by Rick Moody
If the tangle of limbs (1) was the first of their approaches to sleeping together, the second approach was rugged individualism (2), in which they would begin the overnight in the tangle of limbs, thinking back on the very first tangle as though it were the greatest time, the greatest tangle, and they were not so distant from it. They would start out in this slightly nostalgic tangle, and then they would migrate to a position that somehow seemed more comfortable, because, after all, the blood flow in the arm was being occluded, and one of them did have a little back pain and needed to roll over onto a side, and, naturally, at first, rugged individualism meant facing each other, and perhaps kissing each other a few times before drifting off, and then maybe it didn’t quite mean this, or the kissing part was forgotten, and there were a few words exchanged, a few kindnesses, and then they rolled away, and rolling away was so horrible at first, almost anyone would agree that rolling away is horrible, and yet it is a necessary thing, if you believe in the tenets of rugged individualism, because the first obligation of sleep is simply the sleeping part of it, but then the miracle of resilience is to be found in the fact that they came to find the rolling away somewhat acceptable, if solitary, and they rolled away, drifted off, sometimes pretty quickly, in their private dreams (some of these were nightmares).
After rugged individualism (2), there was the period of marital sleeping known as staggered shifts (3). Staggered shifts appeared at first to be a mere extension of personal preference, and who can quarrel with personal preference, which is one of the hallmarks of American life. If one of them wanted to go to bed well before the other one wanted to go to bed, who could object, because the day would come when they could retreat back to rugged individualism, it was right there waiting to be re-employed, and so staggered shifts should not be interpreted as some kind of loss, some kind of giving up. There were occasions during the period of staggered shifts when, out of the murk of semiconsciousness, they occasionally found themselves lovemaking, my God, so unsuspected and sweet, and it wasn’t as if they had forgotten all that they knew about the adventure of meeting a new body and mapping its latitudes, its tastes. Suddenly, they were awake and alive, and they had cast off the staggered shifts, or perhaps triumphed over them, and they were goading each other on and it was good, and because they were lovemaking they went back, as through time, to the tangle of limbs.
Well, it’s my duty to tell you that the middle-of-the-night lovemaking was on the temporary side, or rather the episodes of this old skill diminished, grew infrequent, and soon, it was not just that they went to bed at different times (3), it was that they also awakened at different times (3.5), and didn’t even know that lovely pre- and postsomnolence fumbling that is a couple trying to brush its teeth and change in and out of the outfits of the day; all of this became something that they each did alone, while the other was either asleep or out in an adjacent room gazing catatonically at a television. And in this manner, the period of staggered shifts (3) in turn gave way to haphephobia (4)—one of those half-Latinate and half-Greek technical terms—wherein one of the two of them did not want to be touched by the other (and these roles occasionally shifted) and would recoil if touching was introduced. Sometimes this would be the simplest physical interaction of all—in trying to arrange a pillow, one of them briefly made contact. The recoiling was immediate in the eyes of the one touched, this touched party gazing vapidly as though the touching party, the grazing party, were a stranger, just someone that he or she might meet in an airport dining establishment; the look would linger, the gaze of strangers, in this stage of sleeping known as haphephobia, whereby intimates are reconstructed as strangers, and not the kind who are alluring but the kind who you go out of your way to avoid brushing against, as if the person you shared a bed with were one of those unfortunates with the eight soiled Target bags getting on the subway in August, drenched in perspiration and long past a last bath, and heading for the seat next to you. In this case, the look hovered there for a moment until you realized that in fact you were married to the person a few feet away, and you had been in love with him or her for years, or that is what you said, and having bestowed on him or her the gaze of haphephobia, you cycled through eleven kinds of discomfort which I do not have time to catalog now and went back to the business of trying to sleep.
Except that haphephobia (4) is followed in turn by the period of clinically diagnosed somatic sleep disorders (5), which clamor into the contested sleep space like some colony of metaphysical prairie dogs, chattering constantly, keeping you both from making any progress in trying to move backward toward the tangle of limbs or even rugged individualism. The clinically diagnosed somatic sleep disorders are acute at first, and chronic thereafter, and they take all your waking time to deal with, as well as much of your sleeping time, so that you are exactly in the obverse of the tangle of limbs (where lovemaking is the space between waking and sleep). Now, clinically diagnosed somatic sleep disorders are some never-ending demilitarized zone between the two great estates, waking and dreaming, and these clinically diagnosed somatic sleep disorders are incredibly lonely. Especially lonely are the hours between three and four ante meridiem when you are next to your spouse but instead of thinking about love you are thinking about particularly invasive cancers, like pancreatic cancer or inoperable brain cancer. (In fact, clinically diagnosed somatic sleep disorders are basically a wakefulness-promotion system that in turn generates thoughts of pancreatic cancer.)
Sometimes in this system, actual physical complaints, like the aforementioned back pain, are converted into obsessional patterns of wakefulness, wherein a minor complaint becomes a symptom of a major medical disorder—back pain a symptom of cirrhosis, or headache a sign of brain cancer—and these obsessional patterns of wakefulness generate the need, the next day, for a convulsive nap (6), which is one of the things you should never ever do, nap, at least not if you are trying to get back to the halcyon period of the tangle of limbs, because convulsive napping only makes the clinically diagnosed somatic sleep disorders worse, and the napping, because it comes over you like a paroxysm, must be solitary, is always solitary, and always somewhat embarrassing. It’s almost like you don’t sleep with the person in question, your spouse, at all, because you are never in the bed at the same time as he or she is in the bed; instead, you are struggling with and against the bed, with and against the idea of sleep, with and against the good things that are associated with sleep, and this can go on for years. You pass the spouse, whom you now think of as a reasonably good friend, in the interior spaces of your address without comment. You cannot even begin to describe the horror of the cycle that is clinically diagnosed somatic sleep disorders and convulsive napping because you have not had enough sleep to describe anything at all.
And this gives way, as you knew it must, to the medical diagnosis of sleep apnea (5.5), bestowed upon you by the practitioner of internal medicine. The diagnosis has to do with your weight, the practitioner of internal medicine cautions, or with your genetic chemistry, or with sheer chance, or with adenoids, and you may need to have your adenoids removed and your tonsils shorn away, and in the meantime, you simply need to wear this mask and be attached to this tank, which will, at regular intervals, keep you breathing. This condition is very similar to the chronic snoring (5.75) that your partner now exhibits, your friend who was once your tangle of limbs. One of you has chronic snoring, which is sort of a chthonic snoring, and that has to do with the uvula in most cases, and the other of you has sleep apnea, and so in the rare instances that you do inhabit a room at the same time, you mainly keep each other awake, so even if you weren’t preoccupied with pancreatic cancer you would not sleep because of the near-death experiences, and that is how the two of you sleep now, with the mask and the tank. Even dogs will refuse to sleep in the room with you.
And now you are embarked on a weekend in Toledo, Ohio, for the marriage of a niece, and you are going to stay in a hotel together in Maumee, because it’s cheaper than Toledo, and isn’t next to a s
trip club, which is apparently the case with virtually every hotel in Toledo. You are a couple who cycle between stages 5 and 6 on the marital sleep chart, not quite having gotten to the cessation of biological function (7), though this is a misnomer in some senses, as certain somatic activities continue after the cessation of biological function; for example, cessation of electrical activity in the brain does not necessarily imply a total cessation. A heartbeat may linger on.
In any event, being in the Americas [sic] Best Value Inn in Maumee with your sleep-apnea mask and tank and your bite guard (it inhibits the grinding and clenching) and your prescription for habit-forming sleep medication and your spouse with the chthonic snoring for the wedding of your niece when the two of you were once a tangle of limbs is the closest to a cessation of biological function that you can get on an overnight without actually being in a state of total cessation, and what could be more tender than this? What is more tender than the recognition that you have changed, that you have come to a point where you are not what you once were? Your former state is now sandblasted, as abraded as anything else could be by the ravages of time. What is more tender than mutual recognition of failure? What is more truthful than the acknowledgment that what was once mutual is now solitary and atomized? What is more exact than the distance between you now? What is more perceptible than your awareness that you cannot do what you once so wanted to do, namely, be in love? Why is the fact that sleep is closest to death so much more factual when it is considered in the theater of connubial relations? Who are the two of you? Where will you go next? After Maumee? Why are you always staying at two-star hotels? How are you going to get through this wedding? ★★ (Posted 7/13/2013)
The Davenport Hotel and Tower, 10 South Post Street, Spokane, Washington, April 4–7, 2011
We didn’t know much about Spokane except, in a general way, how to pronounce Spokane. We didn’t know about the waterfalls downtown, and the bridges. And we didn’t know that Spokane is surrounded by arresting countryside. The Pacific Northwest stuff: conifers, skeins of fog, snow on the peaks. We arrived at the Davenport just a couple months after the Martin Luther King Day attempted bombing in Spokane, and so the Davenport Hotel was incredibly empty. The Davenport, it’s accurate to say, is one of the most beautiful hotels in the Lower Forty-Eight. It may be one of the most beautiful hotels in the entire world. Were you to discount hotels that are constructed primarily to house sheikhs—hotels that will never house you or me—you would have to conclude that this was a truly remarkable place. There’s gilded everything inside, and potted palms, but it’s the ballrooms that are outrageous, and while we were staying there—Snowy Owl, as she was called on this trip, and I—you could just walk into these totally empty ballrooms (because how often in Spokane were the ballrooms in use?) and gape at their magnificence.
What I’m really driving at here is that the Davenport is the hotel where Snowy Owl and I began to collect our sequence of films of Snowy Owl running and dancing in public places and in extremely long hotel corridors. The bliss of dancing in a long hotel corridor (not that I have done it anywhere near as many times as Snowy Owl has) is to be found in the fact that you know you are showing up on someone’s camera somewhere. There is not a chance that at any moment you could be asked to discontinue it. There was a very long corridor in the Davenport, that is true, but it was nothing compared to its Hall of the Doges. I don’t really know what a doge is, some kind of magistrate in Venice, perhaps, but I do know that the name has the right kind of seriousness about it, and when we opened the door to the Hall of the Doges, K. was unable not to dance across it. K. was a dancer as a young person, and she can still jump pretty high, and even though she has a few injuries of the sort that a person is liable to have when approaching true middle age, she just threw her jacket, a hoodie of some kind, on the floor of the entirely empty Hall of the Doges and began dancing into the center of the room, irrepressibly. Did I know yet that this moment would describe everything we were going to be, the kind of people who would find it important to dance in hotels and especially to dance in hotels when otherwise besieged by the worst of circumstances?
So, as I say, here it was, just a couple of months after some cretin in Spokane had left a backpack with wires sticking out of it by the parade route on Martin Luther King Day, and we were just visiting the city as I attended a conference on social media in the motivational-speaking world, and I was failing to make any headway at the plenary session, failing to get any speaking offers, but we were, despite all of this, dancing in the Hall of the Doges. How long would they allow us to rehearse this dance? I personally know enough about Terpsichore to understand that diagonals are the most exciting shapes in a dance, how the dance starts at the back corner and moves forward toward the audience along diagonals, and I was an audience of one, and K. started from the back corner, and we had had our hard times, which I don’t need to enumerate here, but now we were here in the Hall of the Doges, and Snowy Owl was coming from that corner, on a diagonal, just like in one of those spectacular ballets where there is a princess and a frog, there is the history of the German peoples, or someone is a swan, and there are a dozen fifteen-year-olds whose toes are all bleeding as they do their extraordinary leaps, and it was all exactly like that, and I was worried about security coming to tell us that our stay was terminated in this hotel that was too good for us, but I was also worried about the dance ending, worried about the time after the dance, when the moment that had brought it about would begin to slip away. ★★★★★ (Posted 7/20/2013)
The Mason Inn Conference Center and Hotel,
4352 Mason Pond Drive, George Mason University,
Fairfax, Virginia, June 3–5, 2005
The question you want to ask about certain lodgings, even if they are newly constructed or newly renovated hotels primarily for alumni who happen to be visiting the campus, is whether sex in these hotels is somehow better than sex at home. There should be a way to test this, there should be a sex-related metric with which you could measure sex in hotels, especially the illicit variety, but of what would that metric consist? How about increments of remorse? Increments of remorse can be measured in hesitations of footfall. Increments of remorse are measured in la nausée. Are you more remorseful after sex at home or after sex at the hotel? Or are your orgasmic epiphanies more or less epiphanic? In certain women’s magazines, it is always possible to speak of mind-blowing orgasms, but never do these magazines advertise diminished remorse. Have less sexual remorse with him at home! Or is it only the male of the species who feels incremental postorgasmic remorse?
You are not the one at the conference. You are the one staying behind in the hotel room, logging too many hours watching ESPN, simply waiting, just waiting, for the time when a certain language arts instructor (back during a brief recidivist spell after a years-long break) will come up to the room and torture you a little bit, because you have not very much going on, except that you have left someone at home, and because of the increments of remorse, a certain amount of ordering-in of foods, especially ice cream, has taken place, despite the fact that any ordered-in foods are going on the credit card of the language arts instructor. You are fat, you are indolent, you are middle-aged, and you are tenuously employed. You are in this newly constructed hotel, and you are looking out at the shiny newly constructed veneer on the campus of George Mason University and thinking that a great many of your very best days are behind you now, which means that you are emotionally affected by commercials for Cialis. You are hoping that the sexual torture that will eventually ensue from the language arts instructor will be noteworthy for varieties of torture not yet experienced so that you will be distracted and your shame will be temporarily mitigated and your increments of remorse will be temporarily diminished by the hotel and the sexual torture and the oblivion.
This is all as it should be, until the trip back to the airport and the dreaded parting from the side of the language arts instructor, when you will be released back into your life, and then w
here will be all the devices, the serrated metal objects, the ropes and binder clips and clothespins that were attached to you in an attempt to get your attention? You should be forced to wear the binder clips on your intimate parts back into your life, instead of confining all of this torture to the Mason Inn Conference Center and Hotel, which is actually squeaky clean and staffed by people who are of good humor, even though they are hosting a conference on the feminist art and literature of the seventies, a subject you know nothing about except what the language arts instructor tells you when she ties you up and threatens your life, vows to put out cigarettes on your inner thighs, and forces you to listen to incredibly long digests of the meals after conference events.
And then B. said that this was not a fair and equitable seating arrangement at the table, not if the department chair was going to sit at the head of the table. This was a revanchist seating arrangement. This was a seating arrangement that perpetuated certain self-hating stereotypes among people of color in the group, and really the best thing to do would be for all of them to stand around the table in a modular way, not in front of seats, but rather at some discreet distance from the seats, so that there would be an implicit reordering of seating customs, and so that the hierarchy of roles that left intact an unexamined privilege for white members of the delegation would be interrogated. That is, there would be no sitting down until they had had a discussion of these procrustean seating arrangements, a discussion that was feminine in the following way—indeterminate, nonlinear, unfixed, and nonteleological, but with syndicalist roots—until the group arrived, perhaps through some theoretical way, at a homosocial consensus, because anything short of homosocial consensus was a de facto reduplication of patriarchal structures, of neoliberal paternalist privilege, anything achieved through persuasion of a rigid sort was a replication of patriarchal structures, and even the shape of the table must be fit for negotiation, or at least under discussion, a biomorphic shape with negative space being preferable, because the fact that the restaurant had only a few circular tables and was more likely to push four-tops together to make sixteen meant that there would be an obelisk shape to the table, which was unacceptable, only a circular table would do, or perhaps an oval table, or, if there was enough discussion, perhaps a table that had a circle at one end and rectangular features at the other end, as long as the chair of the department was not at an end, because the point, the language arts instructor remarked, was to avoid anything that was demonstrably phallic, because we were there to have an important departmental meeting about which of the applicants we were likely to hire, and even though one of the applicants was, alas, a guy, he was the guy who was giving the paper on Stein, and the woman applicant was giving hers on Joni Mitchell post-1974, specifically the album called Hejira, and of course all of us revere Joni Mitchell, but we just think she’s not rigorous enough as a discipline, and this is of course when the language arts instructor attaches a clothespin to a certain intimate part of you.
