Cake or Death (6 page)

That’s travel: deciding the essence of “stuff.” It drives me mad, it really does. I have bags of little tubes and jars ready-packed and yet I have always forgotten something crucial. And yes, some things
are
crucial, crusty reader. I can see without a contact lens in my right eye but I gradually develop a crushing headache that is obviously related to the muscles holding my eyeball inside its casing. I can feel the eyeball pulling away. But I’ve forgotten my vision gear.

I forgot to pack the children’s underwear in London once, which wouldn’t have been so bad, but you try replacing it on Oxford Street on the hottest day of the year on what turns out to be Gay Pride Day and your hotel room isn’t going to be ready until three. Jet lag chews at your sense of humour and the sheer grottiness of the city makes you feel as though you’re in the middle of an Anita Brookner novel as it reaches its stunning climax. In other words, you feel odd and you need to lie down. The next twenty years will be a winding-down in a slightly depressed atmosphere. For some reason, your relatives will tolerate this. I don’t understand Brookner heroines. If I did, I’d be mad in a foggy, genteel kind of way, right?
Incidents on the rue Laugier
was the worst. The protagonist spent decades unable to get off the couch after some guy failed to meet her at the tennis courts. And her husband put up with this nonsense. I must be making this up, but knowing the increasingly finely sieved novels of Brookner, I suspect I am not. Brookner wrote a novel
where the heroine, or the doormat as she would be identified in any other piece of fiction, had a sort of breakdown on a London street as she rushed to get home. (Was it from a disastrous lunch at Durrants Hotel on George Street? I’ve had that.) She had a terrible feeling of panic and felt she could not release these feelings until she was home but she could not find a taxi …

See, this is how I feel after a simple afternoon’s shopping in Holt Renfrew, a store I know by heart and from which I obtain comfort. But there I’ll be at Yonge and Bloor in a complete state, a tizzy, longing to lie right down on the sidewalk, almost as if someone had failed to meet me at the tennis courts, but not quite that bad. Brookner has that talent (obviously, since I remember the scene) crucial to a novelist of making something out of nothing.

And I have it as a
life
talent.

Hotel fanciers seize on all hotel references. In another Brookner, I think they meet at the Basil Street Hotel where I had the misfortune to stay once. It’s the kind of hotel that has little reading lamps with pale pink shades all over the place, and where Joanna Trollope does all her media interviews. In Robert Fisk’s magisterial history of the battle over the Middle East, he meets a contact in the bar at the Hotel Lutetia in Paris. I stayed there, I thought proudly as I read this. They were very rude to me.

These are the thoughts one has on the hottest day of the year on Oxford Street as one’s children buy unnecessary bras at Marks & Spencer.

And then the hotel room is ready—it is three in the afternoon—and you hate the city that kept you awake for thirty-six hours of extra misery in a life that has had sufficient, thank you. You are in your room. You and your spouse unpack with great care. You wash and sleep. You are restored by this room that has been slept in by thousands of people who have left no mark.

I remember the hotel room next to us in Montreal being cleaned, and I do mean cleaned. Floorboards were being taken up. Walls were being sanded. It was the kind of cleaning that is necessary only after an expansive, bloody death. The Americans know this, having developed a sub-industry about a mile below Molly Maid based on the fact that most American deaths are messy thanks to their love of guns. Bone and brain tissue, flying, splattering organs, the smell that endures in the case of the long-dead and undiscovered. This kind of cleaning involves carpentry, and it’s expensive. Hotels, like cruise ships, must get used to this.

The most luxurious hotel room I ever stayed in was at the then Regent in Hong Kong, right on the harbour. The water was a dark blue, although in Hong Kong you don’t question things like that too closely, and turbulent. Everything in the bathroom(s) was marble. I hate marble, find it cold and ugly, as if someone in a temper has been scribbling on it. And the place was … watched. You’d press a button by accident and a white-jacketed room attendant would be at the door in twelve seconds, as if he’d been poised to pounce while watching through his spyglass. It bothered the hell out of me.

One of the attendants stank of sweat, which you do in Hong Kong, such effort does it take to make it through the streets at the best of times. But his was a fermented stink that came from days of not washing. I made myself smell it. Imagine how this young man lived, in a room perhaps, shared with six. How often did he have access to running water and the privacy to wash?

I had a hotel bathroom the size of his family apartment and a bed so big that I could roll over and over and not fall off. Smell his body smell, I told myself. That’s how millions live in the square mile that surrounds you. That’s the sham you have here in this city. That’s why they struggle so, to rise above Fitzgerald’s hot sweaty struggles of the poor.

There was one of those negative-edge pools on the roof of that hotel, the kind that gives you the illusion that you are sitting on the precipice of a waterfall, except this particular waterfall fell into Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbour. It was the most fantastic, exciting, pleasurable place on earth to be, and I went there every day to wash the city off me. But I always had the feeling—I think it’s intentional in Hong Kong and it will become intentional in all of China—that the point of the pool was not that I was revelling in this beautiful splashy glass teacup, but that others weren’t.

If you feel this way in Hong Kong, where you are aware that everyone is capitalist to the back teeth and ready to smash ahead of you, imagine how you feel in Kolkata, where people have concerns besides capitalism and prove every day that they are not willing to smash ahead of you. Now that’s shaming.

Since the extension of buying locally when you travel is that you try to return money to the people of the country you are visiting rather than to some multinational, I never stay in American hotels. In Kolkata we were at the Oberoi Grand, which is not just grand in comparison to what is outside the hotel gates—my toenail clippings were grand in comparison–but grand in itself.

Kolkata proved what I had always suspected: that I will not kill for food or glory but will for air conditioning. After the terrifying trip from the airport, throughout which I berated my husband nonstop about not having named a children’s guardian (“and they’re your children, you’d think you would have taken more care because we shall never see their faces again, our corpses probably won’t even make it home, and I think they might well like to have your grave to visit; oh what a place to die, a flesh sandwich between two buses on a road with twelve lanes none of them marked or respected what hell have I ventured into I regret the life I have led oh I do” and on in that vein while the driver and his companion laughed at us), we arrived in the air-conditioned courtyard of the Oberoi where I restrained myself from kissing the marble (yes, marble) floor at check-in.

It only occurred to me later that we didn’t need a guardian for my husband’s children as they already had a mother, but as I say I was in a state.

My husband remembers the Oberoi fondly because he now lives with a level of insomnia that would trouble the magician in the water bubble, David Blaine. “We slept
for eighteen hours on the bed in that room, eighteen solid hours,” he says dreamily.

“Yes, and we were travelling for forty-eight,” I say.

But it doesn’t matter because it was the best, longest sleep he ever had. An outdoorsy type once explained to me why people love camping. You go without comfort so that when you get home, you see your perfectly ordinary house with new eyes and touch it with fingertips that tingle. Oh, the pleasure of a clean bathroom. You bounce your feet on the carpeting, the way I did when I visited my parents at Christmas during my poor student years. If I ever had any respect for tented people and their canoes, I lost it then when I heard this. It’s all just deprivation by design?

But I understood better when I arrived at the Oberoi. And that time I’d only been in a perfectly nice plane for thirteen hours and a cab for one. I was screaming inside.

I never did get to the point where I could walk around the block where the Oberoi was situated without racing back to the room in tears. How can so many limbs go missing? What disease makes a person’s face look as if it were melting? Indians are the most beautiful people on earth and it makes their suffering all the more painful to see.

In the end, I spent most of my time peering out the window at families living on an area of dirt and managing to keep meticulously clean by using water from a standpipe. People like me, us, our pleasures cause most of the global warming that will dry up the water in that standpipe—that would be my morning thought.

So I spent my time at the Oberoi very much
in
the Oberoi. It was an elegant, gracefully proportioned room (they use that phrase in decorating magazines but you don’t recognize it until you see the genuine article) done in dark woods. It was so clean. I sent my khaki pants to the laundry and they came back beaten to death. They were sorry, those dirty trousers were, and I was sorry too because I knew the washing had been done by hand.

India is so crowded and so devoid of grass and empty pavement that dust gets everywhere. Every inch is filled. Thus Indians are fanatically clean. But an ad where a woman dances through the house for the sheer joy of Swiffering would bewilder them. Why does everything in the West have to be made into an orgasm? Cleaning is a duty, a necessity in a dirty world.

And by the way, Swiffering is not cleaning. Good. You already knew that.

The four-poster bed at the Oberoi is the bed I long to return to, despite the attendant anguish of its surroundings. Imagine you’re in India, I think. Feel this clean white cloth that covers the bed that is soft but not too soft. See this dark wood. Smell this mysterious place. Watch the way the people measure their movements in the intense heat.

The city would black out but the lights would remain burning in the Oberoi, which had its own generator and its own clean water and would serve you toast and jam for supper if you couldn’t cope with an onion bhaji.

I didn’t know what to make of it all, but it did not seem to trouble anyone else. There were just my eyes
staring out of my room’s window, spying on the daily lives of the people who lived on the street. They would have thought a tent in Algonquin was
luxurium extremis
.

What does a hotel room need? A bed, chest of drawers, desk and chair, perhaps an armchair. Two bedside tables. Many lamps. And apparently a shower of such elaborate design that you are scalded or frozen but either way badly frightened. I always resent television, because television is the leveller that says you haven’t left home. And the pornography astonishes me. I can sit in a hotel room in the Rocky Mountains and watch an increasingly dazed and pulpy woman have sex on a table with five hundred men. Can this be done? Apparently.

Lake Louise, named after one of the uglier ladies of the British royal family, winks at me like a lushly lashed turquoise eye. Everything looks sexual after the porno film
Houston 500
. My dinner is meaty, big and beaty. The fondue pot drips oozing diminishing chains of Gruyère. You think of mountain air as bracing, but that movie infects me with lassitude, as though the bones have melted in my body and I might slide off the chair like a Dali clock face.

Most odd. Who comes to the mountains for foreign pornography? Why would anyone volunteer for sex with five hundred men? What kind of men would immortalize themselves by agreeing to have themselves filmed attempting it? Why did I even ask that last question?

The days are gone now when I automatically enjoy all hotels. Sometimes I think this keen enjoyment of anything new, no matter how strange or awful it is, is the only
thing I miss about youth. I once stayed at a Marriott beside the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota, and thought I was having a wonderful time. I left my key card in the door slot, because that is the sort of thing I do when travelling alone—Mr. Bickerson isn’t there to point it out—and the male attendant knocked on the door and slid the key under, warning me politely to be careful. Americans are so amazingly nice, I think. At least until they torture you by taking you to Camp Snoopy, the theme park inside the appalling place that is Mall of America. But I was in my thirties. Given my upbringing, I wasn’t even clear who Snoopy was, or why adults would wish to visit a garish, deafening collection of kiddie rides even when they didn’t have children to entertain. The obvious pedophile angle wasn’t so big in those days (this was fifteen years ago).

I thought the mall was big, which is the way I liked my malls at the time, but even so, the stores were increasingly much of a muchness. The organ store was amusing, though. I took pictures of the salesman sitting alone in the store playing “Yellow Bird.” I thought this was funny. I did not think it was the saddest thing on earth.

But then, I was thrilled to be staying in a Marriott.

Now, I’m the kind of person who shivers with disgust when she is sent by her publisher to a hotel where the coffee maker is kept in the bathroom. True, I have never seen this in any other hotel, so you’d think I’d just find it gross and interesting and go with that. Instead, I quiver, I retch.

Coffee? In the bathroom? I sound even to myself like Niles Crane, but I call the publicist and ask them if they
could never book me into a Marriott again; find me a Canadian hotel, an old Canadian Pacific hotel, now known as Fairmont since they bought the American Fairmont chain. Two years later, the Fairmonts, including all the big Canadian railway station hotels, are sold to an Arab prince and an American speculator. No one raises an eyebrow.