by Lisa Zeidner
People lurched or glided past like luggage coming down a conveyor belt. Some were threadbare, some spanking new. Many were hard to tell apart. At heart was a hunger to be claimed. To be met. By the human beings whose pictures you carry in your wallet. To not spin round the claim carousel, forlorn and unwanted. To not turn out to have missed your life as you’d miss a connecting flight.
Most people, if you yanked them from the throngs and sank your hand into their secrets as you’d search their luggage, you’d find—not much. Deodorant and a change of clothes. Pathetic. But there was, in the pathos, a kind of grim and shining truth. Once you knew, it could make you a misanthrope, or a Christian. You could hate mankind, or love it. But the harder reaction was to not judge them. That required not getting too distracted by the clutter of details. All the bumper stickers of identity, the neckties and hairstyles. All the tiny, useless keys jingling in the tiny, useless locks—all the craving and striving. You had to not be a foreman or general contractor but say: so people’s identities are constructed like birds’ nests. That frantic and fragile. So what? Most of the time, they manage to hold together.
From my plastic chair at the gate I could, if I chose, connect. I could make a friend, seduce a stranger, even pull out my cell phone and call my mother. My mother loved me! If I died, she’d cry! Occasionally a man passing would seem so startled by me, so drawn to my awareness matching his own, that we might pass, in some drama, as meant for each other. That delicious, complicated shiver of recognition in our click of eye contact. This also happened, occasionally, with older women, widows—a calm acknowledgment of loss, like what I’d shared so sweetly with Ignatia. But most of the time I was invisible. I just sat: a trim, professional woman with a black suitcase on wheels, exactly like all the other black suitcases on wheels. My anonymity was both comforting and suffocating. A sexy veil and an oppressive shroud.
In a Twilight Zone episode I’d seen as a kid, a guy flipped a coin to pay for his newspaper as he did every morning, except this time the coin landed on its edge, neither heads nor tails. As a result, this man could now read minds. At first he assumed this would be a useful skill, but it turned out to be a curse. He was almost driven mad by the cacophony of covert thoughts. This episode had haunted me enough that I’d discussed its plausibility with my mother. I must have been eight. I still remember what she’d said. “Only God can read your mind,” she’d told me. “And even He would rather not tune in, probably.” I must have been in her lap, because this memory trails after it another memory of her stroking my hair in the lazy way she had, separating the strands to run some through the underside of her fingernail. Or reaching out to trace, with one finger, the path of my eyebrows. She touched my face and hair the way, if you were reclining in a canoe, you’d dip your hand into the calm lake. Or, sunbathing, pick up sand, let it slowly go.
At airports I tried to read people in that rhythm. Just notice things, with no point or urgency. But it was difficult. What I understood was a burden. In some sense I was waiting for the coin to once more land on its edge, as finally happened in that Twilight Zone episode, and set everything right.
Better hotels instructed staff to clean the rooms with the doors closed, carts safely inside. But they didn’t want to startle any guests returning to their rooms, so they hung MAID WORKING signs on the doors, which rather defeats the purpose of disguising which guests were out. My routines worked perfectly.
In Pittsburgh, a housekeeper named Doris let me into my room on the business floor—too much added danger, I fretted, for free peanuts in the lounge, but I managed to coast in just as the natty concierge was away from his desk, and took the chance. Out the window a huge digital clock, cantilevered on a hill across the river, flashed all night. “So many bridges, so little rust. Coatings from Miles.” Paint, presumably. Someone else’s product and headache.
If I stayed free of charge in each familiar hotel only once, I had between ten days and a month—nine cities, a day or two, three tops, in each. Obviously, repetition would increase the odds of being caught, although each hotel had shifts of clerks, alternate housemaids, multiple floors; the same routines could be trotted out afresh in different months and/or for slightly different audiences, making for infinite possibilities if, like the bigamist with a wife in every port, I could manage to keep my stories straight.
I started a computer file. Date, city, hotel, room number. Key card functional? A space for comments (“claimed to have period”). At three in the morning in Akron, after a swim, I even developed a macro for sorting this information into columns, with the computer prompting me: Housekeeper name? Length of stay? This would join the long list of functions my computer already performed, like alerting me to acknowledge people’s birthdays. (It would soon be my brother’s. I did manage to find a card in the lobby gift shop and mail it, with a reassuring P.S. about my condition and busyness, thinking, heavyhearted: birthday cards? I can’t do this anymore.)
Kramer left more voice mail. “Ken is quite concerned,” he said evenly. “As am I. Please call.” It was difficult for me to hide my exasperation in my answering-machine assurances that I was alive and well on what was, after all, my job, that my days on the road were numbered, but that I’d like to enjoy them in what, I stressed to Kenneth, was solitude.
“If it isn’t someone else,” Ken demanded, “what is it? Some sort of existential thing? Or do you need me to, what, ‘spend more time with you’? Sure love talking to myself. Fuck this. Hey, fuck you, actually,” which made me smile.
I’d always liked Ken’s straightforwardness. We’d fallen into bed on our first date, which came the day after we met, and while that was hardly unusual protocol in 1980, we’d never needed smoke-and-mirrors, stripteases out of silk, the game theory of seduction. What others might consider Ken’s lack of bedside manner I found a refreshing clarity. So his suspicions were frustrating. I almost felt as if he was prescribing adultery, for easy diagnosis. Stupid: one night, wet from the pool, I caught myself in front of the mirror, watching my hair drip onto my goose-bumped nipples, thinking that sex with someone new might not be a bad idea.
Then I did get my period, or thought I did, which explained it. A curious tic of the human female to crave sex then, the body’s last-ditch, kamikaze effort to salvage the egg. Even in grief, I’d always gotten my spasm of premenstrual horniness. That night, idly masturbating, I paused to wonder whether real homeless people ever did this too, late at night, alone on their grates, or whether their sexual urges got as crusted-over as their toenails.
I stopped picking up voice mail, telling clients that the system was unreliable. That complicated my life, since, like Ken, many of my clients couldn’t seem to master e-mail, so I had to check in before appointments. Between that and the crime macro, my schedule felt more structured than I would have liked.
My problem, I now realized, was going to be weekends. I would not be inconspicuous at hotels on Saturdays, among the wedding guests and stray vacationers.
I’d started in Cincinnati on a Saturday, but that was Ignatia. I was not as close to Doris in Pittsburgh, which is where I stood naked before the mirror the following Friday night.
Saturday was very hot. I closed the vent on the air conditioner under the window, opened the blinds to the sun, shut off the air in the bathroom as well, put my purse and laptop under the bed as was now my custom, and went to the pool.
By the time I returned, the room was broasting. I opened the vents, then went out in the hall to search for Doris. “Whoo!” I said, bringing her into my room and fanning myself. “Air conditioner’s not working!”
She put her hand over the working vent, shrugged her, puzzlement.
“I need to change rooms. Who’s at the desk, Steve?”
“No, Cindy. Should I call down?”
“No, I’ll just talk to Cindy myself.”
Whereupon I left Doris to clean the room, headed down the hallway, and ducked into the fire stair in my bathing suit and standard-issue white towel. Sa
t on the steps for five minutes contemplating the cinder block before I returned to announce that Cindy was moving me to 1502, the room that I knew Doris had just completed cleaning, because they weren’t sure when maintenance could get there. I gathered up my things and, with hands full, asked Doris if she could let me in.
This was dangerous. While the business floor would not be jam-packed on a summer weekend in Pittsburgh, there would be upgrades. If caught, I could tell Cindy I’d arranged things with Steve or Steve I’d arranged things with Cindy, shaking my head in surprise that there was no credit-card imprint. I reminded myself that this wasn’t pinball, golf, or pool. I was after no unbroken track record, and could always crack out the old card if the situation demanded.
But no one disturbed me.
The only hitch was that they locked the doors to the pool at 9:00 PM.
Doris was on days. I recognized no other housekeeper to bribe or cajole. The freight elevator in the basement, however, was open, and went straight into the locker room of the penthouse pool, where an open closet had been stocked with fresh towels. It was exhilarating to swim alone with moon through the skylights.
When I noticed that what I’d taken for a period was spotting only, the Tampax, with that curious texture they get after swimming, hardly sullied, I decided that my schedule might be messing with my schedule. Was determined not to make too much of it, as I’d tried to swallow the automatic disappointment at getting the period to begin with. If nothing else, to be this out there mentally ought to free me from watching my body for pregnancy as if the train of a long-lost loved one were arriving.
I stayed Saturday and Sunday and on Monday flew to Lexington, Kentucky, where I made a substantial commission on the sale of a new valve that looked like a $2.98 plumbing part, rented a car, and drove to Louisville. When I finally sludged through the swamp of my voice mail, there was even a congratulatory call from a VP in charge of product development at Ohio Chemical and Surgical Equipment, commending my get-up-and-go.
The Louisville hotel, like several others on this part of my route, had no swimming facilities. At home, I belonged to a fine health club with an excellent pool. It was not a YMCA, though I’d once toyed with joining, so I was entitled to the day rates at the local Ys when I traveled. But I was scared off this plan after hearing a story from a colleague, who had come back from his laps to find his locker open and his combination lock gone, along with everything else he’d worn. He’d had to fish through the filthy, forgotten apparel in the lost-and-found bin in order to find something to wear home.
One could, of course, avoid taking valuables to a pool. But not so easily on the road.
Many of the hospitals on my route were university-affiliated, and universities usually have great pools. Sometimes people arranged to get me access. But it was nothing I could count on, or had ever needed to count on. Now I found myself wishing I’d had the foresight to acquire an administrative pass to some of the places on my route, which could probably have been arranged with only minor string-pulling.
I always tried to stay in hotels with real twenty-five-meter lap pools, rather than the fifteen-yard pools—basically very large bathtubs—standard in so many venues. Alone in a hotel pool, I could swim on a diagonal. That helped some. But even then, one could not do real laps. The exercise was more in the friskiness of the flip turns. And then there were the occasionally inevitable establishments that offered no pool at all, such as the hotel in Louisville.
In Louisville, I remembered my friend returning to his locker. Coat gone, and socks. Credit cards and driver’s license—all of identity to be painstakingly reassembled. I thought of him barefoot, in the puddles caused by his dripping bathing suit, in the middle of winter, wondering if he had lost his mind and had simply forgotten which locker he’d used, as you sometimes panic when you cannot find your car in a mall parking lot. Also stolen: an antique watch that had belonged to his father. The insurance company informed him that it was not very valuable after all. For years he had treasured this watch only to discover now that its value was purely sentimental. It would have been better for him not to have known the truth about the heirloom’s value, as it would have been better for me never to have heard about my husband’s affair. When my friend told me this story, holding up the rubber Swatch he’d gotten as replacement—happy hour, beer at a TGI Friday’s near the office—my eyes had fogged up for him.
I shouldn’t need to swim, was what I told myself. I shouldn’t need anything.
Eleven days on the fly. A high point. Without life as a distraction, my work was going great guns. At forty-one, my swimmer’s body was in its best shape ever. Everything extraneous was being whittled away, melted down, until only a core self remained. The self would feel vulnerable, like the stub of an uncapped tooth. I accepted that, expected it, even relished the sensation of rawness.
In Ohio, home base, the distances between appointments were shorter, so I had to drive—ostensibly my own car, its mileage tracked for tax purposes. Surely I could rent and avoid the panic that would be precipitated by Ken finding my car gone from the garage. But then my expense reports would alert the office that I wasn’t going home at all.
Furthermore, I’d be more traceable. I had not yet even been aware I was hiding. If Ken asked, my secretary would tell him where I was. He was my husband. And clearly he had asked, since I was greeted, at the hotel in Toledo, by an overnight box of mail from back home.
Ken sent everything, indiscriminately. The August issue of Hospital Development. A postcard from a colleague vacationing in Rome. Bills, several overdue. He sent no note, but he’d circled the return address on the envelope in red.
What was he thinking? Did he really imagine that a checkup reminder postcard from my dentist was going to make me feel homesick? I had no more lust for the clothes in the catalogues than a nun would. I felt so exasperated at Kenneth’s miscalculation that I actually drove to a used-car dealership, with the idea that I might buy a car cash, as people in the movies did, and take on a new identity. But I never got out of the rental car. I was not that far gone.
By day thirteen, I felt almost cocky as I made my way past the cleaning cart into a just-finished room, and ducked into the bathroom to put on my swimsuit while the girl, back to me, was noisily vacuuming. Waited until she wheeled the cart away before I left, to make sure I could leave the door unlocked. I could do an efficient number with a bobby pin by now, not picking the lock but jamming the mechanism at the base just enough so that the door only looked closed. But it didn’t work here. I had to leave the door cracked. I returned from the pool to find that the door had been locked for me, and when I tracked down the housekeeper for my well-seasoned forgot-my-key act, she challenged me, narrow-eyed, to alert the desk.
“I can’t go down like this,” I objected.
“I’ll send someone up then.”
“Fine. Let me into the room and we’ll call together.”
She did. She watched me press 1. “There seems to be some confusion,” I told the desk clerk. “Just got back from the pool—let me dress and come right down.”
It was bound to happen eventually. I was a little sad that it had to happen in Scranton, where my options for other lodging were so limited.
I didn’t have to pack, since I hadn’t unpacked. Even then, I felt no particular rush at the prospect of being caught. I am told that shoplifters, who are mostly female, want to be caught. I don’t think I did. I wanted privacy, not attention. “He seems to have me in another room,” I told the housekeeper. “Thanks for checking. I’ll go get the right key,” and I went downstairs wet-haired and quickly out the exit, as she’d known I would.
The hotel in Wilkes-Barre had no pool. It was downtrodden and demoralizing. I marched past the check-in desk and took the elevator to the third floor, where a maid had unlocked a series of the rooms assigned to her, to see whether there were any nasty surprises in store. I tried a new routine that would only work somewhere with security this lax. In the hallway,
the maid’s inventory sheet or whatever they call it rested atop her cleaning cart. I could see her in the room in front of me, making a bed languidly, distracted by a talk show on the TV. With her stub of a pencil I checked off a room two doors down as already cleaned. Then took the room. This would give her pause, but not for long. The rooms all looked the same, after all.
The room could have benefited from her services. There was pubic hair on the bathroom tile and wedged into the grout. The air from the fan was sour, brackish, lifting an almost doggy smell off the humid carpet.
I brought in dinner from McDonald’s. Actually I had acquired the food earlier in the day, coming back from my appointment at the hospital, so I would not have to go out again. Congealed burger, fries hard as if lacquered—that food is not terribly pleasant to eat cold. Despite throwing the bag out down the hall, near the ice machines, I couldn’t clear the oily scent of the fries out of the room.
I slept very badly.
When I awoke, a man was standing at the foot of my bed. I was naked, and he was centered between my legs, looking down at me as an obstetrician would.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “There must be some mistake.” He held up his key card, as if to prove that it had admitted him to the room, and shrugged his bafflement.
I was too startled to pull up the sheets. I lifted myself on my elbows and focused. A chubby, chinless man in his fifties with lots of hair—kin of the pubic hair. But where was his luggage, if he’d been checked into this room before I took it? Or, if just checking in now, why had the room not been cleaned?