Joanna Walsh - Hotel

I have second-guessed your desires, and those of others. I have made myself into a hotel.

Postcard #–3—Nameless II

(This postcard shows neither the hotel, nor any nearby view: it shows a color graphic of a surfer.)

I wish I could find a good analyst, one who could help me find a way out. Some friends say they have good ones, but they live elsewhere. I can’t keep on trying. For financial reasons, for emotional reasons, I need some commitment; I need to commit to someone. I wish I could find a good analyst like I wish I could find a good husband. I don’t wish it like I wish I could find a good home. I don’t wish to find a good home any more. If I could be married without a home, perhaps that would work.

Postcard #–2—Ending

(This postcard shows some cliffs above the sea. There is no hotel in the photograph that may, or may not, have been taken from the hotel.)

I email you about an email I didn’t send.

I email you about not sending the email.

— It was not bad email.

— Good.

— but still didn’t send.

— Why not?

If I am talking to you again does that mean there was never any story?

Plot is good in books but bad in life. Plot is like angst: the fear that something bad is about to happen — is already happening. Why not go backward? There is no plot in a hotel so nothing very bad can happen here. When I am in a hotel, the bad thing that will happen is in abeyance but it is waiting to happen somewhere outside the hotel nevertheless. Meanwhile (while I am in the hotel) nothing will come to an end. I am struggling toward ending. I have left you but the ending is still not arriving. Endings do not arrive in hotels.

I cannot end this. I thought I had ended things already. Why can I not end this?

Postcard #–1—Returning

(Like other postcards in many of the faux-leather folders in the hotels I have stayed in, this one shows a hotel room with the double bed, unoccupied.)

Rewind: I woke at 3:00 a.m. in a hotel and bought a plane ticket back home.

If I go back, I thought, I will have a home. I won’t have to worry about the rent. I won’t have to worry about getting a haircut. I can buy new clothes at the beginning of each season instead of waiting for the sales. I can — I will — buy from the designer boutique I like one jacket, one pair of trousers, and a dress. These things will cost — how much? So long as spending does not become a habit it will be nothing.

In the airport shop I tried a cream that promised to erase the pouches under my eyes that came from all that hotel crying. The cream cost — how much? Much more than I would spend on myself. If I wanted, I could have bought that too.

It would have been nothing, nothing.

£72.00 for a plane ticket.

It is very little.

Later that week I met F in the supermarket — divorced. She asked whether we were back together. I said, yes, but. Before I could finish, she told me this was good. I don’t know why she should say this.

I remember, before meeting you, how optimistic I was about how love would be.

Despite everything I still feel exactly the same.

Cast:

Martin Heidegger:

a philosopher

Sigmund Freud:

a psychoanalyst

Odysseus:

a guest/homeowner

Someone:

a friend(?)

The Library Hotel:

a hotel

I

HEIDEGGER

What if man’s homelessness consisted in this, that man still does not even think of the real plight of dwelling as the plight? Yet as soon as man gives thought to his homelessness, it is a misery no longer. Rightly considered and kept well in mind, it is the sole summons that calls mortals into their dwelling.

There was a time just after we got married when it was fashionable to have your home look like a hotel. What did a hometel look like? We saw it in magazines. It was white, mainly, and clean, and spare. Hard, dark surfaces — wood and slate — were overlaid with things that were pale and soft. In these pictures of homes that looked like hotels, there were no guests. The rooms were ready; only they were absent.

I had looked forward to making a home — but not one I’d lived in. An Ideal Home? Perhaps. Not knowing what to desire other than what I’d seen, I wondered: could hotel come to me?

Our first home was rented, furnished. Having nothing already we filled it with the presents we found waiting on our wedding night. Someone with a car had dropped them off and, before going to bed, we unwrapped them. The presents were wrapped in silver and white paper and they were mostly white and silver: plates, cups, pans, a pair of candlesticks. We had sex that night, yes, in a heap of discarded tissue, but we unwrapped the presents first. We’d had sex before, but we had never had such things!

Home is accumulation: the rush of possessions. Some homes are a whole history in objects: college students return to flick through their toddler books, parents kick past their children’s outgrown shoes. This hanging on to things is what makes it home, where dates are reckoned from a crack in the teapot. Some families live like this, but I wanted none of it. I didn’t want to be responsible for things. You liked to keep things, I liked to throw them away — a wrapper, a receipt, a piece of paper, an old file (to make room for something else? I don’t know what). There’s always something to get rid of. But I also liked to spend time in other people’s homes, the kind where people kept things. I liked to float, dateless myself, anchored to other people’s dates.

At home we tried to get things right but, before everything was in place, parts started to deteriorate, things chipped before we got other things that went with them. You, especially, were left behind. Or was it me? Things can look better weathered, but ours never wore properly. Funny how things never wear in quite the right places.

There were things that went into the house at the beginning of our marriage that may never leave: forks, tin openers, pans, chairs. If I leave, some of these things will leave with me; beds will come blinking into the clear day. It seems unfair to drag them out — their scarred legs, their wrinkled bedspreads — half dead, into the light.

In hotels, things come and go frequently, and nothing there is shabby, unless it’s shabby chic. Things from home seldom go into hotels, though it often happens the other way round. Some things go out of hotels and into home, the small things that come for free, like shampoo, like soap (or, rather, they are included in the price). But a guest would not take the lamps, the rugs, the pictures, no, though some do remove the robes, the bath towels, the ashtrays. Some people I know collect these things, displaying them in their own bathrooms or, more often, guest rooms, so their guests feel they might not be at home, but in a hotel.

Thinking about things happens when I have some distance on them. In a hotel I have some distance on how things are at home, but I have no distance from the things in the hotel. Although some of them are the same things I have at home, I don’t react to them in at all the same way as I do there. Where else but in hotels are things so entirely different — so disposable, and so much worshipped? Being full of things that are replaced as soon as they stop working as part of the whole, a hotel is a thing in itself. In a hotel, everything must be just so.

II

For our second home (mortgaged, unfurnished) I bought: white sheets, beige armchairs, white curtains. He bought a red sofa. I was frightened. I painted the walls in a shade called Elephant’s Breath. He bought a rug with stripes the color of coromandel. I bought a white rug for the bedroom. It was impractical. He bought white kitchen units. They showed every speck. I was a lady in the drawing room, he was a lady in the kitchen, where I was the cook, but he was not. We were both whores, perhaps, but not necessarily in the bedroom.