Hotels of North America by Rick Moody

Author:Rick Moody [Moody, Rick]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2015-11-10T00:00:00+00:00

Windmere Residence, Windmere Lane, Charlottesville, Virginia, December 3–5, 2002

My wife’s great-aunt was a woman of great resources. She was four and a half feet tall and had osteoporosis of the severe kind, but her rapier wit was never in short supply, nor her recall of trivial facts from the lives of extended family members. A slightly raised eyebrow (which one would have just been able to see beneath the enormous spectacles) was a signifier of abrupt turns in her storytelling. I rarely missed a chance to visit with this great-aunt, even if visiting meant agreeing to a family reunion to be held in the Windmere Residence, the aunt’s independent-living address.

It bears mentioning that the wife’s family was already well organized around the opinion that I, Reginald Morse, was insufficiently job-locked. The older feminine members of the clan, all of them given to macramé and tiered desserts, liked to take me aside, banter, and then introduce the surgical lancet: Why aren’t you pursuing more conventional employment? This proved to be the case again at the Windmere. After admiring the recordings of the big-band era played through a public-address system in one of the reception halls and claiming to be unable to hear anything but the highlights of any conversation, and after helping the excellent great-aunt back up to her heavily festooned chambers (she was fatigued and wanted to get to bed early), I let myself be the subject of harassing remarks by one or two relatives whose idea of a good time was televised dancing competitions. Let it be said that my particular talents were not effective in a conventional transnational corporate setting, this is undeniable, and indeed because of my natural desire to innovate, I was not terribly good at serving as an employee. In certain circles, however, these things would have been considered advantages.

Uncle Don wanted to talk with me about ice hockey and he seemed genuinely shocked when I did not know who was playing in my division, and after several times through this particular rondo, I excused myself and went directly back to the guest suite, leaving my wife in the Rosewood Room with her fifty-nine or so relatives, along with their epidemic of obesity and their belief that the fossils of pre-extinction-event cretaceous sauropods were sculpted a mere six thousand years ago. Upon arriving in the guest suite, I laid myself grimly upon a multiply quilted bed, all of its bedclothes synthetic, and, using a new lightning-fast Internet connection in the Windmere, I began to attempt conversation with a certain professional, as shown herewith:

ManilPhil91: hello you wanna go priv

RegRomantic: ?

ManilPhil91: add time by put in credit card mc and visa

RegRomantic: oldfolkshome in VA, wife downstairs talking to second cousins

ManilPhil91: hahahahahahaha you put in numbers

RegRomantic: one sec where are you

ManilPhil91: Manila

RegRomantic: you 18?

ManilPhil91: 21

RegRomantic: parents know?

ManilPhil91: thx for putting in numbers want to party with this boy toy now?

RegRomantic: just had enough bourbon to preserve a dead body for a week

ManilPhil91: have cam?

RegRomantic: you don’t want to

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