Russ Franklin - Cosmic Hotel

She said, “I’ll be right back,” and went into the bathroom.

I got up and took off my coat. There is something contrarily pleasant about having an erection in pleated pants. I hung my jacket on the back of the chair and glanced at the bathroom door, then held my tie so I could bow my nose into the concentrated scent of her suitcase. There was a feminine flowery smell, and a new Band-Aidy smell inside her suitcase, which was a Charleston or Mount Pleasant bedroom. I’d never been in a woman’s real bedroom before, but I’d smelled hundreds of women’s bedrooms inside suitcases. Franni’s life was in there: the beach where she’d invented the game “Fake or Real?” years ago before she and her friend thought they’d be on this trip to have their own breasts enhanced, and surely there was the bad husband’s smell inside there too. The ordinary suitcase and its smell of a home gave me the same feeling I got when our plane was on final approach to yet another airport, and out the window I saw the ordinary neighborhoods with their swirling branches of streets, and the drooping blossoms of cul-de-sacs, the houses collected in curves like seeds in a pomegranate. I had lived my whole life in hotel rooms, wanted to live no other way, a life which made me immune to being homesick except for my aunts’ and uncles’ houses down in Sopchoppy I used to visit every summer when I was a kid.

When the bathroom door clicked open, I snapped out of my trance and found myself sitting on the bed with my fingers still on the knot of my tie. Franni stood before me in panties and a light-colored camisole, her nipples denting the silk fabric, and her perfect shape — breasts, legs, the slight, beautifully feminine paunch of her stomach and hips as she walked and turned out the desk lamp, leaving us in the light filtered through the shears of the orange parking lot below. She searched my face for a second in the dark, and we were kissing again and she was working my tie loose. I took over and she unbuckled my belt and popped me out of my boxers and rubbed me with her fingers.

We got on the bed, me on top, and I tried to lift off her camisole, but she stopped me, instead rolling out from under me and taking off just her panties, and in a flick of a leg she sent them flying, and she rolled on top of me, still wearing the silver silk camisole.

I felt beneath the camisole for her spine and the fine muscles there, and she made a little sound as she pressed herself on me. I tried once again to remove the camisole but she squeezed her arms and worked her hips harder, losing herself for a moment, and the strap of the camisole slipped off her shoulder and one breast flopped out with the dark nipple and she put her head beside mine and I could feel her eyelashes on my ear, and what I saw in my mind was the betta fish that had lived in the little aquarium on my bedside table whatever hotel I was in, rising and falling with his nose in the corner of the glass, those fine fins fluttering like eyelashes, and that made me think about my cousin Ursula letting me give her “butterfly kisses” when we were kids, and there with Franni on top of me, and in about thirty seconds I came. I tried to keep going for her sake, but the juices and my semi-flaccidness was making it impossible.

She pushed up and put the strap back on her shoulder and rolled off me. We lay beside each other, staring at the ceiling, and I realized I was in one of those moods where the idea of doing something was always better than actually doing it. I was thinking we’d just had the worst sex these walls had probably ever seen, then wondering what had happened in this room in the last forty years of its existence. What was the best sex these walls had ever seen? What loves had been made? What fights and heartbreaks had soaked into the walls? What bad deals had been hatched? Who was the richest person who’d slept here? Who was the poorest person? The most famous? What salesmen missed his family and sat against this headboard and watched TV? For a brief second I could hear the sound of his dry feet rubbing together at the end of the bed. People had laid over here, slept here, fucked who they were supposed to fuck and people they weren’t suppose to fuck, masturbated in front of the mirror, and someone missed their flight, people shot heroine, some danced to their own hummed music, washed the travel day off their bodies, a man got on his knees beside this bed and prayed to Jesus, someone tossed pills into their mouth, picked at a hernia scar, puked in the toilet, and another person kept dialing the same number over and over, waiting for the voicemail not to pick up. There had been people inside here who had wished for their regular lives back and people who wished never to have to leave this hotel room, and there was a woman who stopped here and had sex on her way to get her tits done, trying for a new start on her life, and all these people were on their way somewhere.

“Do you hear that?” I whispered.

She wasn’t breathing hard but she held her breath anyway.

“A hotel feels different with a lot of people in it,” I said. “When the occupancy was low a few weeks ago, it sounded different. Now there’s this hum to the walls.”

I didn’t expect her to understand or care, but what I really didn’t expect was to hear her sniff, not like a regular sniff, but one that made me understand she was crying, and a little choke came from inside her.

“Are you okay?”

She swiped tears with her fingertips and pretended to gain composure.

“I’m sorry,” I said, which I meant about me and the sex, but also about the cheating man and her old life.

“It’s not your fault,” she said. “I just don’t think I’ll ever be happy again.” Her voice seemed too loud because these were our first normal sounds after we’d made love.

“You will,” I said trying to whisper. “This wasn’t very good.” I wanted to touch her, but I didn’t know how she liked to be held.

“Is it terrible,” she said, “that I believe that I was always happier in the past than I am now?”

This made me think about the pad beside the telephone when I was talking to Van Raye—“Geneva 1000x”— we were a thousand times happier in Geneva than now .

“Sometimes I think everyone feels like that,” I said. “If there’s anyone who understands, it’s me. Listen, you can’t let yourself get like this. Emotional pain affects you on a cellular level. You think you won’t be happy again, but you will. You and Lisa, you’re going to a resort.”

She twisted her body and arched on her shoulders and took the camisole off and threw it. It flew across the room and she kept her arms spread, one over my chest. She looked down at herself in the dim light. Her nipples were in the middle of the little triangles of untanned skin. She took her hands and pushed her breasts together. She let them drop. “Real,” she said with them flattened by gravity, then she pushed them together, “Fake.” She let them go, held them together, saying over and over, “Real. . fake. . real.” She quickly pinched her nipples as if to punish herself. “You can always remember some time in the past when you were happier than you are now.”

“Do you want some water?” I asked her. “Or something from the minibar, or do you have anything in particular you take when you feel like this?”

“You are so weird,” she said.

She only took a deep breath, and I waited for it to be released, but it came in a whispered, “Tell me how you did it.”

There was the tick of the heater coming on and air blowing through the vent, and I knew what she meant — the coaster trick.

“It’s magic,” I said.

“Right. Right. It could be. You could be one of those Eastern mystics,” she said. “There was a boy who sat under that banyan tree for like a year in India and didn’t move, meditating, and never ate. It’s true. I read about it.”