Hotels of North America (22 page)

The sensei said something about looking forward to seeing her again, and of course I wondered whether he had put his filthy Eastern-inflected paws on K., but there was no time for that, because now she was heading for her personal effects, and I, in my khaki trousers and worn oxford-cloth shirt, was right behind. A few others lingered by the doorway talking about this and that, some vegan treat they were preparing that night. I said to K.,
Would you like to go for a quick cup of coffee? I consider myself a sympathetic listener in the area of bereavement counseling. Indeed, I am bereaved myself.
And she said:
You don’t even know what my bereavement is about.
And she fixed on me a look at once skeptical and amused. I was already gathering up my things, a knapsack and sweater, and we were moving toward the door, but then I was stopped by one of the employees, a minion, and was asked if I had perhaps forgotten something. Now the minion was telling me how much the suggested donation was for me to sit and have my thoughts cleansed, and I did not want to appear insolvent in front of K., so I quickly pulled out a few crisp bills and presented them, after which the minion asked if I wanted to fill out a questionnaire about my first time at the ashram, and I looked at him and then looked at K., radiant, unearthly, and then we were out the door.

There’s not a chance in the world you’re going to believe what happened next, which is to say the unlikely antecedent of this particular review, so I have no choice, in the end, but to try to use a few words to describe my thinking at the time. I don’t imagine that anyone believes love was possible after a mere hour spent sitting in the ashram when most of the meditation time our eyes were closed, but why, then, did K. say the thing she said to me only minutes after we had collected our Americanos and arranged ourselves by the window in a nearby café? You see, the truth is that all conversion experiences are really experiences of love. What I have said I have said, in the matter of the hotels of North America, and I can say now, with confidence, that most of the hotels in North America are not very good hotels, at least not the ones in my price range, and they are places where a long-ago idea of entrepreneurship and customer service has gone to perish. Many hotels and motels of North America are like the Capri Whitestone, and after a point, there is no further purpose in reviewing the hotels of North America, especially if your employer, the Rate Your Lodging website, is going to be absorbed into a larger conglomerate, at which time all freelance positions, and indeed any of the scrappy, upstart energy of the formerly shaggy and handmade operation, will be subject to intervention by corporate apologists and by their accountants and fembot publicists. But the main reason to leave off reviewing is because now I have given an account of love. What else is there to say? So we were sitting on the stools at the front of a café, talking about this and that, when K. said to me,
Why don’t we drive north and check into a bed-and-breakfast?
★★★★
(Posted 3/8/2014)

It was mid-2014, about the time the Rate Your Lodging website was absorbed into the Dynasty Inc. family of publications, that I was approached by one of the former staff editors about writing an afterword to the collected writings of Reginald Edward Morse. Morse, whose manuscript I was then given, was a reviewer who had inspired a healthy readership among the devotees of Rate Your Lodging and sometimes even beyond. There seemed no reason at all to agree to write this afterword. The fee was insubstantial, the deadline was nigh, and I am not the sort of person who goes online to read reviews. Reginald Morse, whoever he was—and I will speculate on this below—was not a William Faulkner, or even a Molly Ivins or a Mitch Albom. He was a guy practicing a homely craft. There are lots and lots of these people out there, cranking out posts about books, movies, recordings, doctors, professors, accountants, appliances, plumbers, hotels. They believe in what they do. I think it’s admirable. But that didn’t mean I needed to help out.

I had decided to reject the offer, therefore, despite the honor of the request, until the day on which I had lunch with a freelance editor retained by RateYourLodging.com to assemble this book project you hold in your hands. This is when I became aware of what I would call the mystery of Reginald Morse. Michelle Perry, the editor in question, explained to me over the course of lunch that Morse seemed to have vanished not long after posting a final review in March of 2014. He had posted monthly, or twice monthly, beginning in 2012 and continued for more than two years, reviews that from the outset were often ambitious in length and scope, with scant attention paid, in some cases, to the actual hotels being reviewed, in order for him to write about identity, intimacy, loneliness, and love. Nothing in his demeanor, in his excesses of verbiage, indicated that he had any reason to put down his pen. And yet on the first Friday in April 2014, there was suddenly a silence, and thereafter Morse failed to communicate with R. Jahna, his in-house contact, nor did he ever turn in further reviews. That was the last that the Rate Your Lodging website ever heard from Reginald Morse. At least, as of this writing.

It is true, isn’t it, that the inner mechanics of even our closest acquaintances are a mystery to us? It is true that our suppositions about character can be reversed in a moment. There are large parts of all of us that lie hidden, both unmapped and unpredictable. Apparently, Reginald Morse, if that’s even his name, had more hidden than most.

For example: Michelle Perry, while assembling these pages, used payroll data to track the author to an address on the Upper West Side of New York City, an apartment never once alluded to in Morse’s prose output. Perry, in fact, taxied up to Morse’s presumptive building and waited around until a superintendent made himself obvious, at which point she ventured a few inoffensive queries designed to bulk out the biography of the writer of this collection. Did the superintendent perhaps know a man called Reginald Morse? Had the superintendent seen a tall middle-aged balding man, a little bit heavyset, living on the fifth floor (per the payroll stubs, he lived in 5C)? With, perhaps, a female companion? The super, according to Perry, pointed out that almost every floor in the building had its share of balding heavyset men, though he did admit that he knew of at least one or two people on the fifth floor who might have fitted the description: affable, talkative, unemployed. On the basis of this scanty information, Michelle Perry waited around for a couple of hours, marking up this manuscript with a red pencil in the process, and did the same on a couple of subsequent days, without ever catching a glimpse of Morse himself. Indeed, it turned out in a few weeks’ time that there were eviction proceedings under way for 5C, on whose button was written only the word
Shy.

Were these mysterious facts intended to entice me, over lunch, into the writing of an afterword? It is true that in the following days, in the midst of a stalled book of my own, I began poking around on the web a bit.

I could and did find traces of Reginald Morse, of his essence—when I was willing to surrender the middle name, that is. He couldn’t have been the R. E. Morse of Biloxi, Mississippi, for example, who had died in a hurricane-related traffic mishap in 1999 after racking up gambling debts. His family was interviewed on their front lawn, on the local news, the night of the tragedy, video footage available on YouTube. Weepy and regretful, they forgave him everything. With the Biloxi Morse out of the way, I tried a few other middle initials online, just to see if any led to the author of these reviews.

There was an R. L. Morse in Fairfax, Virginia, and astute readers of Morse’s writings will note that on one occasion Reg Morse did in fact visit a hotel in Fairfax (see pp. 87–91). This R. L. Morse of Fairfax is a lawyer in private practice whose main line of business is real estate closings. I corresponded with R. L. Morse by e-mail a couple of times, and he seemed tickled by the possibility that he was a furious and infamous hotel reviewer, and if he was putting me on, he did a very good job of it. R. L. Morse explained, in the most genial way, that he didn’t much like to travel.

There is a Reginald Edmund Morse of Tuscaloosa who works for the State of Alabama in child protective services. I had a hard time reconciling the number of weeks that this Morse, who goes by Reggie, gets off each year (ten business days) with the R. E. Morse who was constantly on the move, whose permanent address is a matter of debate.

R. G. Morse of Darien, Connecticut, comes from a long line of Morses, a family who manufactured candles in the state of Massachusetts over the course of centuries. R.G., the scion of the candle-making (and now air-conditioning) fortune, is in his early sixties and is suffering from metastatic prostate cancer, about which he is reasonably cheerful, an accomplishment, under the circumstances. Interestingly, R.G. told me that he is a keen student of famous hoaxes, for example the Ern Malley affair of the early twentieth century. According to R. G. Morse, Ern Malley was a modernist poet created one afternoon by two embittered premodernists (in Australia) in order to embarrass the editor of an Australian avant-garde periodical called
Angry Penguins.
Morse went on to allude to a number of other prominent literary hoaxes, including such celebrated imaginary writers as Wanda Tinasky, Adoré Floupette, and JT LeRoy, which led me to wonder if perhaps the Reginald Morse writings were the work of some prominent contemporary author in disguise. Talking to R. G. Morse didn’t persuade me that he was involved with the work of our Reginald Morse (he said he was too ill to travel, and, if he were going to assume a pseudonym, would he really alter just the one initial?), but it did open up for me questions about fraudulence, about the relationship between the fraudulent and the genuine, and about the ways in which the fraudulent can sometimes feel closer to the truth than the supposedly genuine.

Last, I contacted an R. E. Morse in Canada, a person for whom this was not a legal name, as it turned out, but rather a pen name. R. E. Morse of Regina, Saskatchewan, was the author of numerous books about Canadian trees, plants, and birds (published mostly by the Modeste and Callahan imprint of Toronto), such as
Conifers of the Canadian Rockies, Coastal Ecosystems of Nova Scotia,
and
Tapping Your Own Sugar Maples!,
books often lavishly illustrated and dating back to the early seventies. The work of R. E. Morse (of Canada) is so historically bound, in terms of its look and feel, that it is hard to imagine this R. E. Morse having lived into the digital era at all. Moreover, this Canadian R. E. Morse was a woman. The possibility of gender imposture in the hotel reviews intrigued me, I’ll admit, so I made a few inquiries among acquaintances, and these friends turned up the e-mail address of Ms. R. E. Morse, environmentalist and nonfiction writer. And so I did, at the risk of intruding, write to her:

Some weeks passed. Then, one Sunday, there was the familiar ping on my computer that indicated a new message, this one the most welcome reply from the writer I now understood to be a former prima ballerina, one of fewer than two hundred in the world so honored, Marina O’Shea, of Prince Edward Island, Canada:

Ms. O’Shea and I wrote back and forth for a while, at least when there was something newsy to discuss, and on one occasion Marina sent me a few haikus about her favorite Canadian broadleaf trees, such as the white mulberry. Then, three or four months after we had commenced our correspondence, Marina died rather suddenly. I was left with that acute sense of loss that you can have only when your friendship with someone is still in the planning stages. You see, I had confided in Marina O’Shea, as I had in no one else, about the extent of my Reginald Morse problem, which was that even though I hadn’t even agreed to write this afterword yet, I was already expending more time on investigating Morse’s identity than I was on my own work, without as yet having learned anything substantial at all.

Marina O’Shea, for her part, had more than a few things to say about Reginald Morse. I had sent this manuscript to Marina, and it was her contention that Morse, like Cervantes, was missing a hand or was otherwise seriously disabled, because, as she noticed, there were few, if any, descriptions of Morse’s hands in his reviews, and when the little elegies about Morse’s daughter appeared in the book, there were no descriptions of throwing this child up into the air. Marina observed—and surely here she was speaking from the vantage point of a lifetime of balletic experiences—that bearing a daughter aloft is one of life’s most important pastimes, and sometimes fathers will throw a daughter into the air simply to try to restore themselves to spiritual equilibrium. And so unless Morse was missing a hand, Marina felt, or was otherwise disabled, there was not a chance that he had failed to engage in this curative activity.

Before I could write back to take issue with her theory, however, Marina abruptly ceased to be, following an aneurysm that spun itself into a coma (from which she did not awake), and her nephew, who made contact with some of her many correspondents, later wrote me to ask if I wanted some portion of her library. It turned out she owned a great number of books.

With Marina’s death, it became clear that my need to know more about the specific biography of Reginald Edward Morse would ultimately be frustrated. I had exhausted most of my leads. Perhaps Reginald Morse, the fellow who wrote these lines, didn’t want to be located, didn’t want to be more than the posts you have read, and his need to conceal his physical self is a set of instructions about how the work is to be consumed, namely, that it is meant to be read for what it has to say about the world, not for what it has to say about Reginald Edward Morse. Maybe it would be useful to let Morse go, to follow the words instead. After all, men will let us down, but the work is fixed on the page.

In pursuit of the meaning of Morse’s posts, I determined that in order to understand the associative breadth and the improvisatory immediacy of this literary work, I should experience some of the hotels Morse wrote about. I should try to know hotel life the way Morse knew it. I will add, in a spirit of full disclosure, that I personally like really good hotels. Prior to undertaking this assignment as the writer of the afterword to R. E. Morse’s work, I had stayed in exactly two of the hotels in this book—the Plaza Hotel (of New York City) and the Hotel Whitcomb (of San Francisco). It is not so often, these days, that I get to stay in a hotel. When I do, I favor availing myself of what Morse refers to as amenities. I like to get a massage at a hotel; I like to get room service; and I will rifle a minibar for every last candy bar contained within. I do not refuse turn-down service. There really is nothing like having someone walk into your room in the evening hours to leave a foil-wrapped mint on your pillow.

Given that I have these feelings about hotel life—that hotel life should be a pampering experience—it was hard to get up my courage to stay in the Presidents’ City Inn of Quincy, Massachusetts, one of the worst-rated hotels in the collected writings of Reginald Morse. (And this is as good a place as any to note that there is a great density of two-star ratings among Morse’s reviews. So many that I had thought, at one time, that the publisher really ought to have entitled this book
★★
, or perhaps
★★
1/2. Furthermore, with the elusiveness of Reginald Morse in mind, it seems important to note that, as Michelle Perry told me, the legal department of the North American Society of Hoteliers and Innkeepers insisted on the inclusion of the words
a novel
on this work.) It happened that I was teaching for a week at the Lexington Academy, a secondary school in Lexington, Massachusetts. I had a very good time teaching at Lexington, which was a revelation, because my own teenage years at secondary school were characterized by emotional distress. The modern boarding-school student is better equipped than I was, more patient, more ambitious. I would go so far as to say that I enjoyed Lexington. The teaching paid well, and the school was covering my lodging. They were therefore understandably confused when I elected to stay at the Presidents’ City Inn of Quincy, which is after all a known drug location. I claimed that I felt passionately about saving the school a little money and that I couldn’t bring myself to stick them with a bill from the Ritz.