Russ Franklin - Cosmic Hotel

“ He had a decent time. I paid all the bills, and he had a vacation. He’d just published Report from Earth , which was an economic failure. Are you following the doctor’s tapering guidelines?”

I hit the SUBMIT button for $5,000, and I stood up and tugged the waistband of my pants so that my cuffs sagged an inch and bunched at my socked feet. I got in her direct line of sight and turned so that my back was to her but she couldn’t see my right foot. I held my hands out beside me like a high diver.

“What are you doing?”

I spoke over my shoulder. “I’m feeling a strange force in this room.”

“You know I don’t like magic,” she said. Then she mumbled as though speaking to Karen Carpenter in the book, “He knows I don’t like magic,” and then to me, “Do you realize you’ve been on that medication for over half your life?”

I faced the balcony doors. In the glass’s reflection a mosaic of lights shimmered from our living room and mixed with the stronger airport lights out there in the world, and I tried to ignore her question, which was a statement. I wondered if my cousin Ursula was flying one of those planes right now. I could see my mother’s reflection, formless on the couch behind me. I wiggled my toes to get ready to float right in front of her eyes.

“I’m not looking,” she said very calmly, but I could tell from her voice that she was, and I did it, I levitated off the ground. Or that was the way it appeared to her sitting behind me — my heels floating off the ground a couple of inches. It’s a simple trick done by rotating onto the ball of one foot but keeping your heels together.

“ My God! ” she said.

I landed with a showy wobble and turned to see her face. She had her hand out as if she could block the trick.

I’d gone to my first magic convention in Las Vegas when I was nine, and I got more duping delight out of tricking Elizabeth than anyone else in the world because I could tell that one side of her wanted to believe I had floated off the ground. Tonight, for the first time in my life, she actually said, “How did you do that?”

“It’s magic.”

She picked up Karen Carpenter. “My God, if you could apply the same passion to the business. .” She snapped the book shut and picked up the TV remote. She turned to the financial channel. I plopped down on the couch perpendicular to her and took the remote from her and turned on the menu. “You don’t need to watch the news.”

“Yes, I do,” she said.

“No, you don’t. It’s too real. Did you watch the news when we shut down the Crowne Suites in Denver? No, we watched Follow That Dream . When we shut down Sun Resort in Phoenix? We watched Clambake and Jailhouse Rock back to back.”

“Yes, I remember,” she said, “but I’m only interested in Elvis’s life, his biography, not the movies.”

“Bullshit.”

“Cursing is a sign of low intelligence,” she said, but then, “his movies are completely unrealistic, but they are interesting if you know what was going on in his real life when he was filming them.”

Under the category “Romantic/Feel Good,” I selected Viva Las Vegas . “Admit it,” I said, “you like to watch Elvis movies when you are feeling bad.”

“This isn’t a bad night,” she said as her eyes actually read the FBI warning on the screen and she said, “Did you know when they were filming this, the tabloids obtained the stills from the wedding scene and published them and started the rumor that he and Ann-Margret really got married.”

I knew when Elizabeth was quiet for fifteen minutes (Elvis driving into Vegas with his race car on a trailer), movie flashing on her face, she wanted to enjoy this, and I thought it would make me happy too. All I could think about was Charles.

In this movie, Elvis, a singer/race car driver, is after swim instructor Ann-Margret. Every scene is an excuse to sing, the band always ready, but during the first interior shot of the Flamingo Hotel, Elizabeth said, “Look at that mezzanine. They don’t make them like that anymore. He was in love with Ann-Margret, but she was a Hollywood career woman. He wanted a mother figure.”

Elizabeth was a sucker for the American celebrity biography, the more sordid the downfall the better. Every biography proved to her how corrupting her adopted country and success could be. She took pleasure in the spoiling and the spoils and the downfalls of the Kennedys, Marilyn Monroe, Karen Carpenter, and Elvis Presley, and I’m not sure that these stories didn’t comfort her, showing the high times, just like her younger life with her father and mother, but then everyone had to suffer the downfall just like hers, a once great business of hotels.

In the movie, Elvis looks out his hotel window and sees Ann-Margret teaching a swimming class to kids. Her red hair reminded me of Ursula’s, though Ursula’s was deeper, nearly brown. Elvis grabs his guitar and heads down to woo her. She wears a red one-piece with buttons up the front and shuns him, though there is no reason for her to do so — he is handsome, charismatic, seems nice — but I think this was what girls were supposed to do back in 1964. Ann-Margret is beautiful, and she goes into a dressing room to change, and Elvis begins singing as he waits for her. She sings back from inside. Pretty soon they dance around the hotel pool, and everyone is watching them. Everything in a musical is perfect, and for a second I believed in Rusty and Lucky, and that perhaps things back in 1964 were really like this, but then Elizabeth’s tragic voiceover began, “He started taking amphetamines in 1958 in the army.” She put her feet on the table.

“You are using Viva Las Vegas as a teaching moment?”

“Look at the people there.” She pointed to the background. “Look at those people around the pool and the number of staff serving them. There are too many people in the world today, and everyone has money. Service like that can’t be provided to everyone. Everyone expected this treatment back then and we certainly gave it to them.” She clicked her tongue.

“Elizabeth,” I said, my voice lower, not lifting my head off the back of the couch, “how wealthy was your father?”

“He was trained as a banker in New Delhi before he came here. He worked extremely hard for everything he had.”

“I know that,” I said, “but he owned motels and hotels here. A lot even by today’s standards.”

“It was something back then,” she said, “but now, how many hotels are there in the world? Profits breed infusion of capital. The security is in the conglomerates.”

She had been born Ekaja Sanghavi, and her father made her work at every level in the industry — housekeeping, engineering, and as a bellhop. She liked to claim to others how I’d been brought up the same way, but the truth was that my training as a bellhop had lasted one week and all the bellhops hated me, and I spent the days reading in the employees’ locker room. I had lasted about a month in housekeeping, had never valeted someone’s car, and she knew exactly how long I worked in all these positions, but she liked to tell people I had been from the ground up like her. She had one picture of the nineteen-year-old Elizabeth in her bellhop uniform, hands down by her side, not smiling but holding her chin up. This was six years before her father died of a heart attack.

“What happened to his hotels?” I asked her. “I mean, I know they were sold, but the buildings?”

“They no longer exist — Nashville, Charlottesville, and Tampa were the last ones to go, and there were some minor motor courts, back when motor courts could be nice. We are incredibly fortunate, but compared to where my father was when he was my age. . we are far from that. But times have changed. The world caught up to us. The old wealthy are the new middle class. Why are we talking about this? I want to enjoy the movie.” She pointed at the television.