Call Me a Cab

5

At five past eight, when I saw the Holiday Inn sign far ahead, high in the evening sky like a tacky UFO, we were still in Ohio, now on Interstate 70, but Indiana was very close.

On the other hand, I was very weary. Highway driving is less physically demanding than city driving, but it’s also more monotonous and thus finally more tiring. We’d made three stops — lunch & gas, phone & gas, and gas — but otherwise I’d just been sitting here all day while Ms. Scott brooded in the back, and now I was ready for something else. Indiana could wait.

“Holiday Inn ahead,” I called.

“What? Where?”

She must have been really involved in her own thoughts not to see that monster in the sky. “Up there,” I said. “It’s a little after eight, we ought to stop.”

“Oh. Okay, fine.”

I took the exit, swung right on the county road, and turned in at the Holiday Inn just past the Sohio station. We left the cab together and walked into the lobby, a long low-ceilinged room with purple-and-maroon carpeting and drapes and wall fabric, plus a lot of Revolutionary War wall plaques. The place was air-conditioned down to about eleven degrees Fahrenheit. I hung back to let Ms. Scott make the arrangements, but the desk clerk in his yellow sport jacket looked past her at me, smiled, and said, “Good evening.”

“Good evening,” I said.

Ms. Scott said, “We’d like rooms for tonight.”

The desk clerk flickered his smile at her, then back at me, then back at her again. Speaking more or less to the space between us, he said, “Oh, yes? Just for the one night?”

I kept myself from nodding, and Ms. Scott said, “That’s right.”

“A double?”

“Two singles,” she said.

“Connecting?”

The guy was becoming, in my personal opinion, a pain in the ass, but Ms. Scott remained calm and businesslike. “That won’t be necessary,” she said.

“That’s fine, then.” And, turning to me, he said, “Will you be paying with a credit card, sir?”

“American Express,” said the calm voice to my left. How she maintained her cool I don’t know, but without the slightest hint of annoyance Ms. Scott removed a wallet from her shoulder bag, a credit card from the wallet, and placed the card on the counter.

“Fine, fine, fine,” the desk clerk said. He had clearly decided he didn’t like us, because we were confusing him. Picking up the credit card, he placed two registration forms on the counter in its place and said, “If you’ll just fill these out. Thank you.” And turned away to consult charts and graphs, and to play with his credit card machine.

Ms. Scott and I had just started filling in our forms when a very embarrassed-looking man in a red robe with dragons writhing on it, plus old scuff slippers on his feet, approached the desk. “Excuse me,” he said.

A couple who were a couple would automatically have moved a bit to one side for this interruption. Ms. Scott and I automatically moved a bit further apart, so the man in the robe had no choice but to stand between us for his dealings with the desk clerk, who turned back from his credit card machine to say, “Sir?”

The man in the robe was horribly embarrassed. “I’m terribly sorry,” he said, and while his strained eyes looked straight ahead at the desk clerk his cheeks kept taking sidelong uneasy glances at Ms. Scott. “It’s my—” he said, and clutched the edge of the counter with both hands. He licked his lips. He froze at the brink, then plunged: “—my bed.”

“Your bed, sir?”

The man leaned forward, and lowered his voice. “It won’t stop,” he said.

I looked at the desk clerk, to see if this sentence had made any sense to him, and was relieved to see it hadn’t. Looking baffled, but willing to be of any assistance, the desk clerk said, “It won’t stop, sir?”

“No.” And here he leaned even further forward, put his left elbow on the counter, and shielded the left side of his face from Ms. Scott with his hand. He was expressing acute sexual embarrassment, such as I remembered from my own experiences at the age of seventeen, when buying condoms; at a drugstore away from my own neighborhood, of course. And frequently for only theoretical use.

The desk clerk now asked the question that I too was dying to hear answered: “It won’t stop what, sir?”

The man muttered something, at the same time putting his non-shielding hand over his mouth.

The desk clerk leaned forward, with his Polly-want-a-cracker alert look: “Sir?”

“Vibrating.” The whisper this time was one of those incredibly loud hard windy sounds; you could have heard it in the parking lot. Immediately, the man shrunk deeper inside his Fu Manchu robe, with a despairing look at the countertop. He wanted to die.

“Oh!” the desk clerk said. “Vi-brating!” Everything was clear to him now, except the man’s embarrassment.

Well, nothing at all was clear to me. I leaned sideways to look past the man’s dragon-populated back toward Ms. Scott, to see if she felt the same bewilderment I did, but I couldn’t catch her eye. Having obviously understood the nature of the man’s embarrassment, she was trying to ease matters for him by being totally absorbed in a tourist brochure from a resort hotel on Lake Erie. (I myself glanced at this brochure a bit later, and it did have its fascinations. Since Lake Erie water can eat through a human body in under three minutes, a wood or aluminum boat in ten and a steel hull in twenty-five, this resort couldn’t offer much by way of the usual swimming and boating. The brochure featured lots of color photographs of people playing croquet.)

But now the desk clerk himself came to the assistance of my understanding, saying to the unhappy man, “You put a quarter in the slot, did you?”

This suggestive phrase almost did for the man completely. Broken, willing to confess to anything if only he could then be given an early quiet execution, he nodded and mumbled, “Yes.”

“The bed should vibrate for ten minutes, sir,” the desk clerk said. “Soothing you to sleep.”

The man himself was in a kind of motion: not so much vibrating as quivering. “It did,” he said. “But then it wouldn’t stop.” In telling his story, he was finding new strength, the will after all to go on. “It woke me up,” he explained. “It wouldn’t stop. I did everything. I even pushed the ‘Coin Return’ button. It simply wouldn’t stop. It’s up there right now,” he said, with a gesture upwards of chin and eyebrows, “vibrating.”

I couldn’t help it; I looked ceilingward. Somewhere in this building, a ravenous insatiable bed was vibrating, all by itself.

“I’m very sorry, sir,” the desk clerk said, being brisk and standard now that he understood the situation. He was more a computer than a man, anyway; every possible encounter would be met by a pre-programmed response. (That’s why Ms. Scott and I had thrown him off. There was no program for a couple like us.) A vibrating bed obviously called for the broken-TV response: “I’ll phone the engineer right now, sir. Could you tell me your room number?”

“Two-fifteen.”

The desk clerk repeated the number, in a not entirely convincing show of competence, and turned away to make his call.

Leaving the man to his own devices, between Ms. Scott and me. He flashed her one agonized look — she was still absorbed in photographs of women in long white dresses standing over croquet mallets — then turned his back toward her, hunching his shoulder for added protection; which brought him face to face with me. “I don’t like to complain,” he told me.

“No, of course not,” I said.

“Normally,” he said, “I don’t even go to bed this early.”

“Ah,” I said. Eight o’clock was early; he had a point there.

“But I have a meeting tomorrow at Wilkes-Barre.” Talking seemed to calm him a bit, so he did more of it: “I must be at the airport by four A.M., and I must be alert for the meeting. It’s vitally important.”

“Ah,” I said.

“Normally, Mr. Wilcox would have handled it,” he explained, “but of course Mr. Wilcox is recuperating from his hemorrhoid operation and he, uh — his operation, he’s, um, he’s recuperating, he, um, his operation—”

The man’s very ears were stretching, like Spock on Star Trek: had the woman behind him heard the dread word ‘hemorrhoid’? Surely if such horrible sexual embarrassment were a genetic trait, in the very nature of the affliction it would have been bred out of the race by now; so it must be a cultural acquisition.

And the man was stuck in it, well and truly stuck, very much like his vibrating bed. Without help, he wasn’t ever going to struggle past Mr. Wilcox’s operation. So I provided help, saying, “Tomorrow’s your big chance, is that it?”

“—recuper— Yes!” His gratitude was immense. “That’s right!” he cried. “Tomorrow may be the most important day of my career. I must be alert and well-rested. I realize it may sound, well, it may sound, um, odd, for a grown person to go to bed this early, and to use that, um, that, in the bed. You know, the bed.”

“The vibrator.”

The poor man turned as red as his robe. “Oh, my God,” he whispered. “Is that what they call it?”

“I really don’t know. I was guessing.” Then, because ‘vibrator’ was even more paralyzing than ‘hemorrhoid,’ I helped him again: “But you just wanted to be sure you got your proper sleep,” I suggested, “even though it was so early.” (I was hoping the word ‘proper’ would soothe him.)

It did: “That’s right! That’s exactly it! I may have gone to, um, bed before eight o’clock in the evening, I may have been using that, uh, uh, uh—”

“Machine.”

“Machine. Yes. But I do assure you — I assure anyone at all, in fact—” (with slightly raised voice for the benefit of the lady learning all about Lake Erie) “—that my reasons for being there, at that time, and using that, that machine, were strictly business.”

“I don’t doubt it for a second,” I promised him, and at that point the desk clerk returned to the conversation with his own promises, saying, “Sir, the engineer is on his way to your room right now.”

“Thank you very much,” the man said. “I really don’t like to complain.”

“Not at all, sir.” But then the desk clerk smiled and said, “It’s probably just a loose screw.”

Unfortunate. The man had been getting calmer and calmer, but that last phrase sent him right up the wall again. “Yes yes yes,” he said, backing away from us all, nodding spastically and smiling like a poison victim. “I’m sorry I had to come,” he said, then twitched all over like a marionette. Now he was appalling himself. “But I have to snatch what sleep I can,” he told us. There was no way out for the poor man; every word he spoke was another electrocution. “It’s hard on me!” he wailed, clapped both hands over his mouth, and fled.