In the night room Page 0,52
his view of things to be accurate. Tom is generous, loving, attentive, he has a sense of humor, and—most important of all—he’s slightly skeptical when Willy goes into one of her rants about Mitchell.
At the same time, the possibility that Giles might have tracked her to the hotel quietly speeds up the pace while Willy and Tom wind up deciding to relocate to the hotel Tom had mentioned the previous night, the Mayflower, on Central Park West.
Another bit of unresolved business also keeps the scene taut—along with Willy, we’re wondering what this dire thing is that Tom says he has to tell Willy. It must be important, it must even be crucial, but Tom clearly feels that his message, to call it that, will have an unhappy effect on Willy, and he’s waiting for the proper moment. Tom was even hoping she had forgotten about this thing he wanted to say to her, but no such luck; at some level she’s wondering about this matter throughout their morning together, and therefore our reader wonders, too. What in the world is Tom being so cautious about telling Willy?
And I have to say that I am pleased with the way the sexual tension, also completely unresolved, plays through the scene. At first we think, Okay, they’re handling it very well, especially since it can’t really go anywhere. Anyhow, this hardly seems like the optimum moment for the kind of sexual exploration that would necessarily have to go on. But, aha, Willy is too wound up to fall asleep. She’s anxious and frightened, and she is quite aware that her pal Tom is only faking sleep, and, what’s worse, doing it for her sake. And how can she know that he is also having hours of time subtracted from his life unless she and Tom are more or less holding hands?
So they reach out and grasp each other’s hand, which immediately feels like a tremendous, almost shocking intimacy. And although Willy soon tells Tom that she is so frightened that she would like him to put his arms around her, if he wouldn’t object too much, that is, and Tom replies, “Oh, sweetie, no problem,” and slides across to meet her in the middle of the bed and folds her into his arms so that her lovely head weighs lightly on his chest, the moment when their hands first touched so greatly retains its startling erotic power that this greater, in fact far more intimate, contact seems merely an extension of that first moment of touching. They are both in their underwear, and cannot but be intensely conscious of each other’s body. Tom feels that his primary duty is to keep his beloved friend warm, for he believes that warmth will calm her fears, and he circles her small torso with his arms, her slim, straight left leg brushing his thicker, more solid right. From Tom’s body, which indeed is warm, Willy absorbs peace, comfort, quietude; the slow, measured quality of his breathing, the sweet rise and fall of his chest bring her a degree of relaxation indistinguishable from a slow, spreading, involuntary physical pleasure. What she had needed all along, it came to her, was not a sexual dynamo like Mitchell but someone capable of giving her what Tom Hartland was so wholeheartedly supplying right now: a purring sensation, a feeling of slow, gentle, rhythmic humming that begins in the pit of her stomach and radiates out in all directions, delivering little blessings wherever it goes.
(I have to go back and insert some of this. It belongs in the book, not my journal.)
Anyhow, after all of that, Tom’s murder in the next chapter should come as a real shock.
The reader should be anticipating some trouble at the Mayflower, I’m still not quite sure what, but I think it could begin with Monday morning and their exit from the new hotel. Tom H. is still present, of course. He wants to do everything he can to help Willy through what strikes him as a great, paranoid confusion, and if that involves shifting her from hotel to hotel, so be it, he’ll shift with her and hold her hand. Along the way he’ll do his damnedest to talk her into getting help.
They take the stairs, I think, although Tom says she’s being absurdly overcautious.
They make their way down to the lobby, carrying their bags (Willy’s bags), Willy starting at every noise and clutching Tom’s arm whenever a door opens or closes elsewhere on the