Journey to an 800 Number (12 page)

Instead of ordering room service the next morning, I put on my Fortnum blazer and went to the coffee shop, which was called the Gizeh Coffee Shoppe. On my way to the Gizeh I passed the bulletin board with the list of the day’s activities. I read it out of habit. At the top it said:

While I waited for my order to arrive, I saw Sabrina enter the Gizeh Coffee Shoppe and stand by
the register where a sign said, “Please wait for hostess to seat you.” I saw the hostess return from seating two other people, and as she passed my table, I called to her and asked her please to show Sabrina to my table.

“Your sister?” the hostess asked.

I nodded.

The hostess nodded to Sabrina and said, “This way, please.” She brought her to my table. I didn’t turn around, but she recognized me.

“Maximilian,” she said. “What a surprise.”

“Yes,” I said. “I was born a surprise.”

She sat down across from me. “Mother will be along in a minute,” she said.

“Don’t tell me,” I said. “Let me guess. You’re here for the Conference of the Southern Association of Real Estate Dealers, and let me also guess there’s been some confusion with your conference registration.” She started to say something, but I held my hand up to her. “And let me guess further than that. For some reason the conference has forgotten to give you and your mother—whatever your names are this time—your proper identification tags. But your mother will get duplicates. Handwritten. She’s at the registration desk straightening things out now. Is that right?” I asked. “A basic
yes
answer will do.”

“No,” she said, “we’re here for the U.S. Conference of Physical Therapists.”

“Oh!” I said. “Then you will be having your
farewell luncheon at twelve-thirty p.m. And let me guess again. Your bags will be packed. That’s what your mother is doing right now. And in all the confusion of everyone leaving the convention after the farewell luncheon, you two will also leave. But you two will leave without paying your bill.”

“Yes,” she said simply, “we do that. There’s always a lot of confusion at check-out time. We count on that. Mother was near panic in Dallas when I visited you. I’ll bet it takes days for the hotel to discover that we’ve skipped out.”

“Don’t you know? Don’t they write you dunning letters?”

“When the hotel finds that we’ve slipped out, they have to contact the sponsoring organization. We charge everything to them.”

“Doesn’t the organization dun you?”

“Dun who? Lilly Pacsek or Lilly Miller or Lilly …”

“You’ve made your point.”

“Don’t the hotels ask for identification?”

“Not when you’re a star. Lilly always books herself in as a featured speaker or a workshop leader. Sometimes she has flowers sent to our room with the best wishes of the organization.”

“Don’t the hotels recognize you?”

“Not a chance. There are enough conventions in enough hotels to go for years without repeats. Besides, hotels change management almost as often
as they change bed linen. Mother and I are concentrating on the West this year. We wanted to explore this part of the United States. The year before last we did the Northeast. New York is very expensive. Imagine how expensive it would have been if we had paid for everything.”

The waitress brought my order and pulled out her pad to take Sabrina’s. “I’ll be ordering for my mother, too,” Sabrina said.

“I’ll be back,” the waitress said.

“Never mind,” I said, pulling out my room key. “Put the whole thing on my check.”

The waitress looked at my key number. “Hmmm,” she said. “The penthouse.”

“Yes,” I said, slipping it into my blazer pocket.

“A penthouse,” Sabrina said. “What happened? Did Ahmed demand rights to a Jacuzi or something? I understand Jacuzis are very big in Las Vegas.”

“Everything is very big in Vegas,” I said. “Tits, tips. Everything is big. Nothing seems real.”

I then told her what we were doing in Vegas, how undeluxe, unglamorous, unhousebroken Ahmed had made it into show business. And then I told her about how Trina Rose was my godmother, which was why I was staying in the penthouse. I was ready to tell her the news I had learned last night when Lilly appeared in the doorway of the Gizeh Room. Sabrina, who was facing that direction, waved her mother over to our table.

Lilly was dressed in a tailored navy blue skirt
and a white blouse. She had tied a scarf around her neck so that it looked like something halfway between a necktie and a ruffle. And her hair was pulled straight back into a bun. She had a jacket thrown over her shoulder. Her
HELLO
badge was pinned on the jacket. She slipped it off, but not before I read
LILLY MILLER
, Leafneck, Wisconsin.

After saying how good it was and what a surprise it was to see me, Lilly said to Sabrina, “I have the best possible news, dear. I was talking to a colleague, and she said that the twins are doing fine. They still don’t have skulls; they still wear padded bonnets, but they say
Mama
and
Dada
and they play with each other. They still can’t sit up or walk, but she’s working on that. Isn’t that just grand?”

“Your colleague was a physical therapist?” I asked.

“Yes. She’s one who’s working with the twins. They were Siamese, joined at the top of their skulls, you know.”

I said that I didn’t know.

Sabrina said, “I’m glad you got the report, Mother. If they keep up the good work, I may have to take them out of my freak file,” she said.

Lilly asked how Woody and Ahmed were, and I told her that Ahmed was now in show business.

“Trina Rose is Maximilian’s godmother,” Sabrina said. “He’s staying in her suite.”

“Imagine him not saying anything about that,” Lilly said.

“I didn’t know,” I said.

After our breakfasts had been ordered, delivered and eaten, I took the check. I wrote Room 1424 and
TIP
$5.00 and signed my name. Lilly and Sabrina thanked me, and then Lilly excused herself saying that she had to attend to some packing. I gave Sabrina a knowing nod. Sabrina and I left the restaurant. “Thanks for breakfast,” she said. “We don’t usually have to pay for any of our meals after Mother makes contacts. If we don’t find someone to treat us, we eat in the hotel and charge it to our room, but Lilly usually lines up someone to treat us to lunch, to cocktails, to everything except the banquets and luncheons, where there are speakers and where the cost is prepaid in our convention fee—which we don’t pay anyway.”

I asked Sabrina if she would please come sit by the hotel pool with me. “I look down on it from our room, and it’s always empty. We can be alone there, except for the towel boys and the cocktail waitresses. I want to talk to you,” I said.

She said she would come and agreed to meet at the elevator on the pool level.

I ran up to Suite 1424 and put on the bathing suit Trina Rose had bought me on one of our discount drugstore shopping sprees. Then I raced back out and waited by the pool elevator. Sabrina did not come. I used a house phone and called the registration desk to find out her room number, remembering that they were registered under the
name of Miller this time. Lilly answered the phone. She told me that yes, Sabrina was there, but she was not feeling well, that she, Lilly, was just on her way down to tell me that Sabrina could not be meeting me.

“Mrs. Miller, Mrs. Anderson, Mrs. Pacsek. Lilly,” I said. “Sabrina did not tell me what was going on. I guessed. I have a very logical mind. Please let her come to the pool. I promise you I won’t blow your cover. I promise you Sabrina will be waiting by the door of Cleopatra Hall by the time your farewell luncheon begins.”

“But what about Trina Rose? You know the star of the show. She’s in the employ of the hotel. You’re even related to her.”

“Mrs. Miller, Mrs. Ander—”

“Lilly.”

“Lilly. I can assure you that Trina Rose has more secrets than the chairman of the CIA. And some of them are just as important. She wouldn’t want to know yours.”

“But I wouldn’t want a nice gentleman like your father to think that I’m doing something …”

“I promise you I will not tell my father,” I said.

I asked Sabrina how long she and her mother had been living like this.

“Three summers,” she answered. “What do you think Mother does in the winter?”

I thought about jobs that had long vacations. I could only think of schoolteacher, so that is what I guessed.

“No. We go out only three weeks in the summer. We’ll drive home from here.”

“I can’t guess what your mother is. It’s hard to tell. She seems to be everything she pretends to be.”

“She is. My mother is an eight hundred number.”

“You mean that your mother is toll free?”

“That’s the least of what I mean,” she said. “Suppose you get a catalogue from Bloomingdale’s Department Store in New York and another one from Neiman Marcus in Dallas and another from a gift shop in New Hampshire. All of them will invite you to ‘Telephone your order toll-free twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Use our toll-free number. Call 1-800 … anywhere in the Continental United States.’ Someone has to be there to answer the phone, and for eight hours a day Lilly is a someone. She sits in a room with ninety-nine other people. Each of them has about eighty catalogues that they take orders from. It is the most anonymous job in the world, speaking to people you’ll never know and who will never know you. Always available. Always a polite voice. Never a face. Never a personality. Never a before. Never an after.”

“Airlines and hotel chains also have eight hundred numbers.”

“Yes. They are one degree less anonymous because they handle only one product, but they still sit in a room with a hundred people and they are just a polite voice that you talk to once, that you don’t know where it’s coming from.”

“Where do you come from?”

“Omaha. That’s the home of the catalogue eight hundred numbers.”

“How did you get started doing conventions?”

“There was a convention in Omaha. It was a convention of meat packers. Their convention headquarters was at the Howard Johnson Motel. That night was Mother’s birthday, and we had decided to go out to celebrate. It was raining, and we ran inside the first door we came to after we parked the car. And there we were in the hall leading to the ballroom. Everyone was milling around having drinks, and some old gentleman came up to Mother and introduced himself and kept looking at Mother’s bosom. Later we realized that he was looking for her
HELLO
badge, and when he went to introduce her to someone else, Mother said she left it in her room. The gentlemen knocked themselves out bringing Mother drinks and bringing me Coca-Colas. When the banquet was ready to start, we waited until almost everyone was seated, and we saw there were empty places. We knew they had already been paid for, so we sat down and were served just like everyone else. Mother and I enjoyed the whole evening.

“When Mother got home from work the next day, we got dressed up again and headed for the Howard Johnson’s. We never even discussed it with each other. Everyone welcomed us back, and we enjoyed the wine and cheese. There was always Coke for me.

“That summer we decided to go conventioneering. We decide what time we want to take our vacation, and what towns we want to visit. Then Mother calls the eight hundred numbers of several large motel chains in those cities and asks if their convention rooms are available for those dates. If they say they are not, she pretends to be upset and politely asks what organization is meeting there. When we find out, we begin our research.

“We go to the library. There is a book in the library called
The Encyclopedia of Associations.
It gives the addresses and the names of 13,589 organizations, all you could ever think of. And some you never could.”

“Name one I never could.”

“How about The American Council of Spotted Asses in Fishtail, Montana? Or how about The National Button Society of Akron, Ohio? It has both a junior section and a shut-in section.”

“Have you ever been to a convention of spotted asses?”

“Of course not. It’s got only ninety members. Lilly and I, as well as the asses, would be spotted. No, we choose large and preferably rich organizations.
Mother prefers professional ones; I, business ones. The professional ones are more interesting, but the business ones are freer with the money.

“Mother finds out what groups are meeting in the towns we want to visit, and she writes some letters of inquiry so that we can get letters back. We reproduce their letterheads and send the hotel a letter on the faked stationery, saying that Lilly will be arriving at such and such a time and that she is to be a speaker or a workshop leader, and that the hotel is to charge her bill to the organization. Then she signs the president’s name with a slash and some initials, which tells the people that some secretary signed the correspondence in the boss’s absence. You get the president’s name from the same encyclopedia.”

“We appear at the convention and check into our room. We carry a supply of various
HELLO
badges, but sometimes—like at the travel agents convention—you need a special one to get on and off the convention floor. That’s when Lilly goes into her act about the lost badges and so on. Sometimes, she picks a last name from the list at the registration desk. Lilly can read just about anything upside down. Sometimes she has to produce a copy of the letter she wrote. One thing or another always works.

“After that it’s easy. We simply appear at the meetings and at the banquets.

“Lilly loves the research. She loves being a travel agent or a physical therapist. She loves being
something other than anonymous, other than an eight hundred number. I think conventions are part of the war against anonymity. I’ll bet small countries don’t have them.”