Joanna Walsh - Hotel

(Wait — was that a Freudian slip?)

FREUD

One need only turn each individual reproach back on the person of the speaker.

Edward James, the patron of Dalí’s Mae West sofa, also commissioned Magritte’s painting Not to be Reproduced in which we see a man’s suit-clad torso from behind. He looks into a mirror, which, instead of reflecting his face, shows the back of his own head repeated. Although the subject has no recognizable features, it is said to be a portrait of James.

Herr K, Frau K, Dora, Dora’s Mother, Dora’s Father, Freud look into their mirrors. They see each other. It is impossible for them to recognize themselves as they are seen by any of the others.

Wife or mother, daughter or lover, father or teenager: each can be substituted for several of the others. That’s why A Fragment never ends.

(En-Suite, because “in-room toilet” sounds anything but glamorous.

Suite means “next.”

So, next.)

The restaurant

I The bar

Is, like the lobby, a link to the outside. You can enter it from the street door, or from the hotel.

Is a place to see and be seen, which is difficult: it is almost impossible to do something, and, at the same time, see yourself doing it.

De 5 à 7 (or from 6 to 8, or whatever), waiting, I am at home. I’m waiting, because I have the waiting habit. Commuters are lucky — their time taken up by from and to. Even if they don’t remember the connections, their waiting, at least, is moving. At home, at this time I’d be waiting to make the food, waiting while making the food, waiting for people to eat it, unable to leave, to do anything else, in case they arrive. Too early to drink (though I will); too late to get started on anything. In the hotel restaurant, over the stoned olives’ little assholes, I will put myself at the mercy.

This is not the same kind of waiting as at home, as the waiter, eventually, and not even after a very long pause, arrives.

I wait to be waited on. A double pleasure.

Not so much to feel cared for as to be seen to be cared for.

See.? Feel.?

I can only fall in love bypassing the waiter. But, already anticipating my desires, he is everywhere.

II The restaurant

Since I left home, I’ve been a hotel ghost, living on chocolates, coffee, dregs of champagne and candle ends. There’s no longer such a thing as lunch, or dinner, only a series of atomized teatimes and cocktail hours, tiny meals (it is not so easy to be hungry in the midst of plenty).

The older people sat in the restaurant and the younger people sat in the bar, not that they were so very young, the men still dressed in hoodies, and the women smarter and not eating bread because they’d heard somewhere some movie star didn’t and, although they didn’t of course believe that they themselves were movie stars or even potential movie stars, they might have believed themselves to be on some kind of parallel track, perhaps in the story of a movie. They made me nervous. Imitating them, I didn’t order a starter, then regretted it. People are uglier when there are a lot of them together.

Why are hotel restaurants almost always disappointing? Salty, beefy, sweet, brittle.

Well, hunger meets what meets it.

How women eat together. You see everything: the private in public, the pressing of things on each other, the forced-sharing; I’ll have one of those, but only if no one else wants it. I’ll order one if you’ll have some. They order the sourdough with tough crusts. They order toast with nothing, one egg between them. They have had a lifetime behind them of taking leftovers. It is no fun dining with other women, only with men who will order the T-bone, who will graciously share their fries. “It’s nice toast though,” the women say, “it’s a nice cup of tea.”

The women are wearing dresses, mostly, which shows that they are here to enjoy the food, or to enjoy their enjoyment of each other eating the food, which is something that can be eaten up by the eye.

Or maybe they wear the dresses for work.

The woman sitting at the table across the room is so pretty. And to notice that, additionally, she has an inner life, however carefully she hides it from the man sitting opposite. She does not show it very often. But she will show it here, to you, now. There are other women, but they are carefully hiding their inner lives — they’d not like to show to just anyone — and no one notices. But here is one who has. And yet she looks so pretty too. And later, when she is older, she will be all inner life and no outer, not that anyone would notice her then. But right now her inner life is all yours. But without the outer, who would bother? Without the pretty case she is nothing but an unshelled snail: soft and ugly, not even nice to eat. How delightful! Your discovery. Women who look like that, you have been taught, have no inner life. Yet here is one who both looks and lives, though she will not show both to many, not to many who will notice. Only to you.

She leaves, he leaves. Three females left, each sitting alone. We do not cohere because women in a restaurant are nothing cohesive. We slide off one another, between us no solidarity. A woman alone must be compared to other women. A woman alone is dangerous. Without context she is ageless (or maybe only less aged). Completed neither by other women nor by children, she is an invitation to completion by a man.

(Or maybe her incompleteness is magnificent.)

There are no men here eating alone, though there are men eating together, in twos, threes, fours, wearing business suits so we can tell they are not here strictly for pleasure. The men without business suits are eating with women, who take their pleasure for them. A hotel is no place for a man without a business suit to take pleasure, alone.

I like to see a man eating well, so well that he could almost take over that function for me. They get so hungry, and the food is absorbed so quickly into their square bodies that in me would produce nothing more than spare rounds of flesh. Men are so content to be helpless. My husband can’t operate the coffee machine, my father cannot cook a meal, has no idea what goes into the food he likes. They are content not to know the most basic ways of servicing their bodies.

Perhaps these men are different.

What is there to do in a hotel restaurant, alone, but watch other people? I find myself never a woman — never at any point. Then I hear of women being spoken of and look, and there they are. I see them, just as men do. I see men employing them, loving them, buying them glasses of wine from the bar. But when I look back, it’s like a trick of the light. From where I sit, I see no women, just this person, and that person.

I do not go into

The Swimming pool; the billiards room; the gym, the club. Someone once told me the rich are not afraid to use anything. But perhaps hotels are not for the really rich. Is a hotel an inconvenience, in the end?

Cast:

Dora:

a teenage girl

Freud:

a psychoanalyst

Herr Rat:

a guest

Mae West:

a sex symbol

Katherine Mansfield:

a writer

KM:

her avatar

I

When they could no longer stand it, or themselves, Freud’s clients went to a hotel. And when a hotel no longer met their needs, they moved to a spa and, from there, to a sanatorium.