a virtual recluse in his room, leaving it only when the maid came to clean and he waited in the lobby until she finished, settled on an ornate couch, watching the guests come and go. It was a fine, old-fashioned place that seemed, although he’d never been off the North American continent, European. The clientele appeared wealthy and sophisticated, and the lobby echoed with voices in languages Edward Everett could not identify, much less understand. Men and women swept in trailed by bellhops pushing carts laden with luggage and all seemed to possess the same regal impatience if they had to wait in line to register or if a clerk fumbled for a room key.
Beyond those periods in the lobby—what were they, half an hour?—he stayed in his room, telling himself it was because he didn’t want to miss Julie if she phoned, which she did every evening after she got home from work. She told him about her job answering phones and typing for a podiatrist, describing the people who limped painfully into the office, telling him about the bags of trimmed corns and toenails she carried to the dumpster. For his part, he had little to say: I noticed the plaster walls aren’t square but actually rounded at the corners. I noticed that the paint is flaking outside the window. Gradually, their conversations began waning sooner and sooner each time.
When he wasn’t talking to her, he watched television. He avoided the American programs: they made him homesick. He wasn’t certain what he wanted to feel, but not that—not at a time when he wondered what his life would become, when he wondered if he would ever be able to play ball again or if that life was entirely behind him. What was he if not a ballplayer?
He preferred programs that had nothing to do with his life across the border—soap operas in French, newscasts about places he couldn’t even, if pressed, find on a map. Watching a story about a tornado in Manitoba that had killed a retired cobbler and his wife, he glanced out his window to the park eleven floors below where a plump man and woman lay in the grass, kissing. On the television, the reporter interviewed the dead couple’s daughter, who became so overcome with grief, she covered her face, but where he was, it was a beautiful day.
At night, he had trouble sleeping. It was difficult to get comfortable because of his cast and, outside his room, the hotel always seemed alive with noise:
Children dashed in the hall, shrieking, a mother scolding: “Now, now.”
On the other side of him, a couple made love and, afterward, the woman wept while a man’s voice buzzed with what Edward Everett assumed was consolation.
The elevator dinged.
He gave up, turned on the television. A preacher standing on a stage, framed by two vases of palm fronds, saying, “God has a plan for your life.” On another channel, a test pattern. He turned off the television, tried to sleep again.
Outside, footsteps scuffled by in the carpeted hall.
He eventually began appreciating the hotel’s amenities. In the morning, he had breakfast in the less formal of the two restaurants while he read the newspaper, something he had seldom done in the past, aside from the sports pages. So much turmoil in the world: riots in Rhodesia; three hundred Americans evacuated from Lebanon in the face of civil war; Argentina’s police killing two revolutionary leaders. He read the paper and glanced around the restaurant, feeling fortunate to be part of the privilege of the place: the deference of the waitress and busboy silently appearing to refill his water goblet and coffee cup. Around him, businessmen made notes on legal pads as they ate their eggs and bacon; tables of women with careful hair declined the pastry cart; obvious newlyweds on their honeymoon regarded each other sleepy-eyed across the table.
He began venturing beyond the hotel, going into nearby shops. One day, he spent two hours browsing belts in a leather shop; another day, he drank coffee in a café across the street from his hotel, counting the number of men and women who went inside. That day, he got back to his room after Julie had called and found a message slip under his door. He sat down in his chair by the window, picked up the phone but the thought struck him that he had nothing new to say, and turned on the television, to Casablanca, but dubbed in French, and spent