New Fiction: Chelsea Hotel No. 2 (first draft)

Note: I've been working on this, pieces at a time, since March. This is the first story I've finished since 2004. I don't know if I ever would have if I didn't say that I was posting it on Albatross. But I did it. I had the idea in my head pretty clearly. I'm not saying it's O. Henry, but it is the best short story I've written. Not much happens, but the prose is more elegant than any of my previous stories. It's a very personal story: it's autobiographical in as much as all fiction is somewhat autobiographical. Hannah Baker is inspired by someone I know, or knew. None of this happened...except for one event, but 95% is fictive. It's obvious that the girl who Hannah Baker is based on affected me in a very profound and subtle way, so this has bee fairly therapeutic to write. It's also a first draft, so...if you hate it, find a way of being constructive about telling me why (in other words: be constructive, put up, or shut up). Anyway, here it is. A quick note on the title. It's a Leonard Cohen song. It wouldn't hurt listening to it before or while you read it. It heavily influenced the whole piece in many ways.

Chelsea Hotel No. 2 by Jim Eustice

For A.C.

Gene Sunderland sits in the brightly-lighted metro car, resting wide-legged on the worn, orange cushions covering the corrugated plastic seats. A young woman of around the same age sits across from him, legs crossed, engrossed in a Joyce Carol Oates novel. She blocks out the waning, afternoon sun that has been blinding him, resulting in a halo of sunlight encircling her head. Gene admires the coquettish, strawberry-blond tresses atop her head, all the while feigning deep concentration in his copy of a rock-and-roll magazine. She is more handsome than pretty, with sympathetic, blue-green eyes and smile marks around her mouth, indicative of a life happily lived. He assesses that he has no chance with the woman romantically and falls deeply back into the rock magazine. She dresses too well and is much too attractive, he thinks to himself.

The train rumbles along the electrified tracks, passing through the heart of a deceptively huge capital city into the sprawling suburbs, rife with strip malls and Starbucks. Gene notices the woman’s head move into his periphery. He shuffles his considerable body, by now more muscle than mere insulation, and looks up from his magazine. The woman stares at him, her brow furrowed, more with confused recognition than discomfort or disgust. Gene turns his head to-and-fro, looking to see who the woman is staring at and then looks behind him, confused, after realizing that nobody else is in the car that the two are sharing. As abruptly as he noticed her stare, she shakes her head and returns to her book.

“What the hell, “he mutters to himself, leaning his elbows on his knees and book-ending his head with his palms. Do I know her, he wonders, and trains his eyes on the young woman, searching his memory, like a rolodex, for someone who resembles her. He lowers his head onto his hand and drifts into reverie. He is interrupted, though, by a booming slam, punctuated by the woman’s coarse laugh, a guffaw that startles Gene so that he is no longer slouching, but sitting rigidly erect, wide-eyed with trepidation.

“Excuse me,” she says, choking back a self-conscious smile and more laughter. She repeats herself and adds, “I think we may know each other.”

“What?” he asks.

“We know each other, I think. I think we maybe went to school with each other? From kindergarten through high school?” she says with a smattering of regret and doubt in her voice. Gene squints his eyes. Maybe I do know her, he thinks. Had they dated? Did he ask her to the homecoming dance? Were they buds? Friends? Pals? Did they even talk to each other? “You’re Eugene, right? Eugene Sutherland? We went to school together, I swear,” she says showing her open palms, trying to convince him, Gene thinks, of her sanity and harmlessness.

“Sunderland. Gene Sunderland.”

“Right. Sunderland. Sorry. I knew it was you, though. I just knew it.” She smiles and leans back, relieved and relaxed that she hadn’t just made a complete fool of herself. The sun reflects off of something near her hand and catches his eye: a ring.

“So when did you get married? I never really pegged you as the type,” he says, pointing to the band on her left ring finger. Gene asks who the lucky guy is, more as an attempt to gain more information regarding her identity than out of curiosity. She runs her right hand through her hair and releases an audible, telling sigh. She crosses her hands at her chest defensively, which confuses Gene.

“I can’t believe you don’t remember me,” she says with a playful sneer. Immediately Gene is on the defensive: he scrunches his shoulders and lets out an innocent laugh, knowing he’d been caught red-handed. He stammers an unbelievable denial and shifts uncomfortably in his seat, having become a cumbersome mess; he’d never been a good liar. “It’s okay, Eugene. We probably haven’t seen each other since we graduated and we weren‘t even that close to begin with. I’ve been Hannah Joyner for three years this September, formerly-” she pauses to drum her hands on her thighs, “Hannah Ba-”

“Hannah Baker!” he interrupts, tacitly confirming to Hannah that he’d been lying about knowing her identity seconds ago, “Jesus, I can’t believe I didn’t remember. We were in kindergarten together.” She had told the truth: they hadn’t been close. At all. The years between kindergarten and their junior year of high school had passed without the exchange of more than ten words between them. “What have you been up to for the past nine years?” In the deep recesses of Gene’s brain, a little voice asked him why he cared what Hannah had been doing since graduation.

“Well, you know-” she says, shrugging her shoulders, lifting her left hand and pointing to her ring finger. “I graduated college and got married and pretty much that’s it, I guess,” she shrugs her shoulders and smiles.

“Next stop, Tenley Town.” the driver of the Metro grumbles over an intercom.

“So. Who’s the guy? Anybody from high school? Kindergarten, maybe? That kid, Howie, who everybody hated, maybe?”

“Oh my god! I remember that kid! Everybody made fun of him,” she says, frowning.

“I remember, one day, we were joking with him and he started crying.”

“He did! I remember that. What were we making fun of him for?”

“I don’t even remember. But we were pretty cruel back then. All of us kids were. Who the hell knows what he did? Maybe he, like, drew outside the lines or didn’t figure out how to cut out the square as soon as everyone else. Maybe he crapped in the sandbox or peed himself on the way to art class.”

“Or…maybe he-” she says, moving her eyes up and to the left, itching at her temple as if there was a memory recall button on it. Gene pauses for a second before he drops the bomb that he has been waiting to drop ever since Kindergarten.

“Or maybe he picked his nose and somebody stood up during class, announcing that he picked his nose and liked to eat it.” He smirks and waits for her to take the bait.

“Oh! Picking your nose was verboten! Absolutely taboo! But we’d never narc on him like that. Who would do that?” she asks, treating Gene as an accomplice.

“You would do that, Hannah.”

“What? What do you mean? I’d never do that!” she says, grinning like the Cheshire Cat.

“No, sorry, you would do that. And you definitely did.”

“No way! I did not! Poor Howie.”

“Poor Howie? Poor Gene! Not poor Howie, poor Gene.”

“Oh no! Gene! I didn’t!” she exclaims, shocked, finally frowning with the realization at how grave the conversation could turn.

“You did. Our teacher asked if we knew anybody who picked their nose. You raised your hand, stood, and said, very matter-of-factly, that I was a nose picker. Not only a nose picker, but the worst of them all: the one that ate the boogers. I‘ll admit that I picked my nose. But I never ate the boogers. Never.”

“Next stop, Friendship Heights.” the driver of the Metro drones. They both sit in silence, except for the mechanical whir of the train interrupted by bumps and clangs, neither of which has ever been explained by science or faith. Gene thinks about that day in kindergarten, one of the only ones he remembers, when Hannah implicated him as a booger-eater. It was after one of the health movies they would watch. Imagine two dozen or so children, sitting Indian-style after lunch and sandbox time and their teacher asks them if they knew that picking their noses was bad. Every child nods their head, regardless of their nose-picking habits. At a young age they all knew that being caught picking your nose was a social crime of the worst degree, up there with incontinence and body odor. They all knew this, like how baby sea turtles know to crawl toward the sea after they hatch. This knowledge was innate. Inherent. Instinctual! Even worse is being branded a nose-picker by someone else in class, in front of the whole class. This is exactly what Hannah did on that afternoon in kindergarten. Her victims? Travis Smith, Jessica Conrad and Eugene Sunderland. Ms. Birch, the aging kindergarten teacher, asked if they knew anybody that picked their nose and Hannah, like a gopher, pops up from her place on the mauve, shag carpet. She points at each person as she says their names. She got to Jessica Conrad first, then Travis Smith and after that, Eugene.

“And Eugene eats his!” she says with a grimace as the classmates groan in disgust. Even his accused classmates sit in judgment of him, all of them little Puritans pinning a figurative crimson B onto Eugene’s chest. Eugene remembers running into the bathroom, slamming the door and squishing his hands to his tear-drenched eyes. Retreating into the womb-like claustrophobia of the bathroom stall lulled him to sleep. Minutes (or hours?) later the vice principal came into the bathroom to tell him that his mother was there to take him home. They’d been looking for him for a while and when the school secretary heard his delicate snores from the bathroom stall, she left him be and called his mother. His mother came into the stall, picked him up and carried him to the car. All Gene remembers about this is being amazed that a girl was allowed in the boy’s bathroom. A round of inexplicable bumps and clangs rouses him from his memory. The train slows to a halt and an old lady enters, sitting in between the back of the train and Gene and Hannah. The train driver announces the next stop and the train gradually jerks forward until it reaches top speed. Gene regards the old woman and nods his head at her, accompanying it with a smile.

Gene realizes that it must have been two or three stops since they last spoke. He clears his throat and looks at her book. He waits a second for her to realize that he is about to speak.

“I love Oates,” he says abruptly. She looks at him, clearly very confused, squinting her eyes. Gene repeats himself more emphatically.

“What? Oats? Like to eat?”

“Oates. I like her work.” he says and points to Hannah’s book.

“Oh! Yeah, Oates. I thought you meant… Yeah, I just love her books, too. I just finished her new novel and before that I reread her book on boxing? She finds a way to make it so interesting. What’s your favorite?” she asks, interested in talking about an author that Gene has not actually read anything by. He fumbles and says that his favorite is her latest novel. “Yeah, I think it’s really great. She has a way of writing really violent scenes and then infusing them with this strange beauty. Like when her father kills himself? God that is so stirring, but her prose is so gorgeous,” she says enthusiastically. “Don’t you think so, Gene?”

“Yeah. Yeah, totally. She’s like Hemingway.”

“Really? I didn’t see that at all, but I’ve only read five or six of his novels. Maybe you’re right, though. I always thought she fit more into the class with Mailer and Bellow and Saroyan, but I guess she writes kind of like Hemingway.”

“I’ve never really read any Oates,” he admits. Hannah chuckles and admits that she figured as much. He had never noticed how perfect her smile was until now, when she caught him in a lie that didn’t matter. It made him want to keep spinning meaningless lies for her forever.

“What did you go into the city for?” she asks.

“I went to see the WWII Memorial. My grandfather was overseas during the war and I thought I’d check it out. Kind of a mini-pilgrimage, I guess. How about you?”

“Oh, Joshua and I just moved down to the city from Chicago. We were there for about 5 years and he got a job with the government, so we packed up and moved here.”

“So you‘re actually coming from the city. What are you up to in the suburbs?”

“Well, about eight years ago my parents were in a car accident-”

“Jesus! I’m sorry,” he interrupts. She assures him it is okay, that it has been a while.

“It came as a pretty huge shock and it’s still a pretty painful thing to deal with, but…Yeah. So I’m going out to the cemetery.” Gene sighs and wracks his brain for something to say, trying very hard not to sling platitudes her way, while also being supportive.

“Well. That, um…that sounds like fun?”

“What?” she asks, looking both genuinely confused and slightly offended.

“I never know what to say whenever I’m talking about death and that stuff. I just get so tongue-tied. Usually I can talk about just about anything, but death just turns me into a big ball of awkward. Like whenever a waitress brings me my food? And they say ‘enjoy your meal’? I always say ‘you, too’ like an idiot. That’s how I get with death. Sorry. I know graveyards-”

“Cemeteries?”

“Cemeteries. Right. I know cemeteries aren’t really fun. I just was at a total loss for words. Because I’m an idiot.”

“Next stop: Shady Grove. End of the line,” the conductor said over the intercom, cutting through the awkwardness. As the train comes to a final halt the two stand up, stretching. They look toward the back of the train and notice that the old lady is still sitting.

“Getting off?” Hannah asks.

“Hmm?” the old woman mutters. “Sorry?”

“End of the line, miss. Time to depart from the train. Will you be joining us on the outside?” Gene asks.

“Oh, no. I’m staying on for a few more stops,” she woman says, chuckling.

“Okay! Well have a good afternoon!” Hannah says and waves. The two step through the exit onto the train platform. They walk toward the escalators that lead to the parking garages, side-by-side. As they descend, Gene steps down onto the step below Hannah. He looks up toward her, her head again haloed by sunlight.

“Hannah, it was really great seeing you after all this time. It sounds like your life is really coming together for you. Why don’t we keep in touch?”

“Yeah, definit- watch out for the bottom of the escalator-yeah let me give you my phone number and we’ll get together downtown or something. You, me and Josh.”

“Yeah, that would be great,” Gene says, but thinks that it would be much nicer if it was just the two of them. Without her husband Joshua. Sans Josh. They stand in the middle of the metro station, at a crossroads between the commuter lot and the parking garage. “Are you in the lot or the garage?’ he asks.

“Oh, I’m waiting for my brother here, but he said he’d probably park in the lot.”

“Oh. Well…I’m off in the garage, so I’ll be heading out that way,” he says, pointing to the garage entrance.

“Wait, my number.”

“Right. I nearly forgot,” Gene says, barely hiding the fact that he did not forget her number. Hannah reaches into her purse and takes out a piece of paper. She looks at Gene and smiles mischievously, scribbling all the while.

“Here ya go. Give me a ring sometime. It was great seeing you. And sorry about kindergarten,” she says, extending her right hand with the number.

“Don’t sweat it. We were just kids, right? I’ll see you around.” Gene takes the number and drops it into his front pocket. He smiles at Hannah and nods a stoic goodbye, realizing that he very well may never see her again. He walks toward the garage entrance, but before he turns the corner he turns again and waves. Hannah smiles, waving goodbye. Gene turns the corner and walks toward his car, beaming. As he approaches his car he reaches into his front pocket for his keys and the piece of paper falls to the ground. Gene contemplates balling up the paper and throwing it away. Or losing it temporarily. Anything to prolong the magic of that train ride. Gene unfolds the paper, reads what is written on it and laughs out loud. The paper reads ________. Gene Sunderland refolds the piece of paper that Hannah Baker has given him, puts it into his front pocket and gets into his car.

.