In the small lobby with its registration desk the carpet is patternless, a blend of deep russets and failing greens pale as money. A crown of chandelier above the furniture. A palimpsest of dark low Mediterranean table, notched, carved as old chest, wood nailed across woodlike artisan’d slabs of condemnation. Two lamp tables beside the couch, higher but with the same vague apothecary effect, the tables studded with rounds of brass the size of shotgun shells, the lamps that stand it a sequence of diminished and expanded wooden pots and dowels. (It is a Hindu confection of a universe — the world on an elephant, the elephant on a tortoise, the tortoise on a lotus, the lotus on the sea.) The long faint and patient curve of the brown velvet couch between the lamp tables no greater than the natural slouch and slump of a man’s shoulders. There are four red lounge chairs of a slightly purplish cast like the cherries in chocolate-covered cherries. Velour, they seem to refract light, but it is only the oil slick of conflicting weave, weave set against weave like a turbulence of fabric. Where the buttons are set in the chairs’ soft backs, cracks radiate like geologic flaw. At the other end of the lobby — the furniture makes walls, creating an illusion of parlor — are four deep vinyl chairs exactly the shade of ripe tomato and glossy as shined shoes.
Rising above the southern wall made by two of the strange velour lounge chairs a large display board is fastened to the wall. The ledge at the bottom, like the ledges in banks where one makes out deposit and withdrawal slips, holds brochures like a miniature newsstand (points of local interest, Disney World literature, and, under glass, seven typed index cards with the addresses and times of worship of Ringgold’s churches: Seventh Day Adventist, Pentecostal, Southern Baptist, First Christian Church, Church of Christ, Church of Jesus Christ the Son of God, Church of God the Father of Jesus Christ). Above the ledge is a jagged globe of the world like a flattened, fragmented eggshell — Africa west of the United States, Australia between South America and Madagascar. The map is shaded, shows the off-white of sea level, the pale green of plains, the deep greens of hill country, the rusts of high ground. To the left of this a wheel radiates six 100-mile concentric circles of map that spin about Ringgold, Georgia, the center of the world.
He is more comfortable in the public rooms, the dark lounge with its mural Chickamauga and carriage lamps and the plain lumber of the bar like the gray timber of outhouse. Feels there the anticipation preceding a party, or, no, the sense rather of readiness, preparedness, some soldier security in the ordnance of bottles — the Scotches and bourbons and blends and gins, the handsomely formed bottles of liqueurs with their lollipop liquids, the brandies like the richly colored calligraphy on beautiful invitations (and thinks, too, of ink in old ledgers, letters, checkbooks), the vermouths and wines. The labels on the bottles are like currency. Even the glasses with their upright cords and sheaves of swizzle stick. Even the bowls of peanuts and pretzel. The bar itself a fortification, the gunmetal IBM cash register like some weapon of ultimacy, the cocktail napkins like gauze, like bandage, the infantry of glasses. The uniformity is reassuring. (The competent barman in his gold jacket, a very veteran of a fellow with all the sergeant major’s crisp demeanor.) The clean ashtrays, eighteen inches apart, with their closed blue Travel Inn matchbooks. Everything. The handles of the draft beer like detonators. The refrigerator units for cans and bottles. The ice machine. The cocktail shakers. The round measured jiggers on each bottle. Everything. Even the black cushioned ledge eight inches wide that travels the edge of the bar like a soft coping. Everything. The pleasant scent of the booze, a masculine cologne smelling oddly of air-conditioned afternoons in a cinema. Yes. All is readiness, all the equipment of business and seduction and solace. (Flesh is no drinking man, but even he can appreciate the peculiar decorum here, the clean, surgical rituals of such place. More than anything else there is that quality in the lounge, an aura of spiffy, readied operating theater. He supposes banks have this sort of potentiality before they open for business in the morning, that planes do before they board passengers for the day’s first flight.) Whatever, it is pleasant to take the air here, to see the spotless precision of the stools, correct as chorus line, disciplined as dress parade. (It is the way, too, his motel rooms look before anyone occupies them.) To take the air, deep-breathing the rich oxygen of contending liquors.
And likes, too, the restaurant — the Dixieland Room — the tables with their dinner-party aspect, the white overhanging tablecloths pleated as skirt and the bright blot of the deep blue napkins pitched as tent, discreet as wimple beside the place settings, the perfectly aligned silverware. He is pleased by the clean plates, the cups overturned on their saucers, and admires the tall mahogany salt-and-pepper shakers, the tiny envelopes of sugar in bowls at the center of the table by the netted red glass of candleholders. He likes the ring-a-rosy of captain’s chairs that circle the large round tables, enjoys the solid confrontation of chairs about the tables set for four and two, notices with something like surprise the knock-kneed angle of the chair legs. And sits to a sort of practice lunch, reads, the butter set before him, stamped BUTTER, the letters so smudged they look like Hebrew characters.
He walks the grids of the new plaid carpet.
He looks about him at the strange, dark, implemented walls. (No effort has been made to fit the restaurant’s decor to its name. The plans had been drawn up long before, before the two-day trip became a three-day trip.) They bristle with weapon, with ancient farm equipment, with plow and ax and hoe, with things he cannot name, all earth’s agricultural backscratchers, all its iron-age instrument, its homely spade, pick, harrow, sickle, and pitchfork, all its cultivant tool, its cusps and its blades like the housekeys of ground and rock and dirt.
Yes. He is pleased. He is proprietary. More than with anything he has yet franchised. He owns all this. Owns the spare, no-nonsense meeting rooms with their accordion walls. Owns the long banquet tables and metal card chairs that wait for the Kiwanis of Ringgold, for Ringgold’s Jaycees and Vets of Foreign Wars, for its ecumenical prayer breakfasts. Owns the swimming pool with its thousands of gallons of water pale green as lettuce, the blue-and-white rope floating through the blue-and-white buoys. Owns the turquoise-trimmed diving board, the surface of the board studded with friction, the shiny ladders that grow from the deck like great staples. All the contour pool furniture, the lounges of sunbath and the lanyard weave chairs, the beach umbrellas that rise through holes in the round all-weather tables on notched broad-gauged spindles and blossom above their scalloped fringe into a dome of bright pattern like wallpaper in kitchens. Owns the big Ford shuttle bus. Owns the playground equipment. Owns the 170 or so telephones. (He was, he realized, nowhere. If by nothing else he knew this by the hollow ratchety sound of the dial tone, the shrill feedback of voices like echo in tunnels. A phone company in exile. Mary was dead, the one who couldn’t menstruate. Mary was dead. She had complained of a tummyache, and when, after a week, it had not gone away, she entered the hospital for tests. She died on the operating table during the exploratory. They found a compost of ova, compacted, rubescent, hard as ball bearings, a red necklace of petrified gametes like a lethal caviar.) Owns — partly owns, rents the space for — the vending machine big as a breakfront — the Convenience Center. Behind the forty windows of the big console are collapsed bathing rings, water pistols, joke books, puzzles, nose clips like chewed bubble gum, swim caps, beach balls, lighter fluid, packets of Confederate money, decks of cards, nail clippers, Chap Stick, panty hose, toothbrushes, Modess tampons, Tums, hair spray and hand lotion, sewing kits, aspirin and Alka-Seltzer, Pepsodent and rubber combs, Vitalis, deodorants, shaving cream, razors and blades, Aqua Velva and a mystery by Peter M. Curtin.