Penumbra still had its own money, separate from Vermont's.
Over potent cocktails, they somehow coaxed his gold from him, exchanging it with a sack of this special currency. Money useless anywhere else. His options thus reduced, he would leave in the morning for Penumbra.
Having closed a business deal, the man dons his hat, collects coat and walking stick from a lackey by the vestibule, and dashes down the steps into a waiting landau. His neat mustache has just a trace of silver and his splendid eyes twinkle in their orbits. The driver spins the wheel and they merge into silver traffic.
Boring! thought Murray Adipose. He had hoped the movie would reveal itself to be a musical, some insouciant song-and-dance spectacle, but no one was even saying anything. Stock music plays as the man disembarks at the train station, the porter derives a suitcase from the trunk, and both porter and driver are tipped, apparently generously. The man, smiling, waves away their effusive thanks. He passes through the first-class car, where he belongs, and takes a seat with the commoners, as if to absorb their secrets for some higher purpose.
One channel up, a coach of some sort was saying, "We're getting poised to really catch fire again."
They traveled by train, on which they were but dimly aware of each other's presences; by pneumatic dinky, on which mild greetings were exchanged; and by private landau, on which a doomed friendship was born.
The name of this man with extraordinary eyes was Eli Phineas Tickle, though the name meant nothing, then, to Armando. By choice, he never traveled first class. He was fifteen years older than Armando, dressed like the dandy he was, and implored the Spaniard to call him "Finn." This request, coupled with a hearty clap on the back, confused Armando, who wondered if his months at sea might have engendered some thin, dorsal growth.
"In China," said Finn, "we were transported by palanquin, in the rainy season. Me and Smitty and our luggage. Now that was living. Seventeen Chinamen to do the trick." He made a poor sketch on the back of the envelope. "It's all to do with psychology, see. They thought it might save their souls -- though until our arrival, they had not even possessed the concept of a 'soul.' In any case the passage was pura seta, you know: smooth as silk."
As a young man Finn had wanted to write books -- novels so thick you could use them as pillows. "The American Tolstoy" was the title he sought. Farmed out to Groton, matriculating at Yale, he quit his undergraduate studies after two years and headed for the Far East, ostensibly for missionary work. But when Finn, drained by fever and intestinal ills, finally reached the new station at Fu Lang Chow, twenty years of inculcation in the Episcopal faith had crumbled away. There he developed a field of studies he liked to call "power relations." Espousing a little bit of socialism and a mix of often contradictory religions, and brandishing the threat of violence, Finn energized a clan of heathens who were loyal to him "to this day." Their exploits were numerous and often extreme. ("About which," he promised, "more later.")
Returning to Penumbra with this knowledge, the redoubtable Finn, looking for a time as tanned as any Hindoo, ascended the ranks of the family business--and the rest, as they say, is history. If anyone asked, "Penumbra" would be, essentially, his great creation.
"And what, dare I query, will you do in our town?" Finn asked, stuffing a pipe.
While Finn had been talking, Armando elaborated on the croquis of the palanquin system. In the background, rising above the bamboo he had penciled in a spectacular palace, so magnificent one forgot it was a thing of lead lines and not of precious metal, of diamonds the size of fists.
"Architect!" cried Finn, upsetting the tobacco. Armando smiled. "Sent by the Institute? Bully, sir -- bully indeed!"
Armando dipped his head modestly, debonairly turned his palms upward. Why did this man think he was a bully?
"Your name again, my good man?"
Armando told him, writing it on the envelope at the same time, as if one or both of them were deaf.
"That won't wash, chum," said Finn, with a concerned frown. He poked the air with the tip of his pipe. "Take the '-a' off the end and we're in business. Change it," he made the emendation, "to an '-e.' You're going to hit the jackpot, my friend; I shall see to it. Come stay at the house tonight. I have some buildings that need building."
Thus Armando Adipose was born, midwifed by commerce.
"And one," snapped the voice, "and two. And three. And take it to the left and take it one."
Eh? thought Murray.
"And two. And three. And once more to the right and take it up. And down."
Figures were bouncing, glorious in Lycra.
Morning had somehow become afternoon. "And left. And right and do it once more to the up. And down. And side. And other side come on let's do it one. And two. And three. And four more to the left and we go up. And down. And side. And side more to the left we up down one."
The phone rang.
"Uh...This is your wife Phoebe calling, with the Gnomon Freedom Afternoon Plan. Gnomon Freedom: 'It ain't just for mornings anymore.'"
"Hi, wife."
"So how are you?"
"I'm okay." He turned down the volume.
"I have the phone with me."
"So I hear. How's the library?"
"I'll tell you all about it later. I think I've got an idea."
"For 'Burton Jr.'?"
"For something."
"We don't have to do it if we don't want. I was thinking, we could do anything."
"We could fall on our faces. Our 'arses.'"
"Right," he said. "But we won't."
"No, we won't."
"Because we're Team Adipose." He clicked the TV off. "I'm actually a little shocked."
"Why?"
"You haven't told me to shut up yet."
"This is a really pleasant call, Murray. I don't want to ruin it now."
"You could never ruin anything, ever."
"Murray?"
"Eh?"
"Shut up, Murray. Go play piano or something."
She hung up. He smiled, counted to ten, and turned the TV back on. Four ponytails leapt as one. The beaty music stopped.
"We'll take a break and when we come back we'll concentrate on what's a problem area for many of us, the glutes."
There is a letter from Armando's former master, written on thick white paper, that Phoebe did not see; it was seen years ago by the town historian, Albertus Overreach, the last person to leave, alive, the library at the Oblivion Arms. He had been working on a chapter about the hotel, but his asthma grew so severe he quit the premises -- and, in due time, his project on the Tickle family fortune.
The letter describes the contents of a crate the master is sending from Australia, where he has retired. Customs officials believe it to hold an aboriginal drum that, when hit with twenty fingers, sounds uncannily like a summer storm. Inside, though, in seven hermetic metal capsules, are the insects Armando requested for his "scient-iffy experiment." Though the master's letter is mostly in English (with charming Antipodeanisms -- "these bushboys are the nicest mates"), insect is rendered in Spanish, the two interior consonants mistakenly transposed: incesta.
The historian Albertus Overreach has, it seems, committed a scholarly sin, circling this word with his own pencil. Now the word is disappearing from the paper. Now the paper is disappearing.
"You are becoming absurd, sir."
The Spaniard's smile maintains integrity, though his eyebrows droop, and inside him all is ruin. In a high, excited voice he states his case -- which his interlocutor does not care to hear.
"You do not 'love' her. You are simply confusing your needs. There is a special establishment I can lead you to, where you will find any proclivity requited. Most, anyway. All at my company's expense."
The Spaniard starts to speak and is cut off. "Think very carefully before you say another word."
The hotel has been built. Its financier and its architect stand on the observation deck, looking across the water at the other fingers of Penumbra. One can tell, looking at their stiffness, their distance, how much has changed. At the ribbon-cutting five months ago, the architect stood next to the industrialist's daughter, close enough to smell her. In the photograph she is smiling, looking at him; a daisy, despite her father's protests, in her hair. Though the architect had fallen in love with her even before meeting her -- in the landau, her father, desperate to find someone for his more marriageable elder daughter, had shown the Spaniard a picture of all three children -- he had waited. He was a gentleman. He had never had a private audience with this youngest daughter; they had played cards, with her siblings ("Straight whist or Boston?"), spun at charity balls, and chatted in the parlor of her father's mansion. He had delighted her with drawings of dream-palazzos and hanging gardens, and once, just once, allowed himself to linger for three fateful seconds in her humid hug: he was summering in Italy, and she had said, "Oh! I wish I might go with you!" And he had said, in Spanish: "Another time."
He says the words now, in front of her father, in English.
"You are drunk," says the wealthy father. That evening, he sits in his study, writing to the headmistress of a boarding school in distant Connecticut. For every line, then word, a tear falls, and he must start the letter afresh. He winds up typing it, on a queer old contraption he finds next to the sewing machine, in one of the rooms given over to junk. He must give his daughter away to save her.
In the morning suitcases clog the vestibule, and by supper she is gone. In the afternoon the Spaniard begins his descent into what we might reasonably call madness.
Armando would spend his last years in the asylum at New Anhedonia, the final building of his to see construction. After losing the generous commissions from Eli P. Tickle and its subsidiaries, Armando was forced to shed his work of the flourishes his benefactors had indulged. With Olivia gone (really gone, for she died of a mouth disease less than a year after leaving Penumbra), Armando had no use for his former conceits, his ideas of Old World ornamentation. In fact, a cluster of apartment buildings in nearby New Yorick was known informally as Glumville, until it was torn down for a parking garage, which today waits to be torn down for nothing at all.
After the ridicule heaped on Armando for the Air-Port, followed swiftly by the Roman Baths fiasco, he began devising architectures that, in truth, could never exist. He proposed, to no one: deliriously high walls made of thousands of glass sheets; a new administration building for the ice factory, made of ice; a church in the shape of a toilet. His sketches became looser, billowy. Buildings resembled humans, or gargoyles, and were transposed, with scissors and glue, onto aquatint postcards of the Penumbran peninsulae. The whole landscape howled with pain.
For they had written to each other, and had "nick-names": she was his "Oblivion," he was her "Arms." He would write her a letter a day, each enfolded in an envelope with her address penned in a feminized hand -- supposed correspondence from a schoolmate who lived "in town." Her letters were less frequent, and shorter; they are hard to read, for being pressed with Armando's lips.
In a journal he notes how easy it was to convince her father into agreeing that "Oblivion Arms" was a good name for a hotel. Armando claimed that a small wood-sprite had whispered the solution to him as he dozed in the forest by Bish-Bosh Falls. Finn, the power relations expert, saw a submerged loucheness to it that would lure guests in before they were quite sure what was going on. (That day Armando had brought his Olivia horehound and sarsasparilla, and a shrunken foot-locker filled with ten gold coins, which she ate with magical speed as he told her of his triumph.)
Olivia's letters kept coming to Armando, from her school in Connecticut. She wrote with a quill, with brown ink she joked was some exquisite river mud. "Straight whist or Boston?" she would postscript. He was forbidden to visit; guards would shoot him dead. Then she died, on a rain-laden day, of a sort of thrush. A disease as light as a bird, whose feathers floated to the ground to form letters, words: a sentence Armando could never bring himself to say.
Phoebe shed tears. She was large enough, she thought wryly, that when she cried she, there is no other word, blubbered. What had happened? Her great-aunt had never grown so big, nor her mother so porcine, nor her sister, a failed caterer in New Brunswick, so profoundly wide. True: her grandmother -- Finn's wife -- was stout at the end, in both senses of the word, and earlier forebears included women of considerable girth. Phoebe felt the chair creak. She felt it might break beneath her, despite its metal reinforcements.
She wasn't sure if she wept for Olivia, Armando, or herself. Later she was sure she was crying for someone named Khâder Adipose.
