The Way Inn Read online

  That was why she was in the bar: she had been photographing the paintings. It was late, past midnight already, and I wanted a quick nightcap before going to my room. One of the night staff served me my whisky and returned to the lobby, where he chatted quietly with a colleague at the reception desk. I had registered that I was not alone in the darkened bar, but no more than that. What made me look up was the flash of her camera. I kept looking because I knew at once that I had seen her before—and, too exhausted for subtlety, I let the meter run out on my chance to gaze undetected, and she raised her head from her camera’s LCD display and saw me.

  We had met before, I said—not met, exactly, but I had seen her before. She remembered the incident. How could she forget something like that? Naturally, as a mere spectator, I was not part of her memory of what had happened; I was just one of the background people. Her explanation of how she came to be there, in that state, made immediate, obvious sense, but left me embarrassed. To close the horrible chasm that had opened in the conversation, I asked why she was photographing the paintings.

  A hobby, she said. The paintings were all over the hotel—in my room, here in the restaurant, out in the lobby, in the bar. And so it was in every Way Inn. They were all variations on an abstract theme: meshing coffee-colored curves and bulging shapes, spheres within spheres, arcs, tangents, all inscrutable, suggestive of nothing. I had never really examined them—they were not there for admiring, they were there simply to occupy space without distracting or upsetting. They were an approximation of what a painting might look like, a stand-in for actual art. They worked best if they decorated without being noticed. All they had to do was show that someone had thought about the walls so that you, the guest, didn’t have to. An invitation not to be bothered. Now that she had drawn my attention to them, I could see that she was right—they were everywhere. How many in total? I felt uncomfortable even asking.

  “Thousands,” she had said, as if sharing a delicious secret. “Tens of thousands. More. Way Inn has more than five hundred locations worldwide. They never have fewer than one hundred rooms. Each room has at least one painting. Add communal spaces. Bars, restaurants, fitness centers, business suites, conference rooms, and of course the corridors . . . At least a hundred thousand paintings. I believe more.”

  I could see why this was a calculation she delighted in sharing with people—the implications of it were extraordinary. Where did all the paintings come from? Who was painting them? With chairs, tables, carpets, light fixtures, there were factories—big business. But works of art? They weren’t prints; you could see the brush marks in the paint. It was thoroughly beyond a single artist.

  “There is no painter,” she said. “No one painter, anyway. It’s an industrial process. There’s a single vast canvas rolling out into a production line. Then it’s cut up into pieces and framed.”

  As she said this, she showed me the other photos on her camera, the blip-blip-blip of her progress through the memory card keeping time in her conversation. She was tall, taller than my six foot, and leaned over me as she did this, red hair falling toward me—a curiously intimate stance. The paintings flicked past on the little screen, bright in the gloom. The same neutral tones. The same bland curves and formations. Sepia psychedelia. A giant painting rolling off the production line like a slab of pastry, ready to be stamped into neat rectangles and framed and hung on the wall of a chain hotel . . . there was something squalid about it.

  “Why?” I asked. “Why collect something that’s made like that? What’s so interesting about them?”

  “Nothing, individually, nothing at all,” she said. “You have to see the bigger picture.”

  “Late night?”

  A second passed before I realized that I had been addressed, by Phil. His conversation with Rosa (or Rhoda) had lapsed. She prodded at her phone. Not really reading, not really listening, I had slipped into standby mode and was staring into space.

  I made an effort to brighten. “Quite late,” I said. “I got here at midnight.” And then I had talked to the woman—for how long?—until Maurice detained me even later. Hotel bars, windowless and with only a short walk to your bed, made it easy to lose track of time.

  “I got here yesterday morning,” Phil said. “We’re exhibiting, so there was the usual last-minute panic . . . got to bed late myself. Slept well, though. Did you get a good room?”

  “Yes,” I said. In truth I was indifferent to it, precisely as the anonymous designers had intended. Indifferent was good. “It’s a new hotel.” The same faces, the same conversations. People like Phil—inoffensive, with few distinguishing characteristics and a name resonant with normality. The perfect name, in fact. Phil in the blanks. Once I put it to a Phil—not this Phil—that he had a default name, the name a child is left with after all the other names have been given out. He didn’t take it well and retorted that the same could be said of my name, Neil. There was some truth to that.

  Phil rolled his eyes. “Too new. Like one of those holiday-from-hell stories where the en suite is missing a wall and the fitness center is full of cement mixers.”

  The hotel looked fine to me—obviously new, but running smoothly, as if it had been open for months or years. “There’s a fitness center?”

  “No, no,” Phil said. He stabbed a snot-green cube of melon with his fork, then thought better of it and left it on his plate. “I don’t know. I’m talking about the skywalk. The hotel is finished, the conference center is finished, but the damn footbridge that’s meant to link them together isn’t done yet. So you have to take a bus to get to the fair.” The melon was lofted once more, and this time completed its journey into Phil. He gave me a disappointed look as he chewed.

  “I don’t understand,” I said, patting the information pack in front of me, a pack that contained a map of the conference facilities, lined up next to one another as neat as icons on a computer desktop. “The conference center is two minutes away, but you have to take a bus?”

  “There’s a bloody great motorway in the way,” Phil said. “No way around it but to drive. We spent half of yesterday in a bus or waiting for a bus.”

  “What a bore,” I said. So it was; I was ready to bask in it. It’s part of the texture of an event, and if it gets too much there is always something to distract me. In this case it was Rhoda, Rosa, whatever her name was, still plucking and probing at her phone, although with visibly waning enthusiasm, like a bird of prey becoming disenchanted with a rodent’s corpse. Cropped hair, cute upturned nose—she was divertingly pretty and I remembered enjoying her company on previous occasions. If there was queuing and sitting in buses to be done, I would try to be near her while I was doing it. Sensing my attention, she looked up from her phone and smiled, a little warily.

  Behind Rosa, a familiar figure was lurching toward the cereals. Maurice. It was a marvel he was up at all. The back of his beige jacket was a geological map of wrinkles from the hem to the armpits. Those were the same clothes he had been wearing last night, I realized in a moment of terror. I issued a silent prayer: please let him have showered. But maybe he wouldn’t come over, maybe he would adhere to someone else today. He picked up a pastry, sniffed it and returned it to the pile. A cup of coffee and a plate were clasped together in his left hand, both tilting horribly. My appalled gaze drew the attention of Rosa, who turned to see what I was looking at—and at that moment Maurice raised his eyes from the buffet and saw us. We must have appeared welcoming. He whirled in the direction of our table like a gyre of litter propelled by a breeze. Despite his—our—late night, he glistened with energy, bonhomie, and sweat.

  It pains me to admit it, but Maurice and I are in the same field. What we do is not similar. We are not similar. We simply inhabit the same ecosystem, in the way that a submarine containing Jacques Cousteau inhabits the same ecosystem as a sea slug. Maurice was a reporter for a trade magazine covering the conference industry, so I was forever finding myself sharing exhibition halls, lecture theaters, hotels, bars, restauran
ts, buses, trains and airports with him. And across this varied terrain, he was a continual, certain shambles, getting drunk, losing bags, forgetting passports, snoring on trains. But because we so often found ourselves proximal, Maurice had developed the impression that he and I were friends. He was monstrously mistaken on this point.

  “Morning, morning all,” he said to us, setting his coffee and Danish-heaped plate on the table and sitting down opposite me. I smiled at him; whatever my private feelings about Maurice, however devoutly I might wish that he leave me alone, I had no desire to be openly hostile to him. He was an irritant, for sure, but no threat.

  “Glad to see you down here, old man,” Maurice said to me, not allowing the outward flow of words to impede the inward flow of coffee and pastry. Crumbs flew. “I was concerned about you when we parted. You disappeared to bed double-quick. I thought you might pass in the night.”

  “I was very tired,” I said, plainly.

  “Or,” Maurice said, leaning deep into my precious bubble of personal space, “maybe you were in a hurry to find that girl’s room!” He started to laugh at his own joke, a phlegmy smoker’s laugh.

  “No, no,” I said. I am not good at banter. What is the origin of the ability to participate in and enjoy this essentially meaningless wrestle-talk? No doubt it was incubated by attentive fathering and close-knit workplaces, and I had little experience of either of those. At the conferences, I was forever seeing reunions of men—coprofessionals, opposite numbers, former colleagues—who had not seen one another in months or years, and the small festivals of rib-prodding, backslapping, insult and innuendo that ensued.

  “What’s this?” Phil asked, clearly amused at my discomfort. Rosa/Rhoda’s expression was harder to read; mild offense? Social awkwardness? Disappointment, or even sexual jealousy? I hoped the latter, pleased by the possibility alone.

  “Neil made a friend last night,” Maurice said. “I found him trying it on with this girl . . .” he paused, eyes closed, hands raised, before turning to Rosa: “. . . excuse me, this woman . . . in the bar.”

  “Jesus, Maurice,” I said, and then turning to Rosa and Phil: “I ran into someone I know last night and was chatting with her when Maurice showed up. Obviously, at the sight of him, she excused herself and went to bed.”

  Maurice chuckled. “I don’t know. You looked pretty smitten. Didn’t mean to cock-block you.”

  “Jesus, Maurice.”

  “You’re a dark horse, Neil,” Phil said.

  “Just a friend,” I said, directing this remark mostly at Rosa/Rhoda.

  “Of course, of course,” she said. Then she stood, holding up her phone like a get-out-of-conversation-free card. “Excuse me.”

  “So, what’s her name, then?” Maurice asked. “Your friend.”

  A sickening sense of disconnection rose in my throat. I didn’t know her name. Against astonishing odds I had reencountered the one truly memorable stranger from the millions who pass through my sphere, and I had failed to ask her name or properly introduce myself. I had kept the contact temporary, disposable, when I could have done something to make it permanent. Maurice’s arrival in the bar had broken the spell between us, the momentary intimacy generated by the coincidence, before I had been able to capitalize on it. And now I was failing to answer Maurice’s question. He surely saw my hesitation and sense the blankness behind it.

  “Because you could ask the organizers, leave a message for her. They might be able to find her.”

  “She’s not here for the conference,” I said, relieved that I could deviate from this line of questioning without lying.

  “Not here for the conference?” Maurice said, now blinking exaggeratedly, pantomiming his surprise in case anyone missed it. All of Maurice’s expressions were exaggerated for dramatic effect. When not hamming it up, in moments he believed himself unobserved, his expression was one of innocent, neutral dim-wittedness. “She must be the only person in this hotel who isn’t! Good God, what else is there to do out here?”

  “She works for Way Inn.”

  “Oh, right, chambermaid?” Maurice said, and Phil barked a laugh.

  I smiled tolerantly. “She finds sites for new hotels—so I suppose she’s checking out her handiwork.”

  “So she’s to blame,” Phil said. “Does she always opt for the middle of nowhere?”

  “I think the conference center and the airport had a lot to do with it.”

  “Aha, yes,” Maurice said. Without warning, he lunged under the table and began to root about in his satchel. Then he reemerged, holding a creased magazine folded open to a page marked with a sticky note. The magazine was Summit, Maurice’s employer, and the article was by him, about the MetaCenter. The headline was ANOTHER FINE MESSE.

  “I came here while they were building it,” Maurice said. He prodded the picture, an aerial view of the center, a white diamond surrounded by brown earth and the yellow lice of construction vehicles. “Hard-hat tour. It’s huge. Big on the outside, bigger on the inside: 115,000 square meters of enclosed space, 15,000 more than the ExCel Center. Thousands of jobs, and a catalyst for thousands more. Regeneration, you know. Economic development.”

  I heard her voice: enterprise zone, growth corridor, opportunity gateway. That lulling rhythm. I wanted to be back in my room.

  “Did you stay here?” Phil asked.

  “Nah, flew in, flew out,” Maurice said. “This place is brand-new. Opened a week or two ago, for this conference I’m told.”

  “So they say,” I said, just to make conversation, since there appeared to be no escaping it for the time being. To make conversation, to keep the bland social product rolling off the line, word shapes in place of meaning. While Phil again explained the unfinished state of the pedestrian bridge and our tragic reliance on buses, I focused on demolishing my breakfast. Maurice took the news about the buses quite well—an impressive performance of huffing and eye-rolling that did not appear to lead to any lasting grievance. “The thing is,” he said, as if communicating some cosmic truth, “where there’s buses, there’s hanging around.”

  There was no need for me to hang around. My coffee was finished, my debt to civility paid.

  “Excuse me,” I said, and left the table.

  Back in my room, housekeeping had not yet called, and the risen sun was doing little to cut through the atmospheric murk beyond the tinted windows. The unmade bed, the inert black slab of the television, the armchair with a shirt draped over it—these shapes seemed little more than sketched in the feeble light. Before dropping my keycard into the little wall-mounted slot, which would activate the lights and the rest of the room’s electronic comforts, I walked over to the window to look out. It wasn’t even possible to tell where the sun was. Shadowless damp sapped the color from the near and obliterated the distant. The thick glass did nothing to help; instead it gave me a frisson of claustrophobia, of being sealed in. I looked at its frame, at all the complicated interlayers and the seals and spacers holding the thick panes in place: high-performance glass, insulating against sound and temperature, allowing the hotel to set its own perfect microclimate in each room.

  A last look as I recrossed the small space—the brightest point in the room was the red digital display of the radio-alarm on the bedside table. I slid the card in the slot and the room came alive. Bulbs in clever recesses and behind earth-toned shades. Stock tickers streamed across the TV screen. In the bathroom, the ascending whirr of a fan. I brushed my teeth, stepping away from the sink to look at the painting over the desk, the only example of the hotel’s factory-made art in my room. The paintings in the bar had seemed so threatening last night—remembering the moment, the threat had come not from what lay within their frames but from the possibility of what lay outside them.

  You have to look at the bigger picture, she said—and she meant it literally. If the paintings were simply scraps of a single giant canvas, they could be reassembled. And if they were reassembled, what picture formed? We were being fed, morsel by morse
l, a grand design. “A representation of spatial relationships” was how she described it. Her work, she said, involved sensing patterns in space—finding sites that were special confluences of abstract qualities, where the curving lines of a variety of economic, geographic and demographic variables converged. A kind of modern geomancy, a matter of instinct as much as calculation. She had a particular gift for seeing these patterns, any patterns. And the paintings formed a pattern. She was certain.

  After midnight and after whisky, the idea found some traction with me. But in the morning, with the lights on, it sounded absurd. The artwork before me was simply banal, and I could not see that multiplying it would do anything but compound its banality. A chocolate-colored mass filled the lower part of the frame, with an echoing, paler—let’s say latte—band around it or behind it, and a smaller, mocha arc to the upper left. Assigning astral significance to such a mundane composition was, frankly, more than simply eccentric, it was deranged. She had spent too long looking for auspicious sites and meaningful intersections for hotels, and was applying her divination to areas where it did not apply. I tried to trace the lines of the painting beyond the frame, to imagine where they might go next, extrapolating from what I could see. Spheres. Conjoined spheres. Nothing more. Spatial relationships—what did that even mean?

  Spit, rinse. Bag, credentials, keycard. The shadows returned and I closed the door on them.

  Music while waiting for the lift: easy-listening “Brown Sugar.” The lift doors were flanked by narrow full-length mirrors. Vanity mirrors, installed so people spend absent minutes checking their hair and don’t become impatient before the lift arrives. Mirrors designed to eat up time—there was some dark artistry, it’s true, but a decorators’ trick, not a cabalistic conspiracy. A small sofa sat in the corridor near the lift, one of those baffling gestures toward domesticity made by hotels. It was not there to be sat in—it was there to make the corridor appear furnished, an insurance policy against bleakness and emptiness.