Rick Moody - Hotels of North America

Now, I should say (and it’s rather delicate to say, but for the sake of the review I will say it, because there is nothing that I will not say for the sake of the review, because the truth of the review is everything, as is the accuracy of the review) that the language arts instructor did not tell me something important, she didn’t tell me that as regards a certain time of the month, certain blood rites were hers, she was a veritable fountain of blood and had been known to warn people (she later told me) when that day was present, because not only was she doubled over in pain some of the time, but she also bled like the proverbial stuck pig. It was so overwhelming that there was really nothing to do but give in to the experience of the blood, and, intermittently, make it a part of the experience; she had even (she later told me) insisted on more than one occasion that certain partners in crime wear some stripes of the stuff on their faces as an indication of the seriousness of their devotion. I would have considered myself somewhat apprehensive about the fountain of gore, even though it is certainly bad form to be apprehensive, but see my comment about truth and accuracy above. I had not been informed, so we shucked off our outer layers (I believe I was wearing an olive-colored corduroy jacket, a white oxford-cloth button-down shirt, and some denim pants), and she excused herself briefly, she and her mane of dirty-brown asymmetrical hair and her leonine prowl, which only heightened my anticipation there in the Equinox, and then she emerged, some glorious creature, ready for the assignation, and we assumed some highly combative positions on the white sheets of the Equinox. The extremely white sheets. The white sheets of the Hotel Equinox that were probably labored over at great length by a crew of teenagers down in the basement.

Almost instantly, I could feel the fountaining of liquids in the middle of the illicit liaison, but I did not care, because I was careless at that moment, and we did what we had lied to ourselves about doing for months, and what would certainly hurt a lot of other people, and what was bound to occlude all honest and open conduct in our lives for months, if not years, to come, and we finished up, and, well, there was blood everywhere. I suppose we could have put down a towel, as people do on occasion, but then there would have been blood all over the towel. As it was, there was blood all over the midsection of the language arts instructor, and, likewise, there was blood all over me. I certainly looked as though some part of my anatomy had been, if not sundered from me, then at least badly distressed, perhaps bitten in some way, as though by an animal. Blood everywhere! We got up from the bed, realizing that we had covered the aforementioned white sheets, and dashed into the shower hoping not to spill any more of the blood, and there we laughed like young lovers, though we were not young, and cleansed ourselves of the immediate evidence of our crimes. And then the language arts instructor — brazen in a way I could never have been — called down to the front desk and asked for replacement bedding. She balled up the bloody set and left it right out there in the hall. There was a knock at the door in a very short time. ★★★★ (Posted 1/12/2013)

The Mercer Hotel, 147 Mercer Street,

New York, New York, May 5–7, 2002

Hair-care products are an important part of any lodging experience. A seasoned traveler, that is to say, a person who is never home, a person who’s putting up at an expensive hotel with a language arts instructor while his wife (I regret to say) is in an apartment no more than two miles away, is in a position to profit in the area of travel-size hair-care products. I know that there are readers who believe that a guy with my particular tonsorial stylings — which is to say, with very short hair where there is any hair remaining — does not require conditioner, because what is the purpose of conditioned hair if you don’t really have much hair? But I say that these critics, these abnegators of the creature comforts, do not know of the pleasure one receives in checking into a very good hotel and finding that one can fill one’s overnight bag with superior hair-care products, including a rosemary-scented conditioner that makes one’s scalp tingle. The lavender-scented body wash — or was it verbena? — was also a nice touch, and while I usually disdain body wash, I do not disdain an opportunity to try these products in the privacy of my own home at a later date to see if particular brands meet my needs. If you travel enough, you can get jars and jars of this kind of thing.

Now, the Mercer Hotel, where I was ensconced with the language arts instructor on the dime of her husband the arbitrageur, is the sort of hotel where you are liable to see the occasional movie star, but I do not pay attention to this sort of thing, and I would actually see the presence of movie stars as negatively correlated with a premium lodging experience, because the presence of actors or celebrities brings with it the presence of the kinds of people who want to be seen with or otherwise be in league with celebrities, and these para-celebrities swarm around the hotel and deplete it of hair products and other amenities.

The language arts instructor, it emerged over time, had some kinks in the delivery of romance that were unlike others I had encountered and were, in a word, disturbing. The language arts instructor, whose arbitrageur husband believed she was staying in Brattleboro for a departmental conference, liked to be lightly strangled during the practice of certain advanced kinds of venery. I cannot exactly recollect how she told me that she wanted me to strangle her a little bit. I don’t know how the strangling got introduced into the conversation, nor do I remember if there were explicit instructions as to how I might strangle a little bit. But we were on the floor of a room in the Mercer, and I was able, in those days, to get up off the floor more easily than I am now, so being on the floor does not sound entirely ludicrous. (And I should say that the rooms in the Mercer are incredibly clean, so the floor was not such a bad place to be, and I don’t recall any rug burns.)

I remember trying to accommodate the language arts instructor, and while we could have been talking about the language arts or the department, instead, she seemed to want to be asphyxiated, though I also thought that perhaps she just wanted to feel like there was someone who disliked her enough to strangle her, and while I didn’t know if I loved the language arts instructor, I did think that holding someone and watching her shudder with pleasure, as occasionally happened in the pursuit of illicit affairs, did increase your appreciation of the person, especially if you did it frequently enough, and so I found that I could not, in any convincing way, strangle the language arts instructor, or simulate strangulation, even if that was what she wanted in order to take it to the next level, as she called it. I tried to do what she asked, in the Mercer Hotel, while somewhere nearby, mere floors away, Benicio del Toro was taking a meeting with some midlevel producer, perhaps about a biopic concerning the life of Che Guevara, and so there was a kind of a pause in the illicit affair while we took in the information that I could not strangle, asphyxiate, or otherwise constrict the airway of the language arts instructor.

We repaired to the bathroom instead, and while you grow to assume that bathrooms in the city of New York never have generous tubs, this one did, a tub big enough for both of us to get in, and, after a few jokes and the passing back and forth of some hair-care products of the kind mentioned above, the language arts instructor, with her back turned to me while she soaped up and dunked herself, began to shudder and weep, and said, You have no idea how painful my marriage is, you just have no idea. I just can’t bear to go back there, to the house. To which I said: What can I do? How can I help? And she said: You can’t do anything, nobody can. And then she wept for a while longer, and I held her around the back, held her to me, in a kind of encircling, but not a kind of constricting, and she did have an incredibly beautiful back, just as almost every other part of her was beautiful; there were just enough flaws to make her perfect. But after a while I got bored of the tub, as one often will with shared baths, and therefore I got up and out of the tub on the pretense of getting her more premium bath salts, and I went out to the bed, hoping that she could compose herself so that we could be people who troubled each other as little as possible. I listened to her going through some sequence of ablutions, and then I listened as the water circled down the drain.