The Rampart Hotel at Night
by Susannah Davies
By five o’clock the rain still hadn’t started, but the sky was a dingy yellow color, like an old bruise, and bore down heavily. On Chartres Street, restaurants, bars and souvenir shops were dark and shuttered. The street was empty—as if the catastrophe had already happened, the people disappeared suddenly, leaving behind whatever was in their hands—water bottles and strings of colored beads and souvenir daiquiri cups with twisty straws, which the high wind was now whipping around the gutters.
But the Rampart Hotel was still open. Through the window you could see the hotel lobby, and the hotel lobby attendant, seated calmly by the phone, as if she were still waiting for a few last-minute guests. The valet gate offered a glimpse of the courtyard that lay beyond—the fairy lights strung up in the satsuma tree, the swimming pool, and the baroque stone fountain, burbling away. Next door, the hotel restaurant, where the light was low and warm, and candles flickered on the tables. A few guests were already seated, drinking happy hour glasses of champagne and eating bacon-wrapped shrimp skewers. Servers in black aprons carried trays of glasses back and forth. It was quiet now, but it would be a busy night. Everything else was closed; the hotel guests had nowhere else to eat.
Mira gazed in as she rode by on her bike, and saw her own meager reflection passing over the glass. She knew what she looked like: pale and sullen, child-bodied. Not pretty, and she made no attempt to fool anyone. But the image of herself struggling against the wind filled her with a sharp and lovely pity.
It was the end of Mira’s first summer in New Orleans. She had moved there expecting to be a new person in this new place. But when she arrived, she found that she was just the same. She lived in a wretched sublet near Claiborne, with termite holes under the window where the air conditioner dripped. She kept no food in her refrigerator, liking the feeling of tragedy her hunger gave her.
All summer, employees at the Rampart had clustered around the television in the break room, watching as one storm after another wheeled its way across the gulf, each of them turning mercifully to the east or to the west, visiting its destruction on some other city—until now, November, just as hurricane season was supposed to be ending. Now the whole city was shutting down. Mira had had to show her pay stub even to enter the Quarter; hospitality workers were exempted from the curfew the city was under. Hotel guests still had to eat. Someone had to feed them. There was one thing to look forward to, at least: the hotel was putting up its workers for the night, since it could not send them home, into the storm.
During hurricane season, Mira found she had taken to the helpless waiting, the jumpiness, the fatalism. In secret, she had been looking forward to this. She had never stayed in a nice hotel room, for one thing. But also, she wanted to see the storm, its power. She dreamed about it at night—dreamed of her own helplessness in the face of it. Or, sometimes, she dreamed she was the storm, destroying everything, everything, and awoke disturbed by her own vengeful pleasure.
At the stroke of five Mira came into the kitchen in her company-issued uniform, which was a size too big for her—they did not make them small enough—and hung absurdly on her, unsexing her, so stiff with starch it creaked when she moved.
The kitchen was a huge and windowless room. The space felt pressurized, claustrophobic, like the inside of a submarine, and full of an enveloping din. The smells were loud too: fish and pork cracklings and melted cheese and cherries jubilee bread pudding, all mixed together. In the kitchen, Mira experienced her hunger as a complaint, not a desire. The plates she brought out to the guests were beautiful, warm, fragrant, and delicately arranged; but Mira had seen the five-gallon buckets of gumbo the chefs slopped into the warmer, the hotel pans of braised short rib they brought out from the walk-in, covered with an orange rind of cold fat. She savored her disgust, her abstemiousness.
The servers, waiting for their first tables, were clustered around the counter at the front of the kitchen, all talking at the same time. Tina and Maritza were yelling across the line, taunting their favorite cook; Felicia was improvising dirty song lyrics; Charlene was talking loudly, to the room at large, about her dissatisfaction with her son’s second grade teacher; Brandy was watching anime on her phone. If a manager showed up they would scatter like hens before they could be admonished, but there was nothing for them to do until the guests arrived—no way, really, to prepare for the rush or mitigate the extremes of boredom and chaos the job entailed.
Mira stood in the corner, her arms folded around herself. This moment of the evening, before the first ticket, was the apex of her dread. But, to her, the boredom was infinitely preferable to the chaos. When she was a child she had sometimes gone to a swimming hole with a tall rock for leaping into the water. When it was Mira’s turn she froze with fear, looking down at the murky green water, praying that she would be allowed to remain crouched there until she turned to stone. It was the same feeling now.
Mira’s first table was a middle-aged couple, well-preserved and academic-looking—the man in very small wire-framed glasses, the woman in an oversized linen dress with chunky silver jewelry.
“So,” the man said, folding up his menu as she approached the table, “We’re getting the authentic experience tonight, are we? A real New Orleans lock-down.”
Mira smiled stiffly, filled with loathing. Other people could fake it, brush it off. Brandy, for instance—Mira would watch her sometimes, leaning over a table with her hand on the back of somebody’s chair. She called people “baby” and “hon,” and the guests sank into her tender, authoritative care—not grateful, exactly, but with a sense of satisfaction and rightness, never worrying about how much they were running up the check. Then Brandy would come back into the kitchen talking about them in the foulest way, and never think about them again. Mira couldn’t do that. She remembered every demand, every remark.
“Phillip, please,” said the woman. She looked up at Mira, smiling forbearingly, and said, “Can you tell me about your courtbouillon?”—pronouncing the French vowels with relish.
For those first few hours of dinner, guests were peevish and restless, their vacations suspended. Having nowhere to lodge a complaint about the curfew, they lobbed condescending jokes and rhetorical questions that Mira had no answers to. A bachelorette party shuffled in from the hotel in pajama bottoms and matching sashes, and stared morosely at their phones, ordering an unceasing stream of vodka sodas. A vegetarian couple consigned themselves reluctantly to the single meat-free entree on the menu. “There’s nothing else?” the woman asked, pained. “What about some tempeh?”
With the music playing and the candles flickering on the tables, no one noticed when the rain finally started, until a violent gust of wind drove it into the window with a fleshy smack. People looked up from their dinners to see a flash of wicked-looking lightning split the sky, then, instantly, thunder. “Now that’s what I’m talking about,” a man at the bar shouted.
After that, the mood changed. A new energy came into the restaurant, a kind of anticipation and excitement. Strangers bought each other drinks and moved their tables together, wreaking havoc on the servers’ checks; people turned their chairs to face the window, to cheer on the storm. Thunder rattled the silverware. The bar backs were madly washing and polishing champagne flutes. Mira got seated with a four-top, and then another immediately after that, and suddenly she was slammed.
Around eight o’clock the host handed her a ticket for a one-top—offering her a sympathetic eye roll. Mira actually liked waiting on lone diners, even though you made the least money off them. They were easy. Usually they were single men on business trips, busy with email or the newspaper, who all but ignored her.
This, however, was a woman. She was reading through the menu as Mira approached the table, and did not look up at first. Mira studied her, unsure of how to interrupt. Her build was small, her face narrow and aristocratic, her hair drawn back tightly in a tortoiseshell clip. Her severity was leavened by a dense, even field of freckles that covered her, all the way up to her hairline. She was almost plain; all her beauty came from the surprise of the freckles, the oddness.
At last she looked up at Mira, smiling impersonally. “All right, I’m ready,” she said. She ordered decisively and a lot: the big steak for her entree, as well as an appetizer of oysters, and for dessert the enormous, lavish bread pudding, which had to be put in twenty minutes in advance. “And I’ll take a gin martini, up. Hendrick’s, if you have it. Very dry, please.”
Mira wrote it all down, wondering at the woman’s appetite. The woman folded the menu and held it out, already turning her attention away from Mira. Mira felt a little tug. Before she could think about it she blurted, “I’m going to stay at the hotel too, tonight, you know. It’s my first time.”
She had intended to point out a parity between them but she saw immediately that she had exposed herself. The woman looked at her again, and now the expression on her face was politely amused. “Oh, are you? Well, enjoy. I can tell you the water pressure is excellent.”
Evenings this busy required a kind of total concentration—even a moment’s distraction and all Mira’s momentum, all the swift intuition of her body, would be lost. The list of demands was infinite, and possessed of a wildly disproportionate urgency: glasses of water, drinks from the bar, an oyster fork, a steak knife, a question for the chef, a latte, a discount. With each new demand Mira felt a pulse of rage shoot through her. The adrenaline kept her from feeling her body, but if she stopped for a minute she could see her hands shaking.
The one-top lingered. She had brought a book with her which she read throughout the meal, while the restaurant roared around her. She ate neatly but sat with one elbow on the table, and picked at her potatoes with her fingers. But her relaxed manners only strengthened the impression she gave of sophistication. It was a kind of spacious, entitled composure. She worked through each course slowly but with evident pleasure, not surrendering her plate until she had eaten the last bite. Mira couldn’t stop looking.
And then, while Mira was closing out a check, she glanced over and the woman looked up. Their eyes met. The woman put down her book and smiled. Mira looked away, her face bursting into a blaze of shame.
What Mira felt was rage, the same rage she felt toward everyone she waited on—the ease with which they took the role of patron; how little they understood about her life, how little pity they reserved for her indignity and her hunger.
But there was something else, too, twinning the rage, something that made the anger a pleasure. Around nine o’clock the woman stood up at last and walked toward the exit that led back up to the hotel, stopping at the bar to transfer the last sips of her martini into a plastic cup. She was wearing a pair of brown shoes with little square heels that clicked across the tile. She was, Mira saw, almost exactly her own height. There was the odd sensation of catching her reflection in a window somewhere unexpectedly, before she had had time to fix herself for her own gaze—that rare sense of seeing herself truly from the outside, the surprise at her effect. Desire, she realized. That was what the feeling was.
By close the restaurant was still half full. Diners sat and sucked at the diminished ice cubes at the bottoms of their glasses—ecstatic with the storm, in no mood for bed. Mira stared at her last table, seated in front of the window: a man in an expensive watch, glassily drunk, leaning back in his chair with his hands over his belly, and his wife dragging her finger through the dulce de leche smeared across her plate. The picture flashed up unbidden in Mira’s imagination of the water breaking through the window and closing over them.
It was nearly midnight when the last guest was gone, the coffee dumped out, the silverware and the wine glasses polished, the floor swept and the counters wiped clean. The servers lined up for check-out, taking their slips from the bleary-eyed manager, scanning the column of numbers for the tip total. It was more than usual, but not by much—not by enough. She stuffed the slip into her apron pocket and headed toward the exit that led to the hotel.
The hotel corridor was like a space in a dream—endless, disorienting. Ceiling lights at regular intervals, on and on forever behind and ahead, always shining. The storm could not be heard from here—only a gentle mechanical humming, and the occasional bright burst of voices from someone’s TV.
At last she came to her door. She slid the key card into the reader and stepped into the dark room, and instantly her ears were filled with the rush of the storm. The sheets of rain driving into the glass, the sound of their impact—like a body, like some starving thing, desperate to come in.
She turned on the lights and looked around her. The room was full of enormous, heavy furniture, made of dark wood: a bureau with a television resting on it, a desk with a chair, two nightstands like bank safes, and there in the middle of the room, the bed—huge and white, like an ice floe on the jade green carpet. Against the glossy wooden headboard, a heap of pillows, white ones, and green brocade with gold tassels. The windows were covered with floor-length curtains, and Mira was struck, momentarily, with a primitive fear of what was on the other side of them.
In the bathroom, there were the tiny shampoos, the round soaps wrapped in pleated paper, the fat stacks of clean white towels. She turned on the shower and undressed—kicking off her heavy clogs, which fell with a thud; unbuttoning her starched white shirt and stepping out of her starched black pants, which lay in stiff peaks on the floor where she discarded them. She looked at herself in the mirror. Her underwear was gray from the wash and hung baggily. There were little sprouts of broken elastic coming out of the waistband. Her toes poked out of her socks.
She stripped off the last of it and stood naked in front of the mirror. Now she could be anyone. She thought of the woman she had waited on, undressing in an identical room, somewhere nearby, maybe next door.
When she got in the shower the water was almost too hot to stand. She let it pound and tenderize her flesh, let her mind go blank, like an animal’s, noticing only her own pleasure, the relief at this moment of comfort, the water touching her touch-starved body like human skin.
When she was out of the shower she realized she was hungry. The kitchen had put a hotel pan of hot dogs out for the staff at the end of the shift but Mira had been repulsed by them. She took a package of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos from the mini bar and devoured it, and when it was empty she licked the cheese powder from the inside of the package and sucked it off the tips of her fingers.
Finally she got into bed. And now, as it did every night when she came home, her exhaustion rolled over her like a wave, immobilizing. The different sensations of it rose and fell in turn—the deep ache in her back, the buzzing of her feet, the squeeze behind her temples. But here in this luxurious bed, exhaustion was a kind of luxury, too, relieving her of all responsibility to herself or anyone else. She thought again of the woman—sleeping in an identical bed, her body making an identical shape under the thick white duvet.
Behind the jade green curtains, the rain continued to pound the glass. The noise was engulfing, enveloping, and strangely intimate, like words spoken in the dark, as close as thought.
She woke suddenly, heart pounding, as if she had been startled by a loud noise; but it was silent, finally, no howling wind, no pounding rain. She felt a kind of apprehension or excitement, filling her from the inside with an almost unbearable pressure. She got out of bed, and went to the window, and pulled back the curtain, and looked out.
Outside was a depthless, absolute dark; the power was out in the city. And floating in the dark there was the image of a girl, staring in through the glass. Mira felt no identification at all with her reflection, no pity or sympathy. Tomorrow she would have to give all this back. But for now, what power she felt, what euphoric contempt, as she moved her hand to close the curtain against this girl—shame-filled and stubborn, like a punished dog; naked in her desire for things she couldn’t have; still asking to come in.
But the Rampart Hotel was still open. Through the window you could see the hotel lobby, and the hotel lobby attendant, seated calmly by the phone, as if she were still waiting for a few last-minute guests. The valet gate offered a glimpse of the courtyard that lay beyond—the fairy lights strung up in the satsuma tree, the swimming pool, and the baroque stone fountain, burbling away. Next door, the hotel restaurant, where the light was low and warm, and candles flickered on the tables. A few guests were already seated, drinking happy hour glasses of champagne and eating bacon-wrapped shrimp skewers. Servers in black aprons carried trays of glasses back and forth. It was quiet now, but it would be a busy night. Everything else was closed; the hotel guests had nowhere else to eat.
Mira gazed in as she rode by on her bike, and saw her own meager reflection passing over the glass. She knew what she looked like: pale and sullen, child-bodied. Not pretty, and she made no attempt to fool anyone. But the image of herself struggling against the wind filled her with a sharp and lovely pity.
It was the end of Mira’s first summer in New Orleans. She had moved there expecting to be a new person in this new place. But when she arrived, she found that she was just the same. She lived in a wretched sublet near Claiborne, with termite holes under the window where the air conditioner dripped. She kept no food in her refrigerator, liking the feeling of tragedy her hunger gave her.
All summer, employees at the Rampart had clustered around the television in the break room, watching as one storm after another wheeled its way across the gulf, each of them turning mercifully to the east or to the west, visiting its destruction on some other city—until now, November, just as hurricane season was supposed to be ending. Now the whole city was shutting down. Mira had had to show her pay stub even to enter the Quarter; hospitality workers were exempted from the curfew the city was under. Hotel guests still had to eat. Someone had to feed them. There was one thing to look forward to, at least: the hotel was putting up its workers for the night, since it could not send them home, into the storm.
During hurricane season, Mira found she had taken to the helpless waiting, the jumpiness, the fatalism. In secret, she had been looking forward to this. She had never stayed in a nice hotel room, for one thing. But also, she wanted to see the storm, its power. She dreamed about it at night—dreamed of her own helplessness in the face of it. Or, sometimes, she dreamed she was the storm, destroying everything, everything, and awoke disturbed by her own vengeful pleasure.
At the stroke of five Mira came into the kitchen in her company-issued uniform, which was a size too big for her—they did not make them small enough—and hung absurdly on her, unsexing her, so stiff with starch it creaked when she moved.
The kitchen was a huge and windowless room. The space felt pressurized, claustrophobic, like the inside of a submarine, and full of an enveloping din. The smells were loud too: fish and pork cracklings and melted cheese and cherries jubilee bread pudding, all mixed together. In the kitchen, Mira experienced her hunger as a complaint, not a desire. The plates she brought out to the guests were beautiful, warm, fragrant, and delicately arranged; but Mira had seen the five-gallon buckets of gumbo the chefs slopped into the warmer, the hotel pans of braised short rib they brought out from the walk-in, covered with an orange rind of cold fat. She savored her disgust, her abstemiousness.
The servers, waiting for their first tables, were clustered around the counter at the front of the kitchen, all talking at the same time. Tina and Maritza were yelling across the line, taunting their favorite cook; Felicia was improvising dirty song lyrics; Charlene was talking loudly, to the room at large, about her dissatisfaction with her son’s second grade teacher; Brandy was watching anime on her phone. If a manager showed up they would scatter like hens before they could be admonished, but there was nothing for them to do until the guests arrived—no way, really, to prepare for the rush or mitigate the extremes of boredom and chaos the job entailed.
Mira stood in the corner, her arms folded around herself. This moment of the evening, before the first ticket, was the apex of her dread. But, to her, the boredom was infinitely preferable to the chaos. When she was a child she had sometimes gone to a swimming hole with a tall rock for leaping into the water. When it was Mira’s turn she froze with fear, looking down at the murky green water, praying that she would be allowed to remain crouched there until she turned to stone. It was the same feeling now.
Mira’s first table was a middle-aged couple, well-preserved and academic-looking—the man in very small wire-framed glasses, the woman in an oversized linen dress with chunky silver jewelry.
“So,” the man said, folding up his menu as she approached the table, “We’re getting the authentic experience tonight, are we? A real New Orleans lock-down.”
Mira smiled stiffly, filled with loathing. Other people could fake it, brush it off. Brandy, for instance—Mira would watch her sometimes, leaning over a table with her hand on the back of somebody’s chair. She called people “baby” and “hon,” and the guests sank into her tender, authoritative care—not grateful, exactly, but with a sense of satisfaction and rightness, never worrying about how much they were running up the check. Then Brandy would come back into the kitchen talking about them in the foulest way, and never think about them again. Mira couldn’t do that. She remembered every demand, every remark.
“Phillip, please,” said the woman. She looked up at Mira, smiling forbearingly, and said, “Can you tell me about your courtbouillon?”—pronouncing the French vowels with relish.
For those first few hours of dinner, guests were peevish and restless, their vacations suspended. Having nowhere to lodge a complaint about the curfew, they lobbed condescending jokes and rhetorical questions that Mira had no answers to. A bachelorette party shuffled in from the hotel in pajama bottoms and matching sashes, and stared morosely at their phones, ordering an unceasing stream of vodka sodas. A vegetarian couple consigned themselves reluctantly to the single meat-free entree on the menu. “There’s nothing else?” the woman asked, pained. “What about some tempeh?”
With the music playing and the candles flickering on the tables, no one noticed when the rain finally started, until a violent gust of wind drove it into the window with a fleshy smack. People looked up from their dinners to see a flash of wicked-looking lightning split the sky, then, instantly, thunder. “Now that’s what I’m talking about,” a man at the bar shouted.
After that, the mood changed. A new energy came into the restaurant, a kind of anticipation and excitement. Strangers bought each other drinks and moved their tables together, wreaking havoc on the servers’ checks; people turned their chairs to face the window, to cheer on the storm. Thunder rattled the silverware. The bar backs were madly washing and polishing champagne flutes. Mira got seated with a four-top, and then another immediately after that, and suddenly she was slammed.
Around eight o’clock the host handed her a ticket for a one-top—offering her a sympathetic eye roll. Mira actually liked waiting on lone diners, even though you made the least money off them. They were easy. Usually they were single men on business trips, busy with email or the newspaper, who all but ignored her.
This, however, was a woman. She was reading through the menu as Mira approached the table, and did not look up at first. Mira studied her, unsure of how to interrupt. Her build was small, her face narrow and aristocratic, her hair drawn back tightly in a tortoiseshell clip. Her severity was leavened by a dense, even field of freckles that covered her, all the way up to her hairline. She was almost plain; all her beauty came from the surprise of the freckles, the oddness.
At last she looked up at Mira, smiling impersonally. “All right, I’m ready,” she said. She ordered decisively and a lot: the big steak for her entree, as well as an appetizer of oysters, and for dessert the enormous, lavish bread pudding, which had to be put in twenty minutes in advance. “And I’ll take a gin martini, up. Hendrick’s, if you have it. Very dry, please.”
Mira wrote it all down, wondering at the woman’s appetite. The woman folded the menu and held it out, already turning her attention away from Mira. Mira felt a little tug. Before she could think about it she blurted, “I’m going to stay at the hotel too, tonight, you know. It’s my first time.”
She had intended to point out a parity between them but she saw immediately that she had exposed herself. The woman looked at her again, and now the expression on her face was politely amused. “Oh, are you? Well, enjoy. I can tell you the water pressure is excellent.”
Evenings this busy required a kind of total concentration—even a moment’s distraction and all Mira’s momentum, all the swift intuition of her body, would be lost. The list of demands was infinite, and possessed of a wildly disproportionate urgency: glasses of water, drinks from the bar, an oyster fork, a steak knife, a question for the chef, a latte, a discount. With each new demand Mira felt a pulse of rage shoot through her. The adrenaline kept her from feeling her body, but if she stopped for a minute she could see her hands shaking.
The one-top lingered. She had brought a book with her which she read throughout the meal, while the restaurant roared around her. She ate neatly but sat with one elbow on the table, and picked at her potatoes with her fingers. But her relaxed manners only strengthened the impression she gave of sophistication. It was a kind of spacious, entitled composure. She worked through each course slowly but with evident pleasure, not surrendering her plate until she had eaten the last bite. Mira couldn’t stop looking.
And then, while Mira was closing out a check, she glanced over and the woman looked up. Their eyes met. The woman put down her book and smiled. Mira looked away, her face bursting into a blaze of shame.
What Mira felt was rage, the same rage she felt toward everyone she waited on—the ease with which they took the role of patron; how little they understood about her life, how little pity they reserved for her indignity and her hunger.
But there was something else, too, twinning the rage, something that made the anger a pleasure. Around nine o’clock the woman stood up at last and walked toward the exit that led back up to the hotel, stopping at the bar to transfer the last sips of her martini into a plastic cup. She was wearing a pair of brown shoes with little square heels that clicked across the tile. She was, Mira saw, almost exactly her own height. There was the odd sensation of catching her reflection in a window somewhere unexpectedly, before she had had time to fix herself for her own gaze—that rare sense of seeing herself truly from the outside, the surprise at her effect. Desire, she realized. That was what the feeling was.
By close the restaurant was still half full. Diners sat and sucked at the diminished ice cubes at the bottoms of their glasses—ecstatic with the storm, in no mood for bed. Mira stared at her last table, seated in front of the window: a man in an expensive watch, glassily drunk, leaning back in his chair with his hands over his belly, and his wife dragging her finger through the dulce de leche smeared across her plate. The picture flashed up unbidden in Mira’s imagination of the water breaking through the window and closing over them.
It was nearly midnight when the last guest was gone, the coffee dumped out, the silverware and the wine glasses polished, the floor swept and the counters wiped clean. The servers lined up for check-out, taking their slips from the bleary-eyed manager, scanning the column of numbers for the tip total. It was more than usual, but not by much—not by enough. She stuffed the slip into her apron pocket and headed toward the exit that led to the hotel.
The hotel corridor was like a space in a dream—endless, disorienting. Ceiling lights at regular intervals, on and on forever behind and ahead, always shining. The storm could not be heard from here—only a gentle mechanical humming, and the occasional bright burst of voices from someone’s TV.
At last she came to her door. She slid the key card into the reader and stepped into the dark room, and instantly her ears were filled with the rush of the storm. The sheets of rain driving into the glass, the sound of their impact—like a body, like some starving thing, desperate to come in.
She turned on the lights and looked around her. The room was full of enormous, heavy furniture, made of dark wood: a bureau with a television resting on it, a desk with a chair, two nightstands like bank safes, and there in the middle of the room, the bed—huge and white, like an ice floe on the jade green carpet. Against the glossy wooden headboard, a heap of pillows, white ones, and green brocade with gold tassels. The windows were covered with floor-length curtains, and Mira was struck, momentarily, with a primitive fear of what was on the other side of them.
In the bathroom, there were the tiny shampoos, the round soaps wrapped in pleated paper, the fat stacks of clean white towels. She turned on the shower and undressed—kicking off her heavy clogs, which fell with a thud; unbuttoning her starched white shirt and stepping out of her starched black pants, which lay in stiff peaks on the floor where she discarded them. She looked at herself in the mirror. Her underwear was gray from the wash and hung baggily. There were little sprouts of broken elastic coming out of the waistband. Her toes poked out of her socks.
She stripped off the last of it and stood naked in front of the mirror. Now she could be anyone. She thought of the woman she had waited on, undressing in an identical room, somewhere nearby, maybe next door.
When she got in the shower the water was almost too hot to stand. She let it pound and tenderize her flesh, let her mind go blank, like an animal’s, noticing only her own pleasure, the relief at this moment of comfort, the water touching her touch-starved body like human skin.
When she was out of the shower she realized she was hungry. The kitchen had put a hotel pan of hot dogs out for the staff at the end of the shift but Mira had been repulsed by them. She took a package of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos from the mini bar and devoured it, and when it was empty she licked the cheese powder from the inside of the package and sucked it off the tips of her fingers.
Finally she got into bed. And now, as it did every night when she came home, her exhaustion rolled over her like a wave, immobilizing. The different sensations of it rose and fell in turn—the deep ache in her back, the buzzing of her feet, the squeeze behind her temples. But here in this luxurious bed, exhaustion was a kind of luxury, too, relieving her of all responsibility to herself or anyone else. She thought again of the woman—sleeping in an identical bed, her body making an identical shape under the thick white duvet.
Behind the jade green curtains, the rain continued to pound the glass. The noise was engulfing, enveloping, and strangely intimate, like words spoken in the dark, as close as thought.
She woke suddenly, heart pounding, as if she had been startled by a loud noise; but it was silent, finally, no howling wind, no pounding rain. She felt a kind of apprehension or excitement, filling her from the inside with an almost unbearable pressure. She got out of bed, and went to the window, and pulled back the curtain, and looked out.
Outside was a depthless, absolute dark; the power was out in the city. And floating in the dark there was the image of a girl, staring in through the glass. Mira felt no identification at all with her reflection, no pity or sympathy. Tomorrow she would have to give all this back. But for now, what power she felt, what euphoric contempt, as she moved her hand to close the curtain against this girl—shame-filled and stubborn, like a punished dog; naked in her desire for things she couldn’t have; still asking to come in.