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That was Friday night. Saturday, Roger got drunk and stayed drunk all that day and night. His mind lurched through a jungle of erotic fantasy, with faces, breasts, buttocks, thighs, arms, and strewn hair, all emerging and disappearing in the darkness. But in the chaos, one face kept reappearing. That face was Michael’s.
He had seen that face in classic Greek sculpture, in the works of Michelangelo, and in the lobby of the hotel. The close-cropped, curly hair. The delicate balance of the features. The ambivalence about the lips that seemed always verging on a smile or a pout. The big difference was that the face in the hotel lobby was very much alive.
Although the face, on those chance encounters, had looked at him, eyes as direct and inquiring as a child’s, Roger had avoided contact. Beautiful boys, he told himself, were just not his thing. In the past? Yes, a few fleeting times best forgotten. But now? He was not prepared for a rerun of Death in Venice. Let the face go its way.
But the face kept cropping up. Every time he encountered it, he had felt a growing disquiet. There was a mystery here that had long since vanished with women. He fancied it an exotic decadence, something out of the Weimar republic or late imperial Rome. With all else tried and lusterless, what waning pleasures could be leeched from epicene young manhood?
So he thought.
One time the face had cropped up wholly unexpectedly. To keep himself in shape, Roger made a habit of walking down the fire stairs from his room on the eighth floor instead of taking the elevator. At a turn of the landing, Roger was suddenly confronted with the face coming out of one of the rooms. In that instant, he noted the room humber — twenty-five. And he heard the sangría voice. “Isn’t the elevator working?”
“Sure,” said Roger. “I just walk down the stairs for exercise.”
“How macho . . .” the voice murmured as Roger took the next flight down.
Thereafter, Roger tried to unremember the room number as irrelevant information. But it stuck in his mind. Number twenty-five.
Late Sunday morning, after his epic drunk, Roger woke up to a glare of intrusive sunlight. Slowly he moved his limbs to make sure they were still there. He moved his head and felt a pulse of dull pain. He pushed himself out of bed, bearing the weight of all human sin on his shoulders, went into the bathroom, took three aspirin washed down with two full glasses of water, and concluded that he might survive. The question of just why he would want to survive was, that morning, unanswerable. He shrugged it off simply as force of habit.
He thought, looking at himself in the mirror, that the habit was perhaps too strong. Persistence in living could approach the ridiculous. But the face that looked back at him from the mirror was, despite some wrinkles and ravages, a lot more presentable than he thought he deserved. Maturity had given it structure; age had not yet pouched or sagged it.
Getting dressed, Roger considered going up to one of the singles bars for a Bloody Mary and brunch — hair of the dog, and all that — but the idea repelled him. The question welled up in his consciousness like nausea: “Roger, what are you trying to prove?”
Roger preferred at that time not to consider the wreckage of his life. He consoled himself with the thought that he still had a job, and he still had his hair, and he presumed he had his sanity. With that, he went out, bought the Sunday Times, and retired to a booth in a nearby coffee shop to empathize with the woes of the world. The Times sedately informed him that the world was going plumb to hell on all fronts, and the news made him feel much better. Everybody else, it seemed, was also mired in the human condition.
Finished with his breakfast, Roger walked the deserted Sunday streets back to his hotel, an establishment of faded gentility on Gramercy Park. He’d thought some in the past year of his bachelorhood of getting an apartment, but he had a liking for residential hotels — always someone at the desk, always someone to take messages, always someone to straighten up his room; and the same time, the ambience of temporality about the place fit his own sense of passage from someplace to an unknown someplace else. He had a suite at the hotel. Living room. Bedroom. And bath.
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