Hotels of North America (5 page)

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.

In the middle of this smile it occurred to me that I could simply swipe the ice container off the tiny lacquered side table by my chair and dash it to the floor; the ensuing mess would direct attention away from the testicle stretching itself languidly
en plein air,
and I could then rush into the bathroom and perhaps straighten myself up a bit or at least throw a thin white mildew-inflected towel over my midsection. This I did, and I’m sure the swiping motion, in which all the ice went flying toward the door, did not look terribly realistic, and you can only imagine how distressed Dennis and Olga must have been to think that the man officiating at their service was a hip-waders-at-night kind of guy, but there was not time to dwell on this, because the ice was everywhere, and I got down on all fours and began trying to clean it up, and soon Olga was beside me, and I could smell her perfume, which she had probably put on just for this evening; in our shame, we were close together, she and I, we were investigators of shame, trying to make the most of the moment, and maybe she never saw the testicle at all, nor the slight varicose vein at the bottom of the testicle that I had sometimes had occasion to look at; maybe she hadn’t seen it at all, and I do not know why this motel was called the Viking Motel, and it leads one to wonder many things about Vikings. They did not last long on this continent, because of starvation and disease. They quickly headed back to Iceland and Denmark, in their spiritual devastation, where they could feud with one another and hack one another with axes named Head-Splitter and Tree-Foe. What the Vikings had to do with the Pacific Northwest, I cannot say, as it is my impression that no Viking ever lived in the Pacific Northwest.

Once Olga and I had cleaned up the ice and I had properly hiked up the hip waders, Dennis asked if everything was all right, and if they should be going. I said that I wanted to say something, and what I said was:
Look here, we are in the Viking Motel for this purpose, the purpose of the moment in which you begin your lives together, and I just want to tell you how much it means to me that you have asked me to do this, and I know my father, wherever he is now, and your father were not terribly close, and we didn’t have that many opportunities when we were young to spend time together, especially because you lived down south, and I know that you are in a time of need right now, and so I am honored to be the fellow who helps you in your time of need. I have a lot of ideas about how to make this a special day, and I’d like to tell you about a few of my ideas, and I hope you can see that I make these suggestions out of love for you both and out of reverence for the love that you have for each other, and despite my own situation, I make these suggestions out of appreciation and admiration for the state of holy matrimony.
And then I suggested that maybe we should have some kind of group hug, to indicate the seriousness of my purpose, and they consented to a group hug, though I had to gather Dennis in like he was a stray sheep and I the shepherd, but soon I could smell his perspiration and his clothes that had clearly never seen much bleach, and I held this couple close and said,
This is the warmth that all good people are looking for,
and that was when Dennis began to edge away. I continued, telling them that I had been compiling a list of things that had been done to me in my own marriage that I thought were inadvisable, that no one should do to another person in marriage, but by that point Dennis had his foot across the threshold of the Viking, and Olga stood beside him, and though I offered them a couple of stiff ones from a bottle of bus-station rotgut, they declined.

My feeling then was of forlornness, of the desperate inadequacies of this human linguistic apparatus that we employ to forestall, a little longer, aloneness, and of how futile these fumblings so often are. In the next lurch of solitude I began trying to add to the list of things not to say to someone in your marriage: Don’t ever use a pen while lying on the bed; don’t ever forget to put the cap back on a pen after using the pen; don’t ever use a pen if it’s new; put items in the refrigerator at ninety-degree angles; do not throw things in the bathroom trash if there are already a lot of things in the trash; don’t ever lie on the bed, made or unmade, in your clothes; don’t get into the bed without having showered; don’t put your bag on the bed, don’t put your bag on the chair, don’t put your bag on the counter, don’t put your bag on the table; don’t ever do the laundry; don’t bite your nails; don’t put the toilet paper facing out; don’t put the toilet paper facing in; don’t accelerate quickly; don’t wear those colors together, don’t wear
those
colors together, don’t wear a stripe and a plaid, don’t wear that shirt, that looks bad on you, that looks bad on you, and that looks bad on you, and that looks bad on you, and that looks bad on you too, are you sure you want to wear that, that looks bad on you; please stay out of the house one night a week, please stay out of the house a couple of nights a week so I can have some privacy; don’t put that there; don’t put that there; that plastic cup was given to me by my grandmother; don’t use my towel; don’t use my bathroom; you don’t understand your own family; you don’t understand your own role in your own family; you don’t understand what people think of you; you don’t understand other people; you don’t understand me, you don’t understand yourself; I need money for clothes, I need money for credit cards, I need money for school; don’t cut your meat on the plate, that sound is awful, cut your meat on the cutting board before putting it on your plate; don’t touch me.

And when I was done with this list, which I wrote out on the bed with a pen that I didn’t cap afterward, I slumped onto a proper spot on the floor of my room in the Viking Motel and there I took up a close inspection of the carpet’s dust, blood, seminal fluid, Ritz Crackers, and insect parts.
★★
(Posted 11/10/2012)

Diversity of key and lock design in contemporary lodging is a subject that we need to address, and have needed to address for some time. That there should be some kind of industry standard for how the rooms lock and in the way that you enter the rooms—this does not seem too much to ask. In the old days, you had the little key with the brightly hued tag attached,
If found, please drop in any mailbox
. The postage was guaranteed. You were unlikely to keep the thing for long, because you could easily put it in a mailbox. What was the volume, at the USPS, of hotel and motel keys shipped back and forth across our great land? You can see how the constant duplication of physical keys would be a genuine business expense, because what if you have a guest waiting at that very moment, but the prior guest has run off with the last remaining key? (My favorite keys are the ones in Europe that are attached to little round baubles of lead so that you will not wish to carry the thing around with you. When you depart the premises, you are expected to give it to the philosophy student who is at the front desk overnight. Her hair is blond and straight, her lips are pursed, her English is workmanlike, she has tiny breasts, and she doesn’t want to talk to you, she wants to read Heidegger. So you give her the key so you won’t be tempted to carry the thing around and have it with you when you are set upon on some small footbridge and deprived of your credit cards and all your cash. As you walk across the bridge with your girlfriend (soon-to-be wife) on this summer morning some months after you met in the wintry Midwest of America, a cute little kid in rags comes up to you and rubs his head against your hip, probably cutting a hole in your handmade Irish sweater, and then his friend comes along from behind and they speak to each other in their impenetrable dialect that you later recognize to be Carpathian. And you laugh at their apparent adorability, thinking nonetheless about how you are not supposed to carry your billfold in your hip pocket, how many times have you been told this? Is it some kind of evolutionary thing, that the Romany urchins are so cute? The kid in front is laughing at you and you are giving him a playful smack on the top of the head while the second one is cutting open your pocket with a switchblade. The whole thing is not meant to go unnoticed—on the contrary, it is meant to be noticed, because there’s an art to it, and they want the art to be appreciated—and that’s when the diversion starts: this one is a girl, and they’re feeling her up or something on another part of the bridge, and you rush toward her to defend her honor, but while you are going to do that, they are making Carpathian comments about your girlfriend (soon-to-be wife).
A
ș
dori să dracu ‘soția lui. Doriți să dracu ‘soția lui? Ea are un fund mare. Ea este de mărimea unui automobil. Nu aș ști de unde să încep
.
 And then you realize they’re counting the bills in your very own billfold, your pitiful supply of foreign currency, and off they run in different directions, with your passport too, and you don’t know which to chase, and the girl, the dishonored one, is refixing herself and laughing at you as well, and you reach for her wrist, as if she’s going to help you somehow, and in that way you come to dishonor her just as she was dishonored symbolically before. You let go of her, and she is fleet, as they all are, and you and your girlfriend (soon-to-be wife) are standing there on the far side of the bridge now, divested of all worldly goods, having been welcomed into this central part of Europe.)