Rick Moody - Hotels of North America

Olga and Dennis came by the motel where I was staying while in town, the Viking Motel. (K. was still mad about the gambling losses in Saratoga Springs. And in this, she was blameless.) About the women loitering in the parking lot, let me just say: That is just youth culture! It’s a college town! (Go, Ducks!) And let me say too that Dennis did not deserve the long interval he served in the federal penitentiary for transporting copies of stolen material across state lines, and if anyone was capable of being rehabilitated in the penitentiary, it was Dennis, who met Olga while he was there. It was some kind of epistolary romance, permitted and facilitated by Dennis’s job in the prison library. Dennis was a trembly, nervous person, with an island of hair on the front of his forehead, a saddle horn, if you will, with not much else anywhere around it. He was thin and hunched and resembled one of those dogs that you see in public squares in Eastern European countries. Dennis had not found a way to be comfortable in the world. He seemed as though he were habitually preparing himself for something awful, and this was justified because many awful things had happened to him. He said it was because he wore that necklace with the human tooth on it that his father had given him.

At the Viking Motel there was a sign on the front of the vinyl-sided cottage that served as Reception, and that sign said Back Later, See James in Housekeeping. I never did see the sign removed. When James in Housekeeping finally did turn up, after Olga and Dennis stood out in the parking lot watching women in detachable skirts marching past, he sheepishly admitted that he had blood he needed to wipe up, and the proprietor never appeared at all, which was why Dennis had trouble finding me, neither he nor Olga having sufficient funds for a cell phone, or so they said. After I had drunk several bottles of beer, or more, awaiting their appearance (this behavior is sometimes called a relapse, and K. did not approve), staring at myself in a mirror on the wall by the bathroom that was so large I began to believe that I could walk into it, there was a knock on the door. Oh, mirror on the wall, who has the beginnings of an irremediable panniculus associated with middle age that no amount of dieting can affect? Who has more body hair than a bonobo? I was wearing only boxer shorts, in purple, when the knock came. The hip waders on the cabinet housing the television were for a planned fishing trip in the Cascades area, and I was unwilling to dislodge them to get corduroys out of my drawer. I therefore donned the hip waders. I could see, when I opened the door, that Olga was surprised by the outfit, and I begged her to understand that I was an unsurpassed angler and had a suit at the green dry cleaner up the block, as well as a tie with a naked woman on the reverse side.

Dennis knew me well enough not to be surprised, however, and soon the two of them were sitting on the bed, somewhat uncomfortably. I poured them pop with some ice from the dispensary out by vending and then sat in the lone chair by the window, still wearing the hip waders, which were not suspended properly on my shoulders. I asked them, first of all, if their resolve with regards to marriage was earnest and true and characterized by profundities of desire and mutual support. I told them that marriage, as I had understood it during my own union (come to an end a couple of years before), was a sacred trust, and that many people married because they thought they were supposed to marry or because society expected it of them or because one of them was with child or simply because they were bored and did not know what else to do with their lives. But, I observed, it was possible to do better than this. It was possible to be changed by the revealing light of marriage. In proportion to one’s development in marriage, in proportion to the amassing of age-related epiphanic moments, in the habit of love that is marriage, it was possible, I said, for the beloved to become more ravishing, more perfect, as when ascending into the concentric rings of paradise, and that in marriage we come to find the flaws of the beloved less irksome and instead more delightful and endearing — like that weird spitting noise that the beloved sometimes makes when hawking up reserves of toothpaste, for instance, or that tendency the beloved has to nervously scratch her ankle over and over again, or how about her wearing two pairs of socks all the time?

However, as I was saying these things, I happened to look down and notice that because of the odd layering of my own garments — that is to say, the boxer shorts and the hip waders, whose strap had fallen from one shoulder completely, resulting in a sort of bagging of the waders on one side of me and a concomitant riding up of boxer shorts on the other — one portion of the intimate area of my own person was bulging out the side of my shorts, the sack portion of my private self, and while some men have modestly sized testicular containers, I was not one of these men. It was not unknown to me previously, the occasion of that fleshy pouch becoming somehow visible, it was an ongoing problem, and as indeed this was the case now, I quickly looked up, hoping that Olga and Dennis had not glimpsed the bit of me extruded from the shorts via the falling-down and bunching hip waders. Believe me when I say it was one of those wardrobe malfunctions that only chance can bring about. If I could continuously maintain eye contact during the discussion, perhaps I could imperceptibly move the shorts a bit, or the waders, through some kind of isometric hip exercise, so that a bit of fabric would flap over the testicle and its colony of white hairs. I was driven to ever greater heights of rhetorical fancy in order to assure myself that Olga, in particular, continued to make eye contact with me and did not look down. I smiled like a mad person. Any false move or attempt to excuse myself could easily draw her eyes that way. I began looking around the room myself, in the hope that my darting eyes, alighting here on the extra-large sex mirror, there on the stain on the stuccoed ceiling, would likewise seduce her gaze.

I asked Olga if the marital relations were satisfactory, if she could assure me that these relations were characterized by gentleness and intimacy and proper frequency, and there was a surging in-breath from Olga, which at first I worried was because she had finally witnessed my little semi-bald protuberance with its four white hairs fumbling for recognition, but in fact I think the in-breath was owing to the question being a probing and challenging one, and she thought for a while, and then said she believed that the intimate relations were intimate, and she said, as I recall it, Dennis is a very sensitive man who loves the bodies of women, and I am lucky to have a man like Dennis. Then I asked Dennis if the relations were sufficient from his point of view, and he said, In the time I was inside the penitentiary, I came to believe that I might never get to touch the body of a woman again, and so our love is a holy kind of thing, and here the two of them smiled at each other, bashful smiles of the confederates of love.

Next I asked them about money; I said that it was the lot of some people in the world never to figure out the money problem, and there was no shame in this, because love endured beyond money, and did each of them understand this, and was each of them willing to do the working part, the moneymaking part, if the other was unable physically or was for some other reason unemployed, whether because of felony conviction or ADHD? Olga opined that she had known poverty in Ukraine when it was under the control of the Soviet regime, and her father had for many years had a job as a machinist in which he did nothing at all, he simply showed up at work in a certain dilapidated factory and then came home and spent what little he had on Latvian vodka, and she certainly hoped that the Land of Opportunity would have more monetary reward than that, but as long as Dennis loved her and took her to the movies twice per quarter, then it would be okay. After which Dennis said that he had seen the light about trying to make money by transporting stolen goods across state lines, and now he simply wanted to be, as he said, legit, and if that meant the loading dock, then the loading dock it was. And again they looked at each other and smiled.