Javier Montes - The Hotel Life

I suppose she must have knocked on the door just as I was about to consider the matter. Only to find the answer and realize my mind was quite made up — the questions I want to sit down and ask myself almost always turn out to be answered already.

Hers were not the two taps, gentle but heavy with meaning, of the lover who knows she will be welcomed. Nor the playful Morse code that invites or presupposes the trivial reply from the other side. Still less the four knocks of Fate itself at the door that open the Fifth Symphony — that would have seemed too noirish, or worse, theatrical. And from the little time we had spent talking, it was clear she was not one for melodrama.

They were three short, neutral knocks that would have been the envy of the most professional room service.

“Hi.”

She walked confidently into the room, with a smile that was different from all her previous ones. It was professional, too: a business smile, a smile for paying calls. A doctor’s house call, almost. If I think about the woman now, I realize that the first thing I see floating through the air is that self-contained, precisely calibrated curve.

With that smile, she guessed, formulated, and answered — right from the beginning and better than I ever could have — the question I hadn’t yet managed to ask myself: we were not going to sleep together in that bed. And that might also have contained the answer to my second question, the one I only asked myself later and continue to ask myself now; perhaps that way she had of putting the question to rest is what stopped me from clearly desiring the opposite. We talked a lot that night about people sleeping together, and now I’m amazed to remember how effortlessly she avoided the inevitable fact: that the possibility of our doing the same might flutter through the room at any point.

Of all the things there were to see in my room (not much, of course, compared to hers), she only had eyes for my whiskey.

“I’ll have one, too, see if I can catch up with you.”

“Sure.”

She carried on talking while I took ice, glass, and a bottle out of the minibar.

“Thanks for inviting me over. Or for letting me invite myself. As you saw, my room’s a mess; this way I can give Pedro some time to tidy it up.”

I passed her the glass. She took it without touching me, raised it a little, smiled, and didn’t drink from it.

“Which one’s Pedro?”

“The older one. To tell you the truth, I can’t remember the other one’s name. The boy. We just met him today.”

We were still standing, facing each other, glasses in hand. I think we both understood at the same time how the whole thing risked becoming absurd in that arrangement.

“We can sit down, if you like.”

She was already taking her seat.

“So. I also wanted to thank you for trying to help. There was no need — but all the same. And for not calling reception. That’s why I came.”

I thought I caught some emphasis on the That’s why . It irritated me.

“No need to thank me. And I don’t think that’s why you came.”

It sounded as bad to me then as it does now looking back — straight from the opening scene of the kind of porn they were shooting, or had at least paid to watch on TV, next door. And yet I hadn’t meant to insinuate anything. I wanted to remind her that a few minutes ago she had promised to tell me more. She gave me an amused look.

“Well. That is why I came. But not the only reason. Bearing in mind what you saw earlier when you snuck in this afternoon …”

“I didn’t sneak in. They got mixed up downstairs.”

“But I think you drew out the mix-up. And you must want to know what this is all about. And why I read your reviews. Which I like very much, by the way, I’m not sure if I mentioned that before. Did I mention it? You’ve got to admit that there’s something funny about the whole situation. It deserves a nightcap together, don’t you think?”

Did it deserve one? Perhaps it did, according to some universally accepted scale that everyone but me knows by heart and uses as matter of course. She handed me a business card.

“This is my company. It’s a website, as you can see.”

There was nothing but a web address: www.thehotellife.com. I read the unexpected name out loud to buy myself some time. She laughed.

“That’s right — I lead a hotel life, too.”

I looked at her, not knowing what to say.

“I hope you don’t mind. I’d like to say I named it as an homage, but that wouldn’t be entirely true. I chose it when I was setting up the page, five years ago, kind of off the cuff. The guy who was designing it needed a name for the test page; what I do is related to hotels, too, and I remembered your column. We checked, and you didn’t have the domain name registered. You missed a chance there, by the way, that could have really worked out for you. And in the end, I just kept it. I asked, and they said there was no issue with the rights, that the phrase was in the public domain. And it can’t be changed now.”

I couldn’t tell if the use of the name was flattering or a veiled slight. I opted for asking why it couldn’t be changed now.

“Well, I can tell from the face you’re making that you’re not familiar with it, but since it launched, the page has been really successful. A week doesn’t go by without someone writing to me saying that thehotellife.com has been voted ‘Best Erotic Page Of The Year’ or ‘recognized for its contribution to online racial diversity.’ Apparently, they even study it at universities. A few years ago, this really quiet girl who had posed for us sent me a whole ‘process documentation’ thing — turned out it was a project for a Galician contemporary arts center. They invited me to the opening. I didn’t go, but I was pleased. So I need to keep the name as it is — considering how difficult it is to establish a strong brand, I’d be crazy to change it. I owe it to my audience.”

She looked at me seriously after that remark. The off-the-wall adjectives my neighboring columnist uses in his reviews came to mind. Even now, it’s difficult to tell if her serious tone was a joke. I’d prefer to think it was, even if she could very well be the sort of person who is capable of saying something like that without a glimmer of irony. We have to make ourselves distrust the impression that we can know a stranger perfectly. I like someone who can tell a good joke, but that’s the easy bit. You don’t know somebody until you’ve seen what he takes seriously. Many with an impeccable resume for irony will end up putting a foot wrong and lapsing into awful, plodding earnestness sooner or later. I spoke into my whiskey glass.

“And what’s on the site?”

“Guys like the kid you saw today. Well, guys and girls. You know, the typical repertoire: people on their own, people in couples or in groups. They’re always amateurs, though. And always in hotel rooms, a different one every time. It’s a really saturated market, you’ve got to stand out. And people get a kick out of the hotel thing — they like to see the world a bit, compare bedrooms and bathrooms. That’s our trademark. To get all the photos and videos you have to subscribe and pay a monthly fee. It’s not much though, you’d be surprised. All above board. We always ask the models for at least two forms of ID to be sure they’re eighteen or older. We keep copies in the office just in case ‘the authorities’ come and ask for them one day. Although to tell you the truth, they’ve given no signs of life up to now. When we started, I thought there would be someone watching everything we did online, but these days I don’t even think about it most of the time. Maybe some day the police will call me, or I’ll get a summons in the mail, or in an email. Maybe one of our models’ significant others will turn up one day to ‘have a little chat.’ For a moment, earlier, that’s who I thought you might be, actually.”