Do hotels have switchboards anymore? They must. You can still call room to room, and press 9 for an outside line (which costs!). Now everyone has a mobile, there must be easier ways of being connected.
In her dictionary dream, Dora dreams she is at the train station going from, and to. She remembers either end of her journey. She does not remember the connections.
FREUD
Ambiguous words are like switches or points at a railway junction.
I can talk to you here in the hotel, and you will listen — not via the switchboard but the WiFi, that sometimes costs extra and sometimes does not — but I cannot talk to you about anything that matters. Outside the hotel I talk, but you do not listen, or I say things ambiguously, perhaps.
When I am in the hotel, you say things to me that I love. Sometime you ask me to come back. You can only ask me when I am away.
The stairs (The elevator)
I Going up
The stairs in the lobby are impressive and central.
Or, alternatively (in some small hotels) the lobby is under the stairs.
Everyone looks at the stairs, but most people use the elevators, which are hidden behind a screen, as though elevation were embarrassing.
Freud associated dreams of climbing stairs with the sensation of sexual exertion. At the time he treated Dora, Freud’s clinic was upstairs from his home, which was in the apartment beneath.
I don’t know if his building had an elevator.
DORA
(Describes her dream)
I see myself particularly clearly going up the stairs.
(I have tripped up various hotel stairs, evaded reception, the parlor plants, the stair rods, the emergency lights, the fire extinguishers, laughed, been shushed, laid myself down on single beds, alone or accompanied. if not in body at least in mind: one man I kissed goodbye on the street invited me back to his hotel. and there were still others to whose hotels I would surely have gone, if only I had known where they were staying.)
(Did) FREUD (say to DORA)
Will you come up sometime, and see me?
(Where was Mrs. Freud all this time? One floor down, perhaps.)
DORA climbs the stairs to Freud’s consulting room.
I climb the stairs to my hotel room.
II Going down
In another dream, Dora dreamt there was a fire at her house:
DORA
We dash downstairs and, as soon as I’m outside, I wake up.
When I go down in a lift, I get the same sensation in my stomach as when I’m coming.
Freud says nothing about sex and going downstairs.
In case of fire, the hotel notice warns me, do not take the elevator.
The corridor
Is next to everything is an inconvenience in which all doors are identical in which the floor which normally recedes dominates in which there is carpet on the walls sometimes the ceiling even in which there are no windows out of which it is difficult to get into somewhere else although this is its function in which elevator doors snap to and fire-escape fire doors are airtight in which each corridor on each floor is identical which has to provide maps and the floor number by the elevator to avoid confusion in which there are sometimes amenities which are also landmarks the ice machine the fire extinguisher the chip in the paintwork and (there used to be) the elevated ashtray.
The door (key)
When Dora stays by the lake, her father stays in a hotel but she stays in Herr K’s home. She does not have a key. In Dora’s home the dining room is locked. At home, Dora’s brother is locked in his bedroom, which is on the other side of the dining room. At Dora’s home, the larder is also locked, and Dora must ask her mother for the key. In Herr K’s house nothing is locked. She does not have the key in Herr K’s house, but instead of being unable to unlock, she is unable to lock. Herr K has the keys.
In my hotel, I have the key, but so does housekeeping. Someone can always get in when I am not around, or even when I am. Nevertheless, I lock the door at night. When I am home, but not with you, I lock the door, and put the chain across, which I do not do when you are there.
DORA
There might be a mishap during the night.
At home there are no internal locks. Why would there be?
FREUD
The case has opened smoothly to my collection of picklocks.4
I have lived in relation to desires, often other people’s. It is easy to slot desire in. There is a hole in my side into which someone else’s desires fit. It’s only a matter of finding the right key, a key to the code, which is made of words. I must not want the key always to be a man.
FREUD
No one who disdains the key can ever unlock the door.
In the hotel, the key is a card. It looks just like a regular credit card and acts that way too. You slip it into the slot beside the door until the light goes green. The hotel reads the code, and you’re in.
The bedroom
How soon do I unpack, admit this space is home?
There are so many things I could do here that I could also do at home, but I do not use the gadgets, which resemble, but are unlike, those I have at home: the flip-down ironing board, the trouser press, the hairdryer on its long air-duct tube that will only work with the pressure of a cocked thumb, the mini-bar. These things set me against the hotel authorities. I could put my own champagne in the fridge, but it wouldn’t fit. Everything reminds me: the hotel is not on my side, not really.
The hotel suspects even me of wanting to steal its coat hangers (quite rightly). The hangers are rings threaded onto a steel bar, with wooden shoulders hooked on below. Oh they are strange, like people who lose their heads, who fall apart too easy. What would be the use of them, outside this place? They all have a screw loose.
I thread my clothes on, obedient.
My dress hangs alone in the wardrobe, the shape of a woman with no one inside, no head, no legs. Even if it had legs its feet wouldn’t touch the floor. I take it down. I wake up, my clothes on the floor, or tangled in the sheets’ whiteness. Wear colored underwear; it’ll be easier to find after. Whatever the decor, the sheets are always the color of erasure.
Some hotels are decorated entirely in white. I stayed in one once, in a white city. It was a white box.
THE WHITE HOTEL
The white room is dedicated to a sense of well being, providing fresh white products. The terrasse concepts have a private roof-top outdoor terrace with its own jacuzzi.
In the white hotel I stay in a room on an upper floor. It is square, and everything in it is white. The square bed is high, like a bed in a hospital, high enough to need square block steps leading up to it.
The square French doors lead out onto a small right-angled balcony. The room also has smaller, square, double-glazed windows that don’t open. The microwaved supper arrives in a square white bowl.
THE WHITE HOTEL
The room is white hence the name of the concept. The bed looks like a table. The bathtub looks like a canopy with a plexiglas “bath sky dome.”
Below in the courtyard, square white umbrellas.
Because the sun gets very white here too.
The white hides the hotel’s sharp corners.
FREUD
The two families had rented a floor in the hotel together, and one day Frau K had announced that she could not keep the bedroom which she been sharing up to that point with one of her children, and a few days later Dora’s father gave up his bedroom and they both moved into new rooms, the end rooms which were separated only by the corridor.
At one time Dora had slept in Frau K’s bedroom.
Frau K is white. Frau K is ideal. Except she is not.