ESSAY / By Lisa Zeidner The New York Times (Travel Section) Maybe I saw the Audrey Hepburn movie "Funny Face" too many times in my infancy, and it caused some kind of profound subliminal imprinting. That would explain my lifelong fixation with hotel rooms. I love them. The Paris hotel room in that film with heart-stopping views, museum-quality antiques, and enough square footage for Fred Astaire dance numbers is what I yearn for, each time I make a reservation on a toll-free line. The fact that most real-life hotel rooms are more like the size of the ship cabin in the Marx Brothers movie "A Night at the Opera," and offer scenic views of parking lots, and have punishing Water Savers on the shower heads so it takes a couple of years to get the shampoo out of your hair, and no matter how long you diddle with the thermostat it's either too hot or too cold, and the covers are too light with the bedspread off and too heavy with it on, doesn't stop me from dreaming. I've always believed that with the right hotel room, I could be considerably more Hepburnish. At home, I am mostly sour and ironic. But with a lavish enough hotel room, I could be downright fey. When I was younger, my hotel fantasies came with sex. With the right hotel room, I thought, I would never remember in a flash, during foreplay, that the car was due for an oil change. And even though, when my soon-to-be-husband and I first went to Paris, our hotel room had twin beds with mattresses so bad that he dragged his onto the floor to protect his back, I've not entirely shaken the notion that it would be fun to "rekindle the romance," as ads put it (graphic of clinking champagne glasses), somewhere without the dog's demanding her belly be rubbed or our small son's demanding Gatorade. Parenthood has, in fact, radically changed my hotel fantasies. Forget romance. For romance, I only need third grade to be in session, or a play date at the other boy's house. Now, I want to be in a hotel alone, and look forward to any business trip that gives me that opportunity. No one in the world needs room service more than a mother. You can eat, or bathe, any time you want. You can eat while you bathe. In hotels, you do not put your dishes in the sink. You do not wash towels. You do not even hang towels up. To a mother, it feels bizarrely renegade to put a tray full of half-eaten food in the hallway, for someone else to deal with. Although mothers do not tend to use (or abuse) their hotel rooms like teen-aged boys, or visiting rock stars. No "Animal House"-like debauchery. We line our toiletries up neatly on the marble vanity (no one is going to complain about the number or size of the items, and demand where he is supposed to put his shaving cream). We hang up our clothes and carefully stash the suitcase in the closet, where we don't have to look at it. We do not overspend for the beer nuts from the minibar. And the room service order is not likely to be a burger and beer but a salad, with one and a half glasses of wine with wine from a miniature wine bottle, such as you get on an airplane. In hotels, mothers live like monks. Peaceful, slightly drunk monks. Finally, a neat little space that we can actually control. The most scintillating aspect of the solitary hotel stay is the quiet. The first thing my husband does when he enters a hotel room is commandeer the remote. Within a couple of minutes, he has found CNN and the local weather channel. Alone in a hotel room, I never turn on a TV. I listen to the air steaming through the vents. The silence feels Zen ironically Zen, to be sure, since no true Zen master could do the sound of one hand clapping while still getting this excited about bath oils in cute packaging, but restorative nonetheless. Alone in a hotel room, it feels masterful absurdly, swaggeringly adult to plug in a local access number on the laptop. But often the E-mail feels bad, tugging you back to the world and its joyless checklists. It was in the William Penn Hotel in Pittsburgh, wonderfully alone in a hotel room, that I realized how fine it could feel to be totally disconnected from daily life, and embarked on my fourth novel, Layover, in which a traveling saleswoman strips away her identity in a series of anonymous hotels sometimes staying without even paying. I personally have never broken into a hotel room. Often I can't even manage to gain entry to a hotel room with my key card. But my heroine and I evidently share a rapport with desk clerks. Last year I attended the Modern Language Association convention in San Francisco the event is always held right after Christmas, to assure that English professors all over America abandon their families during the holidays. When I arrived at the desk of the stately Fairmont Hotel, jet-lagged, the clerk almost winked as she said, "You look like you could use something special," and upgraded me to a suite in the Tower. Forget mere fluffy robes and a phone in the bathroom. This suite was bigger than any apartment I ever had when I was single. You could play touch football in the living room, were it not for the furniture a big cushy living room suite in front of a 25-inch TV, and a table that could seat eight. A walk-in closet in the bedroom. And the views! I got, from the ninth floor, the bay, the TransAmerica Building, and both bridges. The sun rose in one of my rooms and set in the other. The lights twinkled; the trolleys and church bells clanged. Hollywood has to commission helicopters to get this view, but here it was, laid out for my personal delectation. Katharine Hepburn in "Summertime" had nothing on me. Like Greta Garbo, I could lounge in satin. (O.K., polyester from Victoria's Secret.) On the excellent sound system, I listened to my favorite CD the one that causes my husband to wonder why exactly he married me while doing nothing more profound than sorting through the anthropological morass of trash in my purse, throwing out shredded tissues and ancient receipts, stray plastic parts from Happy Meals of yore. My husband called the first night to tell me that my son had gotten strep, as my son tries to do whenever I go anywhere. That's terrible, I said. Poor baby, I said. This room, I added, is sublime. I tried to maneuver my way back into that suite when I returned to California for a recent book tour. But the suite of my dreams, I learned, went for a ballpark of $1,000 a night. The Fairmont was not in the budget. Besides, I had my family with me. And there may be no hotel room in the world big enough for an 8-year-old boy. "There's nothing to do here!" he lamented, which was true. Although he did find a concierge who could translate his Japanese Pokémon cards and he was impressed by the deep bathtub at the Hotel Meridien (erstwhile Nikko) in Los Angeles. I adore the kid. But I must confess that, as I watched him draw shampoo monsters on the bathroom's black granite, I thought: Now there is a tub that a mother could really enjoy soaking in, alone. Home / Books / Short Stories / Articles / Personal Essays / Reviews / Biography / At Rutgers University / Contact Lisa Zeidner | |