Cosmic Hotel

by Russ Franklin

  She came to the sofa chair beside me with her book, Little Girl Blue: The Life of Karen Carpenter, and her wine, and I put my phone down.

  She eyed it. “Did he ask you for money?”

  “Elizabeth, he has made the greatest discovery in human history. Guess where he was calling from.”

  She hated when I started a statement with “Guess . . .” Her finger continued dropping below each line as she read about Karen Carpenter, this finger moving a remnant of a depressing speed-reading seminar we attended together years ago in a hotel I couldn’t remember, though she could surely remember even the weave of the carpet.

  “India,” I said.

  Her finger stopped on the page to think and she said, “Even India doesn’t deserve him.”

  She could talk about India as if it was no part of her, changing her citizenship as the moment and mood demanded, and could certainly make comments as if I weren’t half him. She was a self-reliant only child whose hoteling father and her mother brought her to the US when she was five. She had no surviving family members in the states, and she had started telling me early in my life, “The traditional nuclear family is not a necessary unit for success.” When I was a kid, I thought “nuclear” meant something to do with Van Raye’s work, and because of him we were a special “nuclear family.”

  “He said it was the noise of an advanced planet.”

  “They call it an exoplanet,” she said.

  “You pretend like you don’t read his books.”

  “I’ve never said I don’t read his books. I like the science if only he would stick to science.” She turned a page to see where the end of the current chapter in Karen Carpenter’s life was.

  “I don’t know if we should go to Atlanta,” I said.

  “What in the world are you talking about?”

  “Shouldn’t we wait to see what is going to happen? Everything is about to change.”

  After she sipped her Chardonnay, the gold meniscus ring shimmered inside like a trapped halo. “What does life on another planet have to do with the price of American Telephone and Telegraph?”

  “I hate it when you say that.” I was sure this was something her father said to her.

  “Will it help us go through middle management in Atlanta? Does it help us determine margins, the real margins? Will it suddenly make the next property and the existing structure a wonderful investment for shareholders?”

  “I don’t know. If he’s right . . .”

  She said, “You are looking for any reason not to do your job.”

  “God,” I said and put my hands over my eyes. “Why don’t we buy our own property, huh? We could have had the Desert Palm Inn last year. We’ve got the capital. We could have financed only 80 percent, conservatively. We are a banker’s dream.”

  “And when the Desert Palm failed, then what?”

  “Everything can fail.”

  “Ha, you’ve never been there when your own property fails. It’s so . . . it’s so public. Everyone knows. It killed my father and my mother.”

  She rose and went to the kitchenette. Over the bar I could see her refill her wineglass and pour me a glass.

  She said, “You don’t know how good it is to have a job to go to. We have no property, but we have this extensive knowledge nothing can happen to. Everyone in the business knows us and respects us.”

  “I’m not sure it’s exactly like you think.”

  “We do a job that no one in the world can do better and we are paid well. That’s how it looks to me.”

  “We have all this capital, what are we supposed to do with it.”

  “It’ll be yours when I’m gone.”

  “And what am I supposed to do with it?”

  She looked at me as if I were unbelievable. “Give it to your children,” she said.

  I turned my phone and looked at the SUBMIT TRANSACTION for $3,000 to Van Raye, which looked miserly now. Wouldn’t $4,000 make more of an impression on him?

  She came with my glass, sat down again, saw my phone and began, “He comes into our lives only when he needs something. You mistake this for a relationship. We’re going to Phoenix for some business development and then to Atlanta, and we will do our jobs. Control life, don’t let life control you.” She looked at me over the top of her glasses and said, “Have you tapered your medications?”

  “Yes,” I said, trying to avoid the subject. “You and Van Raye and me, we had a decent time in Sacramento together.”

  “He had a decent time. I paid all the bills, and he had a vacation. He’d just published Report from Earth, which was an economic failure. Are you following the doctor’s tapering guidelines?”

  I hit the SUBMIT button for $5,000, and I stood up and tugged the waistband of my pants so that my cuffs sagged an inch and bunched at my socked feet. I got in her direct line of sight and turned so that my back was to her but she couldn’t see my right foot. I held my hands out beside me like a high diver.

  “What are you doing?”

  I spoke over my shoulder. “I’m feeling a strange force in this room.”

  “You know I don’t like magic,” she said. Then she mumbled as though speaking to Karen Carpenter in the book, “He knows I don’t like magic,” and then to me, “Do you realize you’ve been on that medication for over half your life?”

  I faced the balcony doors. In the glass’s reflection a mosaic of lights shimmered from our living room and mixed with the stronger airport lights out there in the world, and I tried to ignore her question, which was a statement. I wondered if my cousin Ursula was flying one of those planes right now. I could see my mother’s reflection, formless on the couch behind me. I wiggled my toes to get ready to float right in front of her eyes.

  “I’m not looking,” she said very calmly, but I could tell from her voice that she was, and I did it, I levitated off the ground. Or that was the way it appeared to her sitting behind me—my heels floating off the ground a couple of inches. It’s a simple trick done by rotating onto the ball of one foot but keeping your heels together.

  “My God!” she said.

  I landed with a showy wobble and turned to see her face. She had her hand out as if she could block the trick.

  I’d gone to my first magic convention in Las Vegas when I was nine, and I got more duping delight out of tricking Elizabeth than anyone else in the world because I could tell that one side of her wanted to believe I had floated off the ground. Tonight, for the first time in my life, she actually said, “How did you do that?”

  “It’s magic.”

  She picked up Karen Carpenter. “My God, if you could apply the same passion to the business . . .” She snapped the book shut and picked up the TV remote. She turned to the financial channel. I plopped down on the couch perpendicular to her and took the remote from her and turned on the menu. “You don’t need to watch the news.”

  “Yes, I do,” she said.

  “No, you don’t. It’s too real. Did you watch the news when we shut down the Crowne Suites in Denver? No, we watched Follow That Dream. When we shut down Sun Resort in Phoenix? We watched Clambake and Jailhouse Rock back to back.”

  “Yes, I remember,” she said, “but I’m only interested in Elvis’s life, his biography, not the movies.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Cursing is a sign of low intelligence,” she said, but then, “his movies are completely unrealistic, but they are interesting if you know what was going on in his real life when he was filming them.”

  Under the category “Romantic/Feel Good,” I selected Viva Las Vegas. “Admit it,” I said, “you like to watch Elvis movies when you are feeling bad.”

  “This isn’t a bad night,” she said as her eyes actually read the FBI warning on the screen and she said, “Did you know when they were filming this, the tabloids obtained the stills from the wedding scene and published them and started the rumor that he and Ann-Margret really got married.”

  I knew when Elizabeth was quiet for fifteen minutes (El
vis driving into Vegas with his race car on a trailer), movie flashing on her face, she wanted to enjoy this, and I thought it would make me happy too. All I could think about was Charles.

  In this movie, Elvis, a singer/race car driver, is after swim instructor Ann-Margret. Every scene is an excuse to sing, the band always ready, but during the first interior shot of the Flamingo Hotel, Elizabeth said, “Look at that mezzanine. They don’t make them like that anymore. He was in love with Ann-Margret, but she was a Hollywood career woman. He wanted a mother figure.”

  Elizabeth was a sucker for the American celebrity biography, the more sordid the downfall the better. Every biography proved to her how corrupting her adopted country and success could be. She took pleasure in the spoiling and the spoils and the downfalls of the Kennedys, Marilyn Monroe, Karen Carpenter, and Elvis Presley, and I’m not sure that these stories didn’t comfort her, showing the high times, just like her younger life with her father and mother, but then everyone had to suffer the downfall just like hers, a once great business of hotels.

  In the movie, Elvis looks out his hotel window and sees Ann-Margret teaching a swimming class to kids. Her red hair reminded me of Ursula’s, though Ursula’s was deeper, nearly brown. Elvis grabs his guitar and heads down to woo her. She wears a red one-piece with buttons up the front and shuns him, though there is no reason for her to do so—he is handsome, charismatic, seems nice—but I think this was what girls were supposed to do back in 1964. Ann-Margret is beautiful, and she goes into a dressing room to change, and Elvis begins singing as he waits for her. She sings back from inside. Pretty soon they dance around the hotel pool, and everyone is watching them. Everything in a musical is perfect, and for a second I believed in Rusty and Lucky, and that perhaps things back in 1964 were really like this, but then Elizabeth’s tragic voiceover began, “He started taking amphetamines in 1958 in the army.” She put her feet on the table.

  “You are using Viva Las Vegas as a teaching moment?”

  “Look at the people there.” She pointed to the background. “Look at those people around the pool and the number of staff serving them. There are too many people in the world today, and everyone has money. Service like that can’t be provided to everyone. Everyone expected this treatment back then and we certainly gave it to them.” She clicked her tongue.

  “Elizabeth,” I said, my voice lower, not lifting my head off the back of the couch, “how wealthy was your father?”

  “He was trained as a banker in New Delhi before he came here. He worked extremely hard for everything he had.”

  “I know that,” I said, “but he owned motels and hotels here. A lot even by today’s standards.”

  “It was something back then,” she said, “but now, how many hotels are there in the world? Profits breed infusion of capital. The security is in the conglomerates.”

  She had been born Ekaja Sanghavi, and her father made her work at every level in the industry—housekeeping, engineering, and as a bellhop. She liked to claim to others how I’d been brought up the same way, but the truth was that my training as a bellhop had lasted one week and all the bellhops hated me, and I spent the days reading in the employees’ locker room. I had lasted about a month in housekeeping, had never valeted someone’s car, and she knew exactly how long I worked in all these positions, but she liked to tell people I had been from the ground up like her. She had one picture of the nineteen-year-old Elizabeth in her bellhop uniform, hands down by her side, not smiling but holding her chin up. This was six years before her father died of a heart attack.

  “What happened to his hotels?” I asked her. “I mean, I know they were sold, but the buildings?”

  “They no longer exist—Nashville, Charlottesville, and Tampa were the last ones to go, and there were some minor motor courts, back when motor courts could be nice. We are incredibly fortunate, but compared to where my father was when he was my age . . . we are far from that. But times have changed. The world caught up to us. The old wealthy are the new middle class. Why are we talking about this? I want to enjoy the movie.” She pointed at the television.

  Her Indian name, I’d never heard spoken, nor the names of her father’s hotels. I was sure the facts and figures of her father’s hotels remained in the archives of her mind just like all the others.

  She said, “This economy will not survive forever, and we will be fine. My father was a survivor.”

  “I think he did more than just survive,” I said.

  She shifted in the chair, lifted her chin to the television, and said, “Shh,” as though I was the one doing the talking.

  Elvis came through the saloon doors onto a stage and began singing “Bright light city gonna set my soul, gonna set my soul on fire, got a whole lot of money that’s ready to burn . . .” and it really did make me feel better, and I could tell she was enjoying this too, Elizabeth a classical trained violinist enjoying this music. Can anyone explain why something makes you happy?

  When she wasn’t looking, I turned my phone on and purchased the song “Viva Las Vegas” and started a new playlist, titled it “Songs to Beat Depression.” I had in mind that “Viva Las Vegas” would be the first song of many songs to play no matter what depression surrounded me, like a special drug when I needed it, and I could feel like I did right then with Elizabeth.

  Even before the movie was over, before Lucky and Rusty were married, Elizabeth went to the dining room table and snapped the latches on the case and took out her violin and bow. I couldn’t imagine another night of having to lie in bed and listen to the violin through the wall, or try to sleep with my ears plugged with tornados of toilet tissue.

  “The movie isn’t over,” I said.

  “You’re paying attention to your phone. We have to leave early tomorrow. I have to wind down. We’ve seen it a million times.”

  She tuned and began Beethoven’s “Kreutzer Sonata.”

  “In Atlanta . . .” I said, “I want my own room. I don’t want to share a suite. We’re getting on each other’s nerves. I’m just saying we need a little space.”

  “Quit saying ‘I’m just saying . . .’ That’s dead talk.” Her chin rested on the violin as she played softly. “The Grand Aerodrome is 672 rooms. You’ll have your choice. As long as it helps you do your job, and we stay on budget.”

  I watched Elvis and Ann-Margret eating dinner on a houseboat, but the slow second movement of Elizabeth’s violin sonata made the movie tragic, and I experimented plugging my ears with my fingers, not caring if she noticed, and my mind began imagining the sounds in the rooms around us, wandering to events I knew had to be going on in this very hotel, events of the traveling lives of ordinary people: the simple click of a door as a guest looked into her room for the first time, and there were the high-low tones of conversations somewhere; water gurgled through pipes in the walls; people walking in hallways, people plopping in chairs, silverware clicking in the restaurant, someone’s empty shoes hitting the floor, and a plopping of a turd in the bowl, a faucet running, one type of snoring became someone else’s, a swizzle stick tapped on the bar top, a man standing beside his bed swung an invisible golf club, the simple rhythm of his weight shifting from leg to leg seeking his perfect balance, and there was the distinctive cadence of fucking and the desperate clopping of masturbators, the metal snip of toenail clippers, all the human activity thrumming the building, the girders, waving through concrete and rebar. These were the noises emitting from our planet tonight like the sounds of Van Raye’s planet reaching us, and when that went through my mind I knew nothing would stop the sounds tonight.

  “I’m going to have a nightcap,” I said loudly.

  She looked at me over her music.

  I went to my room and put on my shirt and quickly knotted a tie. Walking back through the apartment, I said, “I am going to survey the guests in the bar.”

  She played softer. “I bet you are. You can’t stay out all night.” She closed her eyes to play. “We have an early day.”

  I
slid my feet into my shoes that were parked beside the door.

  “Oh, go have your dalliances,” she said, “I know you have to . . . and if it makes you work better, then fine. If you are going to charge another room, however . . .”

  I shut the door, stood out in the lonely hallway of the top floor of this Windmere Hotel, the door blocking out a surprising amount of noise, but she was back to playing loudly, and I thought about it disturbing guests in the other rooms but tried to make myself quit worrying.

  CHAPTER 4

  The woman in yellow turned out to be Fran from Charleston, South Carolina, and she’d changed into a different pair of slacks and a sleeveless batiste shirt to come and sit at the bar with her friend, and that was where I found them, and they kept beginning the stories the same way: “In Charleston . . .” but as the stories became increasingly personal, the preamble began to be “In Mount Pleasant . . .” and then Lisa pronounced that I should call Fran “Franni,” and they both, sitting to my right at the bar, shouted at the same time, “With an ‘i’!” laughing about how Fran tried to convert her name when they were AΔΠs at Clemson University.

  Now alone in the elevator with “Franni,” I kept feeling her phone vibrate against my thigh as we kissed, and I heard the wind chimes in my mind that always precede an erection.

  She had her arms around my neck, and in one hand she had the Amstel Light bar coaster that had “Roberta” written on it, a magic trick involving me ripping the coaster in quarters and throwing them into the bar’s trash receptacle and then reading her mind coming up with the name she’d written, and then I made the original coaster reappear completely whole beneath her own cranberry martini glass.

  Franni and her friend told me their stories, such as the fact they were going to Saint Clara Island in Florida to “have our tits done.” They couldn’t believe that I’d never heard of Saint Clara Island. “Go there,” Franni had said, “have your surgery and recuperate at the resort. Everyone on Saint Clara is getting something done.” I had pictured people dining with bandages wrapped around their heads like Claude Rains in The Invisible Man. I drank cranberry martinis and listened to Franni and her friend play the game “Real or Fake?” as other women came in the bar, and when her friend left, Franni had asked me the question as old as hotels—“Would you like to come to my room for a drink?”