Rick Moody - Hotels of North America

So I understand the development of key cards, I just wish the key cards worked in the same way in each and every establishment. It would not be inaccurate to state that even in the first days of my marriage, there were times when I was asked to vacate the premises, and on these occasions I would stay at such lodgings as were available to me, and mostly these were economy-minded addresses, but on one overnight, for example, I stayed at the Steamboat Inn, which was nautically themed, and it would not be inaccurate to observe that on the evening in question, I could not, in all likelihood, have passed a Breathalyzer test, and therefore it was important for me to book a room quickly at an inn that was within walking distance from the point at which my vehicle, having met a lane divider, had become inoperable. I made my way to the Steamboat Inn, and apparently I was not so impaired that I could not book a room, and I had a line of credit available to me back then that was somewhat more reliable than it became later on, so that I could pay in advance, and so I was shown the room by the innkeeper, who was called Suzanne, after which I went out to try to get some food and perhaps further libation, and when I came back to the Steamboat Inn, at 11:00 p.m., let’s say, I was unable to operate the key to my room. I managed to get in the main door, which had not been locked yet, but I could not get into my room.

Now, there are two kinds of people in the world, and the kind of person I am is the kind who under circumstances like this — locked out of his room, unable to operate the key card in the Steamboat Inn of Mystic, Connecticut, not far from the world-famous Mystic Seaport — would elect not to go to the front desk to demand that he be granted admittance into his room, for which he has paid $108 (it would probably be more like $195 now), but would be likely, instead, to make do with what was available to him, and so I stretched myself out before the door of my room, to listen to the sound of the HVAC in the hallway of the Steamboat Inn, to hear the inrushing of coolant, the breath of God, Te-ai culcat din nou, iar acest lucru este patul tău și ar trebui să stea în ea. So it was until the person came around about 6:45 with copies of that morning’s Providence Journal and gave me a kick, and I was stirred. All of this because of key design.

And so: When you try that card, and that card has, for example, no arrow upon it but rather some kind of advertisement upon it, and therefore you cannot think of what direction the thing ought to be run through the scanner lock, think of me sleeping on the floor of the Steamboat, and when you can’t get the little red light to light up green, think of me, and when you get the thing turned around the wrong way, and you’re on the twenty-third floor, and you’re going to have to go back to Reception, think of me, and when you demagnetize, think of me. Do not, I have been told, carry a credit card near your key card. Do not carry a cellular telephone near your key card. Do not carry keys near your key card. Do not carry quarters and dimes near a key card. I have even been told that the magnetic field of the human body can demagnetize a key card. Demagnetizing is a fact of life. Which means that on occasion, the subatomics are at work. Atoms are mostly space. ★★★ (Posted 12/8/2012)

The Equinox, 3567 Main Street, Manchester, Vermont, October 1–3, 2001

Of the use of the lodgings of North America for illicit liaisons we must now sing. The popular sentiment is that these liaisons occur mainly at motels noteworthy for hourly rates. But this is prejudice, because who does not commence his illicit liaisons in landscapes of affluence, power, and repose? Once upon a time, I was infatuated with a certain professor of the language arts, as they call them now, and this professor was lodged with presumptive tenure at a certain former girls’ college in the southern part of a New England state, and in due course, this infatuation became a searing, abasing sequence of illicit liaisons. One of those days, one of those occasions, had to be the first illicit liaison, the first such event, which is in retrospect like the time-lapse photography of flowers opening to the dew, or like the chrysalis in which the caterpillar performs its striptease and emerges as the Hyalophora cecropia . So much work, most of it in the area of self-deceit, has gone into the preliminaries necessary for the illicit liaison, and you can see the principals convulsed in want, waiting for the decision to be made, tying themselves into such involutions, such elaborate confections of self-deceit, that it’s as if they will never again be able to stand still, and it’s a wonder they can even do a small thing, a picayune thing, like post a few simple comments on an online rating service, so overcome are they with the agitations of their illicit liaisons.

And so it came to pass that we found ourselves in front of a massive hotel, a massive, ridiculously colonial thing, of the sort that no man on earth could possibly fund anymore, such that it must be owned by some latter-day plutocrats, because the place is never full, even in the skiing months. It must have three hundred rooms, because it takes ten minutes to walk from end to end on the main floor, and out on the sidewalk there are these beautiful streetlamps that I believe were the first streetlamps ever installed in the United States, and then there are all these outlet stores just down the block, and you can see them coming from miles around, the buyers heading for the Ralph Lauren outlet or the Giorgio Armani outlet.

It was leaf-peeping season, and the language arts instructor and I had been driving aimlessly in the absolute bliss of illicit congress, the transformative overwhelm of the forests of that New England, the New England of my own early years. We found that we could drive to the top of a certain mountain nearby, and so we drove, not worrying particularly about how the brakes of the rental car might burst into flames on the way down. No, we drove to the top of that mountain, which in any other American state would be considered a foothill, and on Mount Equinox, we surveyed the riot of color and decay, the instructor in language arts and myself, and we didn’t feel we had possession of all we saw, we felt that we were swallowed into all we saw, and at the end of this, it didn’t matter who was married to whom, it mattered only that we shuck off our outer layers, that we abandon our fripperies in the nearest hotel.

There are many lodgings in this part of New England, true, but as new lovers do, we threw caution to the wind, and we picked the most expensive one we could find, and we determined that we would just walk in like we owned the place, because we believed that we had become one with the natural world, all things were as they were supposed to be, a beautiful colonial-era mansion, the virtuosity of autumn. The language arts instructor told the teenage clerks at the front desk that she was pregnant, and she would like to have a room as soon as possible so that she could lie down, which was a pretty amazing fib, especially under the circumstances, and I loved her for it! And I’m not going to say that the response was such as to make the room immediately ours (the only black mark against an otherwise sterling reputation for service), but in due course a room was found for us, and it was lovely and paneled with the wood of local conifers, and there was springwater on a side table that somehow you could imagine came from an actual spring, but it was almost lost on us, as were our surroundings entirely lost on us, because that is the way of those illicit liaisons, which is the selfish part of the whole thing, the part where nothing matters but what you think you have to do, and so we were like some tornado on the plains as we cast off the exterior layers of identity and civilization.