Perhaps it’s all a question of physiognomy — faces can be so disorienting. There are people who carry their features around as though they had won them in a raffle, people who gesticulate at random and never quite understand what their own gestures mean.
But I’m reminded again that we hardly know each other; perhaps he was just looking at me like that to build up the nonexistent sense of ease between us that he considers it so imperative to affect.
“Well, our work is a pleasure, isn’t it?”
It wasn’t much of a comeback on my part, but he celebrated it with the burst of laughter he had been holding in from before, and which again seemed inappropriate. Or all too appropriate, if what he was really laughing at was my attempt to dodge his real question with some arthritic old joke.
Now that I’m writing this, it seems absurd to have given so much thought to a formulaic conversation. But this man has a knack, when you’re face to face with him, for making you think you’re hiding something. Or even for making you remember that that’s exactly what you’re doing. If we ever did talk about these things (which we never will), perhaps we would agree on that. Almost everybody is hiding something, and we ought to feel especially suspicious of anyone who is convinced of not hiding a thing.
“You think? I’d say we work for the pleasure of others.”
I laughed the strained laugh of our dinner companions from that other night.
“Or at least to facilitate it,” he added, no longer laughing, although it was just then that his eyes smiled for the first time.
“So, yeah. I don’t know how many stars you have to rack up before you can take a vacation, but I’ve got a lot of forks and a lot of seafood to get through this season. I’ve got bookings under my name all over the country the next six months, and I’m judging five different prizes. And I could yak on and on about all the talks I have to give. But actually, they don’t count, because I always rehash the same one — I just garnish it a little differently each time, so to speak.”
His boasting didn’t surprise me. Nor did I think any of it was untrue. I had rid myself a long time ago of the adolescent notion that people only show off what they don’t have. Vanity is independent of merit — that’s the mystery of the thing. Sometimes the former exceeds the latter, true; but sometimes it simply comes standard, out of sheer compulsion or habit. It’s not my style, but in cases like his, I admit I don’t find it wholly objectionable. Anything is better than false modesty — and modesty is always false when it isn’t superfluous.
What did surprise me, on the other hand, was that he had so many bookings under his name. Supposedly, it goes against the professional code of conduct. He must have seen it in my face.
“Well, I’ll leave you to it. The hotel’s PR rep is on her way over, you don’t want her finding out who you are. I know you’re a big believer in staying incognito.”
I don’t know how he knows. Gossip at the paper, maybe, although I understand he goes into the office even less than I do.
“I hope your minibar’s good and stocked, because I’ve got nothing I can recommend to you for dinner. They’ve really taken to heart the idea that ‘sauces are back.’ Or maybe they just never knew they’d gone.”
He maneuvered his chair with precision as he spoke. In a flash, he was already more than halfway to the other end of the bar. He turned back a little once more before disappearing.
“And good luck with your work. I don’t think either of us would ever end up here for pleasure.”
The guffaw he let out doubled as a greeting to the cluster of people that was heading toward him.
~ ~ ~
I went up to my room after having been run aground for an hour in the reading room, which was also deserted, and which had been reupholstered in coordinating shades of aquamarine. There were no stuffed bulls. What had survived, however, in a similarly comic vein, were the bell jars of wax flowers that I had missed in the lobby. In times past, they must have held solemn sway over the room.
The place was deserted, and there was not a single shelf, or book, or anything else in the room — except the sign at the door — that conjured the idea of reading. An ancient and vaguely familiar waiter came in a number of times to ask me what I wanted to drink. I could just hear the distant strains of the epicures lingering in the bar. Now and then, a chorus of laughter would play counterpoint to the immediately recognizable laugh of my page neighbor.
I can now admit to myself what I didn’t want to put into words when I was downstairs. I stayed there in the reading room in the hope of catching sight of my other neighbors. From the armchair I was in, I enjoyed a commanding view of the elevators, through the large archway that formed the entrance to the reading room. At any moment, the boy or the girl or both of them might have appeared, either on their own or accompanied by the owner of the voice who had shut the door in my face without knowing it. Perhaps I would have followed them out into the street or to the dining room; perhaps I would have chanced a conversation with them, from one armchair to another. But the elevator doors didn’t open once, and the hubbub from the bar was affecting my mood. I didn’t care much, just then, if they were truly having a good time or if all the guffawing was false. I was envious: it sounded like quite the party.
The waiter kept incessantly changing untouched ashtrays. I’ve just realized, as I write, why he looked familiar. Nothing to do with childhood memories. He was one of the maître d’s from the old photographs in the elevator, now with a lighter moustache. Apparently, he too had survived the remodeling of the Imperial.
I barely made it around the awful horn of that awful hour. Every so often, I would stop writing, look up, and check the clock; the elevators and the clock hands would be exactly as I’d left them. In the end, a soggy feeling of despair soaked through my body. There is no traveler who doesn’t carry it with him in his suitcase, and no hotel where it doesn’t come free with the room. We’re old acquaintances now, and I’ve had to confront the feeling on my own more than once. I prefer it that way, to tell the truth. There is only one melancholy worse than that of the solitary traveler: the double melancholy of traveling companions, each aware of how his own is made worse by the other’s attempt to hide what he’s feeling.
But I notice I’m feeling less brave today. Travel and all its private, asinine little dilemmas (how much shall we pay? where shall we eat? when should we sleep?) can degenerate into a creeping feeling of sadness, into that distinctive, identical desolation that lies in ambush in every room in every hotel in the world. Ten years ago it all felt less dangerous, more subject to objections, to bargaining; in those days, that hotel-room desperation was scarcely even a rustling noise behind the curtains or a claw reaching out from inside the minibar. It would come and then disappear again quickly; and in those days, deep down, I awaited its arrival eagerly, and even relished the thought of it circling hungrily around me, because I knew I had the battle won before it was started.
The distant tinkling of glasses in the bar — drowsier now, my neighboring columnist having perhaps gone home — and the underwater silence of the room of abandoned readings made me think about shipwrecks again, as though I were already under water, sitting on one of those armchairs bolted to the deck on the Titanic. It was better to jump ship while I could still break the spell, and the bell jar in the wax-flower-filled room; before the greenish armchair swallowed me up in its depths, or my notebook, irrevocably blurred, began to float away. I felt nostalgic for the little bedside lamps in my room. The same nostalgia that a man overboard must feel as he sinks, yearning for the ballroom chandeliers and the deck of an ocean liner, all embers and violin chords now and retreating into the pitch-black night.