ORNING crept in like a guilty drunk.  I resisted dragging myself out of bed, though I am ordinarily an early riser.  I lay under the covers longer than I have in years, brooding.  In the numb moments after waking, I felt, for the first time, the burden of our indebtedness as fully as Albertine must have felt it, without the hope that I usually managed to summon to counter the facts.  I felt all the weight of it, as I knew she did, and it seemed that if I did drag myself out of bed I would have to spend the day trudging under a double burden: pulling the weight of all the years the hotel had been operating at a loss and pushing the weight of the likelihood that we would never manage to turn it around.  Might as well stay in bed.  If it hadn’t been for Albertine, I would have. 
   “Are you sleeping in?” she asked. 
   “No,” I said, suddenly ashamed of myself for having wanted to.  “I’m getting up.” 
   I got up and began pulling my clothes on quickly, shivering in the cold. 
   “Do you know what day this is?” I asked. 
   “Yes,” said Al.  “I do.” 
   It was the fifteenth anniversary of our purchase of Small’s.  Only nine years remained on the mortgage, but it was not the mortgage it had been when we first bought the hotel.  We had refinanced it so many times for repairs and renovations that the payments had become a burden.  I knew that Albertine was worried about making the payment due at the end of the month.  I knew because she had told me so. 
   Dressed, I walked around to her side of the bed and kissed her and said, “Sometime in the night, I became convinced that you’re right.  We should go.” 
   “Thank you,” she said, and after she had said it I realized, from the sinking sensation in my chest, that I had been hoping she would say that she had changed her mind, that she wanted to stay, that she had found some error in the books, that we were doing much better than she had thought, that . . . but none of that was true; all of that was wishful thinking.

I DIDN’T GO down to the kitchen to get a cup of coffee, as I usually do before beginning my day’s work on my personal history, because I didn’t want to run into Lou.  Instead, I went directly to my workroom, turned the computer on, and sat at the keyboard.  I didn’t slip into the past, as I usually do.  Instead, I wrote this: 
 

That didn’t feel right, didn’t sound right, so I went back to the beginning and tried again: 
 

   That was as far as I could take it, or as far as I cared to take it.  Writing it, even that little bit of it, left me feeling guilty, because I felt that it was probably very close to the truth.  I put it away and began making some revisions on the episode of Dead Air that I would read in the evening, and in the space of a sigh I was away from all the cares that had made me lie late in bed, brooding.  I was no longer the assistant innkeeper at a failing hotel; I wasn’t even there, in my workroom, sitting at my computer; I was in the past, my favorite place.  Even though the piece of the past that I was exploring was pocked with treachery, shame, and danger, being there, following my former self around, invisible to him and everyone else, I was, if not happy, exactly, at least amused, particularly by the difference between what I saw and understood and what my younger self saw and understood, and by the thought that he would grow up to be me, and would at my age be sitting where I was sitting, amused by his earlier self.  After a while, I leaned back and read from the screen, trying the sound of what I had written.  I was pleased by it, and I was reminded why I prefer to write about the past.  It is a place to go, another place, not this place.  It is another life, not this life. 
   Only after I had turned the computer off and started downstairs did I become depressed by the thought that my childish self would grow up to be assistant innkeeper at a failing hotel, and his wife’s jailer. 

THAT NIGHT, however, I had my biggest audience so far.  It was a Friday night, so we had a few extra people for dinner, beyond the hotel guests, and there were even a few people who in response to Albertine’s advertising had come out in their own boats just to hear my reading.  I was cheered by this show of support, and I think I did a good job with episode four of Dead Air, “Masters of the Arts.” 

IN BED, after we had turned the lights out, found our comfortable positions, and had awaited sleep in silence for a while, Albertine asked me something that I didn’t quite catch. 
   “Hm?” I said. 
   “Sorry.  Were you asleep?” 
   “No,” I said.  “To tell you the truth, I was thinking about Mrs. Jerrold.” 
   “Lucky you.” 
   “Hm?” 
   “You get into bed and you go — away.  I can’t do that.  I can’t manage it.  It’s part of my problem.  You use the past, or your version of the past, as a place to go.  You use it to get away from here.  I have no place to go to get away from here.” 
   “Manhattan,” I suggested. 
   “What?” 
   “Think about Manhattan.” 
   “Manhattan,” she said. 
   “Just try it.” 
   Again we lay in our separate silences, but after a while Albertine asked, “Was there a Mrs. Jerrold in your life?” 
   “You’re supposed to be thinking about Manhattan,” I said. 
   “Was there a Mrs. Jerrold in your life?” she repeated. 
   “ëIn my life,’” I said.  “What do you mean by that, exactly?  Do you include my mental life, or do you merely mean my material life?” 
   “In this particular case, I want to know whether there was a Mrs. Jerrold in your material life.  It is quite obvious that there was — that there is — a Mrs. Jerrold in your mental life.” 
   “Well,” I said, “there were certain ingredients that could be made into Mrs, Jerrold, that I have made into Mrs. Jerrold: a woman who lived across the street, another on the next block, and another around the corner, certain events that occurred to someone else entirely — a man, in fact — and many things that I discovered when I was investigating my memories of all of those people, following where my curiosity led me.” 
   “I see,” she said.  She rolled over. 
   “Want to know where she lives now?” 
   “What?”  She rolled back toward me. 
   “She lives just around the corner or across the street or down the block in that part of a boy’s mind where he keeps all the girls and women who are the objects of his desires — ” 
   “A boy’s mind?” 
   “Well — my mind.” 
   “So you keep a little place around the corner — ” 
   “Around the corner, across the street, down the block, in that shadowy part of my mind where all those ladies live, spending their days in lingerie, whiling away the hours, waiting for my nocturnal visits.” 
   “And am I there when you go there?” 
   “Oh, yes, indeed, my darling.  You are there in all your ages and stages, even the little you from before I met you, which took some doing, let me tell you.” 
   “And are you there now, in that corner of your mind?” 
   “No.  I’m here, talking to you.” 
   “But couldn’t you be talking to me there?” 
   “You mean — ” 
   “Yeah.” 
   Then she slid to my side of the bed and taught me how sweet life is when dreams come true. 

Kraft doesn’t have the wide audience he merits. . . . Even geniuses are shortchanged of the attention they deserve

Leaving Small’s Hotel is published in paperback by Picador, a division of St. Martin's Press, at $14.00. 

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Leaving Small’s Hotel is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, dialogues, settings, and businesses portrayed in it are products of the author's imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. 

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