Hotels of North America Read online

  In the middle of this smile it occurred to me that I could simply swipe the ice container off the tiny lacquered side table by my chair and dash it to the floor; the ensuing mess would direct attention away from the testicle stretching itself languidly en plein air, and I could then rush into the bathroom and perhaps straighten myself up a bit or at least throw a thin white mildew-inflected towel over my midsection. This I did, and I’m sure the swiping motion, in which all the ice went flying toward the door, did not look terribly realistic, and you can only imagine how distressed Dennis and Olga must have been to think that the man officiating at their service was a hip-waders-at-night kind of guy, but there was not time to dwell on this, because the ice was everywhere, and I got down on all fours and began trying to clean it up, and soon Olga was beside me, and I could smell her perfume, which she had probably put on just for this evening; in our shame, we were close together, she and I, we were investigators of shame, trying to make the most of the moment, and maybe she never saw the testicle at all, nor the slight varicose vein at the bottom of the testicle that I had sometimes had occasion to look at; maybe she hadn’t seen it at all, and I do not know why this motel was called the Viking Motel, and it leads one to wonder many things about Vikings. They did not last long on this continent, because of starvation and disease. They quickly headed back to Iceland and Denmark, in their spiritual devastation, where they could feud with one another and hack one another with axes named Head-Splitter and Tree-Foe. What the Vikings had to do with the Pacific Northwest, I cannot say, as it is my impression that no Viking ever lived in the Pacific Northwest.

  Once Olga and I had cleaned up the ice and I had properly hiked up the hip waders, Dennis asked if everything was all right, and if they should be going. I said that I wanted to say something, and what I said was: Look here, we are in the Viking Motel for this purpose, the purpose of the moment in which you begin your lives together, and I just want to tell you how much it means to me that you have asked me to do this, and I know my father, wherever he is now, and your father were not terribly close, and we didn’t have that many opportunities when we were young to spend time together, especially because you lived down south, and I know that you are in a time of need right now, and so I am honored to be the fellow who helps you in your time of need. I have a lot of ideas about how to make this a special day, and I’d like to tell you about a few of my ideas, and I hope you can see that I make these suggestions out of love for you both and out of reverence for the love that you have for each other, and despite my own situation, I make these suggestions out of appreciation and admiration for the state of holy matrimony. And then I suggested that maybe we should have some kind of group hug, to indicate the seriousness of my purpose, and they consented to a group hug, though I had to gather Dennis in like he was a stray sheep and I the shepherd, but soon I could smell his perspiration and his clothes that had clearly never seen much bleach, and I held this couple close and said, This is the warmth that all good people are looking for, and that was when Dennis began to edge away. I continued, telling them that I had been compiling a list of things that had been done to me in my own marriage that I thought were inadvisable, that no one should do to another person in marriage, but by that point Dennis had his foot across the threshold of the Viking, and Olga stood beside him, and though I offered them a couple of stiff ones from a bottle of bus-station rotgut, they declined.

  My feeling then was of forlornness, of the desperate inadequacies of this human linguistic apparatus that we employ to forestall, a little longer, aloneness, and of how futile these fumblings so often are. In the next lurch of solitude I began trying to add to the list of things not to say to someone in your marriage: Don’t ever use a pen while lying on the bed; don’t ever forget to put the cap back on a pen after using the pen; don’t ever use a pen if it’s new; put items in the refrigerator at ninety-degree angles; do not throw things in the bathroom trash if there are already a lot of things in the trash; don’t ever lie on the bed, made or unmade, in your clothes; don’t get into the bed without having showered; don’t put your bag on the bed, don’t put your bag on the chair, don’t put your bag on the counter, don’t put your bag on the table; don’t ever do the laundry; don’t bite your nails; don’t put the toilet paper facing out; don’t put the toilet paper facing in; don’t accelerate quickly; don’t wear those colors together, don’t wear those colors together, don’t wear a stripe and a plaid, don’t wear that shirt, that looks bad on you, that looks bad on you, and that looks bad on you, and that looks bad on you, and that looks bad on you too, are you sure you want to wear that, that looks bad on you; please stay out of the house one night a week, please stay out of the house a couple of nights a week so I can have some privacy; don’t put that there; don’t put that there; that plastic cup was given to me by my grandmother; don’t use my towel; don’t use my bathroom; you don’t understand your own family; you don’t understand your own role in your own family; you don’t understand what people think of you; you don’t understand other people; you don’t understand me, you don’t understand yourself; I need money for clothes, I need money for credit cards, I need money for school; don’t cut your meat on the plate, that sound is awful, cut your meat on the cutting board before putting it on your plate; don’t touch me.

  And when I was done with this list, which I wrote out on the bed with a pen that I didn’t cap afterward, I slumped onto a proper spot on the floor of my room in the Viking Motel and there I took up a close inspection of the carpet’s dust, blood, seminal fluid, Ritz Crackers, and insect parts.★★ (Posted 11/10/2012)

  Steamboat Inn, 73 Steamboat Wharf, Mystic, Connecticut, May 3–4, 1997

  Diversity of key and lock design in contemporary lodging is a subject that we need to address, and have needed to address for some time. That there should be some kind of industry standard for how the rooms lock and in the way that you enter the rooms—this does not seem too much to ask. In the old days, you had the little key with the brightly hued tag attached, If found, please drop in any mailbox. The postage was guaranteed. You were unlikely to keep the thing for long, because you could easily put it in a mailbox. What was the volume, at the USPS, of hotel and motel keys shipped back and forth across our great land? You can see how the constant duplication of physical keys would be a genuine business expense, because what if you have a guest waiting at that very moment, but the prior guest has run off with the last remaining key? (My favorite keys are the ones in Europe that are attached to little round baubles of lead so that you will not wish to carry the thing around with you. When you depart the premises, you are expected to give it to the philosophy student who is at the front desk overnight. Her hair is blond and straight, her lips are pursed, her English is workmanlike, she has tiny breasts, and she doesn’t want to talk to you, she wants to read Heidegger. So you give her the key so you won’t be tempted to carry the thing around and have it with you when you are set upon on some small footbridge and deprived of your credit cards and all your cash. As you walk across the bridge with your girlfriend (soon-to-be wife) on this summer morning some months after you met in the wintry Midwest of America, a cute little kid in rags comes up to you and rubs his head against your hip, probably cutting a hole in your handmade Irish sweater, and then his friend comes along from behind and they speak to each other in their impenetrable dialect that you later recognize to be Carpathian. And you laugh at their apparent adorability, thinking nonetheless about how you are not supposed to carry your billfold in your hip pocket, how many times have you been told this? Is it some kind of evolutionary thing, that the Romany urchins are so cute? The kid in front is laughing at you and you are giving him a playful smack on the top of the head while the second one is cutting open your pocket with a switchblade. The whole thing is not meant to go unnoticed—on the contrary, it is meant to be noticed, because there’s an art to it, and they want the art to be appreciated—and that’s when the diversion starts: this one is a girl, and they’re feeling her
up or something on another part of the bridge, and you rush toward her to defend her honor, but while you are going to do that, they are making Carpathian comments about your girlfriend (soon-to-be wife). Aș dori să dracu ‘soția lui. Doriți să dracu ‘soția lui? Ea are un fund mare. Ea este de mărimea unui automobil. Nu aș ști de unde să încep. And then you realize they’re counting the bills in your very own billfold, your pitiful supply of foreign currency, and off they run in different directions, with your passport too, and you don’t know which to chase, and the girl, the dishonored one, is refixing herself and laughing at you as well, and you reach for her wrist, as if she’s going to help you somehow, and in that way you come to dishonor her just as she was dishonored symbolically before. You let go of her, and she is fleet, as they all are, and you and your girlfriend (soon-to-be wife) are standing there on the far side of the bridge now, divested of all worldly goods, having been welcomed into this central part of Europe.)

  So I understand the development of key cards, I just wish the key cards worked in the same way in each and every establishment. It would not be inaccurate to state that even in the first days of my marriage, there were times when I was asked to vacate the premises, and on these occasions I would stay at such lodgings as were available to me, and mostly these were economy-minded addresses, but on one overnight, for example, I stayed at the Steamboat Inn, which was nautically themed, and it would not be inaccurate to observe that on the evening in question, I could not, in all likelihood, have passed a Breathalyzer test, and therefore it was important for me to book a room quickly at an inn that was within walking distance from the point at which my vehicle, having met a lane divider, had become inoperable. I made my way to the Steamboat Inn, and apparently I was not so impaired that I could not book a room, and I had a line of credit available to me back then that was somewhat more reliable than it became later on, so that I could pay in advance, and so I was shown the room by the innkeeper, who was called Suzanne, after which I went out to try to get some food and perhaps further libation, and when I came back to the Steamboat Inn, at 11:00 p.m., let’s say, I was unable to operate the key to my room. I managed to get in the main door, which had not been locked yet, but I could not get into my room.

  Now, there are two kinds of people in the world, and the kind of person I am is the kind who under circumstances like this—locked out of his room, unable to operate the key card in the Steamboat Inn of Mystic, Connecticut, not far from the world-famous Mystic Seaport—would elect not to go to the front desk to demand that he be granted admittance into his room, for which he has paid $108 (it would probably be more like $195 now), but would be likely, instead, to make do with what was available to him, and so I stretched myself out before the door of my room, to listen to the sound of the HVAC in the hallway of the Steamboat Inn, to hear the inrushing of coolant, the breath of God, Te-ai culcat din nou, iar acest lucru este patul tău și ar trebui să stea în ea. So it was until the person came around about 6:45 with copies of that morning’s Providence Journal and gave me a kick, and I was stirred. All of this because of key design.

  And so: When you try that card, and that card has, for example, no arrow upon it but rather some kind of advertisement upon it, and therefore you cannot think of what direction the thing ought to be run through the scanner lock, think of me sleeping on the floor of the Steamboat, and when you can’t get the little red light to light up green, think of me, and when you get the thing turned around the wrong way, and you’re on the twenty-third floor, and you’re going to have to go back to Reception, think of me, and when you demagnetize, think of me. Do not, I have been told, carry a credit card near your key card. Do not carry a cellular telephone near your key card. Do not carry keys near your key card. Do not carry quarters and dimes near a key card. I have even been told that the magnetic field of the human body can demagnetize a key card. Demagnetizing is a fact of life. Which means that on occasion, the subatomics are at work. Atoms are mostly space. ★★★ (Posted 12/8/2012)

  The Equinox, 3567 Main Street, Manchester, Vermont, October 1–3, 2001

  Of the use of the lodgings of North America for illicit liaisons we must now sing. The popular sentiment is that these liaisons occur mainly at motels noteworthy for hourly rates. But this is prejudice, because who does not commence his illicit liaisons in landscapes of affluence, power, and repose? Once upon a time, I was infatuated with a certain professor of the language arts, as they call them now, and this professor was lodged with presumptive tenure at a certain former girls’ college in the southern part of a New England state, and in due course, this infatuation became a searing, abasing sequence of illicit liaisons. One of those days, one of those occasions, had to be the first illicit liaison, the first such event, which is in retrospect like the time-lapse photography of flowers opening to the dew, or like the chrysalis in which the caterpillar performs its striptease and emerges as the Hyalophora cecropia. So much work, most of it in the area of self-deceit, has gone into the preliminaries necessary for the illicit liaison, and you can see the principals convulsed in want, waiting for the decision to be made, tying themselves into such involutions, such elaborate confections of self-deceit, that it’s as if they will never again be able to stand still, and it’s a wonder they can even do a small thing, a picayune thing, like post a few simple comments on an online rating service, so overcome are they with the agitations of their illicit liaisons.

  And so it came to pass that we found ourselves in front of a massive hotel, a massive, ridiculously colonial thing, of the sort that no man on earth could possibly fund anymore, such that it must be owned by some latter-day plutocrats, because the place is never full, even in the skiing months. It must have three hundred rooms, because it takes ten minutes to walk from end to end on the main floor, and out on the sidewalk there are these beautiful streetlamps that I believe were the first streetlamps ever installed in the United States, and then there are all these outlet stores just down the block, and you can see them coming from miles around, the buyers heading for the Ralph Lauren outlet or the Giorgio Armani outlet.

  It was leaf-peeping season, and the language arts instructor and I had been driving aimlessly in the absolute bliss of illicit congress, the transformative overwhelm of the forests of that New England, the New England of my own early years. We found that we could drive to the top of a certain mountain nearby, and so we drove, not worrying particularly about how the brakes of the rental car might burst into flames on the way down. No, we drove to the top of that mountain, which in any other American state would be considered a foothill, and on Mount Equinox, we surveyed the riot of color and decay, the instructor in language arts and myself, and we didn’t feel we had possession of all we saw, we felt that we were swallowed into all we saw, and at the end of this, it didn’t matter who was married to whom, it mattered only that we shuck off our outer layers, that we abandon our fripperies in the nearest hotel.

  There are many lodgings in this part of New England, true, but as new lovers do, we threw caution to the wind, and we picked the most expensive one we could find, and we determined that we would just walk in like we owned the place, because we believed that we had become one with the natural world, all things were as they were supposed to be, a beautiful colonial-era mansion, the virtuosity of autumn. The language arts instructor told the teenage clerks at the front desk that she was pregnant, and she would like to have a room as soon as possible so that she could lie down, which was a pretty amazing fib, especially under the circumstances, and I loved her for it! And I’m not going to say that the response was such as to make the room immediately ours (the only black mark against an otherwise sterling reputation for service), but in due course a room was found for us, and it was lovely and paneled with the wood of local conifers, and there was springwater on a side table that somehow you could imagine came from an actual spring, but it was almost lost on us, as were our surroundings entirely lost on us, because that is the way of those illicit liaisons, which is the sel
fish part of the whole thing, the part where nothing matters but what you think you have to do, and so we were like some tornado on the plains as we cast off the exterior layers of identity and civilization.

  Now, I should say (and it’s rather delicate to say, but for the sake of the review I will say it, because there is nothing that I will not say for the sake of the review, because the truth of the review is everything, as is the accuracy of the review) that the language arts instructor did not tell me something important, she didn’t tell me that as regards a certain time of the month, certain blood rites were hers, she was a veritable fountain of blood and had been known to warn people (she later told me) when that day was present, because not only was she doubled over in pain some of the time, but she also bled like the proverbial stuck pig. It was so overwhelming that there was really nothing to do but give in to the experience of the blood, and, intermittently, make it a part of the experience; she had even (she later told me) insisted on more than one occasion that certain partners in crime wear some stripes of the stuff on their faces as an indication of the seriousness of their devotion. I would have considered myself somewhat apprehensive about the fountain of gore, even though it is certainly bad form to be apprehensive, but see my comment about truth and accuracy above. I had not been informed, so we shucked off our outer layers (I believe I was wearing an olive-colored corduroy jacket, a white oxford-cloth button-down shirt, and some denim pants), and she excused herself briefly, she and her mane of dirty-brown asymmetrical hair and her leonine prowl, which only heightened my anticipation there in the Equinox, and then she emerged, some glorious creature, ready for the assignation, and we assumed some highly combative positions on the white sheets of the Equinox. The extremely white sheets. The white sheets of the Hotel Equinox that were probably labored over at great length by a crew of teenagers down in the basement.