Hotels of North America (17 page)

The interior of the Albert residence was furnished mostly with downmarket appurtenances of the kind you might get on layaway, and while this furniture did not have plastic covering, it was almost certainly the case that the Alberts had considered plastic covering. It was upon just such an unassuming sofa that we were invited to sit. Swallow slid in close. The Alberts gathered in around us, and I noticed with a certain interest how the boy, Stan, sat in his armchair with his legs crossed beneath him. All four looked at us warily, as if waiting for adversarial courtroom testimony. There was no one else who could start the conversation but myself. I alone was so deputized.
Where are you today?
I said to Tim.
Tell us, where are the Alberts today?

Allyssa, the daughter, slipped out to the kitchen and returned carrying samples of the kind of cookie known as the Lorna Doone, a sleeve of which was presented entire on a florally adorned plastic plate. There the cookies sat, uneaten, each member of the Albert family gazing upon them even as Allyssa at last took up the plate and passed it.

I know what grief and loss are,
I tried again,
and I have traveled over these many weeks bearing my burdens, not knowing for sure if I could go on. This is the way of the faith,
I said,
and it’s our lot. We do not carry our burdens in silence, but we accept where we are, as we also accept that those around us can listen, can help us with our burdens. I know that I have often felt better when I have written about my particular sorrows, and I’m sure that Swallow would agree with this, as she has been with me every day that I have been out and about attempting to carry the message.
K. said,
Carry the message.

I did not feel total conviction, alas, and that is probably why I soon found myself preoccupied with the Lorna Doones. I gorged myself on a good half dozen in rapid succession when they reached me. Indeed, Allyssa and I seemed to be the only ones consuming them. The cookies went back and forth between Allyssa and me for a couple of minutes, and then I watched Swallow slip one into the pocket of her windbreaker.

Tim, by way of reply, began:
I think your church is full of goddamned fornicators, and I’d love to be one of those fornicators, but I can’t be shit, not a fornicator or any
other goddamned thing, because I’m stuck here in this goddamned house with this goddamned mortgage, I can’t even fucking move because of all the money I owe on this goddamned albatross of a house, and I’d like to be in your church full of fornicators maybe chasing around some teenage tail or whatnot
—

To which his wife said,
Please, Tim
—

I know goddamned well what I’m talking about. He’s some goddamned Yankee who turns up in the house supposed to be converting me to whatever pack of lies and he’s probably a fornicator and a homosexual and a Democrat
—

Daddy, please,
said Allyssa, and then to me,
Mister, he can’t help himself, he won’t even remember he said any of this stuff by morning, and especially he won’t remember anyhow that you were here. It’s nothing personal, honest.

Swallow said:
I won’t sit here and have you talk to my husband like that.

Religious nuts think they have all the answers,
Tim said, slurring.
You all die alone, just like everybody else. Let’s see if you all can figure out how to help me keep the family in this house when the bank people come along any day now, how about that? I’m not going to believe in any religious anything at all, and the thing I’m going to believe in is right here in my coffee cup. Cheers, fornicators
.

Maybe it would be good if we tried to pray right now,
I said.

A fine idea,
Mrs. Albert said.
I think so.

And each member of the Albert family grasped a hand adjacent, and I grasped Swallow’s hand, and then we were in a circle, except the last person to allow his hands to be grasped was Tim, who had to put down his travel mug, begrudgingly, and I said,
Heavenly Father, make as to shine down upon this family the Alberts in their time of
need, and bless those who would help the Alberts, and see through their reluctance and their doubts into their hearts, and keep them in their home, and may large platters of food and plentiful viands appear on their table whenever they need, and may their health be good. Shine down Your face upon them, for You alone are all-powerful, amen.

It is true, for those who have been wondering, that Swallow and I have a secret code, a semaphoric language of gestures, an emergency vocabulary that we practice when we want to convey to each other the need to vacate an address without actually speaking. We know that circumstances do arise. We plan ahead. At first, Swallow favored a grabbing of the earlobe. I believe it was the right earlobe. This gesture had the virtue of being highly visible because Swallow was in the habit of wearing nail polish, and thus I would notice the lacquered nails upon her earlobe. However, on what was, unbeknownst to me, the practice run, at a Rocco’s Tacos in Orlando, Florida, Swallow performed the grabbing of the earlobe and made for the restroom, disappearing for what seemed like twenty minutes. I hadn’t noticed the gesture. I was left talking to her freshman-year roommate for the duration, with no idea that Swallow was in fact now standing down the block by the Publix supermarket beside some Girl Scouts soliciting money for a blood bank. On another occasion, in Wilmington, North Carolina, I absently grabbed at my earlobe for some time before realizing that Swallow had disappeared out into a parking lot, where, it turned out, there had recently been arrests for pandering. And so in the end, we settled on tapping the ring finger of the left hand with the first two fingers of the right.

We had agreed on this procedure not long before the trip to Tyler, but we had not yet drilled. It was therefore risky to try it, but when I looked over at Swallow, she was tapping on her wedding-ring finger. How long had she been doing it? Five minutes? I did not know. I knew only that once she understood she had my attention, she got up and excused herself, and after Mrs. Albert pointed to the bathroom, Swallow shut herself in and turned on the exhaust fan. Improvising with great haste, I asked the Alberts if I could have a little tour, and then, while I was out in the backyard, as young Stan was showing me his 12-gauge, I wondered aloud where Swallow was and headed nervously back toward the restroom.

I knocked and, upon hearing no response, opened the door to the dawning realization that Swallow had made the gutsy move of going out through the Alberts’ bathroom window, still ajar. The window in question was one of those small, side-cranking windows, so instead of moving up and down, it swung out to the left. It bears mentioning that on this day Swallow was wearing a calf-length dress with a flattering neckline. In this outfit, she had apparently gotten herself over the sill and out the first-floor window onto the Alberts’ front lawn. At least she had left this insubstantial aperture open. Then it was up to me, with my bad knees and my lower-back pain, to climb onto the bathroom countertop and loft myself up through the window frame. Swallow had gently and quietly placed the screen in the shower stall to make my journey easier. I was nevertheless breathing heavily and feeling myocardially close to God as I lifted one leg out the Alberts’ window and then tumbled out, colliding with their recycling bin and dislodging some empties. I dashed across the front lawn of the insta-mansion adjacent to the lonesome barking of a neighborhood hound, a coonhound, from the sound of it. I had not run so fast or so freely in many years. I texted Swallow as soon as I could, meeting up with her in an unimproved stand of trees where the next tackiness of insta-mansions would soon be built, once the derivatives market improved.

All we had to do was get a taxi back to the Buick LaCrosse, parked onsite at _________, and spirit it away without being seen. Swallow, in her churchy dress, waited for me in a Tortilla Flats just down the county road, and I snuck onto the property at __________, slipped the key into the ignition of the LaCrosse like a repo professional, and coasted down the hill in neutral, all before Peterson or his coven knew that I was gone. Unfortunately, we had not yet chosen a hotel. In Tortilla Flats, we quarreled about our choices, and Swallow nixed the Holiday Inn Express. Which brings me back around to my initial query: What were the Spanish-language speakers doing up at dawn?
★★
(Posted 2/8/2014)

Early check-in is always a crapshoot, but in a good hotel they try to work with you. At this address, we were party to a rigid and inflexible conversation with the manager about why he wouldn’t accommodate us at the hour of 1:15 p.m. It should be noted that K.—known on this occasion as Chickadee—has a medical condition that makes it extremely inadvisable to entrap her in heated conversations. No conversation with K. of this type can conceivably be winnable without resort to Taser. Nevertheless, the manager, who, it should be said, had decided that check-in at his establishment was at 3:00 p.m. on the dot—notwithstanding the agitated group of twenty-odd stylish young Europeans who were probably in St. Augustine for SportsWearExpo 2014—repelled K.’s wish to investigate fully his managerial reasoning on the subject of early check-in. The discussion with this manager proceeded in an uncivil way, including Russian Federation–style doublespeak (“When I say the room is ready at three, I mean it is ready when I say it is ready, which is at three”), until K. snapped.

In her opening salvo, she accused the manager of looking at her like he wanted to murder her. Each side escalated. A simple managerial explanation would have sufficed. If the Sheraton Downtown St. Augustine wishes to have a decent relationship with its customers—despite its dangerously slippery bathrooms that must send a dozen seniors to the ER each year, and its paper-thin walls that make it easy to discern which of the high school athletes berthed next door is giving which of his teammates a blow job—this decent customer relationship is well within reach. Simply don’t stamp up and down with smoke coming out of your ears saying,
This is my hotel! This is my hotel!
(To which, by the way, Chickadee replied:
Your family must be very proud!
) Just free up one of those rooms that you know are available after hours of sustained chambermaid activity, those rooms that are especially ready for the demanding customer. House the customer. That way the customer won’t have to say,
Listen, friend, I am a nationally recognized hotel reviewer, and my laptop is open right now, and I am going to begin writing my review right now, while you are still bloviating.

It is especially galling, Mr. Manager, when you say no room is ready, vehemently refuse service, and then free up a room six minutes later, implying that complaint is indeed effective and that you are a dissembler. Many readers insist that online reviewing is shallow, that the reviewers are vindictive, that their prose is bad, that they want for human feeling, that their physical isolation from the person they are attacking suggests that the worst possible instincts are liable to come to the surface in this online-reviewing process. I want to prove otherwise. It is true that Chickadee, on Valentine’s Day (we had come down south for a day on the links, on a Pricelined package deal and through some barter that I had effected with a golf-pro acquaintance who needed to expand his client base), treated the manager to a few choice words and then had to go lie down (when our room was ready), indicating that her ovaries were about to explode. Our Sheraton Downtown St. Augustine experience was already soured, but we did feel somewhat ashamed of using our privilege to gain access to a room while elsewhere the SportsWearExpo 2014 attendees were killing time, waiting thirty minutes in the manager’s queue. We felt ashamed enough, in fact, that I, as a preferred reviewer on the Rate Your Lodging website, wanted to send Devon Morrison, general manager, a little gift as an apology. I went online and located a trifle that might serve as an appropriate gift, an amiable five-pound jar of attractive Japanese bonbons highly recommended on one of the most esteemed shopping sites on the World Wide Web: