The Hotel Eden(49)

“Why would he do this?” she said. “Why would he get hooked up with these sleazoid sadists?” She was as beautiful as worried girls get late at night in an empty school.

“I don’t know.”

“Well, find out!” She said this as an angry order, and then caught herself and smiled. “We’ve got talk to him, get him out of this.”

“Save him,” I said.

“What are you saying?” She tilted her head, focusing on me.

“Nothing.” Then I decided to go on. “It’s just … Betsy, I saw him strutting around that ring, playing that crowd.”

“And?”

“And: he loved it.”

Betsy folded her arms. “He loved having his neck broken.”

I wanted to say, Listen, Betsy, it’s art. It’s all worth it. I had some new information on this subject, having witnessed the Delsandros wrestle, having witnessed their soaring struggle, and having had my heart in their hands, I was a new convert, but what could I say, some guy who is Aunt Dorothy every night in a bakery? I said, “Let’s not fight.”

She shook her head at me a minute, a phrase in body language that seemed to mean you pathetic man. And then we prowled the vacant corridors of Granger High School for a while, from time to time calling, “Mitchell!”

We went into the second-floor girls’ room, because we could see the light under the door, and inside she turned to me and said, “Oh hell.” It was a four-stall affair, primarily public-school gray with plenty of places to put your sanitary napkins. I could see the back of Betsy’s beautiful head in the mirror. There was an old guy standing next to her and when I spoke I realized he was a screwed-up baker out of town for a night with his brother’s girlfriend. He looked in serious need of a blood transfusion, exercise, good news.

“Dr. Slime?” I said to the stalls.

“What a night,” Betsy said. “It doesn’t matter. He’s gone.” She leaned against the counter and folded her arms. “He told me I should tell you my news.”

“Good, okay,” I said, leaning against the counter too and folding my arms. We stood like that, like two girlfriends in the girls’ room.

“I’m going to L.A. Next week. I have some interviews with agents and two auditions.”

“Auditions?” I said. I am a baker. It is not my job to catch on quickly. I looked at her face. She was as beautiful as any movie actress; with her mouth set as it was now and the soft wash of freckles across her nose and her pale hair up in braids, she looked twenty. She was smart and she could sing. “You’re going to L.A. You’re not coming back here.”

“No, I guess I’m not,” she said.

“Does Mitchell know?”

“Mitchell knows.

“How hurt is he?”

“That would be a stupid question, wouldn’t it, Doug? Don’t you think?”

I took my stupid question and the great load of other stupid questions forming in my ordinary skull out of the girls’ room and through the dark hallways of Granger High and out into the great sad night. The parking lot was empty and I stood by the red scooter as if it were a shrine to the woman I loved, I ached for, in other words Betsy, who now walked toward me across the pavement, and who now, I realized, wasn’t exactly my brother’s lover anymore, a notion that gave me an odd shiver. I was as confused as bakers get to be.

“How certain are these things you’ve got out there?”

“How certain? How certain is my staying here, singing jingles for the next ten years? Come on, Doug: I want to be a singer.” She mounted the scooter and waited.

“You are a singer, Betsy. The best. I love your singing. And so, this is your move, right?”

She nodded.

“And it’s worth Mitchell?”

She started the machine and the blue exhaust began to roil up into the night. It wasn’t a real question and she was right not to answer. Through the raining flux of emotions, worry about Mitchell, love for Betsy, the answer had descended on me like a ton of meringue. I knew the answer. It was worth it. It’s funny about how the world changes and how art can turn the wheel. I had seen the Delsandros and I had seen my brother, a talented person, an artist, fly through the air to where I knew not, but I knew it was worth it. To be thrown that way in front of two thousand people, well, I’d never done it and I never would, but I know that Mitchell even as he squirmed through the terrific arc of his flight thought it was worth it. That’s what art is, perhaps, the look I had seen on his face.

Is this clear? I was annoyed to my baker’s bones at these two people and I wanted them to be mine forever. But they were both flying and I was proud of that too. I then climbed on behind my lost love, a woman who sings like an angel and drives a scooter like the devil, that is, Betsy, and I kissed her cheek. Just a little kiss. I wasn’t trying anything. “Let us go then,” I said, “and see if we can find our close friend Dr. Slime.”