Cosmic Hotel (4 page)

“I know that,” I said, “but he owned motels and hotels here. A lot even by today's standards.”

“It was something back then,” she said, “but now, how many hotels are there in the world? Profits breed infusion of capital. The security is in the conglomerates.”

She had been born Ekaja Sanghavi, and her father made her work at every level in the industry—housekeeping, engineering, and as a bellhop. She liked to claim to others how I'd been brought up the same way, but the truth was that my training as a bellhop had lasted one week and all the bellhops hated me, and I spent the days reading in the employees' locker room. I had lasted about a month in housekeeping, had never valeted someone's car, and she knew exactly how long I worked in all these positions, but she liked to tell people I had been from the ground up like her. She had one picture of the nineteen-year-old Elizabeth in her bellhop uniform, hands down by her side, not smiling but holding her chin up. This was six years before her father died of a heart attack.

“What happened to his hotels?” I asked her. “I mean, I know they were sold, but the buildings?”

“They no longer exist—Nashville, Charlottesville, and Tampa were the last ones to go, and there were some minor motor courts, back when motor courts could be nice. We are incredibly fortunate, but compared to where my father was when he was my age . . . we are far from that. But times have changed. The world caught up to us. The old wealthy are the new middle class. Why are we talking about this? I want to enjoy the movie.” She pointed at the television.

Her Indian name, I'd never heard spoken, nor the names of her father's hotels. I was sure the facts and figures of her father's hotels remained in the archives of her mind just like all the others.

She said, “This economy will not survive forever, and we will be fine. My father was a survivor.”

“I think he did more than just survive,” I said.

She shifted in the chair, lifted her chin to the television, and said, “Shh,” as though I was the one doing the talking.

Elvis came through the saloon doors onto a stage and began singing “
Bright light city gonna set my soul, gonna set my soul on fire, got a whole lot of money that's ready to burn
. . .” and it really did make me feel better, and I could tell she was enjoying this too, Elizabeth a classical trained violinist enjoying
this
music. Can anyone explain why something makes you happy?

When she wasn't looking, I turned my phone on and purchased the song “Viva Las Vegas” and started a new playlist, titled it “Songs to Beat Depression.” I had in mind that “Viva Las Vegas” would be the first song of many songs to play no matter what depression surrounded me, like a special drug when I needed it, and I could feel like I did right then with Elizabeth.

Even before the movie was over, before Lucky and Rusty were married, Elizabeth went to the dining room table and snapped the latches on the case and took out her violin and bow. I couldn't imagine another night of having to lie in bed and listen to the violin through the wall, or try to sleep with my ears plugged with tornados of toilet tissue.

“The movie isn't over,” I said.

“You're paying attention to your phone. We have to leave early tomorrow. I have to wind down. We've seen it a million times.”

She tuned and began Beethoven's “Kreutzer Sonata.”

“In Atlanta . . .” I said, “I want my own room. I don't want to share a suite. We're getting on each other's nerves. I'm just saying we need a little space.”

“Quit saying ‘I'm just saying . . .' That's dead talk.” Her chin rested on the violin as she played softly. “The Grand Aerodrome is 672 rooms. You'll have your choice. As long as it helps you do your job, and we stay on budget.”

I watched Elvis and Ann-Margret eating dinner on a houseboat, but the slow second movement of Elizabeth's violin sonata made the movie
tragic, and I experimented plugging my ears with my fingers, not caring if she noticed, and my mind began imagining the sounds in the rooms around us, wandering to events I knew had to be going on in this very hotel, events of the traveling lives of ordinary people: the simple click of a door as a guest looked into her room for the first time, and there were the high-low tones of conversations somewhere; water gurgled through pipes in the walls; people walking in hallways, people plopping in chairs, silverware clicking in the restaurant, someone's empty shoes hitting the floor, and a plopping of a turd in the bowl, a faucet running, one type of snoring became someone else's, a swizzle stick tapped on the bar top, a man standing beside his bed swung an invisible golf club, the simple rhythm of his weight shifting from leg to leg seeking his perfect balance, and there was the distinctive cadence of fucking and the desperate clopping of masturbators, the metal snip of toenail clippers, all the human activity thrumming the building, the girders, waving through concrete and rebar. These were the noises emitting from our planet tonight like the sounds of Van Raye's planet reaching us, and when that went through my mind I knew nothing would stop the sounds tonight.

“I'm going to have a nightcap,” I said loudly.

She looked at me over her music.

I went to my room and put on my shirt and quickly knotted a tie. Walking back through the apartment, I said, “I am going to survey the guests in the bar.”

She played softer. “I bet you are. You can't stay out all night.” She closed her eyes to play. “We have an early day.”

I slid my feet into my shoes that were parked beside the door.

“Oh, go have your dalliances,” she said, “I know you have to . . . and if it makes you work better, then fine. If you are going to charge another room, however . . .”

I shut the door, stood out in the lonely hallway of the top floor of this Windmere Hotel, the door blocking out a surprising amount of noise, but she was back to playing loudly, and I thought about it disturbing guests in the other rooms but tried to make myself quit worrying.

CHAPTER 4

The woman in yellow turned out to be Fran from Charleston, South Carolina, and she'd changed into a different pair of slacks and a sleeveless batiste shirt to come and sit at the bar with her friend, and that was where I found them, and they kept beginning the stories the same way: “In Charleston . . .” but as the stories became increasingly personal, the preamble began to be “In Mount Pleasant . . .” and then Lisa pronounced that I should call Fran “Franni,” and they both, sitting to my right at the bar, shouted at the same time, “
With an ‘i'!
” laughing about how Fran tried to convert her name when they were AΔΠs at Clemson University.

Now alone in the elevator with “Franni,” I kept feeling her phone vibrate against my thigh as we kissed, and I heard the wind chimes in my mind that always precede an erection.

She had her arms around my neck, and in one hand she had the Amstel Light bar coaster that had “Roberta” written on it, a magic trick involving me ripping the coaster in quarters and throwing them into the bar's trash receptacle and then reading her mind coming up with the name she'd written, and then I made the original coaster reappear completely whole beneath her own cranberry martini glass.

Franni and her friend told me their stories, such as the fact they were going to Saint Clara Island in Florida to “have our tits done.” They couldn't believe that I'd never heard of Saint Clara Island. “Go there,” Franni had said, “have your surgery and recuperate at the resort. Everyone on Saint Clara is getting something done.” I had pictured people dining with bandages wrapped around their heads like Claude Rains in
The Invisible Man
. I drank cranberry martinis and listened to Franni and her friend play the game “Real or Fake?” as other women came in the bar, and when her friend left, Franni had asked me the question as old as hotels—“Would you like to come to my room for a drink?”

Now she let go of me in the elevator and leaned back against the wall with her hips thrust and looked at the coaster. I saw her light on her phone glowing through the material of her pants and that just made me crazier about her, and I tried to put everything else out of my mind and think:
Sex, we are going to open the door in our lives and let each other into the secret room
.
My father thinks he's found out we are not alone in the universe, but I am stepping into a hotel room seven stories above Dallas, Texas, with a woman from South Carolina, her phone lighting up through the material of her pants
.

I stood on the threshold of her room as though I didn't know my way around a queen single and watched her switch the desk lamp on low.

I let the door go. Like any good hotel, at the Windmere there was a nice consistency to the way a clean room smelled.

Franni balanced with one hand on my shoulder to push off her shoes, and she kissed me, and I tasted a grain of sugar from her cranberry martini. I sat down on the bed and pulled her between my legs and wrapped my arms around her body and kissed her neck. She climbed and straddled me, the wind chimes of erection playing in the pleasure centers of my brain.

She said, “I'll be right back,” and went into the bathroom.

I got up and took off my coat. There is something contrarily pleasant about having an erection in pleated pants. I hung my jacket on the back of the chair and glanced at the bathroom door, then held my tie so I could bow my nose into the concentrated scent of her suitcase. There was a feminine flowery smell, and a new Band-Aidy smell inside her suitcase, which was a Charleston or Mount Pleasant bedroom. I'd never been in a woman's real bedroom before, but I'd smelled hundreds of women's bedrooms inside suitcases. Franni's life was in there: the beach where she'd invented the game “Fake or Real?” years ago before she and her friend thought they'd be on this trip to have their own breasts enhanced, and surely there was the bad husband's smell inside there too. The ordinary suitcase and its smell of a home gave
me the same feeling I got when our plane was on final approach to yet another airport, and out the window I saw the ordinary neighborhoods with their swirling branches of streets, and the drooping blossoms of cul-de-sacs, the houses collected in curves like seeds in a pomegranate. I had lived my whole life in hotel rooms, wanted to live no other way, a life which made me immune to being homesick except for my aunts' and uncles' houses down in Sopchoppy I used to visit every summer when I was a kid.

When the bathroom door clicked open, I snapped out of my trance and found myself sitting on the bed with my fingers still on the knot of my tie. Franni stood before me in panties and a light-colored camisole, her nipples denting the silk fabric, and her perfect shape—breasts, legs, the slight, beautifully feminine paunch of her stomach and hips as she walked and turned out the desk lamp, leaving us in the light filtered through the shears of the orange parking lot below. She searched my face for a second in the dark, and we were kissing again and she was working my tie loose. I took over and she unbuckled my belt and popped me out of my boxers and rubbed me with her fingers.

We got on the bed, me on top, and I tried to lift off her camisole, but she stopped me, instead rolling out from under me and taking off just her panties, and in a flick of a leg she sent them flying, and she rolled on top of me, still wearing the silver silk camisole.

I felt beneath the camisole for her spine and the fine muscles there, and she made a little sound as she pressed herself on me. I tried once again to remove the camisole but she squeezed her arms and worked her hips harder, losing herself for a moment, and the strap of the camisole slipped off her shoulder and one breast flopped out with the dark nipple and she put her head beside mine and I could feel her eyelashes on my ear, and what I saw in my mind was the betta fish that had lived in the little aquarium on my bedside table whatever hotel I was in, rising and falling with his nose in the corner of the glass, those fine fins fluttering like eyelashes, and that made me think about my cousin Ursula letting me give her “butterfly kisses” when we were kids, and
there with Franni on top of me, and in about thirty seconds I came. I tried to keep going for her sake, but the juices and my semi-flaccidness was making it impossible.

She pushed up and put the strap back on her shoulder and rolled off me. We lay beside each other, staring at the ceiling, and I realized I was in one of those moods where the idea of doing something was always better than actually doing it. I was thinking we'd just had the worst sex these walls had probably ever seen, then wondering what had happened in this room in the last forty years of its existence. What was the best sex these walls had ever seen? What loves had been made? What fights and heartbreaks had soaked into the walls? What bad deals had been hatched? Who was the richest person who'd slept here? Who was the poorest person? The most famous? What salesmen missed his family and sat against this headboard and watched TV? For a brief second I could hear the sound of his dry feet rubbing together at the end of the bed. People had laid over here, slept here, fucked who they were supposed to fuck and people they weren't suppose to fuck, masturbated in front of the mirror, and someone missed their flight, people shot heroine, some danced to their own hummed music, washed the travel day off their bodies, a man got on his knees beside this bed and prayed to Jesus, someone tossed pills into their mouth, picked at a hernia scar, puked in the toilet, and another person kept dialing the same number over and over, waiting for the voicemail not to pick up. There had been people inside here who had wished for their regular lives back and people who wished never to have to leave this hotel room, and there was a woman who stopped here and had sex on her way to get her tits done, trying for a new start on her life, and all these people were on their way somewhere.

“Do you hear that?” I whispered.

She wasn't breathing hard but she held her breath anyway.

“A hotel feels different with a lot of people in it,” I said. “When the occupancy was low a few weeks ago, it sounded different. Now there's this hum to the walls.”

I didn't expect her to understand or care, but what I really didn't expect was to hear her sniff, not like a regular sniff, but one that made me understand she was crying, and a little choke came from inside her.

“Are you okay?”

She swiped tears with her fingertips and pretended to gain composure.

“I'm sorry,” I said, which I meant about me and the sex, but also about the cheating man and her old life.

“It's not
your
fault,” she said. “I just don't think I'll ever be happy again.” Her voice seemed too loud because these were our first normal sounds after we'd made love.

“You will,” I said trying to whisper. “This wasn't very good.” I wanted to touch her, but I didn't know how she liked to be held.

“Is it terrible,” she said, “that I believe that I was always happier in the past than I am now?”

This made me think about the pad beside the telephone when I was talking to Van Raye—“Geneva 1000x”—
we were a thousand times happier in Geneva than now
.

“Sometimes I think everyone feels like that,” I said. “If there's anyone who understands, it's me. Listen, you can't let yourself get like this. Emotional pain affects you on a cellular level. You think you won't be happy again, but you will. You and Lisa, you're going to a resort.”

She twisted her body and arched on her shoulders and took the camisole off and threw it. It flew across the room and she kept her arms spread, one over my chest. She looked down at herself in the dim light. Her nipples were in the middle of the little triangles of untanned skin. She took her hands and pushed her breasts together. She let them drop. “Real,” she said with them flattened by gravity, then she pushed them together, “Fake.” She let them go, held them together, saying over and over, “Real . . . fake . . . real.” She quickly pinched her nipples as if to punish herself. “You can always remember some time in the past when you were happier than you are now.”

“Do you want some water?” I asked her. “Or something from the
minibar, or do you have anything in particular you take when you feel like this?”

“You are so weird,” she said.

She only took a deep breath, and I waited for it to be released, but it came in a whispered, “Tell me how you did it.”

There was the tick of the heater coming on and air blowing through the vent, and I knew what she meant—the coaster trick.

“It's magic,” I said.

“Right. Right. It could be. You could be one of those Eastern mystics,” she said. “There was a boy who sat under that banyan tree for like a year in India and didn't move, meditating, and never ate. It's true. I read about it.”

Someone in the room above us dropped something on the tile floor of their bathroom, a sound that came into the temporary life of Franni and Sandeep and then went.

“But that's bullshit,” Franni said. She pulled her knee up beneath the covers and slammed it back down. “You want me to believe it's real
magic
?” she asked.

“Just believe what you want.”

“Just tell me how you did it,” she said.

I remembered one part of her story, that she had been the last person in Charleston or Mount Pleasant to know her husband was having an affair. Everyone knew but her. I remembered a chapter in Van Raye's
My Year of Quantum Weirdness
about the steps he'd gone through when he'd been let inside the secret Borealis Project for the Department of Energy. Step 1 was disbelief—this isn't real. One of the other steps was that you felt like a fool for not knowing what had been going on all along, and what everyone else knew.

I began explaining the trick. “It's really a variation of a famous card trick, ‘The Ambitious Card,'” I said. “Seemingly supercilious motions are usually the most important,” and I explained, and in doing so, even to me, it seemed simple and only depended on knowing how to double-card coasters.

After the explanation, there was silence in the room except for the humming of human occupancy around us, and as she was thinking about the trick, I said, “How would you feel if you woke up tomorrow and found out there was life on another planet?”

She began crying again. “
It would be horrible!
” she said. She picked up the sheet and wiped her face. “I remember being twenty-one . . .” she said.

“I'm not twenty-one,” I said because I know I looked young.

She paid no attention to my comment and said, “And I remember thinking anything was possible. I always thought I would work in New York. When I was your age, I wondered, ‘What is Paris like?' but then I had this feeling that one day I would go to Paris or even to the moon—shit, that wasn't beyond the possibility—and I was happy. You know when you were little, someone mentions the moon, and you can say to yourself, ‘I'll probably go to the moon one day' . . .” She started to cry and her voice got higher, and she said, “I'm in Dallas! I'm certainly never going to the
moon
. Why is that so depressing?”

“You can still go to Paris,” I said.

“
I've been to Paris!
” she said. “That's not the point. You just keep moving to a state of unhappiness. I mean it's a scientific fact, I mean they've done studies, the older you get, when you take LSD, the more bad trips you have.” I tried to follow her. “Because your general outlook becomes bleaker,” she said. “When you're young, you have more good trips because you still have time, and more time makes you more optimistic about
everything
.”

This was the worst conversation I had ever had, the walls absorbing our bad experience with forty-plus years of experiences, which dawned on me as a stupid theory, as if you could play the room back like a phonograph, the needle playing in the grooves left by the impressions of all the lives.