High Tide in Tucson_ Essays From Now or Never - Barbara Kingsolver [69]
“I assume you are aware…of our dress code.”
We look at each other, bewildered.
“No jeans,” he says, “and no sneakers.”
I’ve been wearing this outfit so long I can’t imagine the possibility of other clothes, but he’s pegged me all right. Jeans. Sneakers. Suede sneakers, mind you, but no dice. The maître d’ turns to the rest of the party and asks then, “Will there be three of you tonight?”
No one speaks. Lest the congratulations of a thousand fans go to my head, let it be known, I’m a blight on the Rainbow Room.
I consider slinking home in my substandard apparel. Does he realize the alternative was cowboy boots and a T-shirt autographed by a four-year-old? Could his lip get any closer to his nose? Our ambassador of haute couture drifts off, leaving us to mortify in the foyer.
In time he returns. And since I have not yet evaporated, he allows regretfully, “It’s a slow night tonight. I suppose I could seat you at a back table.”
We follow him single file to a back table, from which we are in a position to look down upon the million bright lights of the city. My publisher orders Dom Perignon. “Good,” I’m thinking to myself. “We’ll show them to treat us like pond scum. We’ll spend a pile of dough.”
But as I toast the town in my jeans and sneakers, my spirits begin to tilt and rise. How is this for poetic justice? I wrote my way to this pinnacle of glamour by one means only: being true to the world I know, a tract of workaday lives where a person is no more likely than, say, a buffalo to rise fifty floors and step out into the hushed terrazzo of the Rainbow Room. My characters could never afford this place—and if by some wild chance they could, they’d probably get scuttled to a back table. That maître d’ is no fool. His keen eye caught the girl out of which, as they say, you can’t take the country. And what’s wrong with that? If I couldn’t be myself, I’d have to be nobody.
Our waiter—bless your soul, wherever you are now—bends down and whispers, “I think you look great.”
Thanks. But if I ever go back to the Rainbow Room, I’ll be wearing ruby slippers.
I’m nursing a cold, but gloating. I’ve almost made it. The last stop is a regional booksellers’ convention. The plan here is for authors to make an impression on booksellers, who will then go home with a special fondness for us and sell plenty of our books. All I have to do is give a reading in the morning, then catch a flight home.
I’ve taken to the behaviors of a stressed laboratory rat—eating furtively in my room, for example, odd things at odd hours. A little past midnight, bleary, sneezing, overdue for bed, I stagger out to the hallway to set out the remains of my room-service tray. The door clicks shut behind me. I don’t have my key. I’m standing in the hallway of a finer hotel, wearing an extra-large T-shirt with my daughter’s picture on it, and cowboy boots. That’s all.
I peck at 1604 and am relieved, when the door opens, to see four ladies in bouffant hairdos having a party in there. They stop talking, arrested by this development at their door: a possible escapee from the Symbionese Liberation Preschool.
As a concise response to everything that has happened in the last month, I begin to sob. I ask one of the ladies if she would dial housekeeping and have them pick up the tray from 1605 and, please, while they’re at it, could they bring the key to my room? The ladies do this immediately, since they are not at all keen on the idea of me hanging around crying in their room. They know all they need to know about who I am: namely, that I am deranged.
The next morning, as I give my reading in the convention auditorium, I spot the four ladies in my audience. Turns out they all run bookstores. They are looking at me now as possibly the best story of their lives. If I was sent here to make an impression on booksellers, Lord knows I have done it.
I’m on the plane home, and the devil take my silk jacket. If it’s not coffee-stained by the time I get to Tucson, I’ll go ahead and have it bronzed.