Hotels of North America (12 page)

K. was dead set on trying to hurl a penny from the railing of floor three into the cake, which looked more hatbox and less cake from this distance and which had no figurines on top. There were no persons dressed in NASCAR racing uniforms, there were no vomiting-at-the-altar moments, there were no last-minute speeches about how Jenny really should have married Travis Ritter, the urologist who had given up his true love—comparative literature—in order to procure a more stable income for Jenny during their stormy two years in Columbus, when Jenny really did have a few lesbian experiences, before she met Billy at a sorority-reunion event at a golf-driving range in some forgettable town out in the exurban farmland. There was no self-lacerating speech from Travis
(I took my eyes off the ball, ladies and gentlemen, and I know it each and every night, Jenny, each and every night).
It was not that kind of a wedding. Beyond the girls in blue, each of whom, we decided, might have bulk-e-mailed malicious gossip about us, given the opportunity, and the great-uncle in the bright orange ski jacket who apparently didn’t get the memo about formal wear, it was just another wedding in a nineteenth-century architectural marvel in a city bleeding red ink during presidential-election season, which didn’t stop K. from turning to me, at the railing of the third terrace, with a tear in her eye.
★★★
(Posted 9/5/2013)

My wife’s great-aunt was a woman of great resources. She was four and a half feet tall and had osteoporosis of the severe kind, but her rapier wit was never in short supply, nor her recall of trivial facts from the lives of extended family members. A slightly raised eyebrow (which one would have just been able to see beneath the enormous spectacles) was a signifier of abrupt turns in her storytelling. I rarely missed a chance to visit with this great-aunt, even if visiting meant agreeing to a family reunion to be held in the Windmere Residence, the aunt’s independent-living address.

It bears mentioning that the wife’s family was already well organized around the opinion that I, Reginald Morse, was insufficiently job-locked. The older feminine members of the clan, all of them given to macramé and tiered desserts, liked to take me aside, banter, and then introduce the surgical lancet:
Why aren’t you pursuing more conventional employment?
This proved to be the case again at the Windmere. After admiring the recordings of the big-band era played through a public-address system in one of the reception halls and claiming to be unable to hear anything but the highlights of any conversation, and after helping the excellent great-aunt back up to her heavily festooned chambers (she was fatigued and wanted to get to bed early), I let myself be the subject of harassing remarks by one or two relatives whose idea of a good time was televised dancing competitions. Let it be said that my particular talents were not effective in a conventional transnational corporate setting, this is undeniable, and indeed because of my natural desire to innovate, I was not terribly good at serving as an employee. In certain circles, however, these things would have been considered advantages.

Uncle Don wanted to talk with me about ice hockey and he seemed genuinely shocked when I did not know who was playing in my division, and after several times through this particular rondo, I excused myself and went directly back to the guest suite, leaving my wife in the Rosewood Room with her fifty-nine or so relatives, along with their epidemic of obesity and their belief that the fossils of pre-extinction-event cretaceous sauropods were sculpted a mere six thousand years ago. Upon arriving in the guest suite, I laid myself grimly upon a multiply quilted bed, all of its bedclothes synthetic, and, using a new lightning-fast Internet connection in the Windmere, I began to attempt conversation with a certain professional, as shown herewith:

ManilPhil91:
hello you wanna go priv

RegRomantic:
?

ManilPhil91:
add time by put in credit card mc and visa

RegRomantic:
oldfolkshome in VA, wife downstairs talking to second cousins

ManilPhil91:
hahahahahahaha you put in numbers

RegRomantic:
one sec where are you

ManilPhil91:
Manila

RegRomantic:
you 18?

ManilPhil91:
21

RegRomantic:
parents know?

ManilPhil91:
thx for putting in numbers want to party with this boy toy now?

RegRomantic:
just had enough bourbon to preserve a dead body for a week

ManilPhil91:
have cam?

RegRomantic:
you don’t want to see me

ManilPhil91:
i am real person you are too real persons should…

RegRomantic:
saddlebags of middle-aged flesh

ManilPhil91:
what is name?

RegRomantic:
Stu

ManilPhil91:
hahahahaha that is a funny name Stu what is your job

RegRomantic:
what is your name

ManilPhil91:
my name Maurice

RegRomantic:
real name?

ManilPhil91:
do you have cam? turn on cam?

RegRomantic:
I am just another guy sweating out droplets of desperation and heartache in the 21st century, there is no reason to look.

ManilPhil91:
same guy from yesterday?

RegRomantic:
no

ManilPhil91:
day before that?

RegRomantic:
no

ManilPhil91:
i like to see you bc i like to see if u turned on then i am too because one person turns on the other person and this is way of love

RegRomantic:
what is the weather like?

ManilPhil91:
typhoon come in and sweep everything away bodies wash out and all the trouble

RegRomantic:
a poem?

ManilPhil91:
do u like when it’s rock hard

RegRomantic:
Doesn’t everybody?

ManilPhil91:
hahahahaha u r funny what do you want me to wear

RegRomantic:
taffeta ball gown and a string of pearls and very dark lipstick, perhaps something like African violet or black honey or midnight orchid, some kind of extremely stylish but sensible heel, not like a stiletto, but something more square, and maybe some kind of perfume, you know, something expensive that has an exotic animal part in it, adrenal gland of mongoose.

ManilPhil91:
hahahahaha would definitely wear if i had but is mostly very tight underwears and short pants sexy

RegRomantic:
I see.

ManilPhil91:
i like men who is going take care and maybe we could meet up in usa and you fly me over we go to expensive clothing store and visit tourist attraction like world trade center excavation

RegRomantic:
you want to come to the usa?

ManilPhil91:
more opportunities not to get beat up and drag through street

RegRomantic:
what do you do with your days?

ManilPhil91:
u touching self?

RegRomantic:
does not work without tadalafil

ManilPhil91:
your time run out eleven more minutes will have to buy more minutes

RegRomantic:
money is no object

ManilPhil91:
i take class engineering at university in Manila to get degree want to study nuclear engineering very interested in thorium as different way to use nuclear energy almost waste-free not like uranium plutonium half-life decay ninety or one hundred years instead of 24,360 years opportunity with thorium for Philippines energy independent rise up from economic backwardness become powerhouse in 21st century tired of western countries controlling Asia

RegRomantic:
so sex work is your day job?

ManilPhil91:
like to have sex with men and i get to do it online also talk with men who are sad and help them to feel better in western countries because then they pay for my education that i cannot afford also i go to clubs and listen to dance music and shake moneymaking parts with friends and not think about the western men or my family that has no money

RegRomantic:
I find this story very moving.

ManilPhil91:
one time a child i admit to friend from advanced physics class that i am attracted to my friend he tells everyone and no one ever talk to me in that class again except to call me karne ng baka so i just decide if no one will pay attention i will go make love to men and do my own homework as student of physics in order that i more brilliant than any other physics student of manila and especially more brilliant than men who like girls

RegRomantic:
you have that barely sketched in mustache thing that young Asian men have?

ManilPhil91:
thank you sir for buy more minutes i take test for to be in military thinking that i will be effective in study of intelligence because i speak tagalog language and spanish language and some of arab and french and know how to get man hard and to cry with joy during release in English and other languages can get man to give up state secrets if necessary at first they take me in military but then realize that i am karne ng baka but probably only i sleep with recruiter and then he tell others in military that i am karne ng baka even if he is too and now nowhere to go but engineering school or usa or to nightclubs of tourists while still beautiful

RegRomantic:
When I was young I wanted to be a stock trader or a radical theologian, or I wanted to be some kind of cult-oriented psychoanalyst. But I never got around to these things. I am interested in neurobiology, and during my brief period with the department of defense, I studied hiring patterns in the military. (I definitely would have hired you.) I consider myself a keen student of human behavior, and so I have read widely in the theory of personality. Just so that you know: I prefer women.

ManilPhil91:
u don’t want this boy toy?

RegRomantic:
I assume you are used to men signing on here and picking through the boys as though they are no better than shanks of beef and picking you or your friends based on your thumbnail without any feeling about how you might approach the task and what kind of human values you might bring to the table, but I am not like those other guys. I have genuine feeling about you and your predicament, don’t need anything from you but just the conversation that we are having.

ManilPhil91:
i have pride in job try to do a good job make men feel love whether they want mouth or ass or rock hard boy and it better for me if you want…boss watch video and men that do not achieve release make it harder for boy toy to get shifts

RegRomantic:
I admire your work ethic. I feel lucky that I have gotten a chance to talk to a man who takes his job so seriously.

ManilPhil91:
if you don’t want body then i will talk about oak ridge laboratory and how full courage men who made first bomb were if only use thorium instead plutonium and uranium benefit industry and industrialist but not good for environment and especially not good for Asia and third world—

It went like this only a few more seconds in the earth-toned Windmere before my wife entered, and I engaged in that time-honored maneuver known as the rapid shutdown so that while what is on the computer screen is no longer visible, it does not, at the same time, seem to an observer coming upon the scene as if the closing of the computer is happening in any way but the routine way. There must be a formula or a differential whose purpose it might be to correctly identify the exact velocity that will appear to be a task-completion computer shutdown as opposed to a guilt-related computer shutdown (a complex-sexual-identity shutdown), though this formula or differential will fail to take into account the engagement or nonengagement of the wife in question, who was functionally disengaged from the likes of Reginald Edward Morse. By
functionally disengaged
it should be assumed that we mean physically disengaged, and by physically disengaged it should be assumed that we mean in a painful, isolating way.

While the casual reader of RateYourLodging.com could perhaps reasonably suppose that Morse’s painful, isolating disengagement from his wife would
not
result in a desire for ManilPhil91, that casual reader would lack the tremendous psychological insight that more engaged readers of my reviews have come to possess over the period in which I have been publishing them. Which is to say that everybody has his moment of weakness, where a discussion of economic disenfranchisement and nuclear physics can create a grandiose sympathy for the plight of Asian sex workers—not a sexual desire, it should be said, for ManilPhil91, so much as a Byronesque pathos for sociopolitical disenfranchisement. Which is also to say that the loneliness of the hotel reviewer is sometimes so pervasive, so overpowering, that anyone at hand will do, and if you have to pay certain parties to be at hand, then so be it. And in this particular case, I might add, paying for company created a tuition windfall for a gifted scientist in training.

The wife, coming upon the scene, insisted that I go downstairs to the main floor of Windmere and take in the art exhibition, which displayed art by the various residents of Windmere. I agreed to this proposal. In fact, there was a docent, or at least an underutilized resident of Windmere, who took us through the exhibition and indicated that all the works were for sale. Naturally I picked up a price list. The work was mostly representational and consisted primarily of the flower arrangements of beginning painters and the occasional
nature morte.
There was also a great wealth of landscapes. A couple of surrealist paintings were also included, things that had clearly been produced by painters with dementia. All of this work suggested that in the waning days of life, a visual artist will become preoccupied with the acute observation of what
is,
with the actual appearance of things that will not be seen for much longer. Distortions in the field of what is are perhaps the signs that an elderly visual artist will not come back from the edge of the known world but will topple off into and abyss. I paid two hundred dollars for a painting of somebody’s shih tzu and returned to the room, and while my wife showered she called from the interior of the shower about when we might reproduce.
★★★★
(Posted 9/7/2013)