Hotels of North America (6 page)

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)

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 selfish 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.

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)

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.