Hotels of North America (9 page)

It is true that some people imagine I invented you, that in order to be certain that the thread of comments below my posts are adequate to my purpose, I have found it necessary to imagine a first-generation Mongolian immigrant with a stent in his right coronary artery and a peanut allergy whose father was a tyrant, who votes like a pipe fitter from Indianapolis, and who is constantly trying to get women on this site to pay attention to him, and that I have done this simply in order to boost attention to my comments. On the contrary, I think it will be obvious to anyone who considers the facts for long enough that I could not dream up the likes of you, and your grisly English, and your outbursts of French, and your relentless talk about the private day school you once attended. I am not that creative. And therefore you must be real.

Before I lodge my rating of the dismal Presidents’ City Hotel, let me say a few words about the ratings here on RateYourLodging.com. While I passionately believe in half-star increments (in a
★★★
½ star rating, for example) where appropriate, RateYourLodging.com does not permit a half star, and this is a disappointment. Their argument is that if you’re going to have half stars, why not have a ten-point rating system instead of a five-point rating system? And you can understand their rationale. Nevertheless, at times like these, when faced with rating the Presidents’ City Hotel, you wish you did have a half star. Over time, and given a voluminous knowledge of reviews past on the RateYourLodging.com site, you will want, as I have, to split the hairs more and more finely, finding in the astute perception of basic services a will to critical refinement that requires more perfectly calibrated equipment, for which stars one through five seem ill-suited.
★
(Posted 6/8/2013)

How the two of them slept, that formerly married couple at the center of some of my online work, is to be recorded today as a way of discussing what happened and how this married couple came to the period in which they no longer slept together at all. At first, they slept almost exclusively after lovemaking, though neither of them would, now, describe it as lovemaking; rather, they would choose a more clinical and neutral term so as to avoid seeming, in retrospect, intimate. They slept after lovemaking, because that is what one does after lovemaking, in the condition between waking and dreaming, and so, afterward, they were going from the one place to the other place, and they were
a tangle of limbs
(1). Isn’t a tangle of limbs a glorious thing to behold? Don’t you wish to be in a tangle of limbs? Ought it not be the case for those who have given up some of the hope required to continue with this charade that they should be offered the opportunity to go and see a tangle of limbs in a bed somewhere, or even a photograph of a tangle of limbs, postcard-size, in order that (some) hope may be restored? For example, the feminine head reclining on the masculine chest—is that not, in some cases, the most agreeable tangle of limbs? How about the position in which the feminine arm is carelessly thrown over the masculine face? Or where a pillow is mushed, to use the colloquial term, against a rib cage, and a head pressed deeply into the pillow, so that head rests partially upon rib? It is the carelessness of the tangle of limbs that provides an individual-size serving of hope, the absolute careless placement of limbs, involving some employment of the concept of akimbo, which word may be related to the Icelandic
kengboginn
(“bow-bent”), all while sleep takes place.

If the tangle of limbs (1) was the first of their approaches to sleeping together, the second approach was
rugged individualism
(2), in which they would begin the overnight in the tangle of limbs, thinking back on the very first tangle as though it were the greatest time, the greatest tangle, and they were not so distant from it. They would start out in this slightly nostalgic tangle, and then they would migrate to a position that somehow seemed more comfortable, because, after all, the blood flow in the arm was being occluded, and one of them did have a little back pain and needed to roll over onto a side, and, naturally, at first, rugged individualism meant facing each other, and perhaps kissing each other a few times before drifting off, and then maybe it didn’t quite mean this, or the kissing part was forgotten, and there were a few words exchanged, a few kindnesses, and then they rolled away, and rolling away was so horrible at first, almost anyone would agree that rolling away is horrible, and yet it is a necessary thing, if you believe in the tenets of rugged individualism, because the first obligation of sleep is simply the sleeping part of it, but then the miracle of resilience is to be found in the fact that they came to find the rolling away somewhat acceptable, if solitary, and they rolled away, drifted off, sometimes pretty quickly, in their private dreams (some of these were nightmares).

After rugged individualism (2), there was the period of marital sleeping known as
staggered shifts
(3). Staggered shifts appeared at first to be a mere extension of personal preference, and who can quarrel with personal preference, which is one of the hallmarks of American life. If one of them wanted to go to bed well before the other one wanted to go to bed, who could object, because the day would come when they could retreat back to rugged individualism, it was right there waiting to be re-employed, and so staggered shifts should not be interpreted as some kind of loss, some kind of giving up. There were occasions during the period of staggered shifts when, out of the murk of semiconsciousness, they occasionally found themselves lovemaking, my God, so unsuspected and sweet, and it wasn’t as if they had forgotten all that they knew about the adventure of meeting a new body and mapping its latitudes, its tastes. Suddenly, they were awake and alive, and they had cast off the staggered shifts, or perhaps triumphed over them, and they were goading each other on and it was good, and because they were lovemaking they went back, as through time, to the tangle of limbs.

Well, it’s my duty to tell you that the middle-of-the-night lovemaking was on the temporary side, or rather the episodes of this old skill diminished, grew infrequent, and soon, it was not just that they went to bed at different times (3), it was that they also
awakened at different times
(3.5), and didn’t even know that lovely pre- and postsomnolence fumbling that is a couple trying to brush its teeth and change in and out of the outfits of the day; all of this became something that they each did alone, while the other was either asleep or out in an adjacent room gazing catatonically at a television. And in this manner, the period of staggered shifts (3) in turn gave way to
haphephobia
(4)—one of those half-Latinate and half-Greek technical terms—wherein one of the two of them did not want to be touched by the other (and these roles occasionally shifted) and would recoil if touching was introduced. Sometimes this would be the simplest physical interaction of all—in trying to arrange a pillow, one of them briefly made contact. The recoiling was immediate in the eyes of the one touched, this touched party gazing vapidly as though the touching party, the grazing party, were a stranger, just someone that he or she might meet in an airport dining establishment; the look would linger, the gaze of strangers, in this stage of sleeping known as haphephobia, whereby intimates are reconstructed as strangers, and not the kind who are alluring but the kind who you go out of your way to avoid brushing against, as if the person you shared a bed with were one of those unfortunates with the eight soiled Target bags getting on the subway in August, drenched in perspiration and long past a last bath, and heading for the seat next to you. In this case, the look hovered there for a moment until you realized that in fact you were married to the person a few feet away, and you had been in love with him or her for years, or that is what you said, and having bestowed on him or her the gaze of haphephobia, you cycled through eleven kinds of discomfort which I do not have time to catalog now and went back to the business of trying to sleep.

Except that haphephobia (4) is followed in turn by the period of
clinically diagnosed somatic sleep disorders
(5), which clamor into the contested sleep space like some colony of metaphysical prairie dogs, chattering constantly, keeping you both from making any progress in trying to move backward toward the tangle of limbs or even rugged individualism. The clinically diagnosed somatic sleep disorders are acute at first, and chronic thereafter, and they take all your waking time to deal with, as well as much of your sleeping time, so that you are exactly in the obverse of the tangle of limbs (where lovemaking is the space between waking and sleep). Now, clinically diagnosed somatic sleep disorders are some never-ending demilitarized zone between the two great estates, waking and dreaming, and these clinically diagnosed somatic sleep disorders are incredibly lonely. Especially lonely are the hours between three and four ante meridiem when you are next to your spouse but instead of thinking about love you are thinking about particularly invasive cancers, like pancreatic cancer or inoperable brain cancer. (In fact, clinically diagnosed somatic sleep disorders are basically a wakefulness-promotion system that in turn generates thoughts of pancreatic cancer.)

Sometimes in this system, actual physical complaints, like the aforementioned back pain, are converted into obsessional patterns of wakefulness, wherein a minor complaint becomes a symptom of a major medical disorder—back pain a symptom of cirrhosis, or headache a sign of brain cancer—and these obsessional patterns of wakefulness generate the need, the next day, for
a convulsive nap
(6), which is one of the things you should never ever do, nap, at least not if you are trying to get back to the halcyon period of the tangle of limbs, because convulsive napping only makes the clinically diagnosed somatic sleep disorders worse, and the napping, because it comes over you like a paroxysm, must be solitary, is always solitary, and always somewhat embarrassing. It’s almost like you don’t sleep with the person in question, your spouse, at all, because you are never in the bed at the same time as he or she is in the bed; instead, you are struggling with and against the bed, with and against the idea of sleep, with and against the good things that are associated with sleep, and this can go on for years. You pass the spouse, whom you now think of as a reasonably good friend, in the interior spaces of your address without comment. You cannot even begin to describe the horror of the cycle that is clinically diagnosed somatic sleep disorders and convulsive napping because you have not had enough sleep to describe anything at all.

And this gives way, as you knew it must, to the medical diagnosis of
sleep apnea
(5.5), bestowed upon you by the practitioner of internal medicine. The diagnosis has to do with your weight, the practitioner of internal medicine cautions, or with your genetic chemistry, or with sheer chance, or with adenoids, and you may need to have your adenoids removed and your tonsils shorn away, and in the meantime, you simply need to wear this mask and be attached to this tank, which will, at regular intervals, keep you breathing. This condition is very similar to the
chronic snoring
(5.75) that your partner now exhibits, your friend who was once your tangle of limbs. One of you has chronic snoring, which is sort of a chthonic snoring, and that has to do with the uvula in most cases, and the other of you has sleep apnea, and so in the rare instances that you do inhabit a room at the same time, you mainly keep each other awake, so even if you weren’t preoccupied with pancreatic cancer you would not sleep because of the near-death experiences, and that is how the two of you sleep now, with the mask and the tank. Even dogs will refuse to sleep in the room with you.

And now you are embarked on a weekend in Toledo, Ohio, for the marriage of a niece, and you are going to stay in a hotel together in Maumee, because it’s cheaper than Toledo, and isn’t next to a strip club, which is apparently the case with virtually every hotel in Toledo. You are a couple who cycle between stages 5 and 6 on the marital sleep chart, not quite having gotten to the cessation of biological function (7), though this is a misnomer in some senses, as certain somatic activities continue after the cessation of biological function; for example, cessation of electrical activity in the brain does not necessarily imply a
total
cessation. A heartbeat may linger on.

In any event, being in the Americas [
sic
] Best Value Inn in Maumee with your sleep-apnea mask and tank and your bite guard (it inhibits the grinding and clenching) and your prescription for habit-forming sleep medication and your spouse with the chthonic snoring for the wedding of your niece when the two of you were once a tangle of limbs is the closest to a cessation of biological function that you can get on an overnight without actually being in a state of total cessation, and what could be more tender than this? What is more tender than the recognition that you have changed, that you have come to a point where you are not what you once were? Your former state is now sandblasted, as abraded as anything else could be by the ravages of time. What is more tender than mutual recognition of failure? What is more truthful than the acknowledgment that what was once mutual is now solitary and atomized? What is more exact than the distance between you now? What is more perceptible than your awareness that you cannot do what you once so wanted to do, namely, be in love? Why is the fact that sleep is closest to death so much more factual when it is considered in the theater of connubial relations? Who are the two of you? Where will you go next? After Maumee? Why are you always staying at two-star hotels? How are you going to get through this wedding?
★★
(Posted 7/13/2013)

We didn’t know much about Spokane except, in a general way, how to pronounce
Spokane.
We didn’t know about the waterfalls downtown, and the bridges. And we didn’t know that Spokane is surrounded by arresting countryside. The Pacific Northwest stuff: conifers, skeins of fog, snow on the peaks. We arrived at the Davenport just a couple months after the Martin Luther King Day attempted bombing in Spokane, and so the Davenport Hotel was incredibly empty. The Davenport, it’s accurate to say, is one of the most beautiful hotels in the Lower Forty-Eight. It may be one of the most beautiful hotels in the entire world. Were you to discount hotels that are constructed primarily to house sheikhs—hotels that will never house you or me—you would have to conclude that this was a truly remarkable place. There’s gilded everything inside, and potted palms, but it’s the ballrooms that are outrageous, and while we were staying there—Snowy Owl, as she was called on this trip, and I—you could just walk into these totally empty ballrooms (because how often in Spokane were the ballrooms in use?) and gape at their magnificence.