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)
Hampton Inn and Suites, 33 West Illinois Street,
Chicago, Illinois, March 21–22, 1996
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 s
uspect 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.
Perhaps now I should tell you, as I have not told you in any other review that I have written here on RateYourLodging.com, that I cannot sleep without a pillow over my face, and thus it would be really easy to asphyxiate me, and perhaps my future wife, when I had fallen into narcolepsy after the first bloody round of lovemaking, might very well have executed me if she wanted to steer her fate away from a decade and a half of grief and progressive estrangement among both parties; instead, there I was that night, by myself, with a pillow over my face, probably getting insufficient amounts of oxygen and thus risking stroke, and I was thinking about how great the whole thing was, how great it was going to be, it was all going to be great, the fluorescent bulbs of the Loop twinkling below, the trains going around on the Loop like some monstrously scaled replication of a Lionel train set, the Chicago Bulls in the middle of a great season, it was all going to be great, because I had just had sex twice with a woman who was not in fact a Kansas housewife with IBS and multiple-personality disorder, and I had flown out to Chicago for this very purpose, which was a sign that I had grown into the completion of adulthood and masculinity, and I was enough moved by my hotel experience that I got up and located a piece of stationery in the desk next to the Gideon and with just the light from the window I scrawled out a thank-you note for the maid, and I set it on the desk and laid a crisp twenty beside it. It was all going to be so great. ★★★★ (Posted 3/8/2014)
The Capri Whitestone, 555 Hutchinson River Parkway North, Bronx, New York, March 7–22, 2014
What is it we really want from hotel life? We want the closest thing we can get to home. We want a reminder that home exists—that place you can come back to after a long inadvisable journey where they are in theory happy to see you. A place where the pillow awaits the impression of your head. A place where when you step in out of the rain, you breathe a sigh of relief. A place where everything broken was broken by you or by people you care about. A place where you could close your eyes and, more or less, make your way around just fine. A place at the end of a road you know well. A place where, should you suddenly become afflicted with a total absence of memory, it is reasonable to suppose that you would be returned.
Home, the place your enemies would wish to avoid. Home, the place your former lovers are troubled by. Home, where you can sit at the quiet table in the morning. Home, the place you sometimes hate that you also love the second you leave it. Home, any address that causes you to tear up. Home, near the metal box that has your surname on it. Home, where almost all the postcards you have ever received have been delivered. Home, where the government of your nation believes you live. Home, where your mother or your father brought you the second you no longer lived in a hospital. Home, where you first sang whatever it is you first sang. What welcome means, this you first learned at home, along with the word home. Home is where your bedroom was in the past and is now, and home is where you sleep more days than you sleep anywhere else, because if it were otherwise, you would renegotiate the application of the word home. Home is where there is almost always a beverage that you like. Home is where, if you wait long enough, it is likely that you will be fed a dessert even if it is not the best thing for you to eat. Home is where you are able to watch your favorite programs. Home is where people will try to find you when they need to find you. Home is the address you will sneak out of to kiss the first person you ever kiss who is not a member of your family, and it is the place to which you will return afterward, knowing about that kiss. Home is where you will first learn about disappointment, and it is where you will learn that it is okay to feel disappointed. Home is the place that is almost always indicated with a final major chord. Home, when you are older, is where you will watch your children grow, and, in fact, no other way of describing home is as valuable and meaningful as this, and when you are near death, the impossible sweetness of life will adhere first and foremost to the home where you watched your child or your children grow, or where you watched other neighborhood children grow, watched them rise up from the carpet and stab at something with their little paws before attempting to stick it into their mouths. This will be your home. Home may also be the place where they have called you an asshole more than any other place. Home is where you will paint your masterpiece. Home is what you will describe in your masterpiece; either home or the leaving of home. If you say you have no home on earth, then what you mean is that there was trouble at your home. Home is where you go right before dark. Home is where you go when you are recovered. When work becomes impossible, you will long for home. It is possible that in your life you have had multiple homes, a sequence of homes, and that each of these has required a transition. For example, when you were in a car that carried you from a house where both of your parents had lived together to a house where only one of your parents lived, even during that car ride, there was still an idea of home.
That catch in your throat that is the feeling that you will never be known, never be esteemed? That feeling evaporates in the presence of home fires, and while no substitute is adequate, there is the sense in the finest hotels that you are not far from home. When you embark on your journey, you set aside this notion of home, as if lau
nching onto a whitecapped sea, certain that you are sturdy enough to let go of home, to relinquish the familiar, but it is only because you know that you can return home again, and it is the job of the hotel, the inn, the motel, the furnished room, to suggest the possibility of home or serve as a way station for home, preparing you for that return, lightening the load as long as you must be away. This is the great romance of life, the losing of home temporarily as when, upon that same storm-tossed sea, you lost the horizon line. The hotel helps you to see the horizon, even if there is no land to be witnessed there.
Or so it has been in the recent, modern centuries of human history, and so it would continue to be if it were not for one tiny nettlesome bit of insect life that has emerged from up out of the eons of the past like a scourge to torpedo the serenity of our home lives, and that nettlesome life-form, as you must recognize by now, is the bedbug. Where did the bedbug come from? It came from somewhere in the evolutionary past, the dark ages, and it came to disturb your sleep, so that you would never sleep again, and while resting comfortably, you would wake to a stabbing pain on the surface of some extremity; somewhere the blood is pooling in such a way that the bedbug can come at you for warmth, creature comfort, and a full belly. It was gone, this species, but now it has returned, and it has descended on the cities, almost all places where there are hotels in abundance, and everyone you know, whether virtuous or sinful and carefree, is a potential vector of the dreaded bedbug.
Do you know any musicians? Do you know musicians from Francophone Canada who live in a sort of a commune and practice community ownership of their possessions and who do not wash their hair as often as they might? These musicians are almost certain to be harboring bedbugs, especially after a year of touring and sleeping on various people’s floors. Do not let them into your house. There are bedbugs in their guitar cases or their duffel bags. Every cinema that you visit carries with it the possibility of bedbugs, especially if it is not newly renovated, as in the old chain theaters that attract a downmarket clientele. You are better off not bringing any personal possessions, such as knapsacks or briefcases, into this movie theater. And then there are the hotels. It is widely known that even some of the best hotels in the nation have had outbreaks of these critters, and probably they bomb entire floors or strip them down to the studs before re-releasing the rooms onto the market. How do you know if they have eliminated the problem or not? I have stayed in some fine hotels in my day, but I was in no way certain in any of them that I would be unmolested by the bedbug.