I notice the absence first. The hotel Nate has chosen for us has no front desk; instead, the focal point of the narrow foyer is a square pane of glass in the wall, gray and opaque, as if the room behind it is full of smoke—the concierge inside, suffocating.
Nate’s reflection in the glass is flat, robbed of value. I can make out only the thick black glasses he’s always pushing up his nose, the dark border of the buzz cut he maintains for morning efficiency, the sharp shelves of his cheekbones. I can’t see myself; I stand just out of frame.
“We probably only need an hour, right,” Nate says, squinting at the prices on the wall. Not a question, but I give a tiny nod.
He steps forward until his nose is level with a round beetle-black speaker, soundless as an eye.
Two weeks earlier, Nate and I had moved to Buenos Aires, Argentina as exchange students from our Missouri university. Two weeks also marked precisely how long it’d been since we last had sex. Our study abroad programs placed us with kind, Catholic host families in distant neighborhoods of the capital. My host parents rarely left the apartment for anything longer than an errand or a lunch. Guests were welcomed only after formal invitations and hours of preparation and fresh table linens flattened with a scrupulous palm. It went without saying that the same treatment applied to my boyfriend, and that on the few occasions when Nate visited, my bedroom was off limits.
This presented a problem, Nate said. We would have to figure something out, Nate said.
Nate figured something out quickly: the telo, a pig-Latin-style exchange of the syllables in “hotel.” More formally, a telo was known as an “albergue transitorio”—“transitorio” as in temporary, transitory, provisional, and “albergue” as in lodging, shelter, hostel, sometimes asylum. Put plainly, telos were pay-by-the-hour hotels used for sex. Teh-lo: I liked the way the word felt and sounded. Small and round, like a pebble. When I mouthed it to myself, the tip of my tongue flicked the back of my teeth.
Nate crafted a syllabus of tourist blog posts to catch me up on the history of the telo. After Argentina outlawed brothels in the 1940s, telos had taken their place—often inheriting their physical buildings—to provide a workplace and refuge for sex workers and their clients, adulterers and their paramours. In 1963, a film called La cigarra no es un bicho told the story of a group of lovers quarantined in a telo named La Cigarra. In making telos visible, the film helped make them popular, though their services were already in high demand: in Argentina, living with your parents well into your twenties and thirties was common, even expected. The burgeoning telo industry allowed young lovers to have sex in places beyond their childhood bedrooms. By the time Nate and I arrived in Buenos Aires, telos were more than an open secret—they were regulated by the local legislature. There were almost two hundred in the city center alone.
Nate and I met weekly. I spent the rest of my small per diem on lunch, museum admission, the occasional meal out with friends, donation-based tango lessons in the basement of the Armenian community center, and, on weekends, liters of Red Bull and vodka. Nate lacked both my hobbies and my vices—unless you considered sex a vice, or a hobby—so he could have afforded more frequent visits. This disparity in our priorities became a chronic discussion: an extension of the one we’d been having since deciding to live apart in the same city, calibrating his desire for closeness and mine for space.
My parents still often recount to me how, on vacation as a little girl, I wanted only one thing: to run around in the hotel lobby. I repeated the request like a refrain, sing-song: I want to run around in the laaahhh-beee, Mama. My mother likes to imitate my Tweety-high voice. The simplicity of the request, my naked joy. I was a deeply, almost paranoically self-conscious child, but I remember liking the way other guests’ eyes glazed over as soon as they met mine. As if I were just another feature of the landscape, just another decorative element to their family vacation. Part of me believes I already sensed a slant sensuality to this placeless place, already associated my body with the hotel’s used cleanness. A public privateness that felt like invisibility. I will never see you again, I thought as my laughter echoed off the concrete. I will never be seen by you again.
In the nearly seven years since Nate and I booked our first telo, I’ve read hotel books and watched hotel movies and looked at hotel art. Edward Hopper’s hotel series. Lost in Translation, In the Mood for Love, The Grand Budapest Hotel, Blue Crush. Didion and Dyer, Calle and King. Themes recur. In Joanna Walsh’s Hotels: Object Lessons, the speaker escapes her deteriorating marriage by taking a job as a hotel reviewer, seeking refuge from the wrongness at home in the “unhomeliness” of elsewhere. In The Hotel, Sophie Calle documents the ephemera in the rooms she cleans as a chambermaid in Venice: the contents of suitcases, the pornographic scribbles on postcards, the skid-marked underwear left in the bathroom. She notes which couples sleep together or apart and describes, in an image that haunts me still, how she unlocked a door one morning to find a silk slip suspended between two twin beds “like a bridge.” Annie Ernaux, meanwhile, writes in Hôtel Casanova et autres textes brefs as a paying hotel guest. She revels in the strangeness of the place, an alien planet where actions have no consequences. Of her affair with a married man at a cramped and oily hotel, she writes, “The place itself, where every detail signaled transient sex, whether or not it was for money, was an incitement to excess and the most obscene language imaginable.” Leaving the hotel, the narrator no longer recognizes herself; she encounters in a mirror by the door a woman with “shining eyes,” and when the woman runs a hand through her hair, Ernaux startles at the moisture on her fingertips, a clump of semen just beginning to set.
Of all the books I’ve read about hotels and sex and defamiliarization, however, I return most often to Donna Stonecipher’s Model City, a collection of short prose poems. The book opens with a deceptively simple question onan otherwise blank page.
Q: What was it like?
Every sentence of the subsequent two hundred and eighty-eight sentences responds: It was like . . . Again and again. Each anaphoric answer is separated from the next by an asterisk in a thin layer of white space. The pages remind me of identical buildings, all four fragments high.
Here’s the situation: while living abroad in an unnamed city, the speaker notices, one winter, that all the new buildings going up around their neighborhood are hotels. The speaker has rented a sterile apartment chosen for its anonymous hotel-like qualities, offering “a blank segment of the city” in which to unfurl their own “foreignnesses and domesticities.” They are in love with someone with whom they share a first kiss in a hotel. But the situation has always struck me as less important than the repetition: “it was like . . .” “it was like . . .” It was not exactly like, but almost. It was adjacent to. “It was like thinking about all those empty rooms at night, all those empty rooms being built to hold an absence, as you lie in your bed at night, unable to sleep,” reads one fragment. “It was like thinking about the nights you walked through the city feeling threatened by the rampantly multiplying hotel rooms, as if vacancy were a disease invading the city’s—and therefore your—interior,” reads another.
What was what like? I find myself wondering throughout. Each time I produce a different answer. Living in a city. Living in the twenty-first century. Living under late capitalism. Living in a city invaded by hotels. Living through the ephemerification of everything. Being in love. Having a body (while being in love, living in a city invaded by hotels). On the surface, the book looks more directly at the isolating architecture of the city—and the speaker’s place in it, particularly as an expat—but their body remains a constant specter, moving anonymously through the city’s vacant or temporary spaces. And perhaps this is why, each time I read the book, I can’t help wondering not what it was like, but what dissociative force prevents the speaker from knowing.
The first telo where Nate and I book a room faces an overgrown field at the edge of his neighborhood. From the sidewalk, the residential side looks familiar: the striated French façades, the arched doorways wreathed in bas-relief, the shallow wrought-iron balconies doubling as window grates. The clinical 1960s apartment buildings in cool pastels, pressed so close to the Parisian buildings next door that their edges form seams. A train of petite hatchbacks packed bumper-to-bumper along the curb. Between every couple doorways, a garage or storefront veiled by corrugated metal. The internet says to watch for buildings that look deliberately discreet, with mirrored windows and a thick border of shrubbery. In place of the customary sign above the door, a subtle nameplate should be embedded in the wall.
The cars on the curb are empty, the street deserted. I feel unnervingly aware of my breath, of my footsteps behind Nate’s. My self-consciousness is part vigilance (I’ve lived in cities all my life) and part apology (I am American, exported from the country that helped ruin Argentina’s economy and trained Latin American militaries in the art of state terror). But later I’ll identify another reason lurking in the subcutaneous tissue below language, a sense of my place in something both more precise and encompassing than history or politics: I know that all cities have secrets, that they are good at keeping them, and maybe I already know that I am about to tell this new city, still a stranger, one of my own.
Inside the narrow foyer, the invisible concierge’s voice comes through the black speaker a malformed thing, gravelly and grotesque, like that of a crime show serial killer. Nate seems fine. He does all the talking. Though my Spanish is more advanced than his—especially in Argentinian castellano—he seems to feel at home in the rooms of the sentence, he sweeps through the corridors between them. I know enough to know better than to feel at home there. But it doesn’t really matter—locals, men especially, tend to angle their speech toward him, not us.
We split the cost of one hour in the cheapest room, the equivalent in pesos of ten bucks each.
The walls of the bedroom are Pepto Bismol pink. The carpet is the same beige as the rubber toe on my old Converse, with more than a few mysterious stains. It’s hard not to notice them in the harsh overhead light that skews the angles of the bed, the squat bedside tables, the empty bookcase against the wall, like in van Gogh’s “Bedroom in Arles.” No daylight comes in through the windows: are they real? On the bed is a thin mattress with a nubby pink comforter pulled taut over two pink pillowcases. The pilled fabric looks rough, acne-scarred. I don’t want to touch it. Nate kisses me. “I don’t want to touch it,” I say, pointing at the blanket.
He laughs. “Really?”
“Really.”
I hate this room, I want to tell him as I bend over. I hate its blatant attempt to curate romance and sensuality, hate the honesty of the artifice, hate it not because of what it is but because it isn’t working.
On the wall to the left of the headboard, I make out a rectangular slice in the wallpaper. A trapdoor? I consider planting my hands on the blanket or the floor, but instead I loosen my knees and rest my palms on my thighs, summoning my years of ballet training as they burn.
After, I crouch a few inches above the toilet seat as I pee, something I never do, not even in airports. So easy, usually, to forget the bodies of strangers. My face in the mirror is an unscrewed bulb. I gaze into my own eyes for a long time. I wash my hands twice even though all they’ve touched is me.
Q: What was it like?
A: It was like suddenly thinking about the emptiness in yourself: your body with its cells, your heart with its chambers. There were already too many emptinesses.
Barring distance or special circumstances, for the duration of our three-year relationship Nate and I had sex at least twice a day.
Unlike me, Nate had been in a serious relationship before, and he said this was normal. Beyond normal, it was necessary. Sex was like food, I learned—its rewards got used up and burned away.
It sounded okay when he put it like that. Most things did. Our friendship at school had been instantaneous, dazzling in its clarity. Clarity was the defining feature of Nate’s world: expectations vocalized and respected, ambiguities parsed, opinions researched and defended or else revised, even reversed. I had no clarity by nature, no certainty. I was hesitant to form opinions and anxious about offending others; I was always late, having grown up in Berkeley, California, where tardiness was cultural and everything flexible, even time itself. With Nate, I made plans at certain times and followed through on those plans. We met for lunch every day in the dining hall. I raced to finish my homework—he always already had—so I could talk with him on his couch in the evenings. He steepled his fingers over his nose and scrubbed them up and down the bridge when arguing a point. He taught me about Slavoj Žižek and the drama between the members of The Band. He taught me to notice the strange, hybrid colors in a Rothko, the smudges of green-red at the edges of the yawning black. The lunar blue. I taught him about the technical qualities of the oil paint, how it could tell time by the way it layered over itself. He liked that. He liked that I was a painter, a pianist, a ballerina. He liked that I had worked a real job that paid real money at an art museum. I liked that I could teach him how something worked. I liked that even though he seemed to see everything, he didn’t see it that way; instead, he wanted to see how I saw, he made me want what I gave to him.
I liked giving to him. By the time we got together just a few months into our freshman year, I could already articulate the ways in which I longed to be different from my parents, both the children of Jews who’d lost everything in the Great Depression, whose anxieties had turned them selfish and protective over their resources. I wanted to be a person who wanted to have sex twice a day. To be in a relationship where the wanting was so potent it just happened like that. Where desire could be a form of generosity, and the discrete edges of supply and demand would blur until it felt like the need was mine.
In the morning, crusty with sleep, I watched Nate bite down on his bottom lip in concentration. I peered into the little windows of empty space between his teeth as we moved. “If I hold you any closer, I’ll be in back o’ ya,” Nate joked with his arms around me afterwards, quoting one of my favorite Marx Brothers movies. And I smiled, glowing in the reflection of my particularities, happy seeing him in possession of them. I could picture him occupying my body like a hand inside a puppet, straining its seams.
Q: What was it like?
A: It was like arriving home and entering your rented apartment like the hotel guest that you are at heart, knowing that you own nothing, not even the vacant body you offer to your loved one.
In my second hotel memory, my parents and I play hide-and-seek on the second floor of the ski lodge. Camel couches, a velvety Persian rug. The space is either a room or a hallway, or perhaps both—every public space in the hotel is both a hallway and something else; everywhere people pass through, walking like jaunty robots in their ski boots, heel-toe, heel-toe, stamping snow into the carpet.
My mother is the best at hiding. She presses her spine against one of the thick cement pillars that holds up the third floor and slinks around its circumference to avoid my father, who circles on the other side like the raptor in Jurassic Park. They are still happy together, though the air already crackles around them in a way that makes me pay attention. I watch from under an end table a few yards away. I want her to escape his clutches and I want him to catch her, though I know I can’t have both.
Q: What was it like?
A: It was like wanting to take off everything, clothes, skin, down to the heart working inside your body, and thinking about how our bodies are hotels for guests we may know but have never seen.
Everyone in my study abroad program had heard of telos, but I was the first to confirm their existence. After our morning class on the failures of import substitution industrialization, I described to my new friend Ali the mirrored window, the silent concierge, the trapdoor in the wall. Her green eyes widened. She clapped her hands over her mouth just often enough that it respected the salaciousness of the place without making either of us feel too prudish, too American.
I had sketched a setting, not a story. I cleansed its interior: the dialogue, the arrangement of my features in the mirror. In fact, I scrubbed the two of us from the scenery almost entirely.
It was like what it is usually like. I disappointed Nate every day—in his eyes I was too selfish, too afraid of confrontation, too fragile, too quick to forgive. I befriended people he disliked, loud boys who smashed beer cans into their foreheads on the weekends and made me laugh and carried me up the stairs every day for a week after I nearly broke my ankle during dance practice. I liked that these boys were one way with the world and another way with me. I liked the process of uncovering the soft-skinned homunculus crouching behind the public face they wore. For this reason I had decided to study the U.S.’s history of meddling in the Global South: I had always wanted to know what people didn’t want me to know.
Nate didn’t buy it. He believed we were our behavior, believed that selfhood was expressed through—and determined by—how you choreographed and staged its performance. We should be judged on the performance alone.
When I disappointed Nate, he tented all ten fingers over his nose and rubbed the bridge up and down. The more I let him down, the more vigorous the tic became, abrading a small red wound between his eyes that scabbed and opened, scabbed and opened. The scab said that he needed to hurt something but could hurt only himself, he was incapable of hurting me.
Over time, the pieces of my allegedly authentic, essential self that disappointed Nate began to feel like parts of a machine under repair, commodities I could exchange for better ones. I chalked it up to the cost of intimacy. To open ourselves up to someone else, of course something gets stripped away.
“Nate sucks,” my badly-behaved boys often told me.
And yet. When I’d stopped eating a few months into the relationship, Nate had been the only person to ask me why. (I didn’t know, my stomach hurt, I was busy, I was dancing a lot, I was always nauseous, I didn’t know, I didn’t know.) He was the only person who asked me—no, told me—to eat. He seemed the only person who could see whatever had made a temporary home inside me, the guests I worried were still squatting in the walls. I felt as though I owed him for continuing to desire me, for staying with me through . . . it, all of it: the doctors, the nurses, the pain as my stomach returned to its normal size, the panic that the pain would stay, the shame at being seen in my weakness, at being watched in order to be cured.
When my friends asked me what could possibly be owed, or what could be offered up as restitution, I didn’t tell them I already knew. I could pay for my body with my body. I could make it worth its weight in whatever tender he wanted.
After the first telo, I draw a line in the sand: no “turno”—the same as the word for “shift” or “duty”—cheaper than four hundred pesos, or about thirty dollars between the two of us.
Every telo uses a similar pricing system, a matrix of fanciness and time. The cheaper telos offer just two room options, “Normal” and “Suite,” and the shortest turnos, some as brief as thirty minutes. At the more luxurious (and inevitably higher-rated) telos, options number as many as five or six: Suite, Relax, Executive, Imperial, Premium, and Platinum. These turnos always last a minimum of two hours. The higher tiers include scotch on the rocks; the highest have a hot tub, and, once, something called a “hydro cinema.” Four hundred pesos generally gives us about two hours in a middle-tier room. Generally. Value seems to be measured differently each day—after the election, conservative business tycoon Mauricio Macri unfixed the exchange rate, pegged for years at eight pesos on the dollar, and the value of the peso immediately dropped by half. In a few months, he will strike a deal with the “vultures,” the foreign investors hounding Argentina for debt repayment after the 2001 economic crisis. Protestors already gather every day in front of the black metal barricades that enclose the presidential palace.
Thankfully for everyone, price increases are slow to reflect the new value of the peso, which means that, for a brief time, we can get much more for our money. Nate is unimpressed by this logic. To take advantage of our increased spending power feels icky to me too, somehow complicit in the injustices of the financial market, but what can we do? In the telo foyer, we grapple silently at the register with big ideological questions: who should determine what we’re worth to each other? How to accept the seeming arbitrariness of value? Why pay for what we might otherwise get for free?
I win, in the end, though it doesn’t feel that way. It feels grotesque. I can’t think about the fact that my price is higher than what my boyfriend wants to pay. But neither can I go back to the stained pink carpet, the sunless windows and the sense, though unfounded, that we were in a place where someone had experienced something unspeakable. I don’t need a hydro cinema—I just want a room that can convince me nothing bad has ever happened or is happening or will happen. I want the absence of implication. I want to know absolutely nothing.
It takes a while, but eventually I start to like the ritual a little bit, or at least to feel entranced in a removed, scientific way. I am fascinated by the telos’ blatant inconspicuousness; how, once you know what to look for, you see them everywhere, like the detention centers where the U.S.-backed military junta tortured so-called “subversives” decades ago: ordinary buildings hiding in plain sight on residential streets. I like the telos’ artificial interior sumptuousness: the velvet, chrome, bamboo, glitter, and glass. I notice more trapdoors in the walls, and I learn—from the internet, not from experience—that they allow hotel employees to deliver champagne or snacks without interrupting, without being seen.
The themed rooms are the most fun and strange: the 1950s room with argyle wallpaper in salmon and teal, like wriggling inside a sock; the schoolhouse with a real chalkboard and mahogany flip-top desk; the chrome spaceship with the bidet shaped like R2-D2 squatting beside the toilet. The ceiling in the spaceship room looks like the night sky, complete with stars that actually twinkle, and it makes me feel disoriented and small and embarrassingly full of wonder.
I know it’s silly to assume that any hotel room has seen more ecstasy or suffering than another. It’s the job of a whole labor force to wipe away the evidence. But I have always been good at telling stories, and certain variables—particularly cleanliness, indulgence, and mystery—allow for stories my reasoning can sleep inside. For that I would pay anything.
The intimacy of the ritual had little to do with sex. I felt it most vividly when standing next to Nate before the concierge or sliding the elevator grate closed, sealing us in alone. Intimacy by process of elimination. We became each other’s only source of specificity, our only source of recognition. A kind of opposition between us and them that I tried to avoid at all costs outside the telo, meeting locals at bars or interviewing women for my research on “informal” labor. Nate could always be relied upon to remind me who I was and what I meant. Clarity, always clarity. The telo proved the same—its architecture made its expectations clear. Hidden from view, surrounded by similarly invisible strangers, I could convince myself we were colluding, cooperating. I could convince myself it was the space that implied there was no other choice.
The telo that becomes our home base is perpetually under construction, or at least it looks that way. I realize over time that the sheath of scaffolding over the entrance must be a ruse for added privacy, since I never see any construction workers or feel the thump in my throat of iron struck by iron. The door is embedded at the end of a short tunnel under the scaffold like a button you aren’t supposed to press unless you really mean it. I never glimpse the telo’s identifying plaque, and months later I no longer remember its name.
Inside, the rooms exude pure eighties décor, with ropes of indigo neon behind wood paneling. The right degree of fakery, I think: neither so egregious that it becomes harmless and endearing, as in the themed rooms, nor so sublimated as to be imperceptible, insidious, dishonest.
The glow makes me feel as though we’re swimming in a deep lagoon. I come to think of this as “the lagoon room.” The light switches are so well-hidden that I give up trying to find them after our first turno, and I feel my way to the bathroom along the edges of things. The mattress is round and plush. But the best part is the big circular mirror on the ceiling, positioned just above the bed. In the marine dark, my arms and legs glow white as tentacles, and I feel lithe and even sexy. I’ve been eating again for over a year, but I’m still getting used to my new-old shape. Warm and solid and real. At any given moment I feel simultaneously connected to my body and displaced from it, like I’m peering in at an angle, through a crack.
Q: What was it like?
A: It was like lying down in a new hotel room and trying to imagine a city in which no more building is possible, a city that is already perfectly, completely, sparklingly, imperviously built.
Our limbs in the mirror glow a pale, translucent blue. The light lies in phosphorescent stripes along my arms like the bones in an X-ray. I watch the girl on the ceiling wrap her legs around Nate’s hips and drag her fingernails down his back. I think about all the other bodies that have been my body, have formed these shapes and made these motions in this bed. I could be anyone, I tell myself, and I feel slick with hope.
The roiling muscles along Nate’s spine seize, freeze, then relax. I am still lying on my back. He rolls off the mattress and walks purposefully to the bathroom.
It’s in these moments, when his need is met, that the hope bitters. I could be anyone.
I took just two photos in the lagoon room. Both were snapped in quick succession, and in both I lie on the bed with my cell phone pointed at the mirror. In the first, Nate spoons me, kissing my hair. The threads of light and cracks of shadow along my limbs duplicate his; our knees bend in sharp angles to the right, our legs like four nested arrows. The device obscures my face. In the second photograph, his body is no longer next to mine. He is a blur at the edge of the bed, leaning forward on his elbows like he’s in a Hopper painting, though his face is turned toward me.
The truth is, I remember very little of what my friends now call my “bad sex era.” I remember very little of my whole three years with Nate, which would finally end a few months after returning to the States. On memory’s expired film he is like the telo concierge, a scrap of lip and chin, of fingers in the till, a figure whose behavior I can reconstruct in a causal chain, but whose thoughts and motivations remain inscrutable, unavailable, private. Could he see me on the ceiling, gazing down at us instead of up from between his hands? Did he worry that my heart wasn’t in it; did he worry that I felt obligated to him? Why didn’t he worry that I felt obligated to him? What did he think he needed, what did he want to give me, was he happy?
I think, however, that somewhere inside I knew I was complicit in his ignorance, or in creating the conditions for it. Desire sharpens sight. Satisfaction looks like a light left on in a dark room: even when standing at the window from inside, you see only what’s behind you.
Outside, the weather in Buenos Aires grew cold and wet. The margins of the telo turned increasingly porous; the music of the rain mingled with the radiator hum, and we tracked water in.
Q: What was it like?
If I had to offer up an answer or two of my own, I might say:
A: It was like looking into the mirror on the ceiling—your body a pale starfish under your lover’s long shape—and finding two purple-blue grottoes where your eyes should be.
Or, A: It was like looking into the mirror on the ceiling of a hotel in which everyone is hiding and realizing that when you are locked together like this, when you can see your own face, you can’t see his.
City law barred telos from building lobbies, but there was no real need for them anyway since the purpose of the place was privacy. With narrow corridors and small elevators, there were few ways to observe without also being observed, unless you were a telo employee. Making voyeurism a two-way street encouraged people to avoid each other.
Still, there was only so much the space could do. I still remember the squeal of the dress shoes belonging to the man who entered in front of us one day, remember how I snatched a look at his face as if stealing it away from him, then forgot him as soon as he disappeared down the hall. I remember the Elvis song that floated into the lagoon room one evening through the wall, remember marveling at how easily the soundtrack to someone else’s sex became our own. After Nate and I broke up, I would look back on those moments and realize that any hotel is like both a body and a bad relationship, and therein lies the horror: what is private often feels so public, and still, no one sees.
A year later, back in Missouri, I fall for someone new, an artist who my body responds to in ways I’ve only ever read about. We meet for our first date on the roof of the hotel near my apartment in St. Louis. The hotel is space-themed, with glass-front cases full of celestial tchotchkes: a Barbie dressed for the Lunar Ball; a framed postcard that reads TINY PIECE OF THE MOON above an actual tiny piece of the moon; a chess board where all the pawns are astronauts, facing out into the hallway in two stern lines like intergalactic soldiers. The place reminds me of the telo with the ersatz night sky twinkling over the bed, though of course I don’t tell the artist that.
Above our heads, a large papier-mâché moon spins slowly on a spit like a marshmallow. One half of the orb is painted silver, the other a deep pockmarked black. Light, dark, light, dark; it turns and turns. When he finally kisses me, the bar is closing, and he asks to come home with me soft and low into my hair. We are kissing by the elevator and he is touching me in the elevator and when the little room spits us out into the lobby, the contrived persona of the hotel feels suddenly, gloriously true, as if the space has taken off a mask of its own face.
I realize early on that this new boy notices everything: the stomach medication receipt in the pocket of my car door, my off-center widow’s peak, the little gobs of white sleep that accumulate in the corners of my eyes even when I’m not tired. While we talk, I busy myself with the frayed hems of my shorts or the raised edges of my nail polish, because when I look at him, he is always already staring at me.
In keeping with the cliché, he is Nate’s opposite (tall, generous, chaotic, rude to strangers and kind to me). But I realize one day that the real difference between them is the difference between feeling surveilled and feeling seen.
The old impulses are hard to shake, of course. In the beginning, I’m obsessed with his pleasure, which sometimes means performing—in other words, sacrificing—my own. “Did you just fake it?” he asks me once. I never fake it again after that. (Okay, hardly ever.) I can work on my own embodiment, I think; I’ve done it before. When we kiss, I start imagining that I’m pooling like water into the tip of my tongue. I can feel it, all of me in my mouth, in his.
Q: What was it like?
A: It was like thinking about model cities and about hotels, and realizing that of course no model city ever allocated space for a hotel, for why should there be any vacancy in the fully realized ideal?
When my new apartment gets infested with bird mites after graduation, I sweet-talk the landlord into putting me up at a Holiday Inn for the weekend. The building sits at the far end of a large parking lot ringed with motels and hotels and their trappings: gas stations and fast-food chains and more gas stations. Up the block is a highway, and up the next, another highway. It’s clear that this part of St. Louis was built—or unbuilt—for the traveler. It’s the part of the city you’re never meant to know, so when you leave, you can’t even say you’ve forgotten it.
I bring the boy, of course. “Staycation!” we keep saying, trying to make it fun, and it works. We decide to make a whole thing out of it. We swim in the indoor pool even though the water is algae-green and weirdly thick; we smoke weed on the balcony overlooking the empty parking lot and decide we need candy and sprint to one of the five gas stations, where we load up on sour gummy worms fluorescent as the pool water. I expect us to have sex, but we don’t. The boy falls asleep in his street clothes, and I lie awake for a while, listening to his breath merge with the sigh of the cars on the interstate. I feel as though I’m gazing at us in an illuminated window from across the dark street. I wonder whether the space between our bodies on the bed should make me feel worried or safe. Then I wonder if I’ll ever stop wondering that.
The bargaining stage of grief at the end of my relationship with Nate lasted so long it felt as though we had been bartering all along, and maybe we were—maintaining equilibrium by haggling over what counted as compromise, sacrifice, surrender. It had seemed like a fair trade: sex for a kind of renunciation. Body for selflessness, giving for having given. Being possessed for being seen. But there has to be a way to unhitch intimacy from its trade value, whether in sex, or in money, or in time, or in anything countable. Right? The boy utters a soft, fluttering snore. My eyes coast over the slightly tacky surface of the duvet cover on the bed, the austere white slats over the sliding glass door, the hotel room’s complete absence of theme or character. I wait for it to tell me what we will mean to each other, what this should be like. I sit still with our shapes in our everyday clothes, the lingering smell of chlorine at the nape of my neck, and I know that if he were to look at me right now, all the doors I’ve ever shut would open. All that blue.
Q: What was it like?
A: It was like the feeling of falling through the ‘o’ in ‘hotel’ as you almost fall asleep in your own bed, the bed that you own, caught at the last minute by ownership, the ownership of your wide-awake self.
The front desk has given us two complimentary gift cards for the café, and we set an early alarm on purpose to make sure we get our money’s worth. The boy murmurs something unintelligible into his sweatshirt sleeve. He looks perfect, flushed mammal-pink against the pillowcase. I wonder what I look like. The light cutting through the windows is refrigerator white; the air smells like nothing, then a tendril of exhaust. The boy wriggles closer to me, buries his nose in my collarbone, runs his thumb over the crag of my bottom rib. It’s the first time he’s touched me since last night. I smile hugely since his eyes are still closed.
Leaving the hotel room is strangely easy. We brush our teeth and fold our dirty clothes into our respective backpacks and give the surfaces a quick once-over before closing the door behind us, as if we’re leaving home for the day and not forever.
It strikes me that, for all the telos Nate and I visited, I never lost so much as a sock, an earring, a bookmark. There was hardly anything to lose: since we never stayed overnight, the time we spent there didn’t demand its own belongings; no toothbrushes, no pajamas, not even an extra pair of underwear. No baggage. I never made off with anything from inside, either; when I search for evidence later, I find no telo-related souvenirs, no receipts or room keys in the straining sleeves of my wallet. The telo usually asked that we return our keys in a metal envelope mounted at the end of the hall, or else directly to the concierge—to save them money, I assume, or maybe to maintain discretion, to save us the trouble of hiding where we’d been.
The boy and I are the only two people in the Holiday Inn café. Nevertheless—or as a result—we speak quietly and self-consciously to each other, like someone is listening.
Our server has guileless eyes and deep grooves around his mouth. “Where are you kids from?”
“We’re from Philadelphia,” the boy says without missing a beat. “We’re, uh, interns at the zoo there. The animals keep getting out, so they sent us here to study how to keep them in.”
“Wow,” the poor guy says, wide-eyed, and I know he believes us.
The boy winks at me when the server disappears into the kitchen. “Why?” I ask him, laughing.
“Why not,” he says. “We could be anyone.”
***
Rumpus original art by Ian MacAllen
