Russ Franklin - Cosmic Hotel

Her Indian name, I’d never heard spoken, nor the names of her father’s hotels. I was sure the facts and figures of her father’s hotels remained in the archives of her mind just like all the others.

She said, “This economy will not survive forever, and we will be fine. My father was a survivor.”

“I think he did more than just survive,” I said.

She shifted in the chair, lifted her chin to the television, and said, “Shh,” as though I was the one doing the talking.

Elvis came through the saloon doors onto a stage and began singing “ Bright light city gonna set my soul, gonna set my soul on fire, got a whole lot of money that’s ready to burn . .” and it really did make me feel better, and I could tell she was enjoying this too, Elizabeth a classical trained violinist enjoying this music. Can anyone explain why something makes you happy?

When she wasn’t looking, I turned my phone on and purchased the song “Viva Las Vegas” and started a new playlist, titled it “Songs to Beat Depression.” I had in mind that “Viva Las Vegas” would be the first song of many songs to play no matter what depression surrounded me, like a special drug when I needed it, and I could feel like I did right then with Elizabeth.

Even before the movie was over, before Lucky and Rusty were married, Elizabeth went to the dining room table and snapped the latches on the case and took out her violin and bow. I couldn’t imagine another night of having to lie in bed and listen to the violin through the wall, or try to sleep with my ears plugged with tornados of toilet tissue.

“The movie isn’t over,” I said.

“You’re paying attention to your phone. We have to leave early tomorrow. I have to wind down. We’ve seen it a million times.”

She tuned and began Beethoven’s “Kreutzer Sonata.”

“In Atlanta. .” I said, “I want my own room. I don’t want to share a suite. We’re getting on each other’s nerves. I’m just saying we need a little space.”

“Quit saying ‘I’m just saying. .’ That’s dead talk.” Her chin rested on the violin as she played softly. “The Grand Aerodrome is 672 rooms. You’ll have your choice. As long as it helps you do your job, and we stay on budget.”

I watched Elvis and Ann-Margret eating dinner on a houseboat, but the slow second movement of Elizabeth’s violin sonata made the movie tragic, and I experimented plugging my ears with my fingers, not caring if she noticed, and my mind began imagining the sounds in the rooms around us, wandering to events I knew had to be going on in this very hotel, events of the traveling lives of ordinary people: the simple click of a door as a guest looked into her room for the first time, and there were the high-low tones of conversations somewhere; water gurgled through pipes in the walls; people walking in hallways, people plopping in chairs, silverware clicking in the restaurant, someone’s empty shoes hitting the floor, and a plopping of a turd in the bowl, a faucet running, one type of snoring became someone else’s, a swizzle stick tapped on the bar top, a man standing beside his bed swung an invisible golf club, the simple rhythm of his weight shifting from leg to leg seeking his perfect balance, and there was the distinctive cadence of fucking and the desperate clopping of masturbators, the metal snip of toenail clippers, all the human activity thrumming the building, the girders, waving through concrete and rebar. These were the noises emitting from our planet tonight like the sounds of Van Raye’s planet reaching us, and when that went through my mind I knew nothing would stop the sounds tonight.

“I’m going to have a nightcap,” I said loudly.

She looked at me over her music.

I went to my room and put on my shirt and quickly knotted a tie. Walking back through the apartment, I said, “I am going to survey the guests in the bar.”

She played softer. “I bet you are. You can’t stay out all night.” She closed her eyes to play. “We have an early day.”

I slid my feet into my shoes that were parked beside the door.

“Oh, go have your dalliances,” she said, “I know you have to. . and if it makes you work better, then fine. If you are going to charge another room, however. .”

I shut the door, stood out in the lonely hallway of the top floor of this Windmere Hotel, the door blocking out a surprising amount of noise, but she was back to playing loudly, and I thought about it disturbing guests in the other rooms but tried to make myself quit worrying.

The woman in yellow turned out to be Fran from Charleston, South Carolina, and she’d changed into a different pair of slacks and a sleeveless batiste shirt to come and sit at the bar with her friend, and that was where I found them, and they kept beginning the stories the same way: “In Charleston. .” but as the stories became increasingly personal, the preamble began to be “In Mount Pleasant. .” and then Lisa pronounced that I should call Fran “Franni,” and they both, sitting to my right at the bar, shouted at the same time, “ With an ‘i’! ” laughing about how Fran tried to convert her name when they were AΔΠs at Clemson University.

Now alone in the elevator with “Franni,” I kept feeling her phone vibrate against my thigh as we kissed, and I heard the wind chimes in my mind that always precede an erection.

She had her arms around my neck, and in one hand she had the Amstel Light bar coaster that had “Roberta” written on it, a magic trick involving me ripping the coaster in quarters and throwing them into the bar’s trash receptacle and then reading her mind coming up with the name she’d written, and then I made the original coaster reappear completely whole beneath her own cranberry martini glass.

Franni and her friend told me their stories, such as the fact they were going to Saint Clara Island in Florida to “have our tits done.” They couldn’t believe that I’d never heard of Saint Clara Island. “Go there,” Franni had said, “have your surgery and recuperate at the resort. Everyone on Saint Clara is getting something done.” I had pictured people dining with bandages wrapped around their heads like Claude Rains in The Invisible Man . I drank cranberry martinis and listened to Franni and her friend play the game “Real or Fake?” as other women came in the bar, and when her friend left, Franni had asked me the question as old as hotels—“Would you like to come to my room for a drink?”

Now she let go of me in the elevator and leaned back against the wall with her hips thrust and looked at the coaster. I saw her light on her phone glowing through the material of her pants and that just made me crazier about her, and I tried to put everything else out of my mind and think: Sex, we are going to open the door in our lives and let each other into the secret room. My father thinks he’s found out we are not alone in the universe, but I am stepping into a hotel room seven stories above Dallas, Texas, with a woman from South Carolina, her phone lighting up through the material of her pants .

I stood on the threshold of her room as though I didn’t know my way around a queen single and watched her switch the desk lamp on low.

I let the door go. Like any good hotel, at the Windmere there was a nice consistency to the way a clean room smelled.

Franni balanced with one hand on my shoulder to push off her shoes, and she kissed me, and I tasted a grain of sugar from her cranberry martini. I sat down on the bed and pulled her between my legs and wrapped my arms around her body and kissed her neck. She climbed and straddled me, the wind chimes of erection playing in the pleasure centers of my brain.