She leaves, he leaves. Three females left, each sitting alone. We do not cohere because women in a restaurant are nothing cohesive. We slide off one another, between us no solidarity. A woman alone must be compared to other women. A woman alone is dangerous. Without context she is ageless (or maybe only less aged). Completed neither by other women nor by children, she is an invitation to completion by a man.
(Or maybe her incompleteness is magnificent.)
There are no men here eating alone, though there are men eating together, in twos, threes, fours, wearing business suits so we can tell they are not here strictly for pleasure. The men without business suits are eating with women, who take their pleasure for them. A hotel is no place for a man without a business suit to take pleasure, alone.
I like to see a man eating well, so well that he could almost take over that function for me. They get so hungry, and the food is absorbed so quickly into their square bodies that in me would produce nothing more than spare rounds of flesh. Men are so content to be helpless. My husband can’t operate the coffee machine, my father cannot cook a meal, has no idea what goes into the food he likes. They are content not to know the most basic ways of servicing their bodies.
Perhaps these men are different.
What is there to do in a hotel restaurant, alone, but watch other people? I find myself never a woman — never at any point. Then I hear of women being spoken of and look, and there they are. I see them, just as men do. I see men employing them, loving them, buying them glasses of wine from the bar. But when I look back, it’s like a trick of the light. From where I sit, I see no women, just this person, and that person.
I do not go into
The Swimming pool; the billiards room; the gym, the club. Someone once told me the rich are not afraid to use anything. But perhaps hotels are not for the really rich. Is a hotel an inconvenience, in the end?
6 IN A GERMAN PENSION
Do you suppose that now you have finally lighted your bonfire you are going to find it a peaceful and pleasant thing — you are going to prevent the whole house from burning?
Cast:
Dora:
a teenage girl
Freud:
a psychoanalyst
Herr Rat:
a guest
Mae West:
a sex symbol
Katherine Mansfield:
a writer
KM:
her avatar
I
When they could no longer stand it, or themselves, Freud’s clients went to a hotel. And when a hotel no longer met their needs, they moved to a spa and, from there, to a sanatorium.
A hotel already knows there is something wrong with you. A spa hotel is a melancholy place catering to ordinary unhappiness, sanctioning the desires it treats. A sanatorium is a clinic, but is also luxurious. I’m not sure when a spa hotel becomes a sanatorium.
I have been ill several times in hotels, as though I chose to go there not to recover, but to be sick, to get rid of something, to have my illness out of the way of other people, and their interference. That way, I have kept well and sane a good deal of the time. What good did it do me? I don’t know. I only knew that not to be this way could have hurt others obscurely in ways they might not themselves have understood.
— Doctor, doctor, I think there’s something wrong with me.
(No, I meant to say I feel there’s something wrong with me.)
— Where do you feel it?
(The patient is always the straight man.)
— In lots of different places. What do you advise?
— Well, I advise you not to visit any of those places again.
Some aches become me. It becomes difficult not to sustain them. When I am sick, putting on clothes feels fake. Washing my body is washing something belonging to someone else. Where should my illness take place? I can hardly imagine an out-of-body experience, wouldn’t know where else to go. I could seek asylum in a hotel to get away from it all (as if I ever could), but there are diseases that strike you in hospitals, diseases, perhaps, of hospitals.
To be in a hotel is to have a complaint, or to feel the tension of being about to complain, or to have the possibility of complaining, which is not possible at home. It is difficult to find a hotel for an angry woman but, at home, who would she complain to? If you have a complaint at home, you keep it to yourself, more shame you. You lie on your bed, and then you have to make it. Every day.
From what do I wish to be cured?
I must find something.
I want my temperature taken hourly, my pillow smoothed, my corners hospitalized. I want cool water and a straw, I want to be referred for treatment. I want to be referred to in the first person plural. I want to begin to refer to myself in the third person singular. I want my body parts to have personalities, as though I were in charge of an unruly playground. I want them to be disciplined. I want to be gently smothered by authority, all for the good of my health, to eat strange things at regular times, to be weighed and not to measure up. I want it to be time for something to be done about me; it’s too late for me to do anything for myself. I want to be told to do things, then told to do nothing. I want to be put into unfamiliar machines. I want the machines to do something for me. I want hydrotherapy, psychotherapy, physiotherapy. I want it all to hurt, just a little more than they say. I want to be nursed (oh yes!), I want to be gently, but firmly, physically humiliated. I want to be a hopeless case. I want them to say there’s hope; I want to be out of danger, I want to be brought back from the dead. I want life support. I want my body and my mind to be preserved by “hypocritic” oath. I want to be the stain on the bathroom tiles. If I am here to be ill, I will be. I am here to lack something, to uncomplete myself. I want to convalesce but never leave, because everything outside the hotel is sick.
The reality is, I get sick in hotels. But what I’m sick of isn’t hotels.
I used to call it hypochondria.
I didn’t want to call it anything else.
I blocked it with the name, perhaps. Words can do that. Some words are cul-de-sacs: they prevent anything enacting off the page. They’re just as good as aphonia.
II
A proper disease involves distance, and systems: trains, police, border controls, quarantine, passports, room numbers, bank-card numbers, and somewhere to locate it.
(You never go on holiday where you live.)
Dora’s dad was taken out of the family to be cured. His cure was physicaclass="underline" it was located in a spa. Dora’s cure was mental. It was presumed to be located in a psychologist’s office.
When Dora, or her father, are ill, they go away from home, where they recover. When they return they slowly become ill again. Diseases are not always caught in the street. Sometimes they’re familial. “He was sick before the marriage,” said Dora’s aunt. Perhaps she means syphilis, a family disease that Dora’s feared her dad had passed on to her, as well as to his wife. It was a disease that did not come from home, neither from his childhood home, nor from the one he made with Dora and her mother. It might have been caught in a hotel. In any case, it took up residence in Dora’s home, and made it necessary for Dora, her father — and, sometimes, her mother — to leave home, to search for a cure.