Rick Moody - Hotels of North America

But that does not mean that it’s not worth staying in the Hyatt Regency, which occupies the entire block of the arcade between Superior and Euclid. There’s no way this hotel throws off an abundance of profit; it’s so enormous, and each and every stall of the arcade, on the upper floors, is a room, and there are hundreds and hundreds of them, scarcely occupied, unless maybe there’s a wedding taking place. Hey, wait! That’s exactly right! There was a wedding taking place. Beneath the used-car-dealer-size American flag that hangs in the middle of the arcade, there was a slightly zaftig Midwestern girl showing a lot of back and a lot of cleavage, and a Midwestern guy with a shaved head, and there was a whole host of friends, not-exactly-beautiful girls in blue, circulating past the miserable post office and the shoe repair and the knitting-supply store and the travel agency, each of these enterprises the folly of someone loaded with antidepressants who didn’t really need to make money but just liked to have a shoppe in a location with jaw-dropping woodwork and glass and gilded edges; yes, there was a wedding, and some canned violin through the loudspeakers, and a wedding cake standing at the top of the main staircase, a beautiful marble passage up from the ground floor to the second floor — you could walk forty-five persons across that staircase — and here were K. and I observing from the third-floor terrace, like marriage itself was a lower circle of hell than the one we occupied. We had learned about the wedding not from the groups of worried-looking couples entering the arcade just as we were, but from the stack of photocopies at check-in that indicated there was an event in the arcade and that some of us who had spent good money to come and stay at the Hyatt could instead expect music and unrestrained laughter from 6:30 to 11:30 p.m., and that if we were noise sensitive, they would attempt to accommodate us. So said the photocopied handout from the assistant manager, who had probably labored long and hard over the specific wording.

K. advised me that Cleveland had a thriving dance-music scene, as do all hard-luck Midwestern cities, and although I’m not even sure what that means, a thriving dance-music scene, I think it has something to do with very loud and very repetitive music being played near dawn for people who are on self-administered medication, and my anxiety upon reading the flyer at Reception was that there would be a lot of hallucinating people with purple hair vomiting and shouting about the Apocalypse as they ambled around the arcade, but it was not that kind of wedding. We went first to our room for a quick nap and found that we did have an extremely deluxe view of one of Cleveland’s finest multistory parking facilities; our room was nice, that was the best you could say about it, and Meg, at Reception, was kind to put us here in the corner, facing the garage, far from the elevator and far from the wedding, so that we could sleep deeply on the memory-foam pillows, and the thing about our almost excellent room at the almost excellent Hyatt, with its absence of ice machines and its overreliance, decorating-wise, on tan, was that our room made us want to go wander in the arcade and try to get the attention of the Chinese guy who had the pan-Asian takeout place, who was probably just trying to hold out one more year. We hoped he would make us a spicy broccoli and bean curd something or other, but the arcade was closed off during the hours of the event, which the flyer at Reception did not properly refer to as the wedding between Jenny Gartz of Sandusky, Ohio, and William Blunt of Bloomington, Indiana. She had met the groom at a state school where she was studying social work while he was studying sports management. Since we could not go to the arcade, and since we certainly couldn’t wander around downtown Cleveland, because there is no downtown Cleveland to wander around in, there was nothing to do but watch the wedding.

K. was dead set on trying to hurl a penny from the railing of floor three into the cake, which looked more hatbox and less cake from this distance and which had no figurines on top. There were no persons dressed in NASCAR racing uniforms, there were no vomiting-at-the-altar moments, there were no last-minute speeches about how Jenny really should have married Travis Ritter, the urologist who had given up his true love — comparative literature — in order to procure a more stable income for Jenny during their stormy two years in Columbus, when Jenny really did have a few lesbian experiences, before she met Billy at a sorority-reunion event at a golf-driving range in some forgettable town out in the exurban farmland. There was no self-lacerating speech from Travis (I took my eyes off the ball, ladies and gentlemen, and I know it each and every night, Jenny, each and every night). It was not that kind of a wedding. Beyond the girls in blue, each of whom, we decided, might have bulk-e-mailed malicious gossip about us, given the opportunity, and the great-uncle in the bright orange ski jacket who apparently didn’t get the memo about formal wear, it was just another wedding in a nineteenth-century architectural marvel in a city bleeding red ink during presidential-election season, which didn’t stop K. from turning to me, at the railing of the third terrace, with a tear in her eye. ★★★ (Posted 9/5/2013)

Windmere Residence, Windmere Lane, Charlottesville, Virginia, December 3–5, 2002

My wife’s great-aunt was a woman of great resources. She was four and a half feet tall and had osteoporosis of the severe kind, but her rapier wit was never in short supply, nor her recall of trivial facts from the lives of extended family members. A slightly raised eyebrow (which one would have just been able to see beneath the enormous spectacles) was a signifier of abrupt turns in her storytelling. I rarely missed a chance to visit with this great-aunt, even if visiting meant agreeing to a family reunion to be held in the Windmere Residence, the aunt’s independent-living address.

It bears mentioning that the wife’s family was already well organized around the opinion that I, Reginald Morse, was insufficiently job-locked. The older feminine members of the clan, all of them given to macramé and tiered desserts, liked to take me aside, banter, and then introduce the surgical lancet: Why aren’t you pursuing more conventional employment? This proved to be the case again at the Windmere. After admiring the recordings of the big-band era played through a public-address system in one of the reception halls and claiming to be unable to hear anything but the highlights of any conversation, and after helping the excellent great-aunt back up to her heavily festooned chambers (she was fatigued and wanted to get to bed early), I let myself be the subject of harassing remarks by one or two relatives whose idea of a good time was televised dancing competitions. Let it be said that my particular talents were not effective in a conventional transnational corporate setting, this is undeniable, and indeed because of my natural desire to innovate, I was not terribly good at serving as an employee. In certain circles, however, these things would have been considered advantages.

Uncle Don wanted to talk with me about ice hockey and he seemed genuinely shocked when I did not know who was playing in my division, and after several times through this particular rondo, I excused myself and went directly back to the guest suite, leaving my wife in the Rosewood Room with her fifty-nine or so relatives, along with their epidemic of obesity and their belief that the fossils of pre-extinction-event cretaceous sauropods were sculpted a mere six thousand years ago. Upon arriving in the guest suite, I laid myself grimly upon a multiply quilted bed, all of its bedclothes synthetic, and, using a new lightning-fast Internet connection in the Windmere, I began to attempt conversation with a certain professional, as shown herewith: