“I told you, I hardly saw anything: the kid wasn’t getting turned on, he was cold … and then that man Pedro shut the door, and I left. I didn’t even realize you were in the room.”
She looked me in the eye. I think she was trying to calculate the extent to which it might be I, and not she, who was really calling the shots in the conversation. Because that’s what this conversation was partly about, or mostly about — like all conversations.
I watched her weigh up how worthwhile it would be to break our unspoken agreement and go to the trouble of getting me to answer her question without any stalling, as directly as she had asked it. Or at least I imagine that’s what she was doing; perhaps all she wanted from me that night were enough answers for her to shape her monologue around and give it the appearance of a conversation.
Now I think (and perhaps I thought it at the time, too, and then forgot) that, just as I do in mine, she must have to speak to a lot of people in her line of work without having a real conversation with any of them. Perhaps she’s forgotten how it’s done. Or was never very interested in doing it, or lost what interest she had as she met more and more people and discovered that their apparently endless variety in fact boils down to a handful of possible combinations of the same tired old gambits.
In any case, after a short silence, she let slide the fact that I was avoiding the question and carried on talking. I can’t tell if she was being a little more or a little less astute than me at that point.
“Right. Today was a disaster. They were useless. We’ll have to see if we can cut anything good from it.”
“What happened after that? Why did the girl get angry?”
“Well, you must have seen she’s got a temper on her. She was nervous, and the kid wasn’t doing a great job. And I’ll admit that I don’t have a lot of patience anymore. Sometimes I forget that, for the actors, every session is the first session. Well it’s too bad for her. She left before getting paid.”
“Paid?”
She laughed again.
“Of course. The models get paid. It’s one thing for them not to have done this before, but it would be another one entirely if they didn’t get paid for it. I’m upfront with them about that before we get started — it makes things easier. And she was the one most interested in the money, too. The kid just wanted to be in a movie.”
“Didn’t you pay him?”
“Yeah, sure, of course I paid him. But he wasn’t really concerned about the money, although he pretended it was really important to him. It’s like that with a lot of them, although it ought to be the opposite; they think the fact that there’s money involved cleans the whole thing up. That it makes it all a bit more noble — or less sordid, anyway. So.”
A silence followed. Perhaps, if I’d answered her question, if I had made an effort to say whether I’d liked what I’d seen (or what I had liked of everything I’d seen), the conversation would have continued down that road and we would have gotten to philosophizing. But I doubt it — that didn’t seem to be her style, and now it seems even less so. But she appeared to notice that my precautions forced her to take some of her own. It made me angry to think that I might have disappointed her. Or rather, it made me angry that it made me angry — my being in the position of the person who will either satisfy or disappoint decisively gave her the upper hand.
But she already had the upper hand, anyway. That’s clear to me now that I remember how, when she said “So” again while brusquely getting up from her chair, I suddenly felt a burning desire for her to stay, a desire free from doubt or precaution, a silent groan that surprised even me.
And she did stay. She walked over to the desk and turned to look at me.
“I’ve got an idea. Do you have a pen? There aren’t any here. These new hotels have lost the good old habits.”
I held out to her the one I am writing with now. With a smile, she jotted a few numbers in the margin of one of the hotel brochures.
“Here’s a password to get into my site. It’s like a universal subscription, and it won’t ever expire. You can get into any of the sections with this, including the paying ones, of course, which are where the good stuff is. Like the master key they gave you at reception. It’s the one I use, and a few other special members, and now you.”
She handed me the slip of paper, and I left it on the bedside table without looking at it — it would have been like counting a tip. I didn’t thank her, but only because I was caught off guard. That really irritates me now, even though I don’t think she thought much of it; she smiled and suddenly seemed resolved to start liking me, or else to keep liking me, come Hell or high water. I didn’t like that, either because it was less than I had hoped for or because it slyly reintroduced the question of who had the advantage. Apparently, liking me would be her revenge.
“It’d be an honor if you returned the visit. Even if it is just virtually. It seems only fair — I’ve got the advantage, after all.”
I must have looked taken aback. She hadn’t read my mind, but apparently we were thinking in the same terms. She smiled.
“Because I’ve read you, you see. It doesn’t make much sense to sit here talking to you about what I do if you haven’t seen it. And as you know, it’s truer in my business than in any other that a picture is worth a thousand words. That’s what it’s all about, in the end.”
She sat down again.
“Even if I never was interested in offering just the photos on their own. It’s odd, but they’re not enough. You always need at least one line, a carefully chosen little paragraph. That guy, the web designer? He hadn’t read a book since he left school, he listened to me talk and talk and then ignored everything I told him. And yet he’s still a subscriber after all these years. He’s practically the oldest customer. So I imagine he’s worked out by now that what I write does matter, in the end. It’s what sets us apart.”
Her passion for clichés caught me off guard again. She sat up and laughed.
“So, you know, if you need a bit of extra work.”
We both laughed. Then we both took a long sip from our drinks at the same time, then we laughed again. I give her all the credit and admit she had a knack for cunningly working a new note into the conversation. We talked about my work, about the hotel, about hotels in general. Like me, she enjoys the big ones, and any that have a long track record. And failing that, she would always choose an impersonal establishment over a charming boutique hotel. We agreed that it’s a scourge, charm. I provide the charm, I remember her saying. She chose the hotels carefully when she was preparing her work trips — she liked to handle that part herself. For her own enjoyment and for practical considerations: she would rather the staff be efficient than friendly, that they have enough experience to have seen a few things, that they be discreet, and not keep track of all the people coming into the room or knock on the door every five minutes. We both lamented the progressive extinction of that particular species of hotel professional.