Ann Beattie - The State We're In

A whole vase of flowers in the photograph. So lavish, its extravagance conveying more than a sense of romance or the idea of a luxurious life inside a welcoming apartment. Flowers that will be picked up and whisked away after the shot, as the curtains are pulled together against the daylight that will fade the rug. Close down the set, bring on the travelers, light it up again.

Indelible, the yellow pollen on the floor.

Rose petals blew off the trellis, and the small pots of lantana outside each of the five motel rooms fell over in unison, like Lego pieces swiped by some kid’s hand. Moira picked up a clump of dirt near her door and put it back in the pot, but she was on vacation, she didn’t have to clean, she didn’t want to ruin her manicure. She kicked aside a bit of what remained with the toe of her sneaker.

June in California was great, and the motel was amazing: the Nevada Sunset, in the Russian River Valley. She’d found it on the app that showed hotels discounted that day and managed to get the same rate for the rest of the week. It was Wednesday. She and Hughes wouldn’t have to check out until Saturday at eleven. She knew at least one time when they’d be having sex: at ten forty-five Saturday morning. He loved to have sex before checking out of a motel. He just loved it.

Also (as he’d made clear) he loved his longtime girlfriend who had never thrown him over, never had a problem with alcohol, didn’t want children. This paragon, Elizabeth, was also conveniently allergic to pets and didn’t eat red meat. Her negative traits were that she worked all the time and took calls from her colleagues up until midnight; she was borderline anorexic; she woke him up when she had nightmares about rabid animals; her mother, a psychiatrist, was always hovering. Most shocking of all, Elizabeth chewed cinnamon gum.

Moira herself had drawn up a list of pluses and minuses, half kidding, half hoping he’d see that he should break off his relationship with neurotic Elizabeth and make a commitment to her, instead. Drinking weak margaritas at the swimming pool wasn’t helping her cause, though. (She was doing it because her impacted molar hurt. She didn’t look forward to the surgery she was going to have in September to dig out this remaining molar. The other extraction had caused her a lot of problems and pain. Right now she was taking two or three more Advil Liqui-Gels at a time than the label suggested and trying not to think about fall.)

“It doesn’t suggest. It tells you the correct daily dose,” he’d said the night before, tossing the bottle of Advil aside, watching Louis C.K. on his iPad mini. She’d only been having a ginger ale at that point, from the vending machine at the end of the row of motel rooms. Like everyone, she’d brought The Goldfinch on vacation. He’d read two or three pages and not fought her over it. He was, at the moment, reading The Economist poolside.

Kunal, the nice young cleaning person with perfect posture, had been mobilized by the wind. He suddenly appeared with a broom, also pulling a wagon behind him carrying the ceramic planters he and the motel owner no doubt wished they’d gotten the plants into before the wind blew up. “More tonight, maybe no electricity, so there will later be flashlights, ma’am,” Kunal said. “One time, no storm at all, squirrels did an acrobatic act on those power lines. See up there? No power for a day and a half. Some people came to play cards by the light of the oil lamp. I like the owner, who is very adaptable, as people often are in their second careers. He won at cards himself! He said, ‘If I were Ben Affleck, and you were the casino owners, I’d be turned out of my own house!’ Then later in the night he lost what he had won and some more. I’ve never seen him gamble before or after. Let me tell you, this job is so much better than driving a taxicab. Every morning he squeezes fresh orange juice for us. He says, ‘Here’s to whatever’s going on in Silicon Valley,’ and we clink rims.” Kunal talked over his shoulder, going past all the doors, lowering the plants into the blue and green striped ceramic pots. “Okay, I think the Dustbuster is fine for this slight problem,” he said to himself. Earphones were draped around his neck. He listened to what he called “native music” but was embarrassed if anyone asked to hear. “He’s probably listening to porn tapes” had been Hughes’s opinion, when it turned out both he and Moira had asked about what music was playing and Kunal had demurred both times. Usually you could hear a bit of sound leaking out, but neither had.

A storm. How dramatic. It would be another occasion to have sex. After sex, it might be another occasion to bring up their future, long term. Though to be honest, she wasn’t one hundred percent sure she thought being with Hughes was a good idea. He was sort of a tyrant about personal cleanliness and watching one’s weight and he even — this was unbelievable — wanted her to put on a hairnet when she prepared food. This, from someone who enjoyed the kind of sex he liked?

Five was an unusual number of motel units. Unit three, rented to a wan-faced Norwegian couple who could barely even pantomime English, was the largest, Kunal had told Hughes, when he asked. It had been formed from half of room number four, the rest of which had been converted into closet space. In the afternoon the closet door was often open and the owner’s six-year-old daughter, of whom he had joint custody, could be seen doing her almost alarmingly good paintings of trees and the pool area across from the motel units, sitting at a little easel, listening to music through her own earbuds (She liked xx). She, Lark, had told them that her mother was “a burned-out hippie.” She’d been surprised when they laughed. “What’s funny?” she’d said, frowning. Hughes had quickly said something to spare her sensitive feelings. “We just don’t remember that there were hippies, ourselves, most days, so that took us aback,” he’d said. Why did he think he’d be such a bad father? He wouldn’t. But she accepted that there was no way to change his mind.

She answered a call from her mother as she was undressing to take a shower, sweaty and itchy from the suntan lotion that felt like wet moss when it was applied. A white glob of wet moss. They were really going to have to buy a better brand. “Mom!” she said. “How goes?”

Her mother was at a spa, getting a pedicure. It was a lovely place, not one of those dubious Korean scrub joints, where the women looked off into space and chattered as they exfoliated your heels. Every now and then she and her mother made a day of it, ate lunch at the fabulous Thai restaurant, then had some wonderful treatment, followed by a neck massage. It had been a while, though. Her mother had been preoccupied with insurance problems Will had somehow caused by checking himself out of rehab midprogram and being gone for twenty-four hours before being readmitted. It was June, and her mother had not yet been able to pay their taxes, though she and Larry (her accountant) had filed for an extension.

“Are you at the Nevada Sunset motel, is that what you told me?” her mother asked.

“Yeah. About to step into the shower. And I’m not just making that up. Why?” she said.

“Because today I heard about two places — I wrote both of the names down, because one sounded so familiar. Have you heard of Hope’s Cottages, in Healdsburg?”

“No. Why?”

“Well, Larry’s wife came with me to the spa, and their son is interning for some protégé of Roman Polanski’s, and that young man is going to be doing a film at two places, and one of them is the motel you’re staying at, and the other one is the cottages place. I forget — some famous musician lives in Healdsburg, who’s doing the sound track. You’d know the name if I could remember it.”