by Rick Moody
Hotel Francesco, Via Dell Arco Di San Calisto 20,
Roma, Italia, May 20–22, 2004
A charming little hotel in a neighborhood right in the center of the old city, within easy walking distance of many well-known tourist destinations, the Hotel Francesco also happens to be the hotel where my child was conceived with the woman who used to be my wife. This was not a joyful coupling, but it was a momentous one, a coupling that took place after a year or more of disputing, arguing, relenting, agreeing, disagreeing, and agreeing again, and which took place with the technological application of thermometers, calendars, medical advisers, and so forth. We were successful on this, our first genuine attempt, which is remarkable because preliminary ambivalence seems to have had no effect on fertility. If your chronicler was not ready to be a father before embarking on the process, the presence of a child nevertheless conferred on him the right and just use of the term.
The hotel played almost no role in the fact of conception, excepting that it was the place we happened to be. The hotel is not to be blamed for the state of marital relations. There was a functioning Internet at the Francesco, which is named for the beloved saint who loved animals, and the functioning Internet was able to call up, after merely a few keystrokes, the kinds of images of unclothed women in tableaux of female slavery that will enable one who has given up on marital relations to reach the necessary preliminary condition for the miracle of conception, but I do not mean to speak of this amenity (the Internet), nor of the hotel and its proximity to tourist destinations, nor do I even mean to speak of Saint Francis. I mean to speak briefly of the laughter of the beloved.
The laughter of the beloved is such an excellence that it can bring about positive outcomes in 98 percent of imbroglios, even when these are the worst sorts of imbroglios. In the early days of a romance, especially a romance which for some brief moments is situated in Rome, the city of the suckling wolves, laughter is easy to come by, and all things that seemed gray and implacable suddenly yield to the light upon hearing this laughter. In the early days of romance, especially a romance that it is situated in Rome or Paris or Reykjavik or Florence, the laughable is anything on the exterior of the romantic dyad, and so a traffic jam, or an audit by the Internal Revenue Service, or entrapment in the elevator, these are all funny, because they are the world attempting to make itself present in the context of romance, when of course the world is not present at all, the world is some kind of picture postcard, and it is this state of affairs—how untouchable the lover is by the facts of the world—that causes the easy laughter of romance, and this must be what Dante was talking about when he first beheld Beatrice on the streets of Florence, while the Guelphs and Ghibellines were preparing to slaughter each other; even in the face of atrocity, there was still that giddy sense of impropriety and joyful laughter that comes from the presence of the beloved. This is not a seven-hour wait on the tarmac at an international airport, this is the presence of the beloved!
The only problem is that, after a time, the jokes of the beloved become familiar jokes. I notice in myself this sense that if a certain joke was reliable before with the beloved, it should be used again, because the improvising of jokes is so hard. Why shouldn’t you be able to use the material again? And so a certain predictability comes to roost in the eaves of the romance. The jokes become sturdy bits of lore in the romance. It’s easy to turn the pages of the book back somewhat, to find the old hilarity there, maybe a few low jokes about flatus or extreme intoxication. This is not such a bad time, the long middle section of your journey through marital humor, and many things of the daily sort can now be accomplished because you are not so preoccupied with how the world is just a backdrop for the glory of your romance. The middle is the longest time in any story, and therefore the time with the most desperation. Just as you settle in there, certain that nothing much is going to happen and believing that things can go on this way, you begin to notice that the laughter of the beloved has become increasingly rare. The laughter of the beloved has given way to a sort of wry smile that is frankly retrospective and seems to have a certain melancholy attached to it. Try as you might to bring about a few good moments of hilarity, you are unable to do so, and there’s a desperate recognition in this. It was dangerous when it seemed as if the beloved would never stop laughing. But that doesn’t mean you want the beloved to stop laughing altogether, and this unbearable poignancy starts to set in when you realize that you are unable to make the beloved laugh as you once did.
On a certain occasion you are out with another couple or two, at a dinner, and someone else in the assembled company causes the beloved to laugh. Internally you subject her laughter to some kind of laughter verifier; you evaluate whether the laughter caused in this case is genuine laughter occasioned by a moment that is legitimately funny in some way or whether it is simply social, a laughter of a kind that might take place at any dinner and therefore insincere, even if generous. But worst of all is how this peal of laughter, coming from her short, slender, blondish physique, has been coaxed forth by a guy with a harelip and a job doing something IT-related. The whole way home, you will think about this; on the subway, when there’s not really anything to say because you are both so tired, you will think about how the beloved laughed for a guy in IT. About what? About beer-making or county fairs? And you cannot get the beloved to laugh at all, or there is a ghost of laughter, a little bit of laughter that mainly recalls a time when true laughter once existed, and you will lie awake wondering about the former laughter of the beloved, and all of this wonder and worry will give way eventually to the nonexistence of laughter in the beloved, and you will wonder if the nonexistence of laughter should be a cause for professional counseling.
It’s not like you have that many problems. You can make decisions jointly, and you agree on some things, and you don’t fight terribly much, but the beloved never laughs, and not because you have given up trying but just because you don’t seem funny to her anymore. You are losing out, entirely, in the struggle to cause laughter, and because of it, the world, which was somehow kept at bay, becomes a thing that you can’t escape. Things go wrong that you can no longer fix, and when you come to this realization, that problems have completely crowded out laughter, that the beloved is not going to laugh again, and that there is nothing you can do at all to cause the beloved to laugh, this is the moment at which you attempt to impregnate the beloved in a hotel in Rome, in a charming neighborhood near many tourist destinations of choice. ★★ (Posted 1/11/2014)
Days Inn, 1919 Highway 45 Bypass,
Jackson, Tennessee, January 21–22, 2012
Although the bliss that I feel with K. in my life now is a significant kind of bliss, an ultraviolet bliss, a cohabitational bliss in the convenient and (relatively) inexpensive city of Yonkers, New York, it is not the case that we, K. and I, never have little moments of negotiation, and I am only being honest when I speak, for example, of the bed problem. The Days Inn, located not far from the Rotary Club of Jackson (where there is an annual luncheon on “salesmanship and the American way of life,” with guest speakers), is not notable for the excellence of its beds, and I simply have nothing to say about it except that it reminds me of our bed problem. We are not alone in our bed problem. Beds can be a significant issue with couples. There should be a therapeutic resource for couples struggling with the bed issue. To be clear, K. has always had a problem with chemical smells of any kind. She uses the technical term—off-gassing—and comes from a line of people who can smell a gas that to most others would be odorless and who are badly changed by their encounters with such gases. Our initial plan in the bed department, then, ran aground on the shoals of off-gassing, because if you read the reviews of the memory-foam-style mattresses, you will see that there’s a significant off-gassing component to the early phase of memory-foam ownership. And, you know, I always read the reviews. (I assume all of you who are right now reading this review of the Days Inn of Jackson, Tennessee, which cost $32.65 a night, the night
we stayed there, are readers of reviews, and some of you read my reviews particularly because you know that I am one of the top reviewers on this site.)
So after reading the reviews of the memory-foam-style mattresses and determining that the off-gassing components, so often spoken of in these reviews, were contrary to our needs, we searched for and found an all-natural equivalent to memory foam, one that felt just like memory foam, or so the reviews said, but did not have the dreaded off-gassing issue, because it was made of natural materials. This all-natural equivalent, which we were going to house in our three-hundred-and-fifty-square-foot apartment in Yonkers, the site of our cohabitational bliss, which we managed to afford through strategic subletting and, on occasion, living in the car for a couple of weeks here and there, was going to take up a significant amount of space, but it was going to be where we slept, which was important for K. and myself, and so we ordered the all-natural equivalent, a significant expense, and when it arrived, we were at first full of joy about the all-natural queen-size memory-foam equivalent, a joy that lasted a couple of nights, because there was no off-gassing in the land of Reg and K., but then things started to go sour. Though we had not slept on true memory foam and therefore had no way to know, K. nevertheless could not help feeling that the all-natural equivalent was not as soft as genuine memory foam, and she argued that her sleep had been slightly disturbed over the nights we had possessed the all-natural equivalent. We thought long and hard, and we decided that even though there was a one-year warranty on the all-natural equivalent, we would not return it yet, because it had required significant man-hours to get the thing delivered and installed in the three-hundred-and-fifty-square-foot apartment in Yonkers, and we didn’t want to have to go through the delivery process again (twice more, you know, because they would have to pick up the all-natural equivalent and then deliver another).
We determined instead that we would get a topper, which was not a word I knew until the moment that K. said, We should just get a memory-foam topper. A topper, you may know, is a thin mattress pad placed on top of the existing mattress and then affixed to it with a fitted sheet—less expensive than a mattress itself. When K. called the online mattress-ordering company, the sales adept she spoke to insisted that a memory-foam topper would not have the same off-gassing problem because it was, in fact, a thinner piece of memory foam and therefore featured fewer artificial compounds. Most people, he went on, ordered a one- or two-inch topper for their non-memory-foam-mattress product, and we should choose a height according to our needs.
But what were our needs, exactly? Our needs were to feel that a bed was a place of sanctuary, especially after the many ups and downs in the housing area that we had experienced, up to and including living in our car, and not because our parents were awful to us or because we were recovering from joyless marriages or what have you, but just because a bed is where a sense of shared purpose first takes root, and so we tried to evaluate our needs, in whispered urgencies, while the sales adept awaited us, and then of course he added that the two-inch memory-foam topper, while admittedly a bit pricier, was superior to the one-inch in terms of simulating the memory-foam experience, and so K. said, That’s right, that’s what we need, she said, we need to simulate the memory-foam experience, and so we charged it on our card. A week or ten days later, we had a two-inch memory-foam topper that did not off-gas significantly and that adequately simulated the memory-foam experience. I will say that when my child visited, which she began to do more regularly in those early days of the topper—that little gremlin of the interior spaces, who was happy, at least, that the space of visitation was an improvement over recent living conditions, I love it, I love it!—she immediately referred to the bed in question as the bouncy bed and exercised upon it in ways suggested by this sobriquet, such was the profundity of the two-inch memory-foam topper in terms of its luxury and enveloping qualities. To lay your head on the topper was like laying your head on the breast of your slightly soft librarian friend. It was like sinking into an acceptance of the afterlife.
The child loved the bouncy bed, but K., after sleeping on it for a couple of weeks, turned against it, thinking there was something almost swampy about the two inches of memory foam, which did not off-gas, it’s true, but which were otherwise a little bit too much for her. I can vividly remember the day she called the online mattress-ordering company again and described her experience to a different sales adept, who was probably exactly as good as the other. The two inches, she said, were just an inch or so too much, and even though the all-natural equivalent was a bit too hard on its own, now the bed was a bit too soft. The sales adept gave us the bad news, which was that our topper could no longer be returned, though he would be happy to offer us the one-inch memory-foam topper, which was more reasonably priced, because it was only half the size. (To this point the bed-shopping experience had been in the mid–four figures, or way beyond what was feasible without advanced use of credit card debt.) Accordingly, we purchased the one-inch memory-foam topper and removed the two-inch to K.’s former apartment in Long Island City, Queens, now sublet to her cousin, which she was hanging on to in case it didn’t work out with me, a fact that was understood without necessarily being acknowledged.
In due course, during which we reflected on our bedding experience so far, the one-inch memory-foam topper arrived, and we put it on the all-natural equivalent, and there were a couple of nights where K., like a cosmetic-surgery addict who is certain that this procedure has fixed all the problems, pronounced the one-inch memory-foam topper a profound success and claimed she was sleeping better than she had ever slept, although I could tell when K.’s praise of a certain thing was a ★★★ instead of a ★★★★ based on certain tonal features of her voice. She could say the exact same words—Awesome! Now that’s what I’m talking about!—and yet if you listened carefully to the tone, you would definitely hear in the tone the ★★★ instead of the ★★★★. So some time passed, and maybe we were simply exhausted by the bed problem, but despite the clear ★★★, we both pretended, as one, that the one-inch memory-foam topper was adequate to our bedding needs, because that is the way that cohabitational bliss sometimes works. The child, when she visited, that blob of single-digit girl matter who made me a better person, had no idea that we had gone from a two-inch topper to a one-inch topper, and still referred to the bed as the bouncy bed, and had to be relieved of her mud shoes, on more than one occasion, before getting onto it.
More time passed, and then, as you knew would happen, K. began to complain about the all-natural equivalent with one-inch memory-foam topper and said that it sagged in the middle a little bit, and so I volunteered to sleep on the side that she said sagged a little bit, anything to prevent K. from sending back the all-natural equivalent mattress altogether, because I knew when she did so we would again have to face the off-gassing problem. Her solutions would no doubt include scenarios in which I would, e.g., wait until she was traveling for her job, which at this particular juncture was the job referred to in certain circles as party planner, though this was no permanent gig, and then put the memory-foam mattress in basement storage for a week to allow it to off-gas while she was away. Or she would sleep in the “foyer” (three hundred and fifty square feet, remember) or return to her apartment in Long Island City (where, you will recall, the two-inch memory-foam topper now resided) while the off-gassing took place, whereas I was in favor of intermediate solutions: for example, rotating the all-natural equivalent with one-inch memory-foam topper 180 degrees and seeing if the sag was still present in the same spot, which would suggest that the sag had somehow to do with the bed frame or box spring and not with the mattress itself. This we did. And for some days it seemed as though K. was trying to say that the situation was now a ★★★★ situation again, but I could tell, each day, that the rhetoric of contentment was getting scaled back, however slightly, to a ★★★, and as a result of her ★★★, I myself started to feel a little bit ★★★, though this is not my no
rmal rating, and, as a motivational speaker, I need to be operating from a ★★★★ or even a ★★★★★ position if I’m going to be able to spread the word of self-confidence and positive messaging to the denizens of towns such as Jackson, Tennessee.
It was against the backdrop just described that I booked the room at the Days Inn. ★★★★ (Posted 1/25/2014)
Sleep Inn and Suites Tyler, 5555 South Donnybrook Avenue, Tyler, Texas, March 24–25, 2012
What the hell were those guys doing carrying plants around in their wheelbarrows at 7:00 a.m., and why were they yelling in Spanish? More like the Do Not Sleep Inn! I distinctly heard cámaras, or ocultación, unless that was a hypnopompic distortion brought on by the night before, about which more anon. Why the hell in Tyler, Texas, anyhow? you ask. Well, I’ll tell you why in Tyler, Texas. I had this idea that I might take my motivational-speaking business and give it a bit of sizzle, in order to create notoriety for my brand. And if you want to get real attention these days, you need a little religion, a little institutionalized ethical certainty, and I was thinking that perhaps I could get my foot in the door of that megachurch in Tyler, whose name is __________; the folks there agreed to take a meeting with us, with myself and my girl Friday, because we are attractive and presentable fellow travelers, well spoken, forward-thinking, and it was a pleasant meeting where they actually gave us lattes, which I wouldn’t have thought was a __________ kind of beverage, expecting, as I was, something a little more utilitarian, perhaps in the traditional Styrofoam.
If it’s useful, I can bullet some of the talking points of the meeting with the staff, which involved my describing the outreach and on-point messaging associated with my brand and the way I had in the past been able to bring men, especially men, back to the theological fold, at least where pride in family was concerned. I noted too that I had on many occasions spoken on the subject of the pollution of the spirit (or so I told them), and how the spirit should not be polluted, and how I personally looked askance at, for instance, a latte, although the one I had in hand, I hastened to add, was tasting mighty good, and if a person of my particular credentials should be needed at the megachurch called __________, I would be happy to render services, especially in pastoral settings, in the one-on-one of listening and sharing, in which I felt waves of compassion for the suffering of others. I liked teen groups, I continued, and K., who smiled brightly and wore a used diamond ring we had bought at an antiques store so that we would not appear to be partisans of any kind of alternative lifestyle, would chime in often, repeating the end phrases of my most powerful assertions. If I said positive outreach, K. would also say positive outreach. The fellow we were meeting with was called Peterson, and we had a fine conversation with him, and if he had administered a polygraph test, I would have passed a polygraph test on any subject.