His eyes when she’d said that. To understate, he wasn’t pleased. ‘Why not?’ he’d asked. ‘I’m the one late for a meeting and besides, you have to eat.’ ‘I just …’ she’d said, then ummed and ahhed and then remembered she didn’t owe him more than that and just said she’d rather not. If he displayed disappointment, she didn’t notice it, now solely preoccupied by the possibility of it spreading across her own face. To expedite her discomfort she’d expressed a wish that there would be no hard feelings. A good time had been had but more didn’t make sense as they were both only briefly in Texas and didn’t know when they would be again. He had heard her out, even nodded his head, and yet seemed to remain unconvinced. The unforeseen consequence of this, although he’d complied and swiftly dressed, was that she herself had begun to be less certain of the grounds for her stance. The thing about the coat, he’d obviously meant as a joke. And she actually was kind of interested in the taste of his home. Plus, after last night, he no longer felt totally unknown and perhaps he felt that too. These thoughts, in their turn, must have been what caused her to behave in a fashion which she now considers, frankly, ridiculous. Specifically, when he’d said, ‘Well, I’d better get on then,’ she had crossed the whole room to kiss him goodbye. And with a greater enthusiasm than her dismissal justified. Then she opened the door. He went out. She closed it behind him and has stood there ever since willing him, if she’s honest, to come back again. He appeared to have gone though, she heard the lift. The corridor had been empty when she first looked out. But then he had. Rung and knocked. Like a fool she’d opened up but, just as suddenly, remembered to not and quickly slammed it on him again. She knows her own mind, if nothing else, after all this time but … No, no ands and buts. She does know her own mind and this is not it. She is decided already and must not allow that choice to ever become undone. So, what will happen next? she wonders. Nothing will happen next. You have decided that nothing can.
She attempts to take comfort in the knowledge of her impeccable reasoning. After all, her record in these matters is clean. The years of residua circumvented should not be superseded flippantly. She is certain of the rightness of all of this. So, she ushers herself back towards the listlessness that has, for all these years, kept her in the manner which she wishes she preferred. Collected. Other side of the glass. But she liked his face. She liked his laugh and the weird way their bodies kept insisting on contact. This, however, does not alter the fact that the only place for impulse is in her past. She knows this. She has made it like that so everything occurring, after the old life stopped, would simply be an again. A kind of repeat. Nothing new. Pathetic really, when she thinks of it. If she allowed herself to, she might admit she’s grown tired of her own loneliness, which she really doesn’t want to have yet. Because it has come to be all I know.
so
so
so
The Imagined Room
A man told me a story, and it wasn’t just a story, and he thought it would make me run. And if that ending to his story had proved to be the story? Some choices are made only once, but that other path still reconsiders its merit within me now and then. My eye pressed to a spyhole in an unfamiliar hotel appears to be one such occasion.
So.
She sees myself standing in an imagined hotel room all arrayed like a Victorian bedchamber I’ve repurposed from some film. Four-poster bed and bolster. Only bare bulb lit – an invented authenticity but … I am inventing this so I can deck it out in any way I want. Conversely now, a real truth: it would have been my first hotel. If not the Savoy of my imaginings, he would have taken care to make it decent. He’d have been conscientious about that because I was so young, showing up there in the middle of the night and then … would have been staying on my own. I think he would have walked me to the foyer. He would have seen me in and ensured all the details were in order – breakfast ordered, payment taken – before taking his final leave of me at the lift doors or foot of the stairs. Would he have leant in to kiss my cheek goodbye? I can’t imagine him having not but, if coming here was the choice I’d opted for, we would already have been different. And, hard as it may be to gauge how we’d have introduced that space, this decisive going of our separate ways would certainly suggest a start. That said, now I’m in bed with the purely speculative any possibility might become fact.
Therefore, continue on.
Goodnight.
And to you.
Guilt and I step into the lift alone. While I press the button, guilt notices how quickly he turns and is glad when the doors slide shut. Then, aerial inside with the desolation I’ve wrought, I offer only silence to the joltering through floors. I have never been here, in either respect. Air freshener impeding the reek of my own stale smoke. But in the scuffed parquet, and polished rail, I detect traces of what may have been a heyday. Admittedly this is probably because I have no idea what to expect. There are no bell-boys in red suits or anything like that, which might have been a disappointment in another life – the one where my first hotel is an extra vagant gift in some far-off shared future which now will not be reached. I don’t want to think about that and force myself inside every second so none of me is anywhere else. I am here, only here. I grip my room key. It’s too soon for the plastic cards – not that I’d have known to miss them. Besides which, all of this is theoretical and I have nothing to prove … not least regarding my lack of expertise about hotel room security, thirty-five years ago.
God.
I feel the lift stop. I see the doors part. There are plaques with arrows. I take a left. The dank art hanging in no way distracts for who cares about hay and wains? Instead I aim for the broad brass 36, nailed about Christ-height on a white gloss crucifix. I go to it. I try the key. I turn it. I open it. I enter in. I close it shut behind my back. And suddenly I am all by myself, standing somewhere new.
So.
Now I am in that hotel room. Brown furniture. Brown drapes. A quick, and heedlessly, packed bag dangling by my leg. I slide the chain. I turn the lock. I probably, definitely, take my coat off and hang it on the door. Then I see myself, in her youth and shock, walk across the room – certain that she is indeed crossing it, uncertain of all else she is doing. Beneath her though, the very carpet conspires with the faux Victorian theme: cubes and blocks in beige and brown, gold and fawn-tipped leaves. Autumnal, would’ve crossed my mind, despite the mid-June heat, as if I had already passed through time and found myself in August. Oh, to be safe in August, far beyond this insoluble here – I might have thought. I would have thought. I think I would … maybe. But the air itself would have held me there, close to the knowledge it could only be summer. Even in the flat of night the mineral fumes London respires would have given it away. Also, I doubt there’d have been air conditioning there then but, if there was, I’d have been baffled by the mechanism. Dials and buttons I don’t recognise are best left alone I’d have thought and for God’s sake don’t break anything. Then I would have wished for him. Then I close the sides of the present down. I hold myself still in this alien place in which I have chosen to be. Having plumped for this unknown over something and, more importantly, over someone why is not too much to ask. But I’m not yet prepared for that. I’ll have to gather myself closer into sync.
So, I notice the solitary window is slightly ajar. Single-glazed. Held unsteadily by an old rope sash. Through it I see the matching windows of the hotel opposite. Then – because I now usually do so, chances are, I would have then too – I go across the room with the intention of sliding it up. And do. And pull the nets out of the way. Above me, a moon and cloudless sky. There might be stars beyond the night flights but the glow makes it tricky to tell. Inevitably, my – as yet utterly untravelled – self covets the journeys those aeroplanes make. The cities their dozing passengers will see – Byzantium springs to mind, irrationally, but I am a romantic back then. More reasonably, the oceans they’ll sail across in their sleep. What continents will be waiting once they awake and bother to open thei
r travel-bored eyes – I never seem to imagine specific travellers but then I haven’t met any of them yet. What I don’t fantasise is that they too head to hotels. Only skyscrapers. Yellow taxis. New York invariably, like that is the very best of the world, which would not have been an entirely incorrect assumption. I can think of worse places to rent a room and I’ve stayed in quite a few of them since. But even with all of that said, I would not have been completely unaware of my having, in my own way, already come very far. And I probably would have accepted how that very far – so far from the innocence of where I started – had, until now, proved to be everywhere.
Or would I?
No. That won’t fit. That’s what I believed before imagining this situation I’m in. But tonight I am in a strange hotel and, therefore, an ulterior me. Yes, that surely must make sense. Unless, of course, in reality it doesn’t. After all, it may be the case that the act of leaving him would not have left me changed. Perhaps, by my choosing to imagine coming to this place, I am merely absenting myself from what I don’t know how to hear?
But I did know how to hear.
But that’s not what you’re referring to here.
I think I might be complicating this unhelpfully.
You are and you know you’ll eventually get to that part of it anyway.
True.
Just keep going for now. Pick up from where you were.
So …
Maybe stars. Definitely flights. Heat and pushing the window higher. Plane trees visible everywhere, becoming the scourge of my hay fever which – still being London green – I have yet to acquire.
Then I turn my eyes from the sky to the roofs, to the street. To the double-decker through whose top deck I can perfectly see. As expected, across is another hotel. Its white block facade almost identical but with not a single light on upstairs. Only a lamp above their entrance and, as I watch, even that goes out. Followed swiftly by the lamp shining up from below me. It is very early. Or very late? Dark before dawn, is that the hotel way? I have no yardstick by which to assess the hospitality industry’s norms. Instead I consider all the lives asleep which those identically drawn brown curtains conceal – their also brown linings pressing against the indistinguishable nets. Some of their windows sit open too and, again, only an inch or so. What’s occurring in the wonderlands of their symmetrised sleep? They must already be long hours in. Were they combing hair or brushing teeth, masturbating, reading, watching TV while I was awake, listening to him, having life peeled of its skin?
I don’t know.
I don’t know.
At that age I still thought I could hear anything. And I’d already heard plenty of things. But they’d only ever formed the backdrop before which I’d been trying to construct ‘things’ of my own. Tonight, this night, his life had taken the floor while I’d assumed the role of the sheet-clad chorus. I became the door through which his story passed into the realms of Can Never Be Unsaid. And it was hard to hear. Not that he was, or ever could have been, merely another sad voice confessing its baleful history – and that’s not the vainglory of hindsight speaking, I knew it even then. He was more of a switchboard with the wiring ripped out whose adult life had been spent trying to intuit where it all plugged back in. And I had listened to him. And some of the details were very gruesome. And I was very young. And I still thought the house that the past lived in had a padlock on the door. That open didn’t mean open eternally after. And even this imagined self comes too soon to be able to understand. I don’t doubt though she’s doing the very best she can. I should really get back to her.
So.
Given everything that he had said, it does seem unrealistic to pretend those hotel rooms across the way would’ve piqued much interest in me. I would have been, as I actually was, incorporating his story into what I had known. Full of those words and aspects of him which I could now suddenly see. The other hotel’s clients’ rest, or rest-inducing activities, would have never crossed my mind. In truth, I imagine I’d have stood like rootless in there, growing gnarled by this reveal of a history I found unbearable, and trying to make some shape of it I could more easily name. Trying to make some shape of it that would justify my running away. Then finding, inevitably, the ache which comes after pain hurts far longer and more than the blow. Shame might be the name for it – it usually is – for the discovery of being less than the person you offered to be. I don’t doubt I’d have been feeling it and it would not have been entirely undeserved.
But no, back to this – the exercise will be futile if these digressions persist. So, I stand looking out at the hotel opposite. Then, with the Greek chorus returned to its place, and me reassuming an imagined centre stage, I decide – once another night bus passes by – I … I will look down onto the road.
I choose what I want to see. I know I am imagining this. I, in the here and now, am wilfully abstracting my own history. Because? There are a number of answers to this but today’s will be: I can never find my past where I think I’ve left it and, in his designated role as catalyst, he is the worst offender of all. He will never just lie down where he lay. I keep discovering him wandering around inside me again. And the worst of it is, he will never allow me not to be the girl he knew back then. But, while I know what he means and he has the best of intentions, she can be very hard to endure. She was always so sure. I suppose we both admired, and now regret, her loss of certainty.
Oh …
Dear God, save me from this.
And he can’t, because he doesn’t exist.
Instead I cast a flustered eye down.
Down to there.
And I see him below in the empty street, lowering his head to light his cigarette. If that’s the case, he’ll be using a match because he’s left his lighter at home. I think I’ll remember noticing it lying by his bed as we left. Unusual for him not to remember it himself but unusual is how I’d describe this whole night. So, while I tentatively signed the hotel registration slip, I imagine him asking the sleepy desk clerk for a matchbook. Then, he’d have quickly pocketed it before we said goodbye. I’m glad to see him lighting up. He should have something to take the edge off and it could be so much worse. I can’t say that I’d say no to one either, and this is a smoking room, but I’ve also forgotten mine – probably at his too. This is the kind of little punishment I enjoy giving myself for being unable for what he shared. Because he wouldn’t have punished me. He’d have been so keen to prove he wasn’t holding it against me that he wouldn’t have noticed an extraneous thing – which would surely include a lighter folded into a duvet on the unmade bed in his room. Unlike me who, having chosen to be up against nothing, now has plenty of free time to observe.
Which I do.
When the cigarette lights, he drops back his head. Inhale and exhale. I think he’ll think he’s done right, finding me this room. And he has too, but is he now suffering pangs over what else he decided to do? How well I’ve come to know that dread: the stomach comeuppance of disclosures made to someone who turned out to be entirely unsuitable for any such disclosures at all. That’s not how I want him to think of me, and I’d rather he wouldn’t regret anything but even then – even imagining – I knew him sufficiently well to hazard an accurate guess. Besides, from my vantage point up here, I can see the dejection in the angle of his shoulders. I would really rather not see but the grey streetlight he loiters beneath refuses to become my accomplice in this. He is the one with whom it forms an alliance, arranging itself in such a fashion as to ensure I see his every twinge. In how he rubs his eyes. In how he rubs the back of his neck. I can see all of it. So, when he drops the match, I shut the sash. As he walks away, I pull the curtains tight. I will tolerate nothing being privy in here to the standard I have failed to meet out there. Either that or I can no longer bear looking at the empty place where he stood.
Too late, too late will be the cry and now, on top of this, here comes the time to be the choice you made.
So.
I stand golden in
the sixty-watt of my brown room but, cloistered in here, what future do I imagine I’ve chosen? As I’ve just fled from serious complexity, one more greatly inclined to be infantilising, I would expect. But who imagines alternative personal futures fraught with difficulty? Why would I have? Or no, why would I have then? When you are young Better usually hovers around all the entrances or, at worst, The Same. Even back at brass tacks, when I remained in his room, it never occurred to me that what would become of us both was in the offing at all. Small mercies, I suppose, and that sort of thing. But perhaps – to lie about this differently – it all worked out another way? And why not? I hear you can try anything.
Strange Hotel Page 9