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Authors: Joshua Corey
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hotel
(to make up, to make love), the comic-book adaptation of Les
Fleurs du mal that she glanced through, the eighth-grade
French which she hadn’t needed once the whole trip, not even to order a glass
of wine, suddenly suffusing her consciousness, so that when the new reader
encountered « L’Invitation au voyage »
she was able fully to accept, guided in part by the black-and-white images the
artist had chosen to illustrate, no to accompany, the text: a languid arm
pocked with needle scars dangling down from a bed, a needle rising to meet it
that is really a ship’s mast, a ship’s mast that is really a gigantically erect
cock thrusting from the hips of one grinning sailor into the eager sucking
mouth of another sailor, a mouth that is really a cave lit from within by
phosphorescent crystals, a cave that is really a grave straddled by a waif-thin
woman in a black raincoat, wearing sunglasses from under which tears are
streaming. She took all this in—the artist’s melodramatic conception and the
innocent poem—in a single glance, or so it seemed, as her husband approached
the register carrying a Tintin book, Objectif Lune .
Murmuring to herself silently now—a split now, at once in that hotel room on
the Place des Vosges and in that bedroom in a soft Chicago suburb— Tout
y parlerait / À l’âme en secret / Sa douce langue
natale . All illuminated, as in a flash of scarlet, by three
words at the bottom right corner of the page she holds between thumb and
forefinger, not even the end of the paragraph or the sentence, syntax
incomplete and yet luminous: the invitation to ….
The rain falls on the skylight window. The new reader is always a stranger.
2. Letters From M
Hotels. How I loved them. The intoxicating combination of anonymity and privilege, as though
living in an American city could be made somehow portable, bearable. There were
times, of course, when I needed that feeling, that departure. Midweek, in the
unreal interval after my diagnosis, I would find myself on a train or in a cab
wandering without luggage into the lobby of an old hotel, out of the chaos of
unmade decisions into the cool echoey atmosphere of marble and steel, the
lobbies with their heavy upholstery and mirrors and chandeliers and fresh-cut
flowers winter and summer and the silent tread of the uniformed employees and
the laughter of temporarily unrumpled businessmen and visiting wives as they
traipsed in and out to the cabs or over to the elevators or across to the
winking comfortable cavern of the bar. Sometimes it was enough for me to sit,
just sit on one of the sofas by a white telephone, as if waiting for a call,
and to read the newspapers and brochures I’d find lying there, or even the
occasional discarded paperback. Skin on my neck prickled against the
possibility that I’d be discovered, asked to show my key, asked to leave, but
it never happened. I looked like a traveler, I suppose, or less flatteringly, like a tourist. Other times I’d walk right up to the front
desk and ring the bell, if necessary, and some cleanly young man with
brilliantined hair or a dignified older man with a carnation in his buttonhole
would assume the proper distance from me to be heard without shouting, to
assume the friendly impersonal intimacy of hotels, and I would take bills from
my purse and place them on the counter between us and he with a faint formal
gesture of precisely calculated embarrassment would pick up the bills as though
they were litter and make them disappear in a drawer, and he would hand me a
key, that is to say a card, a little plastic rectangle with an image, as often
as not, of the skyline printed on it, or the hotel façade, or an ad for a
nightclub. With prize in hand I’d deflect the suggestion of luggage, but accept
the accompaniment of a bellboy to escort me to the elevator and we’d be carried
up up up (I always asked for the highest floor I could get) and the door would
open onto a whisper-quiet carpeted hallway with
(to make up, to make love), the comic-book adaptation of Les
Fleurs du mal that she glanced through, the eighth-grade
French which she hadn’t needed once the whole trip, not even to order a glass
of wine, suddenly suffusing her consciousness, so that when the new reader
encountered « L’Invitation au voyage »
she was able fully to accept, guided in part by the black-and-white images the
artist had chosen to illustrate, no to accompany, the text: a languid arm
pocked with needle scars dangling down from a bed, a needle rising to meet it
that is really a ship’s mast, a ship’s mast that is really a gigantically erect
cock thrusting from the hips of one grinning sailor into the eager sucking
mouth of another sailor, a mouth that is really a cave lit from within by
phosphorescent crystals, a cave that is really a grave straddled by a waif-thin
woman in a black raincoat, wearing sunglasses from under which tears are
streaming. She took all this in—the artist’s melodramatic conception and the
innocent poem—in a single glance, or so it seemed, as her husband approached
the register carrying a Tintin book, Objectif Lune .
Murmuring to herself silently now—a split now, at once in that hotel room on
the Place des Vosges and in that bedroom in a soft Chicago suburb— Tout
y parlerait / À l’âme en secret / Sa douce langue
natale . All illuminated, as in a flash of scarlet, by three
words at the bottom right corner of the page she holds between thumb and
forefinger, not even the end of the paragraph or the sentence, syntax
incomplete and yet luminous: the invitation to ….
The rain falls on the skylight window. The new reader is always a stranger.
2. Letters From M
Hotels. How I loved them. The intoxicating combination of anonymity and privilege, as though
living in an American city could be made somehow portable, bearable. There were
times, of course, when I needed that feeling, that departure. Midweek, in the
unreal interval after my diagnosis, I would find myself on a train or in a cab
wandering without luggage into the lobby of an old hotel, out of the chaos of
unmade decisions into the cool echoey atmosphere of marble and steel, the
lobbies with their heavy upholstery and mirrors and chandeliers and fresh-cut
flowers winter and summer and the silent tread of the uniformed employees and
the laughter of temporarily unrumpled businessmen and visiting wives as they
traipsed in and out to the cabs or over to the elevators or across to the
winking comfortable cavern of the bar. Sometimes it was enough for me to sit,
just sit on one of the sofas by a white telephone, as if waiting for a call,
and to read the newspapers and brochures I’d find lying there, or even the
occasional discarded paperback. Skin on my neck prickled against the
possibility that I’d be discovered, asked to show my key, asked to leave, but
it never happened. I looked like a traveler, I suppose, or less flatteringly, like a tourist. Other times I’d walk right up to the front
desk and ring the bell, if necessary, and some cleanly young man with
brilliantined hair or a dignified older man with a carnation in his buttonhole
would assume the proper distance from me to be heard without shouting, to
assume the friendly impersonal intimacy of hotels, and I would take bills from
my purse and place them on the counter between us and he with a faint formal
gesture of precisely calculated embarrassment would pick up the bills as though
they were litter and make them disappear in a drawer, and he would hand me a
key, that is to say a card, a little plastic rectangle with an image, as often
as not, of the skyline printed on it, or the hotel façade, or an ad for a
nightclub. With prize in hand I’d deflect the suggestion of luggage, but accept
the accompaniment of a bellboy to escort me to the elevator and we’d be carried
up up up (I always asked for the highest floor I could get) and the door would
open onto a whisper-quiet carpeted hallway with
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