tumbldown stories

In Communication

(originally published October 2016)

I suppose you could call it a harmless affectation of mine – a feeble, tawdry attempt to seem more bawdy and worldly and zestily adventurous than I actually am. It's a harmless enough habit, though; so long as no one else is playing the same game.

I travel frequently, selling this and that here and there, but don't often get a chance to do it – it's gone out of fashion to a degree. But when I do find myself in a hotel room with a communicating door, I always unlock it from my side and try the opposing handle (which never moves) – then close it up and leave it unlocked. It's a pitiful little thrill of daring, to be sure – a sad middle-aged man's overdone eyebrow-waggle of a glory-hole invitation; I'm ready, the unlocked door says to nobody ever on the other side – if you're ready too, let's come across and get to know each other a little better, and do something we're both sure we're going to regret in the morning. To nobody, forever – until it isn't.

I was in a generic business hotel out by the airport in D–, and happened to find a door by the back end table where I could grant myself my sad and pointless little frisson, then showered and settled in, in my bathrobe on the bed, to vainly search the limited channels for something interesting and postpone the inevitable soul-scour of paying an hour's rental for two minutes of porn, when the door creaked on its hinges. Not the locked and do-not-disturbed front door – the inner door, the communicating door, the one I'd left open for vanity and self-directed lust.

I looked over, and it was a woman looking around the frame, thin and leggy, wrapped in a towel, with wet strawberry-blonde curls falling off her head, over her shapely and freckled shoulders like a waterfall. I looked, and barely stirred, but didn't speak – this wasn't supposed to happen, this never happened, and it certainly didn't happen Penthouse-Forum-style like this was seeming to be.

Whoever she was, she was certainly a lot less intimidated by the situation – because she'd opened the door? Because she was the kind of woman who opened her door and tried the other door, just like me, and let herself in when it yielded, which I hadn't ever had to decide if I was going to be that kind of man? Whatever it was, she came in, still dripping like she was fresh from the bath, looking around the lamp and table at me.

"Hey," she said, "I dunno if I'm getting in your space, but the door was unlocked, so I felt, like, like I had to take a look? I don't get out a lot, so, it's, like, good when people open up to me." She was standing at the end of the bed now, looking down with an expression on her drawn face somewhere between calculating and hungry.

"No," I said, somehow finding my voice, "not at all; if I didn't want company, I wouldn't've opened the door. It's... always good to get out, get to know people a little better."

"Yeah," she said, sitting herself down on the bed, the end of the taut damp towel hitching up high on her thighs, "since we're here, me like this and you like this, well, maybe we could get to know each other real good." She laid a hand on the inside of my leg, pushing the end of the bathrobe up, trying to look coquettishly through darkened eyes.

"If you're looking for a client," I said, waveringly, "opening the door shouldn't be taken as a solicitation, and –"

"Aw no, no," she said, shifting herself to sit closer, to lean into me, her strange and enticing scent filling the room, "no, I'm not here for that. I done enough of that; I just want some company, for me – don't you want some company too?" I nodded slowly, nervously, and she smiled, wide and guileless and free, and untucked her towel as she reached across to undo the knot in my robe.

I must have fallen asleep afterwards, because in the morning when I woke up she was gone, leaving nothing but that faint, strange scent of her bath wash or whatever, and the damp trace of her hair on the pillow. I shook myself awake the best I could – she had been the lay of a lifetime, the skills of a porn star with the passion of a lover returned to after a long trip away – and cleaned up my things before I showered again; I had to be on the road early. Despite this, I opened the communicating door and tried her side before I left – locked, the handle sticking in my hand. Whatever; her reasons were her reasons, and if all she wanted from me was one night, that had been a hell of a night to have.

Down at reception, a block-innocent twentysomething called on her name badge Theodora checked me out. "That's you set, sir," she said, "any comments about your stay?"

I was feeling my oats after that night of passion and decided to answer rather than just nodding away with the bill; maybe I thought that I might be back here, and that this young thing might want to have a turn on a dashing mature lover. "Excellent," I said. "And even more than anything else, the function of the communicating doors in promoting... good relations between guests."

She looked down, puzzled, and then her eyes opened wide. "Communicating – but, sir, you were in 214, weren't you?"

I blinked – what was this? "Yes – what's the trouble?"

"Room 214 communicates onto room 212. That room ain't let – I dunno how you got in there, but you shouldn'a."

"What? Wait, no – you have the room right, but I didn't go into the other." Not let? What the hell was going on here?

Theodora looked around from side to side, like she was worried about getting found out for something. "If you didn't go in, that aint a problem then – but you shouldn't go talkin' about that round the hotel."

It was barely seven, reception was empty. There was something else here. "If you don't mind me asking, what exactly is this all about? What on earth is the matter with room 212?"

She gulped and looked from side to side. "Don't breathe a word of this to nobody, sir, but there's tales in the staff here that that room aint been let for twenty year. Back then they had some hooker die in it – took an overdose of sleepin' pills on accident and drowned in the bathtub, so they tell – all this horrible stuff about her hair spreadin' out like a red net – and the manager back then, he didn't want to go to the police with it. Who would? You get a hooker die in a hotel, you get it out that hookers turnin' tricks at your place, it's finished for decent people, done; and she was here under a fake name, no documents case she got picked up, no touch of nobody from nowhere on her – the manager, he got a couple workers from the boiler room to wall her up in the bath, and that room aint been let since. That's the story, as much as I got it – if it's true or it aint, I dunno, but at least since I been workin' here, we aint never let 212, not even if the hotel was booked solid and the President wanted to stay a night." She gulped again and looked back up at me with those cow eyes; I flinched and stammered, and backed away, bill in hand.

I should have known – I should have placed that strange and sweet scent. And I should have known from the first – that when you open your communicating door for whatever reason, there's no telling who – or what – is on the other side.