L'hôtel
by Stacey Forrester
A psychic visited a roadside motel in the town we used to live in last weekend. People, some of whom I grew up with and you knew as well, paid seventy-one dollars and eighty-seven cents to bask in the flickering hope of connecting with their deceased loved ones. Once, when I was a child, I saw in my mind every gory detail of a rock smashing up the face of another child moments before it happened in the ravine across the street from that same motel. Even having had a premonition myself, I tend to think that psychic mediums are not real and that people who are grieving are vulnerable. Plus, I don’t come home as often as I used to when you lived there too, so I was not there to bear witness. I heard from a mutual friend that you stopped by, so maybe if you make it around to visit me, we can talk about it.
French artist Sophie Calle worked as a chambermaid in a hotel for three weeks to create L'hôtel, a crime scene-esque photographic diary of the twelve rooms she cleaned and their rotating contents over those three weeks. The rooms and the items were photographed and cataloged without their owners' consent or presence. Viewing the rooms’ contents so candidly allows the viewer to project themselves into the scene as though they are a voyeur or maybe a ghost cloaked in the vulnerability, repulsion, and intimacy of it all. Haunted.
You worked in a roadside motel for years, breaking your young back cleaning rooms. After a few years of that, you got promoted to the front desk where you were grossly underpaid in cash so that you could dodge taxes and have more money to feed your kids. This was in exchange for both helping people feel at home when they arrived and for minding your own business. Because we could never be apart for too long, the motel became my second home too. I would pad around in stocking feet while you worked. I collected transferable skills from the regular guests, including:
● how to play Gin Rummy for some wash tokens
● how to use the wash tokens to get us a free Cherry Coke from the vending machine
● how to read poetry
Sometimes when I stay in hotels in strange cities now, my need for independence competes with the loneliness that can only come from being alone in a room with a city view and sprawling my own body across a bed that has held so many bodies. Most times I don’t need a new lover in a strange city when there is a woman who:
● turns the bed down, waiting
● places my toiletries carefully on a towel while I am out
● leaves me a note and some chocolate
It all provides the intimacy my body might think it craves. Chambermaids, sex workers, brides, mistresses, business women, waitresses—I am protected and I am loved here at this altar of feminized labor. Communion.
Sophie Calle seemed to love Love. Or at least the sentimentality of Love. You can see this in all of her work, but her tell is the types of items she was drawn to document more often than others—slips, stockings, love notes, napkin-scrap phone numbers. You loved Love too, in addition to being equally as curious as Calle about the stories of strangers. One evening your high school sweetheart checked into the motel on a work trip. Legend has it, he asked you if you were still good at pinball, but you told him that he would have to stay somewhere else if he wanted to play because there was no pinball machine there, and because he was married. At the time, there were no other hotels or motels with rooms available, which is an event that can be seen as both bad and good depending on where your moral compass falls.
You and I grew up here together, and during it all, you became a mistress in the space where you knew where to find extra towels and how to hide the evidence. It’s hard for me to picture you in the early days of the affair, even though I was there, also charming strangers and running around unsupervised in empty rooms, sworn to secrecy and promising not to be a bother to anyone. If I focus, I am able to remember that we were both happy, even if no one else understood what the hell you were doing. I remember you as playful back then and that you saved everything he touched. Souvenirs to tide you over until he returned a few months later. Maybe a reminder that he was real.
Your lover arrived with a truck full of his belongings one Christmas, nine and a half years after you two re-met, just in time to help you and me decorate the tree in the motel lobby. Your heart, the nagging guilt, the maintenance man holding the ladder I stood on, me wobbling, and the angel at the top of the tree all sighed in unison under the glowing lights. You traded in a lifetime of cleaning up men’s messes for the rest that comes with being loved by one. A hallelujah.
I am not mad about it, but I don’t know why you or anyone would go back to that shitty motel now. You got to escape it all and rest your body after years of hard labor. But like I said, I heard you went back last weekend, and I am not sure why you wouldn’t try to visit me too if you were passing through. I wasn’t around anyway. I was in a hotel 4,515 kilometers away, feeling sentimental in a manner that is a story for another day. Which, I guess, brings me back to the need to wrap this one about the psychic up.
I learned about your pinball skills for the first time when Dad avowed a list of things he loved about you. It was right at the top, and when I heard that, my knees gave out a little. I looked toward the sky, but it was just the motel reception room and its tiled ceiling. I remembered that I was annoyed that this was where your celebration of life was happening. Twelve years after L'hôtel was published, Sophie Calle disclosed to an art historian that while everything she photographed was as she found it, one room in L'hôtel had been staged. She had arranged it and filled it with items that she had “wished to find” during her time at the hotel. She has yet to reveal which room in the collection it was. A lesson from her work and our life is how hotel rooms are safe spaces for women’s secrets and lies. A confessional.
A classmate of mine wobbled on a stool in the same room your service was in six months later, beside the motel maintenance man, hoping that the psychic would have a message from her mom who also died of cancer a touch too young. I imagined the psychic’s words starching a crisp white sheet for the audience to project their loved ones onto. I told you I don’t really believe in this shit but it got back to me through this classmate that the psychic, she opened her bit by thanking the spirit who got her settled upon arrival and I heard she called you by your name, so maybe there is a convert in me yet, mama.
Stacey Forrester (she/her) is a nurse, activist, and author who grew up on an island and now lives on the occupied and unceded ancestral territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓ əm, Skxwú7mesh and səl ̓ilwətaɁɬ people. She gravitates to reading and writing prose and creative nonfiction on the topics of caregiving, community, and reproductive justice. Her works have appeared on pages via GUTS magazine, Briarpatch, and Alternating Current.