Hotel

Date: Mon, 29 Apr 1996 15:21:20 -0400 (EDT)

Hotel

I arrive at my hotel room in mid-morning, returning from setting up the modem in the computer in Allison's suite 7 floors down. The door is open: the maid is here. As I walk in she's in the bathroom; I announce myself with a "hi" and move to the window. I can't take the shower I'd planned, and I'm putting off going over my speech notes until the last possible moment, so I pick up my novel and plant myself at the window. The sun is phenomenal; by the time I woke up this morning at 7 a.m. a shaft of California brilliance had snuck in through the triple shades (a light, translucent gauze, merely the suggestion of a blind; a pleated, olive green drape on a metal track, pinioned by a dangling white handbar; finally, a thick rayon, patterned in muted polygons, normally tied back, the last line of optical defense) and was burning a hole in my bedcover. Now I'm safe in a corner at the mahogany-stained table, pages sheltered from the shine, but I'm still allowed a 14-story vantage on San Jose: red-tiled roofs, off-white walls, palm trees, public transit, 20-story hotels looking as natural as cactii, diminishing in their casual progress towards the low deserted mountains out of town.

I'm reading The Mezzanine, by Nicholson Baker. It's an inspection of the minutae of modern life. From the back cover: "It lends to milk cartons the associative richness of Marcel Proust's madelines." The narrator examines in detail the machinery and psychology of straws, escalators, tone arms, office supplies, register lines at the pharmacy, sandwiches, urinals - it sounds painful but it's honestly delightful.

My eyes notice the activity in the center of the room and wander towards it. It's the maid, stuffing pillows into pillowcases. As this very subject was addressed by Baker at some length, I take notice. Her technique involves holding the pillow in her right hand, bunching it up into a shallow U, while her left hand shakes the case open. She then guides the far corner of the pillow into the opening made by her palm, now splayed inside the case. Once both near ends of the pillow are inside, she then shakes and pushes until the pillow is snug against the far side. Now she's left with a dangling rectangle of unused pillowcase extending past the side of the pillow. What's to be done? Her solution is as elegant as it is unexpected: she folds one side of the pillowcase under the other, snug against the pillow; the remaining scrap of fabric is then folded inward onto itself, its straightness assured by grabbing from the inside and snapping tight to the lateral sides, using the tension between the corners, enhanced by the pillow's very presence, to straighten and tighten the line.

Intrigued, I continued watching as she attacked the other bed. With a casual lift, she spread out the bottom sheet - not fitted, but flat -- a sister or mistress to the dominant topsheet, whose highly visible, businesslike cuffs are matched by her quarter-inch, slightly frilled, pink-threaded hem - and smoothed it down on the near side of the bed. The foot-side edge of the sheet lies flat against the edge of the mattress, falling over only on the sides. She tucked in the corner near the headboard; the details of this motion were hidden to me. To my surprise, instead of tucking in both sides immediately, she then spread out the topsheet and, after only a cursory straightening, the blanket (a muted orange man-made fiber; if you pinch it you get a fingerfull of peach-colored fuzz). The masculine cuff is now turned over, providing a supervisory interface between the unruly scratchiness of the blanket and the chin of the reclining client.

By this time I wasn't even feigning interest in the novel; for some time now it had been resting at my lap. She approached the bottom corner, and with three swift strokes, executed a perfect corner tuck. I had the opportunity to witness her technique once more, and I record it here with awe. One: the mattress is lifted slightly with the left hand, and the bottom edge of blanket-and-sheet is swept cleanly under with the blade edge of her right. Two: (and this is the miraculous part): a triangle of excess fabric is held slightly above the mattress by its vertex as her right hand adjusts the dangling cover resting akimbo along the long side of the bed. The triangle manages to remove just enough cover to allow what in my feeble corners is a chaotic clump to settle into a more natural, straighter line. (Note that the portion of the cover tucked under in step one affords the clearance necessary for the right hand to finish its task unaided.) Finally, three: the triangle joins its fellow strands under the mattress, and the line is smoothed and straightened all the way back to the headboard.

Ultimately, she grabbed the pillows from the other bed, where they had been waiting in readiness, and dropped them lightly at their natural position above the turned-down cuff. I just checked: all four pillows are placed tuck-side down, so the hotel client is faced with an archetypical pillow, unblemished by any undue (however ingenious) folds. Later, as the afternoon fades and the guest is more likely to return for an afternoon nap or shoes-off phone call or television show, she will return, to lay the heavy, quilted bedspread, hiding her meticulous bedmaking work from the sight of the very guests who will not think to consider the attention and care it took to create their feeling of snug, smooth comfort.

"You want a vaccuum, sir?" Her accent is Spanish.

"No, that's all right." The conversation I had been considering broaching perished stillborn. "Thank you." She pushed her cart, its plastic bottles and mysterious implements clanking soundlessly, through the door of my room without further eye contact, pausing only to remove the doorstop - without needing to stoop -- by pulling it up by its chain, which chain, on entering the room ten minutes before, she had presciently affixed to the doorknob.

San Jose
30 April 1996