One of These Things First by Steven Gaines

Author:Steven Gaines
Language: ara, eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Delphinium Books
Published: 2016-05-26T19:33:28+00:00

Five

Mr. Halliday

The third floor of Payne Whitney reminded me of the Beauregard, the small residential hotel in Bournemouth, England, in the movie Separate Tables. The hotel is a little worn, but clean and comfortable, with Irish lace window curtains. All the seemingly respectable, long time residents have secrets and surprises that reveal themselves over the winter. For instance, David Niven’s character isn’t really a major; he’s a lonely man who had been arrested for feeling up women in the local movie theater. (Niven won the Best Actor Oscar for it in 1958.) And the hotel’s manager, played by Rita Hayworth, is secretly engaged to Burt Lancaster’s character, an ex-alcoholic. The people on the third floor of Payne Whitney had secrets like that. Only I think our peccadilloes were more interesting.

Three was only half a floor. There was a wall down the middle separating our side from twelve patients on the south side who were in an experimental six-month dietary study for which they ate the same exact meal three times a day—each portion weighed out to the gram so they had to eat every last scrap. The patients chose one favorite meal when they started the program. I tried to imagine what it would be like to sit down at breakfast for my ninety-fourth meal of shrimp in lobster sauce with house-special fried rice. We weren’t allowed any contact with the patients in the study, and when I spied them walking in the manicured hospital garden ahead of us, or being herded into one of the large elevators, I wanted to try to slip one of them a stick of gum. What this dietary experiment achieved, I have no idea.

I was the only youngster with eleven adults on the third floor. Almost all the patients chain-smoked, and a layer of gauzy smoke collected a foot below the hallway ceiling under an unbroken line of ghastly fluorescent lights encased in a plastic shield. Audubon prints in plastic frames were screwed into the walls, in a smoking lounge with frumpy slipcovered sofas and a console television on which was glued a plaque that read “Donated by Arthur Murray.” I was greatly impressed with Arthur Murray’s generosity, but no one could explain why he would donate a television to a psychiatric hospital. I assumed he wanted crazy people to watch his show.

The night I was moved to the third floor I changed into a cocoa-brown pants and eggplant shirt ensemble before dinner and thought I looked very spiffy. A nurse brought me to a small dining room where the patients were eating dinner at tables set with white tablecloths and tiny ceramic vases with sprigs of flowers. If it weren’t so brightly lighted it might have been an English tearoom. When I was ushered in by a nurse, the patients turned in unison to gape, a gallery of dour neurotics. Only one of them mumbled hello to me. An older man, with half-glasses down his nose and silver hair combed back like a bust of Beethoven, gave me a quick once-over and sneered, “Oh brother.

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