Rick Moody - Hotels of North America

What about towel warmers? Some people really like towel warmers, and I will admit that there is a moment after a shower when a towel warmer is a rather extraordinary thing. Other examples of an amenity might be on-staff astrologers, or free onsite e-book readers, or perhaps a barbershop on the premises, or peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches, crusts sundered, on the room-service menu. The Hotel Whitcomb did not have these sorts of amenities during my stay there with K., who berated me for taking a room there.

And what if the ghost on the premises resembles your own father? Now, astute readers of Reginald Edward Morse are aware that his father has been infrequently discussed in this canon of work, but let’s say there were, at each floor’s elevator disembarkation point, mirrors facing mirrors, and while waiting for the rather slow elevators, there was ample time for reflection, as it were, upon one’s own appearance, or the appearance of one’s loved ones, in these ample mirrors enveloping on all sides. I was having, on the night in question, one of those middle-of-the-night perambulations, insomnia-related, and heading past the elevators for the ice machine down the hall, when, upon hearing something that could easily have been picked up on extra-sensitive investigative-recording equipment, I stopped, because it sounded as though there was a voice, or voices, coming from behind the mirrors, as if issuing from the reflections themselves. The sound, if I was going to characterize it, was like a barely stifled sob, or a series of barely stifled sobs, something alto, or perhaps falsetto, from the throat, not the chest or diaphragm, but the kind of heaving, asphyxiating sobs you associate with high grief. I stopped by the mirrors and, in so doing, felt myself lassoed into their complexity. In architectural and design circles, the mirrors-upon-mirrors gambit affords the illusion of scale, but I was distracted, in overhearing these ghostly sobs, by the way that mirrors eternally reflecting one another muddy the reflecting pool with their layers of philosophical and oneiric speculation, with ideas of the infinite, and infinite regress, as if, it would seem, any kind of reflection is to be had only in the beholding of the infinite.

While thinking about all of this, hefting my as yet unfilled ice bucket, I realized, at first casually, that I was seeing a man — a man besides myself, that is — in the systematized mirrors. He was wearing a suit of black three-piece serge with narrow lapels and a red tie, from sixty or seventy years ago, and a fedora, and I wondered, you know, because it was California, if this was itself a hotel amenity, as with those amusement-park rides in which an apparition appears in your gondola with you — would the serge-wearing fedora-sporting gentleman have been visible to anyone happening this way? — or if it was an apparition visible only to me. With sangfroid I thought of waking K. and asking her if she would come and look at the suited visitant, the mourner in the looking glass, but before I could take this on (and the wrath that would ensue for having awakened her), it occurred to me that this was not just any man, but my own father . I didn’t know, at that time, if he was living or dead, and I had not had anything to do with him since well back in my early life, and he was a presence more in his absence than in any other way, and that was why, perhaps, I realized suddenly that the stifled sobs were my own and did not belong to the mourner, who, when gazed upon directly, vanished out of my sight. He had been perceptible only with the literary sidelong glance, this ghost who haunted the father (me) who was worried about being another father who abandons his daughter, another father who is insufficiently present in the life of his daughter (stifled sob). Is that an amenity?

At one time, the Hotel Whitcomb had the largest indoor parquet floor in the United States of America, which is the kind of thing your grandmother would have known. For jazz-age voluptuaries circa 1929, it was a “see and be seen” hotel. K. went looking for weaknesses, and there were, it’s true, not one but two toothpaste caps stuck down the old-fashioned drain in the modestly sized basin in the bathroom. The mirrors, by the way, that appear everywhere in the Hotel Whitcomb are slightly yellowed. Is that a feature of the original 1910 design? Or a slightly later Art Deco renovation? The dog-eared pamphlet in the top drawer of the desk indicates that the Hotel Whitcomb has been renovated to keep up with the times, but as far as we could tell, no significant renovation had taken place in the past twenty or thirty years, with the possible exception of the “business center,” which seemed, when we checked in, heavily populated with mobsters. Was one of these men my father? ★★★ (Posted 12/14/2013)

Hotel Francesco, Via Dell Arco Di San Calisto 20,

Roma, Italia, May 20–22, 2004

A charming little hotel in a neighborhood right in the center of the old city, within easy walking distance of many well-known tourist destinations, the Hotel Francesco also happens to be the hotel where my child was conceived with the woman who used to be my wife. This was not a joyful coupling, but it was a momentous one, a coupling that took place after a year or more of disputing, arguing, relenting, agreeing, disagreeing, and agreeing again, and which took place with the technological application of thermometers, calendars, medical advisers, and so forth. We were successful on this, our first genuine attempt, which is remarkable because preliminary ambivalence seems to have had no effect on fertility. If your chronicler was not ready to be a father before embarking on the process, the presence of a child nevertheless conferred on him the right and just use of the term.

The hotel played almost no role in the fact of conception, excepting that it was the place we happened to be. The hotel is not to be blamed for the state of marital relations. There was a functioning Internet at the Francesco, which is named for the beloved saint who loved animals, and the functioning Internet was able to call up, after merely a few keystrokes, the kinds of images of unclothed women in tableaux of female slavery that will enable one who has given up on marital relations to reach the necessary preliminary condition for the miracle of conception, but I do not mean to speak of this amenity (the Internet), nor of the hotel and its proximity to tourist destinations, nor do I even mean to speak of Saint Francis. I mean to speak briefly of the laughter of the beloved.

The laughter of the beloved is such an excellence that it can bring about positive outcomes in 98 percent of imbroglios, even when these are the worst sorts of imbroglios. In the early days of a romance, especially a romance which for some brief moments is situated in Rome, the city of the suckling wolves, laughter is easy to come by, and all things that seemed gray and implacable suddenly yield to the light upon hearing this laughter. In the early days of romance, especially a romance that it is situated in Rome or Paris or Reykjavik or Florence, the laughable is anything on the exterior of the romantic dyad, and so a traffic jam, or an audit by the Internal Revenue Service, or entrapment in the elevator, these are all funny, because they are the world attempting to make itself present in the context of romance, when of course the world is not present at all, the world is some kind of picture postcard, and it is this state of affairs — how untouchable the lover is by the facts of the world — that causes the easy laughter of romance, and this must be what Dante was talking about when he first beheld Beatrice on the streets of Florence, while the Guelphs and Ghibellines were preparing to slaughter each other; even in the face of atrocity, there was still that giddy sense of impropriety and joyful laughter that comes from the presence of the beloved. This is not a seven-hour wait on the tarmac at an international airport, this is the presence of the beloved!