“I treat hotels, even sleazy specimens,” says poet and cultural critic, Wayne Koestenbaum, in his book, Hotel Theory, “as utopias.” How do hoteliers do it? I wonder. Or, rather, why? Who’d take up the profession without boundless optimism, boundless generosity, boundless cynicism about the nature of human desire? I’m here to try on someone else’s version, not of my life, but of an ideal life, cut to my budget. Like the towelling robe in the bathroom, it feels good but it doesn’t really fit. Nevertheless I’ll put it on. I insert my keycard into the slot. The handle turns. I’m in.
They’re keen on black here. And white. The floor of my room is slate. A huge pale bed rises from it on a central platform. I stumble like a pilgrim as I approach, missing a step in the dark gulf of the floor. I pick myself up. My bed must be six feet square, seven. Goldilocks, I spread myself across it to check. It is wider than I am tall.
Now I am in, what do I do? I had envisaged my hotel-self working all afternoon, my bed strewn with books and papers but, somehow, I can’t get started. However much they try to shake it up, provide “experiences,” hotel terminology exists to soothe and relax. Staff pillow conversations with long, formal sentences. Not “No Problem,” advises Doug Kennedy, provider of training programs for “guest service excellence” and “front desk profit optimization,” but “It was my pleasure.” Or “You are most welcome.” Hotels — hushed — have a problem with the active voice. The passive evades clock time and diffuses responsibility (not “We’re serving your dinner at eight,” but “Dinner is served.”). To stay in a hotel is never like living at home. Hotel is a nothing-doing, but hardly through what I would call choice. Like Miss Golightly, I am “travelling.” Nevertheless I have — simultaneously — arrived.
What should I do in a hotel room? I look around for clues. Some of the things in my hotel room, pretty as they are, are merely for use and, as such, uninspiring. Others, being purely decorative, are puzzles without solutions. The eternal hotel-room question is what am I allowed? Should I pull the curtains — is there a cord? How do I control the air-conditioning? What is the WiFi password? Can I open this window? I put out a hand to stroke the gilt serpent, hand-stencilled by a well-known graphic artist, that snakes across the wall. It is scaly with crackled lacquer. Electric buttons are hidden in the wallpaper. I push one and, leaning toward the head of the snake, I hear a faint hiss. As I turn away a useless vase of purple liquid, poised on a small tray-table, overbalances and crinkles, almost mutely, into cartoon diamonds on the carpet. Did I do something wrong? Hotel bedrooms are invitations to failure. In my time I have accepted many of these, eventually concluding that I am unlikely to survive a hotel visit without breaking something. Then there are the personal tripwires: How much should I tip? When should I call room service? As someone trained to ask for little, to make as little fuss as possible, I am in truth badly suited to my job. In order to become a guest I must learn to adjust the horizons of my desires.
A knock at the door. It’s the manager with something complimentary.
“You like the room?”
“It’s. fantastic.”
“You would like me to show the bathroom? It is very Philippe Starck influence. Influence — is that a good word?”
“Yes.”
In a city where most apartments have space for no more than a shower cubicle, my en-suite has a bath. As white, almost as big, as my bed, any bather is no more than a specimen on a marble slab. I notice the egg-shaped toilet, wall-mounted slightly too high, like the bed. There is the black toilet paper waiting beside its white alternative and, on the shelf, a “babapapa nostress”: a squeezy toy you can press to relax, around it a band of cellophane that tells me it’s not included in the deal.
“We are a boutique hotel,” the manager explains, “so we have various items available.”
I’d been under the impression that “boutique” referred to the size of the place and its independent style, not to the fact it sold things.
She indicates a menu by the bed. The hotel offers other overpriced toys: “erotic” chocolates, jelly-flavored condoms. As well as the “nostress,” you can buy incense and “calming” bubble bath. The hotel sells you misbehavior, then something to deal with the fallout, both in candy colors. There’s a pointed notice in the bathroom: “If you would like to take away a souvenir, our robes are for sale at reception.” The hotel mistrusts me. I’m not surprised. There’s no right or wrong here. Despite the bedside drawer’s insistent Bible, the usual moral standards do not apply. This is my holiday, my treat. I’ve come for what I’m owed, and more. The disappointments of my life may revenge themselves in petty larceny, but, even then, will I get what I’ve paid for?
How am I in a hotel? Although enraged, I whisper. But I will enthuse when required. I will delight in what is put in front of me, unsure I would delight in such a thing at home. A tour of the hotel? For my review? I’d love to. I follow the manager. Shame works its way under our skins as she unlocks door after door, as we cross thresholds to find guests’ clothing unpacked, underwear straddling the chair backs, surprised electricians balancing on sinks to repair light fittings, cleaners removing bin-loads of empty bottles. More shameful yet (in a world where the guest must appreciate the value of everything and the price of nothing) are the workings of the hotel’s mind laid bare. “This is our most expensive room,” my guide is forced to admit. “This room is designed to appeal to ladies, this to economically-inclined families. This room is ‘specially equipped for romance.’ ”
“We didn’t want to be like the big hotels,” the French-accented hotel manager tells me. “We have only seven suites. In this space, we could have had fifteen. Big hotels are sometimes a bit. impersonal. We wanted to do something more personal. We want the ghosts (she modulates the vowel in ‘guests’) to feel at home. not like in a ghosthouse. But the hotel is also not somebody’s home. We want ghosts to be left alone — or to have conversations with other ghosts if they want to.”
Desire, being not so easy to fool, however, feels a disjunction between itself and what arrives to answer it. In that gap, disgust grows like mold between tiles. Intimacy was something I’d come to escape; didn’t she understand? But I cannot avoid the ghosts.
Like Greta Garbo in Edmund Goulding’s 1932 movie, Grand Hotel, I wanted to be alone, but in truth I was never left alone. It was not my fellow guests who, like me, seemed to have come here to get away. Other ghosts with passkeys stole into my room unannounced, if I did not bar them by hanging a totem of cardboard on silk rope around my door handle. They left small tokens of their presence: a newspaper, the corner of a sheet turned down; a single melting chocolate on my pillow; toilet paper folded into a v — sometimes no more than that. In the corridors they hardly disguised themselves. It was strange how — once outside my door — they were willing to be seen in the flesh, their tiny treasures spilling from tall steel shelf-stacker trollies. Inside my room they dissolved into a mist of might-have-been, but I always met one pushing through the lobby in the morning, in the way of breakfast.
A ghost erases the present by repeating the actions of the past. That’s what haunting is. Was this what I wanted from hotels — to be haunted? Was it the gleaming tiled bathrooms I hadn’t cleaned, was it the beds I hadn’t made, that magically remade themselves every time I left the room, my own presence constantly smoothed over? Was it the clean sheets that had nevertheless been slept in by so many others: old and young, sick and well, couples and singles? Was it the clinical paper that put itself between me and the room’s objects: the “police — do not cross” strip across the toilet, the miniature soaps wrapped with no more than one end-user in mind?