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Room 829 Wolfe unearthed the Earth... It was Stanley Bard who told me that Thomas Wolfe lived in Room 829 of the Chelsea Hotel. Bard was the manager of the Chelsea at the time, about a decade ago, before a corporation pushed him out. Stanley’s father - David Bard (1905-1964) - had been part-owner of the Chelsea and had known Wolfe. The great writer, who died before turning 40 while undergoing brain surgery in 1938 at Johns Hopkins, lived at the Manhattan landmark while working on The Web and the Rock, his follow-up to the immortal Look Homeward, Angel. “We had a bellhop here back then named Pernell Kennedy, a confidante of the guests who took care of them personally,” said Bard. “After Wolfe died, there was still a pair of his shoes left in the room. Pernell put them in the basement and forgot about them.” In the first Spring of this new century, I rented Room 829 for an assignation with a woman I hadn’t seen for a long time. It was not Wolfe that attracted us; the mojo magnet is never literature but the stuff that makes it possible. A shared love of Tom and his kin through the ages - Twain, Richard Yates, Tom Nugent - connected us. Before the meticulously planned rendezvous at the Chelsea, I’d only touched her twice: once underwater at a surprise 30th birthday thrown by her husband - a quick squeeze of her foot as she swam by. And once in the vestibule of St. Alphonsus church at the corner of Saratoga and Park, around the corner from what long ago had been Baltimore’s Chinatown. She stood just outside the sanctuary - built in 1845 and Oz-like in its vaulted columns; a shrine where old-school Communicants regularly participate in the Latin Mass - as pregnant as a woman can be without giving birth. The church was a stop on one of our chaste strolls around Baltimore, early afternoons where we’d find a bench on the street and I’d read her early drafts of my fledgling fiction. For some reason, she had a Magic 8 Ball in her bag, the classic kiddie oracle the size and shape of a duckpin-bowling ball. You ask the ball a question, turn it over and through a small window, an answer appears upon which you can chart your fate. I held the toy in my left hand with my right on the pulsing globe spinning inside her belly and asked a question unspoken. As she smiled, I turned the ball over and received this answer: You may rely on it. *** After that, except for a quick glance at the funeral of a friend, we did not see one another for nearly a decade. Her life took her away from Crabtown while mine burrowed deeper into all the zip codes east of President Street. One day, a letter arrived on Macon Street - 21224 - saying how often she had thought of the stories I’d read to her way back when; tales of an artist who cuts a hole in his grandfather’s roof, the Virgin Ruthie arguing with an angel in a hot air balloon above Patterson Park, Orlo and Leini living in Eden. The letter said she was happy to discover that the stories had found their way to print and that she was finally taking a chance with her own. I wrote back. She wrote back. Valentine’s Day came and went. Then Easter. Early May arrived with a plan: meet me at the corner of Prince and Mott in lower Manhattan, outside of Old St. Patrick’s Church. She appeared with the last light of day and - against the walls of New York’s original Catholic cathedral - we kissed for the first time. I broke free and hailed a cab: “Take us to 23rd Street and 7th Avenue.” More incredulous kissing in the cab and then - at 223 West 23rd - up the ancient elevator that the young Stanley Bard used to ride with Pernell the bellboy. We got off on the 8th floor. “Tom’s room,” I said as we crossed the threshold and fell into bed. The first time was gentle before turning wild. The second time was riotous from the start - she called it a “violent passion,” the kind of sex, she believed to be rare in a marriage of considerable years - before rippling back toward gentle. We confirmed all of the mutual, not-acted-upon hunches from years ago - remember that time, remember this time? - and settled down enough to open presents. There were books from me and books from her; stories by and about Tom, whose centennial had been commemorated the year before with a United States postage stamp. “He’d leave this room in the middle of the night with a new manuscript in his hand, narrative hot out of the typewriter,” I said. “And then go walking the streets telling anyone who’d listen: ‘I WROTE 10,000 WORDS TODAY!’” She said that she’d wanted to be a writer since she was 8-years-old - two perfect circles set atop one another. After referencing more incidents from Wolfe’s chaotic life - his pain and his doubt and the bodies left in the wake - I asked, “Do you want it that bad?” To which she answered: “This is the wildest thing I’ve ever done.” We played some more and, just before her return to real life - one Wolfe never experienced, not as a child or an adult - I pulled a brand-new Magic 8 Ball from the satchel of presents. I don’t remember what we asked this time around, but I can tell you this: The question I’d posed years earlier at St. Alphonsus has yet to come true. Copyright 2010 Rafael Alvarez, http://www.alvarezfiction.com/ Order now: |
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