Rick Moody: Hotels of North America

I flew out on American Airlines and met her just beyond security, which was a lot different in those bygone days, no shoe bomber yet, liquids permitted. I was a young man in my thirties who still believed that the world was ahead of him, striding through the airport as though the striding were important, and I was meeting the short brown-eyed blonde with the bangs on the far side of security. And there she was — greeting me with her barrage of sunny verbiage that didn’t seem to slow down for any purpose: Hey how was your flight okay did you sit on the aisle or the window I always like to sit on the aisle well actually I don’t know which I like because I don’t fly that much but if I did fly I would like the aisle because if you think about it the aisle causes the least interruption in your flight and what did you read did you read the flight magazine do you like to look at the airport layout in the flight magazines do you ever do the crosswords in the back I have thought of some things for us to see in Chicago if you haven’t thought of anything to see I mean it’s great if you have thought of some things to see but if you haven’t thought of any things to see you probably didn’t know that Chicago is one of America’s greatest cities for architecture and it’s that way because of the fire you know about the fire right well the fire wasn’t really set by a cow just in case you think it was set by a cow that’s just a story they tell anyway so a lot of buildings needed to get rebuilt quickly after the fire and I can show you some of the buildings and tell you why they’re important because actually I work for one of the wealthiest families in Chicago it’s a real estate company and I’m the office manager for this family and so I know a lot about Chicago real estate I have seen it up close and did you know that river floods a lot and there are problems with the basements of a lot of these buildings because of the flooding .

On it would go until something physically stopped it, like we had to get into a taxi, which I was paying for, and find a restaurant to eat in, and we ate in a Thai restaurant, and she had some story about how she and her friends always ate in this particular Thai restaurant because it had a cheap Thai night, and she kept getting up, with a kind of joyful sigh, to go call her best friend on the pay phone, to inform her friend that she had not yet been cut up into pieces and shoved into a freezer. I have no idea what kind of impression I made, but I suspect I did not make much of a good impression. I don’t know that I have ever made a good impression.

I had booked one night at the hotel (she picked it, by the way), because if things went badly I’d be gone in a day, and if things went well, I could always come back. We went back to the hotel to take our clothes off immediately, as though this were our only purpose, and I recollect that this was about loneliness, as far as I was concerned. The thing you did to alleviate the loneliness was to take off your clothes and touch someone, even if you didn’t really know the person well. I could just as easily have asked her to let me lie down on top of her fully clothed on a couch in the lobby of the Hampton Inn and Suites, but I didn’t know that then. I thought I was supposed to take off my clothes, and I wanted her to take off her clothes, and somehow this seemed a foregone conclusion, perhaps because each of us had started with no face and no body, as a condition of modern life, and now we were here and we wanted to celebrate the fact that we were not hideous, not entirely, and we were in the flesh.

It was at this point, I believe, that she indicated it was that time of the month. (Yes, for those who would read the back catalog, see my review of the Hotel Equinox of Manchester, Vermont. Never the romance without the bloodshed!) Again, I want it to be on the record that I could provide a sturdy facsimile of love under any circumstances. We did what men and women do. Later, we went down to the lobby, while some poor underpaid room-service technician had the job of removing the evidence. I must conclude that the maid service was adequate, as the police were not contacted, and we went back in the room and did the whole thing over.

You might imagine that this would be a predictor, in the next decade and a half (more or less), of some gymnastic approach to the conjugal act, a prognostic of a mutual commitment to the arts of physical pleasure, even if the rest of the relationship fell to pieces around our heads. But no! We quickly reverted to some quiet desperation in the years following, wishing even as we engaged in our rote connubial relations that the state of desire could be hours long again, despairing about the loss of it, feeling at first a numbness and then even irritation, each for the other, in some kind of hopeless yen to allow ourselves to give up on the relationship, a longing that for some reason could not quite be effected, so that we experienced at once both devotion and betrayal, love and contempt, each motive at the same time, watching the years tick by. Who is to blame for all of that? Can we somehow blame the Hampton Inn and Suites? I stayed the night, alone, and sent my future wife back to the apartment she was living in without her former boyfriend, who had uncouth tendencies and against whom she had filed a restraining order. I was the most decent, most reasonable person she had gone out with in at least a year, the kind of guy who in high school was again and again and again some girl’s pal, and perhaps even my wife wanted me only as a pal.

Perhaps now I should tell you, as I have not told you in any other review that I have written here on RateYourLodging.com, that I cannot sleep without a pillow over my face, and thus it would be really easy to asphyxiate me, and perhaps my future wife, when I had fallen into narcolepsy after the first bloody round of lovemaking, might very well have executed me if she wanted to steer her fate away from a decade and a half of grief and progressive estrangement among both parties; instead, there I was that night, by myself, with a pillow over my face, probably getting insufficient amounts of oxygen and thus risking stroke, and I was thinking about how great the whole thing was, how great it was going to be, it was all going to be great, the fluorescent bulbs of the Loop twinkling below, the trains going around on the Loop like some monstrously scaled replication of a Lionel train set, the Chicago Bulls in the middle of a great season, it was all going to be great, because I had just had sex twice with a woman who was not in fact a Kansas housewife with IBS and multiple-personality disorder, and I had flown out to Chicago for this very purpose, which was a sign that I had grown into the completion of adulthood and masculinity, and I was enough moved by my hotel experience that I got up and located a piece of stationery in the desk next to the Gideon and with just the light from the window I scrawled out a thank-you note for the maid, and I set it on the desk and laid a crisp twenty beside it. It was all going to be so great. ★★★★ (Posted 3/8/2014)

The Capri Whitestone, 555 Hutchinson River Parkway North, Bronx, New York, March 7–22, 2014

What is it we really want from hotel life? We want the closest thing we can get to home. We want a reminder that home exists — that place you can come back to after a long inadvisable journey where they are in theory happy to see you. A place where the pillow awaits the impression of your head. A place where when you step in out of the rain, you breathe a sigh of relief. A place where everything broken was broken by you or by people you care about. A place where you could close your eyes and, more or less, make your way around just fine. A place at the end of a road you know well. A place where, should you suddenly become afflicted with a total absence of memory, it is reasonable to suppose that you would be returned.