Great House: A Novel - By Nicole Krauss Page 0,131

them to find herself there, in that little circular booth, dispensing information about Liverpool she never knew she had.

It was almost dark by the time I arrived at the hotel. The walls of the tiny, overheated foyer were papered with a flowery design, bunches of silk flowers were set out on the small tables clustered at the back, and hanging on the wall, though it was still some weeks before Christmas, was a large plastic wreath, the whole thing giving one the feeling of having stepped into a museum dedicated to the memory of long-extinct floral life. A wave of the claustrophobia I’d felt at the station came back to me, and when the receptionist asked me to fill out a registration form I was tempted to make something up, as if going under a false name and occupation might bring the relief of another, untapped dimension. My room looked out on a brick wall, and it, too, continued and elaborated the floral theme, so that for the first minutes during which I stood in the doorway, I did not believe that it would be possible for me to stay there. If it weren’t for the heavy ache in my legs and my feet that felt like a pair of anvils, I almost certainly would have turned around and left; it was only exhaustion that made me enter and collapse on the chair with its dense print of exuberant roses, though for more than an hour I was unable to close the door behind me for fear of being shut in alone with so much choked, artificial life. As the walls seemed to lean in toward me, I couldn’t help but ask myself, not in so many words, but in the fragmentary shorthand of thoughts one thinks alone to oneself, What right do I have to turn over a stone she wished to leave unturned? It was then that the sense rose up in me like bile, a sense I tried but failed to keep down, that what I was really doing was trying to expose her guilt. To expose it against her wishes, in order to punish her. For what, you might ask, punish the poor woman for what? And the answer that comes to me, which is only part of the answer, is that I wished to punish her for her intolerable stoicism, which made it impossible for me to ever be truly needed by her in the most profound ways a person can need another, a need that often goes by the name of love. Of course she needed me—to keep order, to remember the shopping, to pay the bills, to keep her company, to give her pleasure, and, in the end, to bathe, and wipe, and dress her, to bring her to the hospital, and finally to bury her. But that she needed it to be me who performed these duties and not some other man, equally in love with her, equally at the ready, was never entirely clear to me. I suppose it could be said that I never demanded she make the case for her love, but then I never really felt I had the right. Or maybe I feared that, honest as she was, unable to tolerate the smallest insincerity, she would fail to make the case, that she would stutter and grow silent, and then what choice would I have but to get up and leave forever, or continue with things as they had always been, only now with the full knowledge that I was simply one example where there could have been many? It isn’t that I thought she loved me less than she might have loved another man (though there were times I feared as much). No, what I’m speaking of now, or trying to speak of, is something else, the sense that her self-sufficiency—the proof she carried within her that she could withstand unthinkable tragedy on her own, that in fact the extreme solitude she had constructed around herself, reducing herself, folding in on herself, turning a silent scream into the weight of private work, was precisely what enabled her to withstand it—made it impossible for her to ever need me as I needed her. No matter how bleak or tragic her stories were, their effort, their creation, could only ever be a form of hope, a denial of death or a howl of life in the face of it. And I had no place in that. Whether I