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  Almost instantly, I could feel the fountaining of liquids in the middle of the illicit liaison, but I did not care, because I was careless at that moment, and we did what we had lied to ourselves about doing for months, and what would certainly hurt a lot of other people, and what was bound to occlude all honest and open conduct in our lives for months, if not years, to come, and we finished up, and, well, there was blood everywhere. I suppose we could have put down a towel, as people do on occasion, but then there would have been blood all over the towel. As it was, there was blood all over the midsection of the language arts instructor, and, likewise, there was blood all over me. I certainly looked as though some part of my anatomy had been, if not sundered from me, then at least badly distressed, perhaps bitten in some way, as though by an animal. Blood everywhere! We got up from the bed, realizing that we had covered the aforementioned white sheets, and dashed into the shower hoping not to spill any more of the blood, and there we laughed like young lovers, though we were not young, and cleansed ourselves of the immediate evidence of our crimes. And then the language arts instructor—brazen in a way I could never have been—called down to the front desk and asked for replacement bedding. She balled up the bloody set and left it right out there in the hall. There was a knock at the door in a very short time. ★★★★ (Posted 1/12/2013)

  The Mercer Hotel, 147 Mercer Street,

  New York, New York, May 5–7, 2002

  Hair-care products are an important part of any lodging experience. A seasoned traveler, that is to say, a person who is never home, a person who’s putting up at an expensive hotel with a language arts instructor while his wife (I regret to say) is in an apartment no more than two miles away, is in a position to profit in the area of travel-size hair-care products. I know that there are readers who believe that a guy with my particular tonsorial stylings—which is to say, with very short hair where there is any hair remaining—does not require conditioner, because what is the purpose of conditioned hair if you don’t really have much hair? But I say that these critics, these abnegators of the creature comforts, do not know of the pleasure one receives in checking into a very good hotel and finding that one can fill one’s overnight bag with superior hair-care products, including a rosemary-scented conditioner that makes one’s scalp tingle. The lavender-scented body wash—or was it verbena?—was also a nice touch, and while I usually disdain body wash, I do not disdain an opportunity to try these products in the privacy of my own home at a later date to see if particular brands meet my needs. If you travel enough, you can get jars and jars of this kind of thing.

  Now, the Mercer Hotel, where I was ensconced with the language arts instructor on the dime of her husband the arbitrageur, is the sort of hotel where you are liable to see the occasional movie star, but I do not pay attention to this sort of thing, and I would actually see the presence of movie stars as negatively correlated with a premium lodging experience, because the presence of actors or celebrities brings with it the presence of the kinds of people who want to be seen with or otherwise be in league with celebrities, and these para-celebrities swarm around the hotel and deplete it of hair products and other amenities.

  The language arts instructor, it emerged over time, had some kinks in the delivery of romance that were unlike others I had encountered and were, in a word, disturbing. The language arts instructor, whose arbitrageur husband believed she was staying in Brattleboro for a departmental conference, liked to be lightly strangled during the practice of certain advanced kinds of venery. I cannot exactly recollect how she told me that she wanted me to strangle her a little bit. I don’t know how the strangling got introduced into the conversation, nor do I remember if there were explicit instructions as to how I might strangle a little bit. But we were on the floor of a room in the Mercer, and I was able, in those days, to get up off the floor more easily than I am now, so being on the floor does not sound entirely ludicrous. (And I should say that the rooms in the Mercer are incredibly clean, so the floor was not such a bad place to be, and I don’t recall any rug burns.)

  I remember trying to accommodate the language arts instructor, and while we could have been talking about the language arts or the department, instead, she seemed to want to be asphyxiated, though I also thought that perhaps she just wanted to feel like there was someone who disliked her enough to strangle her, and while I didn’t know if I loved the language arts instructor, I did think that holding someone and watching her shudder with pleasure, as occasionally happened in the pursuit of illicit affairs, did increase your appreciation of the person, especially if you did it frequently enough, and so I found that I could not, in any convincing way, strangle the language arts instructor, or simulate strangulation, even if that was what she wanted in order to take it to the next level, as she called it. I tried to do what she asked, in the Mercer Hotel, while somewhere nearby, mere floors away, Benicio del Toro was taking a meeting with some midlevel producer, perhaps about a biopic concerning the life of Che Guevara, and so there was a kind of a pause in the illicit affair while we took in the information that I could not strangle, asphyxiate, or otherwise constrict the airway of the language arts instructor.

  We repaired to the bathroom instead, and while you grow to assume that bathrooms in the city of New York never have generous tubs, this one did, a tub big enough for both of us to get in, and, after a few jokes and the passing back and forth of some hair-care products of the kind mentioned above, the language arts instructor, with her back turned to me while she soaped up and dunked herself, began to shudder and weep, and said, You have no idea how painful my marriage is, you just have no idea. I just can’t bear to go back there, to the house. To which I said: What can I do? How can I help? And she said: You can’t do anything, nobody can. And then she wept for a while longer, and I held her around the back, held her to me, in a kind of encircling, but not a kind of constricting, and she did have an incredibly beautiful back, just as almost every other part of her was beautiful; there were just enough flaws to make her perfect. But after a while I got bored of the tub, as one often will with shared baths, and therefore I got up and out of the tub on the pretense of getting her more premium bath salts, and I went out to the bed, hoping that she could compose herself so that we could be people who troubled each other as little as possible. I listened to her going through some sequence of ablutions, and then I listened as the water circled down the drain.

  It came to pass that she called to me: What should I wear to bed? And this must have been a rhetorical question, because what should one wear under these circumstances but either (a) nothing at all, or (b) something that is suggestive of and/or preliminary to nothing at all, meaning something barely substantial and yet expensive and black, or perhaps red, but instead I said: Let me see your pajamas. I want to see your pajamas. To which she said: No way, no fucking way, why would I let you see me in my pajamas, you won’t want me anymore. And I said, Don’t be ridiculous! I love everything about you! I’m crazy about you! I want to see you in your pajamas because I want to know about you in your pajamas, I want to be someone who knows that about you, and if that’s a vulnerable thing, then that’s a vulnerable thing, all the better. I want to love you even in your pajamas. There was some rustling around in the bathroom, which, as you know, is a very agreeable rustling to listen to. Which color? she said. I have pink and I have black. I said: Pink. It could have gone on this way for years. We could have turned up at dozens of places, dozens of hotels; she could have accompanied me during my training in motivational speaking, come to the conventions I went to, she could have come on some of my corporate retreats, we could have become parts of each other’s lives so that it was impossible to tease us apart if only she hadn’t agreed to wear the pink pajamas there in the Mercer Hotel. Because once I saw her in them, I loved her in the same way I love my sister, which is an impasse of the truly impassable sort. ★★★★ (Posted 1/13/2013)

  La Quinta Inn, 4122 McFarland Boulevard East, Tuscaloosa, Alabama, January 5–9,
2002

  Under circumstances of regret, during the long nights of regret, you should be back at home, but you are not back at home, because you have to go somewhere you don’t want to go, somewhere no one should have to go, namely, Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Well, sure, you can go there without incident if you are fervently interested in things gridiron, and you can go stand on the lawn and watch as the twenty-year-olds with the shaved heads pass down the main drag along the campus in their flatbed trucks, waving their bruised fists. Oh, look, there is the tight end; oh, look, there is the safety. Another winning season. If you are interested in things gridiron, your heart will rise up at this address. If not, this will not be your experience. I wish I had never been there. I will never again go to Tuscaloosa, I will not go to La Quinta on McFarland Boulevard, no one can make me unless I can be assured that each day in Tuscaloosa I will be served grits. And I do not mean cheese grits. Were it not for the tasty grits, I’d be happy to permit the southern part of the country its long-delayed secession.

  And yet, on one occasion I found myself at La Quinta, which has good access to the interstate highway system, isn’t far from campus, and—if you are not selling auto parts or rug samples and do not believe in a personal Redeemer—makes you feel like you are at the edge of the known universe, hastening away from all that is good and civilized. When I wound up at La Quinta, having been hired as an independent contractor by the major-gifts department at the university, charged with putting on motivational workshops for the staff, I looked deep into my heart and found that there was nothing there, that I had become like an expanse of synthetic-fiber wall-to-wall carpeting. My paralysis was complete, and all I could do was watch television and pop pills from the vials given me by the language arts instructor, who had a lot of vials of, for example, Wellbutrin and Zoloft and Klonopin and Ambien.

  The list of Ambien side effects includes headache, depression, sleepiness, and profound personality change, and nearly all the literature suggests that you should call your doctor if, while taking Ambien, you have a profound personality change, but the question, in this rearview mirror, is whether the profound personality change I experienced in La Quinta in Tuscaloosa was caused by the Ambien or by La Quinta itself. For example, the interior decorating of La Quinta could in fact cause profound personality change, as this decorating had a nauseating insistence on what I like to call Mexican pastels, perhaps owing to the chain’s origins in the state of Texas, and I have to say that earth tones, at least for me, certainly brought about profound personality change, as did the absence of a dining facility, and I’m not going to say that the breakfast nook was sufficient to scratch that itch. So if we were attempting to isolate possible causes of profound personality change, we could speak of the presence of Ambien in the bloodstream, or we could point to La Quinta itself, or we could remind the reader about aggrieved heartbreak. But what about Tuscaloosa itself, with its pro-life billboards and its relentless fraternities and sororities? Could this not result in profound personality change in which a person who was normally sunny, upbeat, kind, and entirely positive found himself feeling like throwing himself under one of those flatbed trucks?

  It bears mentioning that part of the period at La Quinta in which I was supposed to be conducting empowerment workshops took place during, or just after, what appeared at the time to be an irremediable separation from the language arts instructor, before subsequent instances of recidivism, and there were occasions during this stay when, in the breakfast nook, I found myself burying my face in my hands, stifling sobs, while a fat guy with a crew cut got his pancakes and drenched them with syrup stored in individual packets, and his pal Don, the one with the galloping rosacea, piled high a plate with more breakfast meats than I have ever seen a man take, and they then proceeded to talk about another fellow in the office who just absolutely would not give up his habitual parking space to the woman in Accounts Receivable who had just been classified as an American with Disabilities because of her rheumatoid arthritis. This conversation crossed the fifteen-minute threshold. I listened because how could I do otherwise, and somehow in the course of the discussion, there was a joking mention of unwanted back hair—here was a type of levity that might have indicated that these two men were reasonably aware of the shortcomings of their lives and habits—and yet I buried my face further in my hands, thinking about the language arts instructor who, after having accompanied me to Tuscaloosa, had returned home early following multiple instances of chastisement of my person (for such is the way of romance, which, until K., had always seemed to me the success that was an interval between failures) and about the poor attendance at my empowerment workshops, all the while taking in the fact that though there was a breakfast nook and this was the Deep South, there were no plain grits at La Quinta, only cheese grits, and as I have already said, it is not possible to consider a serving of cheese grits as falling under the rubric of grits.

  What about tradition? The tradition of coarsely ground cornmeal, which goes back as far as the natives of this country? I understand that there is a tendency in an evolving economy to want to tinker with tradition, to tinker with greatness, but the addition of cheese stretched this elemental food beyond its proper range, and it could be considered fit only for the expanding belt lines of an ever more obese local populace.

  I was suffering with profound personality change, and if I had to go out onto the highway and stick out my thumb and secure a ride to a Waffle House in order to consume grits in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, I would go to a Waffle House, leaving behind the unwanted back hair and the expanding belt lines and the godforsaken cheese grits to make of myself a person of the road, a person of the highway, a person of indeterminate location. You could get some grits at a Waffle House, and it wouldn’t cost you an arm and leg, because it was presumed at Waffle House that you were on your last nickel, that you had squandered opportunities, that all was illusion. A man still has to eat, however, and coarsely ground cornmeal was best. It needed nothing other than what it was, and if an inn with a bunch of nauseating pastels and some faux-Mexican decor could not provide you with true and authentic grits, then you might go elsewhere, as you did, eventually. ★ (Posted 3/9/2013)

  Union Station, Water Street, New London, Connecticut, May 13–14, 1984

  How grateful I am that you guys have named me a top reviewer on this site! You and I are people conjoined by a belief in sincerity and by a basic agreement about what that means. I’m not going to say the hair dryer in the room didn’t scorch a hole in the wall if it did. That’s just who I am. Say you are staying in a hotel room in Hilton Head, South Carolina, that was used shortly before you took occupancy for the filming of an adult movie, perhaps because of the sybaritic amenities of the hotel and the appearance in the backdrop of southern vegetation, such as Spanish moss. Don’t you want to know that this is the kind of hotel that allows such uses, the kind of hotel that might clean up a little bit and spray around some disinfectant but doesn’t bother to eradicate the condom that is draped across the desk chair that had been wheeled into a corner so that the makeup girl could linger there before applying more concealer to the buttocks of the principal actress?

  Which reminds me: I have often desired to have an infrared camera of some kind that could detail the dried, encrusted seminal fluid that is surely concealed on hotel-room bedspreads, which we all know are not routinely cleaned. Should we not be trying to create a national conversation on the subject of cleaning the unlaundered bedspreads of the world? I think there should be a referendum on the laundering of those bedspreads. Is it not worth saying aloud, if you are a well-respected reviewer on a well-respected hotel-rating website, that the fact that we accept these bedspreads as reasonably clean is hard to fathom? Is this just where we find ourselves, in a world where the bedding in every unregulated public space is heavily encrusted with dried seminal fluid? It’s true, the sheets were changed this morning, the old ones taken down to a subterranean cave where a group of Hispanic women stirred the sheets in gigantic va
ts of bleach and probably threw in frogs and newts and cursed you and your Gringolandia, but your bedspread has been in touch with chlamydia, scabies, human papillomavirus, and crabs, and on that bedspread two college students who borrowed their parents’ credit cards and charged the night’s lodging (in order to get away from their roommates) made four hours of furious love without bothering to peel back the bedspread, because their urgency made the peeling back unnecessary, and maybe you lie awake some nights in your hotel wondering why you do not have the urgency that the college students had, but that does not mean you want to sit on that bedspread, or put your windbreaker on that bedspread, thereby coming into brief contact with the vermin cataloged above.

  My own college career, which was spotty and episodic, mainly took place in the so-called college of life, also known as “The Land of Steady Habits,” and on one occasion close upon my graduation (which took place in the seventh year of my undergraduate studies and had involved a lot of moving around between departments: premed, English literature, philosophy, and then business), I traveled a little farther to the east of the Nutmeg State in order to try to make contact with a girl on whom I had some kind of feverish and mostly imaginary crush. The girl in question was staying with her family on Long Island, and I determined to take a ferryboat from the run-down and hard-luck town of New London, Connecticut. There are roadhouses upon roadhouses in New London. And a very few strip clubs, and a lot of people with missing limbs. I was young and poor, and I was bent on love the way a crow is bent on a flattened squirrel, and so I made my way to New London, regardless of the lateness of the hour; no, perhaps because of the lateness of the hour. I climbed down from the Amtrak train at Union Station and jogged toward the ferry company’s ticket office, carrying (clumsily) my overnight bag—whose zipper had long since given out and which was now closed only with safety pins—desperate for reunion with this girl (I’m leaving out her name), only to find that the last ferry of the evening had already left.