Rick Moody - Hotels of North America

The only problem is that, after a time, the jokes of the beloved become familiar jokes. I notice in myself this sense that if a certain joke was reliable before with the beloved, it should be used again, because the improvising of jokes is so hard. Why shouldn’t you be able to use the material again? And so a certain predictability comes to roost in the eaves of the romance. The jokes become sturdy bits of lore in the romance. It’s easy to turn the pages of the book back somewhat, to find the old hilarity there, maybe a few low jokes about flatus or extreme intoxication. This is not such a bad time, the long middle section of your journey through marital humor, and many things of the daily sort can now be accomplished because you are not so preoccupied with how the world is just a backdrop for the glory of your romance. The middle is the longest time in any story, and therefore the time with the most desperation. Just as you settle in there, certain that nothing much is going to happen and believing that things can go on this way, you begin to notice that the laughter of the beloved has become increasingly rare. The laughter of the beloved has given way to a sort of wry smile that is frankly retrospective and seems to have a certain melancholy attached to it. Try as you might to bring about a few good moments of hilarity, you are unable to do so, and there’s a desperate recognition in this. It was dangerous when it seemed as if the beloved would never stop laughing. But that doesn’t mean you want the beloved to stop laughing altogether, and this unbearable poignancy starts to set in when you realize that you are unable to make the beloved laugh as you once did.

On a certain occasion you are out with another couple or two, at a dinner, and someone else in the assembled company causes the beloved to laugh. Internally you subject her laughter to some kind of laughter verifier; you evaluate whether the laughter caused in this case is genuine laughter occasioned by a moment that is legitimately funny in some way or whether it is simply social, a laughter of a kind that might take place at any dinner and therefore insincere, even if generous. But worst of all is how this peal of laughter, coming from her short, slender, blondish physique, has been coaxed forth by a guy with a harelip and a job doing something IT-related. The whole way home, you will think about this; on the subway, when there’s not really anything to say because you are both so tired, you will think about how the beloved laughed for a guy in IT. About what? About beer-making or county fairs? And you cannot get the beloved to laugh at all, or there is a ghost of laughter, a little bit of laughter that mainly recalls a time when true laughter once existed, and you will lie awake wondering about the former laughter of the beloved, and all of this wonder and worry will give way eventually to the nonexistence of laughter in the beloved, and you will wonder if the nonexistence of laughter should be a cause for professional counseling.

It’s not like you have that many problems. You can make decisions jointly, and you agree on some things, and you don’t fight terribly much, but the beloved never laughs, and not because you have given up trying but just because you don’t seem funny to her anymore. You are losing out, entirely, in the struggle to cause laughter, and because of it, the world, which was somehow kept at bay, becomes a thing that you can’t escape. Things go wrong that you can no longer fix, and when you come to this realization, that problems have completely crowded out laughter, that the beloved is not going to laugh again, and that there is nothing you can do at all to cause the beloved to laugh, this is the moment at which you attempt to impregnate the beloved in a hotel in Rome, in a charming neighborhood near many tourist destinations of choice. ★★ (Posted 1/11/2014)

Days Inn, 1919 Highway 45 Bypass,

Jackson, Tennessee, January 21–22, 2012

Although the bliss that I feel with K. in my life now is a significant kind of bliss, an ultraviolet bliss, a cohabitational bliss in the convenient and (relatively) inexpensive city of Yonkers, New York, it is not the case that we, K. and I, never have little moments of negotiation, and I am only being honest when I speak, for example, of the bed problem. The Days Inn, located not far from the Rotary Club of Jackson (where there is an annual luncheon on “salesmanship and the American way of life,” with guest speakers), is not notable for the excellence of its beds, and I simply have nothing to say about it except that it reminds me of our bed problem. We are not alone in our bed problem. Beds can be a significant issue with couples. There should be a therapeutic resource for couples struggling with the bed issue. To be clear, K. has always had a problem with chemical smells of any kind. She uses the technical term — off-gassing — and comes from a line of people who can smell a gas that to most others would be odorless and who are badly changed by their encounters with such gases. Our initial plan in the bed department, then, ran aground on the shoals of off-gassing, because if you read the reviews of the memory-foam-style mattresses, you will see that there’s a significant off-gassing component to the early phase of memory-foam ownership. And, you know, I always read the reviews. (I assume all of you who are right now reading this review of the Days Inn of Jackson, Tennessee, which cost $32.65 a night, the night we stayed there, are readers of reviews, and some of you read my reviews particularly because you know that I am one of the top reviewers on this site.)

So after reading the reviews of the memory-foam-style mattresses and determining that the off-gassing components, so often spoken of in these reviews, were contrary to our needs, we searched for and found an all-natural equivalent to memory foam, one that felt just like memory foam, or so the reviews said, but did not have the dreaded off-gassing issue, because it was made of natural materials. This all-natural equivalent, which we were going to house in our three-hundred-and-fifty-square-foot apartment in Yonkers, the site of our cohabitational bliss, which we managed to afford through strategic subletting and, on occasion, living in the car for a couple of weeks here and there, was going to take up a significant amount of space, but it was going to be where we slept, which was important for K. and myself, and so we ordered the all-natural equivalent, a significant expense, and when it arrived, we were at first full of joy about the all-natural queen-size memory-foam equivalent, a joy that lasted a couple of nights, because there was no off-gassing in the land of Reg and K., but then things started to go sour. Though we had not slept on true memory foam and therefore had no way to know, K. nevertheless could not help feeling that the all-natural equivalent was not as soft as genuine memory foam, and she argued that her sleep had been slightly disturbed over the nights we had possessed the all-natural equivalent. We thought long and hard, and we decided that even though there was a one-year warranty on the all-natural equivalent, we would not return it yet, because it had required significant man-hours to get the thing delivered and installed in the three-hundred-and-fifty-square-foot apartment in Yonkers, and we didn’t want to have to go through the delivery process again (twice more, you know, because they would have to pick up the all-natural equivalent and then deliver another).

We determined instead that we would get a topper, which was not a word I knew until the moment that K. said, We should just get a memory-foam topper. A topper, you may know, is a thin mattress pad placed on top of the existing mattress and then affixed to it with a fitted sheet — less expensive than a mattress itself. When K. called the online mattress-ordering company, the sales adept she spoke to insisted that a memory-foam topper would not have the same off-gassing problem because it was, in fact, a thinner piece of memory foam and therefore featured fewer artificial compounds. Most people, he went on, ordered a one- or two-inch topper for their non-memory-foam-mattress product, and we should choose a height according to our needs.