Hotels of North America (19 page)

Only a few nights elapsed before I was leaving dinner early with the excuse of preparing the next day’s lecture and discussion while really I was leaving my wife there with the Midwestern culture experts and going back to our room to watch Italian programming on a thirteen-inch television with a coat-hanger antenna. At one time, our room had been the rabbit hutch. Probably I am interpreting the specific wording in my own way, but the word
rabbit
was definitely employed. The rabbit hutch, like its chimney, was essentially open-air, and if you opened a window in the midsummer heat, you found there were no screens on the windows. We were told, when we asked, that there were screens—
Yes! We will fetch them, yes!
—but no screens materialized, and here in the land of only recently eradicated malaria, the local mosquitoes descended on us with a force such as I have rarely encountered. Every night at dusk there was a swarm around my head, and the swarm stayed until morning unless I pulled the sheets over me entirely. Eventually I needed to come up for air. My upper lip swelled from the volume of clotting agent injected into it by the mosquito hordes, and I had to give one or two classes looking like a boxer fresh from some KO.

In the afternoons, we would go out to see things in the area around Puglia, like a chapel that was filled with the bones of martyrs, or some thatched cottages called
trulli
that looked like the backdrop for an elvish fantasy spectacular. We went to the tip of the boot heel of Italia, Leuca, to see the Adriatic and the Mediterranean meet, and there were a lot of attractive young Italians there eating gelato. We were not them. One day we were on our way to see some mosaic somewhere—Otranto, I think—and my wife became sick from the heat and had to sit down or have some food, and I began to feel in that moment that my obligation to teach, and my vanishing from dinner to watch Italian television on my own, and her inability to keep up on the long marches of tourism were disparate examples of the pain that is vacation.

One night, toward the end of our stay, we noticed that the birds in the birdcage in the center of the farm had disappeared since that morning. What had looked so lovely and symbolic in the morning, a mating pair of some lovely species, destined to replenish their numbers in the fullness of theological time, was now symbolic only of loss, a few feathers, some bird shit, and kernels of cracked corn. My wife realized at once what we should have realized all along, namely, that we had been eating the birds. Every day a different bird, and it had seemed so picturesque, so fecund, and really it was just about the myriad ways you could kill those animals. Had the others known what we were too naive to know? That night at dinner, in broken Italian, we asked the Ernest Borgnine proprietor to tell us what had happened to the pair of grouse or pheasants or turkeys or chickens that had been in the cage that morning, and he looked up at the ceiling and without a trace of a smile said,
They have gone to their Heavenly Father.
Everyone had a good laugh.

This was the moment that I felt my marriage beginning to give out. It seems preposterous to say so, because we were only some few years into it and it would be years more before there was ever a discussion of our separating, and this was a trip, despite some routine tribulations, that we later thought back on with some amusement. But what is that little shearing away that takes place that somehow you can’t repair? How does that happen, when it happens against your will? When there are many other such moments that you willingly tolerate or let go of without incident? There are rows, shouting matches, secreted away or even in public that seem so much worse but that are followed by sweet reunion, and why is this the moment that later appears to be when things started to go wrong? Here we were, laughing on a beach on the Adriatic, watching the Italian families with their not terribly flattering bathing suits playing in the grainy uncomfortable sand, and gazing out together on the still Adriatic, with its effluvial tide of Albanians on their fragments of boats rowing across and landing in some ditch in the middle of an olive grove and sleeping on a mattress in that ditch, all so they could come to the old, grizzled, implacable Europe.

Back then I could still remember a first kiss in some hotel in Detroit, and a time when she still wanted to whisper something in my ear and would set a cup of tea in front of me in the morning. It would just appear. To any outside observer all was fine, and in Puglia there was a dish of olives the day before, and there would be a dish of olives again that night containing olives as good as any I had ever tasted, and by first kiss I mean the kind of rhetorical kiss that says the future is of milk and honey. I could still have remembered it there, and maybe the Italian families could still remember such things too, could remember when they had been young and riding around on motorbikes, not bent out of shape with children and responsibilities, but simply young and untroubled and beautiful and eating gelato, three or four of them beautiful and hanging off a motorbike careening down a one-way street in the dark with no headlights, no helmets, going forty-five miles an hour and barely missing some Fiat racing around a curve, laughing, the dumb luck of it all, the dumb luck of the Mediterranean sun, the perfect light of Renaissance painting; maybe the Italians remembered all of that, and on the days when they needed to, they thought back on it. Why was this the moment that I gave up? The predictable failure of lovers over time was at least something you could warm yourself with on a long winter night. Like the mixed blessing of vacation.
★★
(Posted 3/2/2014)

I had heard about her from a friend in New York. My friend said I should meet his friend in Chicago. It was actually Detroit, in all honesty, but as these reviews are appearing in a public forum, I’m going to say it was Chicago, and I have made up a hotel and an address, and you will simply have to believe me that this hotel is exactly like the hotel in question, and thus my rating is accurate, even if it is accurate only by analogy.

It was the early days of this life that is now increasingly common, by which I mean the online life, the life where I ply my trade as a top-rated hotel reviewer. I was already having a number of affairs with people I didn’t know in the real world, but only in the so-called chat rooms of online life, those early features that have now given way to random mutual masturbation in video with Muscovites, and so for the early part of our association, which lasted about a week, we spoke mainly in this online way, and she had no face, so far as I knew, and could easily have been a housewife from Kansas with IBS and multiple-personality disorder. I didn’t care so much about her real identity; the simulation of an identity was adequate enough for the time being. For a few days we did that dance where your identity is a collision of citations—books, recordings, musicals, films—and then a number of snapshots that you re-create in some fit of idealized self, and she passed all the tests, meaning that she adhered very faithfully to a fantasy idea of a woman with whom I might be involved, if in fact I was ever going to be involved with another woman rather than just some humiliating magazines or online avatars.

I had no particular reason to believe that she existed. Nevertheless, it occurred to me, and here I was way ahead of the curve in the digital world, that maybe I ought to meet her, just to avoid wasting weeks more of time, several hours a night, talking to her in chat rooms and wondering if she was on a respirator or had only one limb. We discussed this and, incredibly, were in perfect agreement about how to proceed, though perhaps less incredibly when one recalls that in the early frothy period of talking to someone who doesn’t have a body, who is a brain in a vat, you agree about everything. In my mind she was tall, thin, blue-eyed, and brunette, with her nose just slightly off-center and perhaps a gap between her front teeth, and she liked to wear denim with a few rips in it, but not too many, and she wore cheap sneakers and liked thrift-store clothes, especially bowling shirts. It would be useful, I felt, to compare this imagined person with the real person, who happened to live in Chicago. I had been in Chicago for business once or twice, because I had been most everywhere. Usually I stayed in the Loop, not seeing much of the city besides, and I was looking forward to seeing some of the city in a more relaxed way. I believe my father, from whom I was estranged, as I might have mentioned, also lived in Chicago at one time. Though I had no interest in chasing down the facts of my father’s life, his having lived there did leave an afterglow on the city for me. And who knew—perhaps the father who had fled was just a few blocks over from John Wayne Gacy’s house. Maybe my father too had learned how to contact women online, pretending to be a luxury car dealer with a double-breasted suit and a power tie who was looking for someone who enjoyed hiking and single-malt Scotch whisky.

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.