Viewmaster

by Ferdinand Stowell

A perfect day would start something like this: I hear your footsteps on the front stoop. You fumble around a bit and then find the doorbell, which you ring only once. I open the door and I smile at you. It’s a smile so light, so breezy and broad that it practically peels the mouth from my face and sends my lips flapping, flying up into the full light of day. I say something inadequate to the moment like “Welcome, come on in,” but it doesn’t matter, because you understand me. Your russet locks trace soup ladle curves as they curl and dip into the tureen of your shoulders. Your breasts pounce un-tethered like plump birds of prey. You enter and saunter in such a way that your clothes can barely contain you; your garments seem as ready to fall crumpled to the floor at your feet as I am.

  As you stand in the foyer with your angelic child (I have a thing for good-looking moms,) you say, “Oh, what a beautiful Italianate home you have.”

  “Thank you,” I reply, as I motion for you to sit down. Your five year old is bound spiritually by your strict but fair rules of etiquette and physically by some sort of truss made of canvas straps that you hold firmly in your grip……

  I’ve never had that day exactly; life is a calendar of longing and imperfection. And though I’d once planned on the days of my life accruing with the beautiful logic of the Fibonacci series, good days and bad days now climb and fall, climb and fall in exact correlation with my bank account, which never seems to get past four low digits. They are found in finite combinations with the other major categories of the quotidian – days until and days since, sunny days and days without sun; days without end and days that are over too soon.

  Last Spring, a season indistinguishable from winter where I live, the usual mist condensed into actual pelting rain on several occasions; I was then reminded of the near tropical summer rainstorms of my childhood somewhere else. Once or twice during last year’s long extended season, the atmosphere prickled with electricity, sending veins of lightning coursing like effects through the apparatus of a movie madman’s laboratory. Great blasts of thunder, usually found only in the ground here, shook the air and everything caught in it. Such weather is rare; the gods above San Francisco are usually stoned and not so temperamental.

  On April 4th I dutifully turned my clocks forward, welcoming the extra light courtesy of Daylight Savings, as though you could deposit the sun in a piggy bank or a beggar’s cup, as though it were a place with a drive-thru window.

  I paid my taxes on April 15th, driving down to a late-closing post office south of the city to post my return before the deadline. I joined a miles-long line of cars waiting their turn to drop their envelopes into mailboxes in some procrastinators’ re-enactment of the Trail of Tears.

  That was the day before Celestine left and I realized I’d made a terrible mistake, even before I’d found the used condom wrapped in a wad of tissue paper in her wastebasket, even before Porky had drawn me into his vortex of shame and scandal .

  “Well,” she said, her head shaking slightly, involuntarily, “thank you Roy.” I waited for the next word out of her mouth but none came.

  “I’ll call you a taxi,” I said, practically jumping for the phone, for something that could make it all better.

  “Nope, all taken care of.” A horn sounded outside. “Oh, that’s him now. Well, goodbye, thanks again.”

  “Here, let me at least help you with this.” I took Celestine’s suitcase and carried it down the front steps to the taxi, the trunk lid of which popped open even before we made it down the stairs. The cab driver wasn’t moving from behind the steering wheel, not until his backward gaze caught Celestine taking out a twenty-dollar bill.

  “I want you to have this,” she said as she handed me the money. I’d obviously been indiscreet about my financial worries. I didn’t want her to leave thinking our relationship was all about money, even though it was my need for money that had brought us together.

  “No, no, that’s not necessary, really.”

  “Take it, buy something nice for the house, I insist.”

  “Alright, that’s very sweet of you. Take care of yourself,” I said in my little Ming vase voice, the cracks artfully contrived. She waved me away. I returned to the house and opened up a cabinet in the dining room that connects to a defunct dumbwaiter; I stared down into the rabbit hole in which many bottles with little tags marked ‘drink me’ were cached.

  On April 17th Porky was off and running with his mouth again, telling me things I didn’t want to hear and the very next day I became terribly shy and wondered what all these strangers were doing in my house. Then I lifted one of those bottles from the hole in the wall, placed it on the kitchen counter, where I sat before it, resting my chin against the bottle cap until it hurt.

  Checking hospitality into the hospital

  I run Golden Rules Bed and Breakfast in my home, catering to a public that surprises me with its ability to elicit my warmth and sympathy. I haven’t been accustomed to warmth and sympathy in my life, brought up by a man and woman whose interest in children was negligible and given that they produced ten of them, perverse. Being a hotelier has forced me to confront what has always been my biggest physical challenge, which is smiling. When I hear the phrase ‘unnatural acts’, I think of smiling at the top of the list of carnal no-no’s. Doing that with one’s mouth seems manipulative and is physically uncomfortable to me, as though someone takes the ‘V’ for Victory pose of fingers and shoves them into the corners of my mouth, then thrusts them upward suddenly – torture. I have no trouble laughing, but any facial display of sentiment below raucous good cheer and above solemn disapproval just makes my cheeks quiver.

  Although I’ve never had much interest in, or been very good at, serving other people, my initial apprehension of strangers has given way to a professional anticipation of the arrivals and departures of travelers. I’m now kindly disposed towards them before they even walk through the door just because they’re staying with me. Most of them live up to this early promise by being pleasant and not too demanding.

  Likewise, I’ve found that most of them are kindly disposed towards me. The good humor of people unhinged from their routines is seductive. Our lack of a shared history lends itself to a conspiratorial camaraderie; I help them to understand that we’ll be working together, that I share their burdens and safeguard their small claim on freedom. I bond easily with them and our intimacy feels real. By comparison, my other relationships, with people I’ve known for years, seem too complicated and difficult.

  My house is an Italianate former brothel that lists to the side like the inebriated prostitutes that used to ply it – I’ve nicknamed it Lenora. It makes all sorts of noises that sound like bodily functions and goes through my money as if it were toilet paper.

  The house accomplishes the subtle magic of projecting my presence in the world (though much of that presence is still Uncle Arthur’s) and this helps keep my guests in line, focusing them on the demands of tourism, not on tormenting me.

  I inherited the house and business from my Uncle Arthur. Arthur believed in the hereafter and communed regularly with dead people. He helped me reclaim three of my past lives, Septimus, a Roman centurion and rapist of Britannic maids; Mimi, a fashion designer in Belle Epoque Paris and Jefferson, an African-American slave whose biography sounds suspiciously like that of Kunta Kinte on the TV show ‘Roots’. A fourth previous life, Aldaric, I discovered on my own as I waited in a Greyhound bus depot in Los Angeles. A psychic – Tamara Schwartz, psychic, LA – NY, Past Lives Retrieved, it said on her card – informed me that we had been monks together in 12th century Provence. I ended up sleeping with her and apparently it wasn’t our first time.

  Per Arthur’s example, I have re-named each of my four guest rooms after this eclectic group of personalities (displacing Arthur’s own coterie of previous incarnations: Alcibiades, Princess Mokomo, Lord Dulcington and Smitty – so far at least there have been no repercussions for bumping them from the roster, but who knows what awaits me in the gre
at beyond.) All this gets explained to the guests who then understand it as a genuine San Francisco experience that will be recalled with warmth and/or cruel laughter for decades into the future. As I’d heard Arthur say many a time, eccentricity is good for business.

  Sexygenarian

  I like playing host for paying guests because it gives me the opportunity to practice being with people I might never come into contact with or if I did, the kind of people to whom I might not be so nice. Celestine I liked right off.

  There was something about her that piqued my interest as soon as I opened the door and she said, “Hi, are you Roy? I’m Celestine.” She was of a type I knew well, an independent, weather-beaten but pretty, youngish grandmother; likes traveling but isn’t a slave to it like some of those lost and wandering Nordic souls. She was warm and humorous, knocked around a bit by life, unmanned. She was around twenty in the early sixties when I was born.

  I asked her immediately if she had driven here, as I do all my guests, because I try to forestall any unpleasant parking situations with the neighbors. I live in North Beach, a very congested part of San Francisco where automobiles are forced into an evolutionary struggle for survival that turns their owners into irate pawns. She hadn’t driven.

  I sort of smiled and ushered in her and her small suitcase, bright backpack, sensible shoes, faded jeans, printed blouse, dangling silver earrings and that mane of silvery blonde hair – a lioness.

  “Did you find the place alright?” I asked her.

  “I’m here aren’t I?”

  “Celestine, you really are here and I’m so glad to have you, sit,” I said in that overly familiar yet commanding tone that lets people know I will be the new, temporary and conditionally benign authority figure in their lives.

  “Please,” I added.

  “You’ve got a lovely home,” she said, looking around the Italianate living room as though she were star gazing. Here was a woman eager to be delighted.

  “Thanks. To start off I’m going to have you fill out this registration card and then tell me how you’d like to pay.”

  “Credit card, but I already gave the number to the guy who booked me in here. Tipton, I think he said his name was.”

  “That’s just to hold the reservation, the agents don’t actually charge your card. I take your number again and give it to my accountant (the very same Tipton!) for processing.”

  While she filled out the card, I continued pulling down the drapes in the living room that the parents of a set of two-year old twin boys had gathered together in bunches and then stuffed up onto the window sashes out of fear their children might hang or suffocate themselves. Hhmm….hadn’t thought of that. From all the evidence I’ve gathered, being two years old is no picnic. I can’t tell you how many surround-sound screaming fits we had during their stay. It made me wonder if there wasn’t anything more to life for me than preventing the double suicide of emotionally disturbed children.

  I showed Celestine to Mimi, her room, but as I was about to point out the light switches in the bathroom, I could sense the couple in Septimus was checking out. I excused myself and rapidly made my way to the hallway, where the thirty-somethings from Connecticut were departing. They looked determined and then when they noticed me, annoyed.

  Guestiness

  Departure is always a tug at the emotions. You can feel the tension as guests who have an inkling that they should tip you try to run out the door with all their luggage, which has increased dramatically in girth due to their purchase of products, the bulk of which they could have gotten at their local mall. I hail them, but they are adamant about not giving in to weakness. They believe in clean breaks; I like to make our farewells messy.

  “It was really great having you,” I say. He avoids meeting my eyes while he barely manages a ‘thanks’. She gives me a beaming, silent smile, her hair still wet from the shower. Once downstairs, she says ‘thank you’ to the wall before slamming the door shut. I’d asked her not to do that.

  Tipping is the longed-for result of a performance art that I may never master. Like many Americans, I have always felt uncomfortable, even philosophically opposed to the custom. It’s the guests that I least like who I feel I deserve extra compensation from. And the ones I like the most, the ones most likely to tip, (though I don’t like them solely for this reason) I feel uncomfortable taking even more money from.

  Flirtiness

  The next morning I greeted Celestine at the breakfast table; she was a balm to the wounds that had already been inflicted upon me by thoughtless guests and my kitchen sink, which was horribly plugged and disgorging blackish clots the size and consistency of what I imagine dinosaur mucous to have been.

  “Good morning Celestine, how did you sleep?” I asked.

  “Good morning, Roy. I slept like an angel. This fruit is fabulous.” She was referring to my inspired fruit plate, which consisted of slivers and bits of colorful fruit arranged in geometric patterns. “It’s kind of like one of those Busby Berkeley movies. You know where they have all those chorus girls doing routines in a kaleidoscope?”

  “Yeah, I know what you mean,” I said. “I suppose if Busby Berkeley had been allowed unlimited access to seasonal fresh fruit while in solitary confinement at a particularly bleak prison, he would have made fruit plates like this.”

  Celestine smiled and said, “Well, you’ve certainly brightened my morning, and I think I’m going to need it; it’s rather dark and misty out.”

  “Yeah, but walking out in this weather is like getting a really great facial, best thing for your skin.”

  She giggled and said, “I hadn’t thought of it like that.”

  “Where are you off to today?” I asked her.

  “I thought I might hike down to the wharves and walk over to Golden Gate Bridge. Do you think that’s too far?”

  “Not if you’re a walker. With great legs like yours, I don’t think you’ll have a problem.” I was a little taken aback by my own forwardness. Her legs, a bit slack and age-mottled to be sure, but shapely, descended from her trim waist and flared safari shorts like prongs from a plug. She paused to consider my remark with her tongue pressed against the inside of her cheek and a steaming mug of coffee inches from her lips. She scattered the steam with her breath.

  “I can see my legs are going to get quite a workout in San Francisco,” she said mischievously.

  I said goodbye to Celestine, handing her a map, a plastic spoon and a container of yogurt for her journey, then cleared the breakfast table and focused my attention on the plumbing problem in the kitchen.