The Plaza Hotel
by Charlotte Gill
THE LOBBY IS PLUSH, creepy and vacant. "Because we just reopened
last week," Karen, the front-desk attendant reassures us.
"We're new here," I say.
And new, Matt and I, with each other.
Brass fixtures, replicas, claret-coloured
runners tacked down onto virgin hardwood. Ceiling fans jiggle,
cut up the air. What she means is, it's a building with history.
A former downtown rooming house that can't shed its ghosts.
"It's great," I say, "just
not what we expected." What were we hoping for? A haunt full
of bare bulbs and bad smells, ruinous habits and regret? We've
stayed in such places, witnessed paintings of bullfights, drapes
the colour of cheese balls. We'd have stayed no matter what we
encountered. We're as in love with disappointment as we are with
bottom-end prices.
But now there's no reason to suffer.
Everything's been renovated. Very renovated, and it's beginning
to feel like a high-ticket night.
Karen's blazer matches the carpets.
We're dusted with road filth. I want to catch her looking twice
at his dirty fingernails, the oily smears down the thighs of his
jeans. Or at my luggage, a grocery bag of toiletries dumped from
the medicine chest in my apartment. She seems not to notice, slides
us the keys to several rooms so we can inspect. "Every room
is different," she says.
MATT ASKS IN cavalier tones
if we can prowl around the honeymoon suite. I blush, creep back
to the old black-and-whites on the lobby walls. Canada's Mother
of the Year dines with John Diefenbaker. A couple, circa 1940,
stand together in front of a bread truck shaped like a big white
loaf. The woman's expression is pinched. The man wears a sliding
grin as if, beyond the camera's reach, he nips at her ass with
his fingers.
THE OLD OTIS has a solid wooden
door that must weigh more than a piano. The machinery rumbles
and clatters up to the fifth floor, where the honeymoon suite
is a letdown, a fiasco of ruffle and plaid. The bed, a mammoth
cast-iron thing canopied with white netting. There is a draft
of conditioned air, mingling smells of fabric sizing, curing paint.
We escape into the bathroom, where we've been promised there's
a claw-footer big enough for Matt, who's got a long stretch for
a body. Who's a putterer with stone and wood, the last in an uncanny
series of my carpenter-type companions. I know he doesn't wear
underwear or own bed sheets. I'm pretending to think I could like
him that way.
We bumble into something of a kiss
while he gropes for the light switch. "Don't turn it on,"
I say. What if there's no tub at all? Just a shower curtain in
more screeching plaid.
The room's high, narrow windows
look out onto the main street, a corner of parking lot. Matt tries
to open one, finds it painted shut, resigns himself to leaning
on the sill. "Look," he points down into the darkness,
"there's someone breaking into your car." I see for
myself. In the parking lot, a man with curly hair and a leather
vest slivers something into the lock on my old car.
For some reason I fling the room
key at Matt's feet before racing out, as if I'm not quite sure
I'll make it back. I hear myself pound down tunnels of deserted
corridor, then dash out the first exit I can find, an old door
revamped with a push bar and safety glass. Out into hot summer
wind, down four flights of fire escape, heart thumping with the
adrenaline, I decide I'm poorly equipped for the occasion, for
hypothetical outcomes, for ugly possibilities.
But I'm no dame in a movie, just
a girl in a life. Life, where situations good and bad end as quickly
and inexplicably as they begin. I land on the asphalt, find myself
stymied by a locked, barbed-wired gate. The man fiddling with
my car door has disappeared, and I'm left in an orange glow of
streetlight.
I hear Matt's feet on the metal
steps above me. We climb back to the fifth floor only to discover
the door we've passed through has locked behind us, and suddenly
sleep seems terrifically far away.
Out here, the hotel is a century
of mismatched additions, a puzzle of rooftops and ladders. The
older ones slapped with layers of tar paper, the newer ones, lawns
of stone chips. Newer still, the Cold Beer and Wine's buzzing
neon. We roam in search of openings.
Eventually we come across the chambermaids'
smoking parlour: a sunbrella, a couple of plastic chairs tipped
against a table. A door, of course, without a handle. I dig my
nails under the steel security plate with a secret desperation.
I feel Matt's eyes on my back. And then, like a triumph, a sliver
of light presents itself.
DOWN IN THE LOBBY we relate
our adventure to Karen, now suspicious, her chatty effervescence
gone flat. She comes out with the price like it's the biting end
of a whip. "What the hell," we agree. Carpe diem. We're
travel mates, nothing more than temporary.
Karen doles out registration forms.
Of no fixed address, I push them at Matt. I watch him, a gypsy
as well, jot down his sister's address in Alberta. He winks my
way and merges our
names-his first, my first, then his last-into something marital
and at the same time irreverent.
"Ha," I say.
Karen peers at us from under crunched
eyebrows. We halve the bill, scribble two signatures onto two
Visa slips. We've also driven our own vehicles here, for convenience,
for separate getaways if need be.
WE PICK A MODEST room done in a low-key
shade of green. The same colour my mother once painted my bedroom
because tests had shown it soothed, promoted feelings of security.
I think of sun-bleached garden hose or a twenty that's been put
through the wash.
We shower, muddy up plush white towels
we're sure must go fifty bucks a pop. I glide by the bathroom
and, from the corner of my eye, catch Matt shaving at the mirror.
My father never shaved, always wore a beard, so I now loiter in
the door frame. Matt's razor dips over jaw and cheekbones. Foam
and stubble disappear down the drain. I watch, though not for
too long.
Just an hour ago we were vagabonds at
the entrance of the Plaza Hotel, blinking at the newness, all
those light bulbs inside. Walls so starkly white we could almost
smell paint through the glass. Was there a revolving door? A whirl
of shining brass, a rain of light from the chandeliers? I want
to say yes, but in truth there almost certainly wasn't.
