And that’s because I’ll start with its rooftop deck, which, following the overhaul, is only open to guests during the day, and at night to customers of the outdoor bar they’ll set up there in the summer. It’s the centerpiece of the new facilities. At least, that’s what they’re calling it. As you know, I research these flimsy reviews as a plain-clothes guest, and I must say that, as of now, it isn’t an easy place to visit.
But I insisted. And I’m afraid it wasn’t just so I could recount the experience to you here. I have a weakness for rooftop decks. As a child, I used to love going up to the one on our building. It wasn’t all that high, but the world, or the city, or at least the courtyards on our block (the three came to more or less the same thing), when seen from above like that, promised adventure. Thick foliage bloomed and garage roofs sprouted here and there, all of it invisible from sidewalk level. And the windows on the other side of the road suddenly seemed to conceal a gold mine of youthful intrigue.
I’ve said it a thousand times in this column, and you’ll have to forgive me for saying it again: to sleep in a hotel is to return to one’s childhood. To that time when the bedding changed itself and a comforting, turned-down sheet kept guard over the four corners of the bed during the night. Climbing out onto a rooftop also reawakens the intrepid, domestic explorers we once were.
The one at the Imperial could not be visited. Which was a shame because it’s sure to be one of the city’s loveliest (and there’s no such thing as an ugly rooftop deck, so that’s saying something). It has its hidden little corners, its views of downtown and of the mountains in the distance — all in the shadow of the two towers on the facade, which from close up have an air of ruins of long-forgotten civilizations about them.
Not just anybody could go up on the roof of the building I grew up in, either. My mother had wrangled a contraband set of keys from the doorman. Sometimes, in early summer, at siesta time, when the smell of respectable stews hung in the air on the landings and not a whisper was to be heard behind any door, she would go up to sunbathe. She wore a swimsuit under her brightly colored dressing gown and would take a book with her that would come back down unopened.
Sometimes she would let me go with her. Now, I’m surprised to think of it, because silence was mandatory, and running and shouting were not allowed up there. For one hour, the two of us would become thieves, partners in a crime committed in broad daylight, walking on tiptoe across the searing roof at four in the afternoon.
As I say, it wasn’t a particularly beautiful roof — there were no plants or awnings, no sheets hung out to dry. The rough floor tiles somehow both scorched the soles of your feet and made you shiver. In the middle, there was a white, windowless little hut. Out of the slats in its small door came the squeaking of gears, the grunt of machinery: the elevator pulleys stirring themselves as someone, deep down in the pit of the stairwell, went up to their apartment or down to street level in the middle of the siesta heat.
Sometimes a French neighbor of ours, younger than my mother, would already be there when we arrived. She seemed to exaggerate her accent in jest, and she didn’t move except to dovetail one cigarette with another. She may or may not have sunbathed topless. And I may or may not have invented the memory of her perfect breasts. But in any case, she was different, and she seemed more attractive to me up there than the times I would see her down in the lobby, when, wearing her street clothes and a smile, she would make me feel like I was her co-conspirator, and all the blood would go to my head. I’ll say it again: that roof was nothing out of this world. But for me, its rusty door did somehow open onto another world.
Somewhere you will find sheets on a rooftop, however, is at the new Imperial. They hang from recently erected trellises, forming canopies and covering the sofas — their plastic still on — that surround the bar in the middle. They might look better in the months to come, be flattered by the summer nights. But for now, the impression is pretty bleak.
It could be that the management know it, too, because getting up there was more complicated than getting ahold of the keys to the roof terrace of my boyhood. Only after a number of visits to reception, a flurry of phone calls, a lot of to-ing and fro-ing on the part of the staff, and the odd disconcerted look did I get them to open the glass door that leads to the roof. This was without any subtle exchanging of tips, I should point out. But let this be a warning to the unsuspecting guest: the views are worth the effort. But you will have to earn them.
~ ~ ~
This is no good, and they won’t like it at the paper, either. They’ve grumbled lately when I’ve written things like this. You’ve got a very personal style, they’ll say, but this is a review column. Childhood memories can give a piece some flavor, but we can’t have them taking up the whole page.
And these were memories I hadn’t revisited in awhile; I’m sure that if I hadn’t gone up to the roof, they would have remained in the deepest basement of my mind for a very long time. I’ve come to the hotel bar to write and to warm up. I can’t write at the tiny table in my room, and the idea of going back to sharing a wall with my now silent neighbors was making me nervous.
There’s no point sitting on the roof with the way it’s coming down out there. After all my insistences that they open it for me, the bellhop made a face when I only stayed up there for three minutes. And of those three, two were just to make him feel better and justify the panic that had descended on reception when I went down to say I wanted to see the roof.
“They haven’t finished setting it up. In fact, it’s still not officially open.”
Luckily, the twin receptionists’ shift was over. There was a girl there now, also very young. With her, at least I could read the irritation writ large on her face.
“It’s not going to be very nice, with the way it’s coming down out there.”
And the truth is that it wasn’t. But I was irritated by her irritability. There was still not a single guest to be seen in the lobby, and it didn’t look to me as though the bellhop had anything better to do. The elevator control panel had a lock next to the button that took you to the roof. He turned the key in it in silence, and we didn’t talk during the ride. Nor did I allow him to follow me with an umbrella on my little walk around the roof. The whole scene was suddenly seeming stupid enough as it was, without him playing the movie butler into the bargain. I told him to wait for me somewhere he could keep dry. And that didn’t go down well, either — I think he was pleased that it was pouring down and that the whole thing was a disaster.
I walked over to the edge, more to get away from his eloquent poker face than out of any genuine curiosity. It smelled of turpentine and wet sawdust. The streetlights in the square came on right at that moment. They steamed orange in the rain. A hushed dusk, without ambition or intrigue, was falling over the withered horizon of rooftops and antennae. I couldn’t quite see the windows of my empty apartment from up there as I had thought I would be able to. But I do think I was able to more or less make out my building’s rooftop deck. I can’t be sure; things are very different when seen from that height and I have never, in twenty years of living in that building, thought to go up on the roof. From a distance, it didn’t look very different from the building I grew up in, which in the end never quite delivered on the adventures and mysteries it promised.
Or perhaps it did, and I didn’t know it.
I leaned out further so that I could see the facade of the hotel from above. Almost half my body was hanging over the edge. All the while, I could feel the bellhop’s disapproving gaze boring into my back, and I would have loved him to think I was going to jump. Now that really would be a nuisance, for him and for the entire Imperial hierarchy — no establishment can survive the suicide of the critic reviewing it. And there could be no more personal review, of course; even my editors would have to admit that. The sort of farewell to my column that would really make a splash.