But hotels are never successfully haunted. Hotel ghosts might go through the motions but it’s homes (usually stately) that are haunted, by ghosts that are in the family, or at least familiar. A ghost is an exegesis — it comes to point the finger, tell the true story — but hotels like to make up their own histories in keeping with the fashion, remake them each time they make up your room.
A hotel, restless, cannot be a home, not even a home away from home; far from it. It puts the mockers on home and all that is homely. A ghost must be seen by the living in order to exist (if we are all dead, a ghost is nothing but a neighbor); a hotel sets itself apart from home and, in doing so, proves rather than denies home’s existence.
Sigmund Freud in his 1919 essay, “The Uncanny,” tells how the word heimlich ranges in meaning from “homely” to “private”and from “private” to “secret,” and thence to “dishonest” and on to “uncanny,” and that unheimlich, home’s apparent opposite, stands for no more than the uncanny inner workings of the homely, uncovered.
A hotel’s secret is that it’s only a seeming mini-break from the rights and wrongs of home. A hotel is an occasion for unheimlich longing. That so few hotels are satisfactory may be part of the trick. We expect our desires to be addressed and dispensed with. Instead, they are put on ice. We’re numbed. So what: What-isn’t can be richer, more ornamental, than what-is. But, in constructing a hotel, you can’t keep out the human element. A hotel’s glamour is its guests. We must live up to our hotels. We’re on display; we’re what’s being sold. No need to ask us in like vampires: we invite ourselves. We are paying ghosts.
I return, with the hotel manager, to my room, to find the broken vase spirited away without mention, end of story. My mistakes do not come back to haunt me. Instead, I must learn how not to fear the consequences.
* * *
Going down to breakfast the next morning I comply a little with my surroundings, put on lipstick. As I enter the lobby I am aware of the looks, the smiles, some of which have been paid for, but not by me. As a reviewer I am only performing being in a hotel, after all. The hotel might be footing my bill, but it won’t let me get away with nothing in exchange. As I’m not a consumer, it will gobble me up through the words I will write. I am but a tiny organ of the system with no immediately obvious function: a hotel appendix.
I find the dining room closed. On its terrace a group of women from a fashion magazine shoot a model in a floral trouser suit against the lush wall of blossomless chic bamboo. They have hung expensive dresses on cheap wire coat hangers in the expensive door frames. I have to duck under them to pass. Why did they choose this hotel?
A hip hotel is a palace on an edgy street, or a ghetto in a bourgeois neighborhood. Like fashion, what makes it is always its difference, as required as the loneliness we slip on as we cross a hotel threshold. The fashion women sit at a garden table in a mess of colored pots of eye shadow, ashtrays, discarded hats and shoes. Like me they are dressed informally: jeans, Converse, army surplus jackets. They are familiar with luxury; intimately connected. They promote it, sell it, but they do not participate in it.
Forgetting breakfast, I wheel my case down to the lobby, preparing to haul it back down the cobbled hill to the Metro and my next hotel. There’s no rest for the wicked.
As soon as you’re in a hotel, you’ll want to get out — at least that’s what the receptionist behind the desk is there to tell me, proffering a sheaf of maps and discount entry offers. I catch myself longing for the cheap trashiness of the real. In the street outside the hotel I know there are stalls selling “I heart” T-shirts and snow globes enclosing the city’s monuments. I know there is bad takeaway coffee and that there are queues of tourists happy to drink it. I check out.
As I wait for my receipt, I flick through telephone-directory-thick architectural magazines. The fat bearded man still haunts the square of chairs, or he is there again. Is he rich? Like many rich people, he seems mildly but constantly irritated. I notice a notice by the front door. The designer chairs in the lobby are only temporary. They are for sale. As is the art on the walls.
The rich, fat man takes delivery of a Japanese takeaway. He returns to his table in the corner and unpacks two large trays of gleaming pink sushi, three of glutinous, translucent rice, two closed brown paper bags and a cardboard noodle box. It is all for him. He has everything he could wish for, more. In the privacy of the secret hotel, he arranges his trays on the low table before him and, bending uncomfortably at the waist, reaches for his chopsticks and begins to eat through them, one by one, with dogged, unpleasured stolidity. The delivery guy waits for a tip. Then fades. He doesn’t get one.
The Belgian philosopher Raoul Vaneigem feared such encounters.
“Remarks, gestures, glances tangle and collide, miss their aim, ricochet like bullets fired at random, killing even more surely by the continuous nervous tension they produce. All we can do is enclose ourselves in embarrassing parentheses; like these fingers (I am writing this on a cafe terrace) which slide the tip across the table and the fingers of the waiter which pick it up, while the faces of the two men involved, as if anxious to conceal the infamy which they have consented to, assume an expression of utter indifference.”
But perhaps that was what I wanted from hotels: the impersonal; the comfort of strangers. Orderly ways to be. The same big joyful con as in the movies where everyone knows that the performers, like dinner-jacketed waiters, will leave through the service entrance in jeans to climb onto their mopeds or slouch off to the metro. Hotels are for those who understand performance: ghosts, actors, women. To hold onto its clientele a hotel must understand performance well enough to create a certain amount of traction.
Still, there’s no place like home, and the hotels knew it. As if in apology for this deficiency, when I arrived at my hotels I was offered whole hospitals of fruit baskets and flowers. I was offered bottles of wine and sometimes, if I was lucky, champagne. I was offered chocolate lollipops, boxes of pastel macaroons (these things never happened at home!). I was offered, once, oddly, a hook on which to hang my bag beneath the breakfast table, stamped with the hotel’s enameled crest. It was decorative, but also suggested that during my stay I should be wary of loss.
There was always something, the hotels suggested, that I should worry about losing.
What did I gain? I was not paid for my hotel reviews, but neither did I pay for the promise of escape they provided. Along with escape, I was offered the prospect of return. These hotels wanted me for life. When I left, one gave me a tiny tinkling golden charm to hang around my neck — the hotel’s logo. One gave me a key ring, another a potted candle, each embossed with the hotel’s gilt initials. Would I return? It being my job to review many different hotels, almost none of which I could normally afford even on special occasions, I never did.
By the end of one month during which I’d lived in hotels almost all the time, I got sick. Inside the white stone walls of my last hotel — a medieval convent whose rooms were of the mushroom-colored, Zen type — the bath would not run hot. No longer able to tell whether this was my fault or someone else’s, no longer having the energy to call room service to get it fixed, I took a chill, and went home to a place where what was expected of me was less formalized, if more rigorous. There, if anyone gave me anything, something would be expected in exchange, though there was never any tariff fixed to the back of the bedroom door, along with instructions for escape.