Lost in Hotels (8 page)

“Can I get you to lift your shade, ma’am?” asks a flight attendant hovering above with a mom-like French accent. I lift the flap in an instant.

“How long till landing?” I ask the slender and distinguished flight attendant, whose hair was pulled tightly back behind her face.

“Captain says it’s about forty-five minutes,” she says in her fabulous French accent.

“So I have time to do a quick change once the bathroom frees up?”

“Yes, we’ll announce the final call for landing, but you can have a few minutes after that if you want. I won’t tell.” Her authoritative but considerate manner makes me feel more relaxed as I get up with my makeup bag and line up for the restroom. Through the window, Paris comes into view through the small window in the bulky exit door with its plastic covering.

In February, thick clouds always blanket Europe, the weather rarely letting itself known until that one dip that takes you just below the cloud cover to reveal the sprawling city of Haussmann rooflines and urban perfection where even the outlying suburbs offer some sort of romantic charm. The city seduces my thoughts as much as the possibility of seeing David as I mentally plan my outfits under either a heavy cashmere coat or a Rick Owens trench that justified my checked bag surcharge.

Charles de Gaulle Airport never disappoints with its customs line of exquisitely dressed travelers and epic hallways that feel like a catwalk for my new Giambattista Valli boots. The automatic doors that open to the outside world reveal a platoon of drivers with more signs than I could have ever imagined. Virtually every hotel is represented with a clearly written all-cap nameplate. I spot my name almost immediately. I approach my Parisian driver who has a super-cute pencil mustache and a slender silhouette that makes him look forty and not his youthful twenty-something that almost feels of another time.

“Are you Ms. Catherine Klein?” the driver stutters through a mere sentence of English with secondary syllables that linger an extra beat on his boyish pink lips.

“Yes, indeed. Thank you for being so prompt.” I smile as he grabs my bags without attempting another word and quickly walking a few feet ahead.

His suit shows the sign of a long day, or perhaps a few wearings since last pressed—wrinkled in the rear of the pants, at the knees, and just below where his butt should be on his slight torso.

As we get into the car, the scent of cigarette smoke fills the air despite a well-positioned No Smoking sign. The boyish driver enters the car and makes eye contact with me sitting patiently in the backseat, and then again. His thick black hair seems almost stitched to his head like a doll without a bit of flesh or scalp exposed. His pitch-black eyes are deep set with black circles that look like bronze coins but still sexy and mysterious.

He navigates the immaculately paved freeway with the zeal of a boy captivated with driving a car he can’t afford, passing and changing lanes with full blinker and right-yielding European vibrato before exiting into the thick sprawl of Paris. And there is that perfect urban landscape that seems planned by Aphrodite herself, from quixotic buildings clad in balconies built for two to cinematic cafés where couples linger over shared lunches and coffee always served with a proper cup and saucer. Bridges are capped in a frosting of gold paint flanked by iron art nouveau lampposts that herald a time when kings paraded with cavalry and princesses traveled by gilded horse-drawn carriages.

It’s difficult not to stray into deep fantasy when lost in the shade of the meandering rues and the interconnecting arrondissements of central Paris. I wasn’t quite sure where to stay, either, as it was high season and rooms would be tight virtually any place you’d want to stay and even in some you wouldn’t. Then there was the question of where David might be staying, and how close I could get without being too close.

With the Plaza Athenee and Le Meurice fully occupied, my choice was between the super-cute but sort of removed Hotel Tremoille or the Ritz in all its aristocratic glamour. Plus, the fact that it was soon closing for renovation made me want to see it one more time in all its fabulousness, especially on someone else’s dime. I also figured its close proximity to the Costes, Bristol, and InterContinental increased the chances that I would bump into David.

The driver takes the grand approach to the Ritz from Rue Saint-Honoré before turning into Place Vendôme, which brings a jolt of wheels over cobblestone pavers as the plaza’s column comes into view. Built by Napoleon from bronze derived from his enemy’s canons, yet it was years before I ever really knew what it was despite seeing it all the time.

It’s hard to imagine Place Vendôme being anything but a fashionable square, but under its glittery commercial facade lays a history of almost constant friction and a centuries-old struggle between those who have and those who don’t. How unlikely that a working-class girl like me would be staying at its most fabulous hotel just a few centuries later.

Paris is a city truly unafraid to tear down monumental things, whether a landmark to Louis XIV that once stood at the center of this square, or the former Tuileries Palace that burned nearby during the Paris Commune, which I can still hear my college history professor describe in detail. Even this column was a replacement for another destroyed by an angry mob, only to be rebuilt a short time later by Napoléon with a statue of himself secured back on top.

A flurry of activity outside the Ritz has us sitting idle. My eyes are transfixed on its fairy-tale facade with its white canopy awnings and windows that seem to each tell a different story of the guests within, despite their almost identical, symmetrical architecture. By the end of the ride, I’m a bit more charmed by the driver as well—the kind of guy who would take you to an edgy Paris party or nightclub for a long night you would never forget—even though no more than three words and a few more glances have been exchanged between us.

“So if you need anything while you are in Paris, please do not hesitate to call me to be here,” he says in his boyish tone, looking through the mirror and into my eyes at the end of the sentence.

I take the card and notice his long fingers that taper between thick knuckles and come to a head at a rounded, well-trimmed nail.

“What hours do you work? I may need a driver for an afternoon or evening depending on my work schedule.”

“I work all day and night; you just call and I come.”

He looks away as the traffic clears in front of him, and a dapper bellman whistles his attention as the car moves forward. In my mind, this kind of man is who you have an affair with, the type who is attractive and sexy-wild, yet also the type you’re eager to leave as soon as you’re finished and not linger in a romantic sugar coma that consumes everything that you are.

Staying at the Ritz is a benefit of the journalism world that makes up for years of low wages and long hours. The valet lacks the sexy brutes that line the front of the Costes or the quaff haircuts of the Athenee; these courteous kinsmen have been at the Ritz for more than a generation with eyes that can assess your breeding and social credit score without uttering a single word. Their uniforms have the fit of being worn over years with slight shoulders and stuttered movement that make you hesitate to hand them your heaving luggage.

The driver readies the credit slip as the men rush the car, his left hand gripping the pen in an almost boyish apprehension about the paper of someone who spends very little time writing much of anything.

“Please add twenty percent if possible,” I say.

“Thank you very much.”

He responds immediately, looking up to gaze through those midnight eyes that have yet to see very much of the world outside this city. However, I guess if you’re going to be untraveled, there are worse places than Paris is.

With a pull of the door, the Ritz comes alive as my black Valli boot extends out the car door and struggles just a bit on the cobblestone landing. I look up, staring in the eyes of architectural greatness, the aged masonry details of the square enveloping my soul and washing away any trepidation I had about the trip. The scent of wet Paris asphalt from a morning rain mixed with auto exhaust fills the air. I make my way under a buttoned trench to the plush red carpet and through the revolving Ritz doors that seem to connect to a different era.

I sometimes wonder if Saudi princesses who call the hotel home or better fashion editors are ever as humbled as I am walking through the entrance, each pacing footstep meeting the royal blue Oriental rugs as endless candelabras, scones, and statuary glisten in perfect gold. Ornate Louis XIV furnishings are everywhere, beckoning another time when women would sit for daily tea and businessmen would gather near the largest lighting fixture that was among the first in Paris to be electrified.

You don’t stay at the Ritz because you like the endless gold decor that would look garish in almost any other setting, or the crystal chandeliers polished almost daily to give them that impossible luster. You stay because of the people. Since the beginning, scenes have included the likes of Marcel Proust pursuing handsome waiters at grand dinners in the hotel dining room. And Coco Chanel living out the war years in her apartment while taking a Nazi lover. Or modern-day fashion alum like Valentino or Karl Lagerfeld opting for the terrace at lunch or evenings at the lobby bar in lieu of their usual creative isolation.

When it comes to rooms at the Ritz, I’ve learned it’s a bit of a mixed bag given the hotel’s history as a one-time private residence turned hotel in the late nineteenth century. Opened in time for the 1900 World’s Fair, it was the first hotel in the world to have a private bathroom in every guest room, and you could bring your household staff, which many people did during the rationing war years, storing them away on the hotel’s top floor made almost entirely for maids. These days, an ideal room would be on the lower floors. Ideally, the second or third floors are home to the best rooms like the Imperial Suite that Dodi and Princess Diana were living in at the time of their accident, or the Windsor Suite, where Wallis the duchess of Windsor would take many of her arranged interviews while her former king languished over his memoirs.

Hotels upgrade B-list magazine editors like me, even the Ritz. A bellman opens my third-floor room facing Vendôme Garden seen through arched windows hidden behind swags of plush drapery tasseled to an inch of their life next to beds tucked in Wallis blue-quilted coverlets under robust gold headboards. Upon opening the door, I’m usually greeted with a small floral arrangement from the Parisian florist Djordje Varda or a bottle of Moët that’s the standard greeting from the manager. The decor is still rooted in pieces from another era, like desktop makeup mirrors in lieu of functioning business desks and boudoir side tables with lighting better for mood than practicality.

“There you go.”

A quick €10 tip rids me of my fatherly bellman and casts me alone in the room to prep for my interview. At the beginning of my journalistic career, I would have researched a subject for a good week before ever sitting down for a sixty-minute interview that would lead to a national cover story. These days, however, I’m rarely as prepared. I rely on a quick read of a
Wikipedia
page and a wing-it attitude that relies mostly on my remarkably accurate tabloid knowledge. The results are a more interested interviewer who makes the subject far smarter than the person really is.

That’s a funny thing about celebrities; as soon as they become famous, they think the years of lost education and life experience mean nothing. Their words are suddenly valued and opinions so sought that they begin to believe they are actually experts. So there’s really no point in researching people who are going to admit to nothing or believe they have an answer for everything.

In lieu of doing my due diligence, I retreat to my emotional lunge back toward David Summers. Before unpacking my carry-on or hanging up my garment bag, I begin a journalistic flush of every five-star luxury hotel and four-star design property in the city center to find him. Plaza Athenee, Le Meurice, and George V are all marked off the list in addition to less obvious places like the Pershing Hall and L’Avenue just in case Oscar Wilde is on my side.

My goal isn’t so much to rekindle the moment we had in Rio, as it is to have one more chance to seal the memory of his face into my mind so it sustains me in my own world for just a while longer. I do not intend to talk to him, and I’m still skeptical that I’ll even be able to find him, but there is an instinctual need inside of me to know where he is, if only to share the same air in an unknown room or street corner for just a minute more before I return to my old life.

The beauty of the modern front desk personnel is that if you ask, “Is David Summers staying in your hotel?” they would never answer the question. However, if you ask, “Can I have David Summers’ room?” the answer is either a “There’s no guest by that name,” or they simply connect you to his room.

Alas, my answer comes after the tenth or so call—the Park Hyatt—the type of place a top-tier financial firm would put one of their mid-range staff in Paris. The connection catches me off guard, and I hang up the phone with the connecting dial tone. I imagine him sitting in his room working away by the dim winter light, shirt unbuttoned, and boyish scruff under a heavy brow. A redial to the hotel and I discover from the desk clerk that the property is even closer than I imagined, on Rue de la Paix at the north entrance of the Place Vendôme. It’s also a perfect location to hold my interview without worrying about paparazzi, and of course, I have a chance of seeing David one last time.