Hotels of North America (15 page)

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)

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!

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)

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).