Luggageless Love

You are a writer (said my neighbor Avery) and I remember when I was in college and had a brief go at English Lit, and somewhere it said that the best writing is the kind where it points a moral, so now I got one for you.

Sometimes a man finds himself in a situation where he wants to register at a nice hotel with a lady who is not related to him in any way and the trouble is, they got no baggage.

To a lot of men this is a very embarrassing situation. It always was with me. That is, I mean, well, I don't mean to say it happened to me very often, but, oh, say maybe two or three or maybe four times. And every time it was the same. I'd get up to that hotel desk with this babe alongside me and the clerk giving me a fish-eye stare and I'd start to stammer and stutter, and I'd swallow hard like I had a bullfrog stuck in my throat, and I'd turn as red as a spanked baby's behind. I remember once with a girl from Scarsdale, I started to go into a long song and dance at the desk, starting out, "My wife and I live in the country and we ..." and it came out in a high squeak like a radio set that's suddenly gone haywire. Then when I tried to sign the register, my hand shook so bad the writing looked like it was done by a man a hundred and nine years old.

Now, to go back a ways. I don't ordinarily see much of the guys I went to college with but there was one, Stan Moresby, we used to hell around a little together, and one day somebody told me Stan was manager of the Arcade Plaza Hotel in New York. The Arcade Plaza, as you know, is strictly a class joint with fat ladies leading their dogs around and three or four bellhops old enough to be my father.

Well, I went around to see Stan and after that we had lunch together a few times and then one day I happened to think about this business with a girl. I figured, we're a civilized people, we ought to have a civilized way of handling this matter. So I asked him, "Stan," I said, "what's the best way to work it when you got a girl and no baggage and (concluded on page 91) Luggageless Love (continued from page 39) want to register as man and wife?"

"Why," says Stan, "the best way is to just pick up the pen and register."

"No," I said. "I mean, you know, if you're nervous about it."

"Well," says Stan, "if you're the type that gets embarrassed about it and don't want to say you just missed the last train to Greenwich or something like that, then you might use the Niggardly Wife technique."

"Proceed," I said.

"The way it works," Stan says, "is you coach the girl ahead of time what she's supposed to do, and when you walk into the lobby of the hotel, she goes over and takes a chair not too far away from the desk. You go up to the desk and say you want a double room. Twin beds. The desk clerk gives you the register or a card to sign and while you're writing 'Mr. and Mrs.' on it, the girl gets up and walks over to you and says, so the clerk will hear it, 'How much is the room, dear?' That establishes her as your wife and nobody could possibly ask any questions or even hint that there was anything suspicious. So now you say to her, 'Oh, for god sake Myrt,' and then you casually mention that you got no baggage and the chances are the clerk won't even ask you to pay in advance."

You see how neat it's worked out? It sounded real good to me and one evening a year or so later I was over on East 42nd Street to see some people in Tudor City and later I stopped in a tavern for a drink. There was a girl sitting alone in a booth and I was at the bar. She was a beautiful thing with coalblack hair and when I say she was stacked, I am understating the facts. I kept looking over at her and she would once in a while look at me and give me just the faintest flicker of a smile. So finally I just picked up my drink and walked over and told her my feet hurt and did she mind, and she said no, and we started having some drinks together.

It got late, around two or three in the morning, and she was a little in the bag, and so was I, and finally I sprung the question and she said why not, and we got a taxi and headed for the Arcade Plaza. In the cab I gave this girl her routine, what she was supposed to do, and she bobbed her head and said, "Sure, Mac, I got it."

As we walked into the hotel lobby I noticed that she was a little unsteady on her feet, so I escorted her over to a chair not far from the desk and gave her a quick final briefing. The lobby was empty except for a scrubwoman, and the clerk looked to be half asleep over a copy of the Mirror. So I went up to the desk and said I'd like to have a room with twin beds. The guy gave me a card and a pen and I started writing.

This was the point where the babe was supposed to come forward. I glanced back at her, and she was sitting in the chair staring straight ahead as if she was in a trance. I went "Psssst!" She didn't move. I wrote another word, and then I went "Psssst!" again. She still didn't seem to hear me, so I gave her a "Psssst!" that almost lifted the carpets off the floor. She wobbled her head around and looked at me and then gave me a silly sort of grin, and got off the chair and came up to the desk. The clerk had heard me doing all that hissing and he was looking from one to the other of us, and now the girl stared him straight in the eye and said, almost in a snarl, "If this bassard says he's my husbuh, he's bigges' damn liar eas' th' Misspippi."

The clerk just stood there and stared at her awhile, no expression on his face. Then he turned to me. I was furious. I was holding myself in, but I could have strangled that dame. Here I had been carefully working out that beautifully organized scheme, watching it unfold exactly the way it was supposed to unfold, as if it had been drafted by a master architect, and now she comes along and with one nasty, uncouth crack, throws the whole thing out of kilter.

The clerk, as I said, looked at me and then he slowly winked his eye and turned around and got a key and handed it to a bored and waiting bellhop. I stood there and stared at the key in my hand, still steaming inside; then I handed it back to him, and nodded toward the girl, and said, "Throw 'er into the street if you feel like it." Then I turned around and walked out and went home.

The moral? You mean you don't see it? It's simply this: A man can fall so much in love with a blueprint that he forgets to put up the building.