It’s Not You

Hotels were different in those days. You could smoke in them. The rooms had bathtubs, where you could also smoke. You didn’t need a credit card or identification, though you might be made to sign the register, so later the private detective—just like that, we’re in a black-and-white movie, though I speak only of the long-ago days of 1993—could track you down. Maybe you anticipated the private detective, and wrote down an assumed name.

Nobody was looking for me. I didn’t use an assumed name, though I wasn’t myself. I’d had my heart broken, or so I thought; I had been shattered in a collision with a man, or so I thought; and I went to the fabled pink hotel just outside the midwestern town where I lived. The Narcissus Hotel: it sat on the edge of a lake and admired its own reflection. Behind, an ersatz lake, an amoebic swimming pool, now drained, empty lounge chairs all around. January 1: cold, but not yet debilitating. In my suitcase I’d brought one change of clothing, a cosmetic bag, a bottle of Jim Beam, a plastic sack of Granny Smith apples. I thought this was all I needed. My plan was to drink bourbon and take baths and feel sorry for myself. Paint my toenails, maybe. Shave my legs. My apartment had only a small fiberglass shower I had to fit myself into, as though it were a science fiction pod that transported me to nowhere, but cleaner.

I would watch television, too. In those days, I didn’t own one, and there is a certain level of weeping that can only be achieved while watching TV, self-excoriating, with a distant laugh track. I wanted to demolish myself, but I intended on surviving the demolition.

It wasn’t the collision that had hurt me. It was that the other party, who’d apologized and explained a catalog of deficiencies—self-loathing, an unsuitability for any kind of extended human contact—had three weeks later fallen spectacularly and visibly in love with a woman and they could be seen—seen by me—necking in the public spaces of the small town. The coffee shop, the bar, before the movie started at the movie theater. I was young then—we all were—but not so young that public necking was an ordinary thing to do. We weren’t teenagers but grown-ups: late twenties in my case, early thirties in theirs.

New Year’s Day in the Narcissus Hotel. The lobby was filled with departing hangovers and their owners. Paper hats fell with hollow pops to the ground. Everyone winced. You couldn’t tell whose grip had failed. Nothing looked auspicious. That was good. My New Year’s resolution was to feel as bad as I could as fast as I could in highfalutin privacy, then leave the tatters of my sadness behind, with the empty bottle and six apple cores.