To the motel to fix a room for a tryst with Moira on the Fourth. No sign of sniper or anyone else for that matter. But I take no chances, slip into Howard Johnson’s through the banquet room where the rent Rotary banner still flies from Tuesday’s meeting five years ago:
Is it the truth?
Is it fair to all concerned?
Will it build goodwill and better friendships?
and straight up the inside stairs without exposing myself to the patio.
Room 203, the most nearly intact, was nevertheless a mess when we first saw it: graffiti, illuminations of hairy pudendae, suspicious scraps of newspaper littering the floor. The beds moldy, the toilet fouled. I’ve been working on the room for a month, installed a generator for air-conditioner and TV and coffee-maker and lights and bed vibrators; brought in hose water from Esso station next door; laid in supplies for a day or so.
And I haven’t finished. This weekend, knowing what I know, I’ll lay in supplies for six months, plus clothes for Moira, books, games. All hell will break loose on the Fourth and Moira and I may need a place to stay. What safer place than a motel in no man’s land, between the lines so to speak?
This is the place. Moira, in fact, picked it. She and I came here for a few minutes last month. She likes the byways. That weekend we hadn’t time to fly to Merida or Tombstone. So we took a walk. A proper ruin this, and what is more, it has a bad reputation and people don’t come here. But I think it is safe. The whites think the black guerrillas have it. The blacks think the white drug-heads have it. Neither wants any part of the other, so both stay away. I think.
Moira was delighted with the motel. There was a soupçon of danger, just enough. She clutched my arm and shrank against me. We stood by the scummy pool. Spanish moss trailed from the balcony. Alligator grass choked the wading pool. A scarlet watersnake coiled under the lifeguard’s perch. Moira found a pair of old 1960 harlequin glasses and an ancient vial of Coppertone.
“It’s like Pompey!” she cried.
“Like what? Yes, right.”
We kissed. Ruins make her passionate. Ghosts make her want to be touched. She is lovely, her quick upturned heart-shaped face and gold-brown eyes bright with a not quite genuine delight, a willingness rather to be delighted. Are you going to delight me? isn’t this the time? aren’t things falling out just right? Pleasing her is fathoming and fulfilling this expectation. Her face. Her cropped wheat-colored hair with a strong nap that aches my hand to brush against, her rather short tanned perfect legs drawn with strong simple strokes like the Draw Me girl in magazine contests. She’s poor, having left her West Virginia parents early and supported herself in civil service, worked in Bethesda for N.I.M.H. before transferring here. I can see her in Washington in the evening washing out her things in the washstand, keeping her budget, minding herself…. But she has her own views and likes. She opposes the war in Ecuador, subscribes to Playgirl, a mildly liberated, mildly Left magazine, and carries in her purse a pocket edition of Rod McKuen, a minor poet of the old Auto Age, which she likes to read aloud to me: “Don’t you just love that?” “Yes.” But what I love is her loving it, her faintly spurious love of loving things that seem lovable.
A turtle plopped into the pool.
“Can’t you just see them!” she whispered, swaying against me.
“Who?”
“All the salesmen and flappers.”
“Yes.”
“Aah!” said Moira, stretching out on a convex lounge which pushed her up in the middle. I perched somewhat precariously beside her.
Moira, who is twenty-two and not strong on history, thinks that the great motels of the Auto Age were the haunt of salesmen and flappers of the Roaring Twenties. Whereas, of course, it was far more likely that it was the salesman and his wife and kids and station wagon who put up here in the sixties and seventies.
A green lizard did push-ups on Moira’s lounge, blew out a red bladder. Moira screamed and hopped into my lap. We kissed. I kissed her smooth biscuit-shaped kneecaps. Her eyes were fond and faraway. “Just think,” she said.
“What?”
“It’s all gone. Gone with the wind.”
“Yes.”
“The lion and the lizard keep The courts where Samson gloried and drank deep.”
“Right.” I held her close, melting with love, and whispered in her ear: “The wild ass stamps o’er his head, but cannot break his sleep.”
“Don’t be nasty!” cried Moira, laughing and tossing her head like Miss Clairol of olden time.
“Sorry.”
Taking my hand like a child, she led me exploring. In a rusted-out Coke machine in the arcade we found warm, five-year-old Cokes. I opened two, poured out half and filled the bottles with Early Times.
“This is how the salesmen and flappers used to drink.”
“Wonderful!” She took a big swig.
The hot sun blazed in the patio. We could not swim in the foul pool. So we sweated and drank Coke and bourbon like a salesman and a flapper. The Spanish moss stirred on the balcony. We went up to get the breeze. Then we explored the rooms, sat on the moldering bed in 203 and drank some more.
“A penny for your thoughts,” said Moira thoughtfully.
“I fancy you. Do you fancy me?”
“Yes.”
“Let’s lie down.”
“On this? Ugh.”
“Then let’s sit in the chair.”
“Not today, Josephine.”
“Why not?”
“I didn’t bring my Cupid’s Quiver.”
“Your what?”
“My sachet, silly.”
“I’m not sure I understand. In any case, I don’t mind.”
“I do.”
“Then let’s have a drink.”
Again she took a mighty pull. Again we kissed. Her gold eyes gleamed.
“Ugh,” she said again, noticing the graffiti and pudendae on the walls. Damn, why didn’t I clean the walls? But she refused to be shocked by dirty pictures. To prove it, we had to make a museum tour. Love, where is love now? We gazed at the poor penciled organs, same and different, same and different, like a figure in the wallpaper, and outside the swifts twittered down the sky and up sang the old skyey sounds of June and where was love?
So we walked hand in hand and read the graffiti. Moira had taken a course in semantics and knew there was nothing in dirty words.
Above the Gideon Bible: For a free suck call room 208.
Moira shook her head sadly. “What an unhappy person must have written that.”
“Yea. That is, yes.” Desire for her had blown my speech center. “Love, I, you,” I said.
“Love I you too,” she said, kissing me, mouth open, gold eyes open.
Holding hands, we read the graffito under The Laughing Cavalier: Room 204 has a cutout on her pussy.
“The poor man.”
“Yes.”
“What is a cutout?”
“It is a device salesmen used to attach to their auto mufflers.”
“But how—? Never mind. Ummm, what a good place for a picnic!”
“Yes.”
“Far from the maddening crowd.”
“That’s true.”
It was then that the notion occurred to me to fix the room up properly and spend a weekend here.
“Tom, do you remember that quaint little hotel in Merida?”
“Yes, I do.”
“There’s a small hotel. With a wishing well.”
“Right.”
“Remember the coins we threw in the fountain after our love and the wish we made?”
“Yes.”
She is right. I must remember that women like to think of the act of love as a thing, “our love.” There are three of us, like a family, Moira and I and our love.