Jailbird - Kurt Vonnegut [54]
And yet the man at the reception desk in the distance appeared to be wearing a tuxedo, and even a boutonniére!
As I advanced on him, it became apparent that my eyes had been tricked on purpose. He was in fact wearing a cotton T-shirt on which were printed a trompe l’oeil tuxedo jacket and shirt, with a boutonniére, bow tie, shirtstuds, handkerchief in the pocket, and all. I had never seen such a shirt before. I did not find it comical. I was confused. It was not a joke somehow.
The night clerk had a beard that was real, and an even more aggressively genuine bellybutton, exposed above his low-slung trousers. He no longer dresses that way, may I say, now that he is vice-president in charge of purchasing for Hospitality Associates, Ltd., a division of The RAMJAC Corporation. He is thirty years old now. His name is Israel Edel. Like my son, he is married to a black woman. He holds a Doctor’s degree in history from Long Island University, summa cum laude, and is a Phi Beta Kappa. When we first met, in fact, Israel had to look up at me from the pages of The American Scholar, the Phi Beta Kappa learned monthly. Working as night clerk at the Arapahoe was the best job he could find.
“I have a reservation,” I said.
“You have a what?” he said. He was not being impudent. His surprise was genuine. No one ever made a reservation at the Arapahoe anymore. The only way to arrive there was unexpectedly, in response to some misfortune. As Israel said to me only the other day, when we happened to meet in an elevator, “Making a reservation at the Arapahoe is like making a reservation in a burn ward.” He now oversees the purchasing at the Arapahoe, incidentally, which, along with about four hundred other hostelries all over the world, including one in Katmandu, is a Hospitality Associates, Ltd., hotel.
He found my letter of reservation in the otherwise vacant bank of pigeonholes behind him. “A week?” he said incredulously.
“Yes,” I said.
My name meant nothing to him. His area of historical expertise was heresies in thirteenth-century Normandy. But he did glean that I was an ex-jailbird—from the slightly queer return address on my envelope: a box number in the middle of nowhere in Georgia, and some numbers after my name.
“The least we can do,” he said, “is to give you the Bridal Suite.”
There was in fact no Bridal Suite. Every suite had long ago been partitioned into cells. But there was one cell, and only one, which had been freshly painted and papered—as a result, I would later learn, of a particularly gruesome murder of a teen-age male prostitute in there. Israel Edel was not himself being gruesome now. He was being kind. The room really was quite cheerful.
He gave me the key, which I later discovered would open practically every door in the hotel. I thanked him, and I made a small mistake we irony collectors often make: I tried to share an irony with a stranger. It can’t be done. I told him I had been in the Arapahoe before—in Nineteen-hundred and Thirty-one. He was not interested. I do not blame him.
“I was painting the town red with a girl,” I said.
“Um,” he said.
I persisted, though. I told him how we had peeked through the French doors into the famous restaurant. I asked him what was on the other side of that wall now.
His reply, which he himself considered a bland statement of fact, fell so harshly on my ears that he might as well have slapped me hard in the face. He said this:
“Fist-fucking films.”
I had never heard of such things. I gropingly asked what they were.
It woke him up a little, that I should