Metropolitan Manners
“No! No! No!”
“You can not stay in that bathroom all night.”
“Do we wanna bet?”
“Argh… I… grrr,” she growls. “Sam, come out of there immediately!”
“I said no!”
“Don’t make me call security.”
“I don’t care if you do.”
“Damn it, Sam, Dave’s been looking for you for over forty minutes. I ran out of excuses after the first fifteen, and you know what happens when I try to improvise. If you don’t come out of there, you’d better prepare a list of alternatives to alien abduction and being sucked down into the drains, because right now I have no other ideas for justifying this sudden ridiculous love of the toilet seat you seem to have developed!”
“He should have told me,” I say, remaining behind the door with my arms folded.
“Maybe he didn’t know,” she says.
“Oh right!” I snap sarcastically.
“Hey, maybe he really didn’t! It’s possible!”
“Spontaneous combustion is possible too, but despite my prayers, my Uncle Theodore keeps turning up for Christmas every year.”
“What the hell has your Uncle Theodore got to do with anything?”
“Haven’t I ever introduced you to my Uncle Theodore? I should. Why don’t you come over for Christmas dinner?”
“Sam,” she sighs, “I do understand your frustration, but I don’t think the two things are really comparable.”
“Well the effects on my digestion are identical.”
“Sam,” she shouts in exasperation, “it’s only two days – two days – and you told him that you would help him. You can’t change your mind now.”
“I’m not changing my mind,” I explain. “I would have changed my mind if I’d known from the start and, after agreeing to it, I had pulled out, but I didn’t know. I never accepted. So I’m not changing my mind, Terry. I’m just refusing to spend two days in the hotel with Dave, particularly because I’m less than ten miles from home and I can quite easily come back here tomorrow for interviews.”
“If the organisation expects you to be a guest of the hotel…”
“They should have asked me!”
“Will you tell me what the problem is? Until yesterday, this was your secret fantasy!”
I go quiet.
“Sam?” She’s noticed. “Sam, did something happen that you forgot to mention when I asked you ‘So how did it go yesterday with Dave?’ and you answered ‘I’m not sure that’s olive pâté?”
I sigh with frustration.
“Sam… Sam, I don’t want to rush you but we’ve been locked in the ladies’ bathroom for too long for people to think we’re bulimic or just doing coke. I’m really starting to worry what the angry women waiting their turn outside that door are thinking. Half the town is out there in its best clothes, along with – I hope – the multi-millionaire dentist who’s going to decide that I am the love of his life as soon as he sees me in my Versace dress, which only cost me the modest equivalent of three months’ salary. And you? I mean, in the middle of all this, what are you doing? Barricading yourself in and running the risk of losing the only job you’ve been able to get? I know you’d prefer death to dishonour, but you’re not Joan of Arc and there isn’t the Spanish Inquisition or a firing squad waiting for you out there. So why not quit worrying about being burned at the stake or becoming a human sacrifice or whatever and concentrate on the fact that, whatever it is you want, you’re not going to get it by hiding in the toilet? You’re just postponing the inevitable. Please, please,” she begs me, changing tone, “for once, for one time in your life, listen to me. Can you? Try and be understanding, this can’t be easy for him either. Open the door, go to Dave, and if you just don’t want to stay over, just say ‘Dave, I don’t want to stay over.’ It’s so easy even you can do it.”
“Understanding? I’m the one who’s supposed to be understanding?” I yell. “I don’t want to be understanding. I’m sick and tired of being understanding!”
“Then go out there and tell him!”
“No!”
“What do you mean, ‘no’? Why not? What, are you embarrassed or something?”
“I’m not embarrassed!”
“That’s not what it looks like,” she says, changing strategy. “You’re terrified, that’s what it is. You haven’t got the guts to tell him to his face to leave you alone.”
“That isn’t true!”
“Yeah, it’s so typical of risk takers to lock themselves in the john. I’m sure Dave is terrified.”
I throw open the door and glare at her. “I am not afraid of Dave.”
“Sure…” she says with a sarcastic smile, not believing a word of it.
“I’m not afraid of Dave,” I repeat.
“Sure, I can tell…”
“And now I’m going to go over there, take him to one side and tell him that tonight he’ll have to look for someone else to be his slave, because I’m done with unpaid overtime. I’m done with it!” I yell angrily. “And I am not going, in any way, to let myself be talked out of it. If he wants a running dog, why doesn’t he call Madeleine?” I ask, not giving her a chance to answer. “No, of course not, why disturb Madeleine if there’s Sam? Sam Preston. Sam ‘do what you want with me’ Preston? Well that’s enough! This time it’s a no. Because Sam Preston has a life and Sam Preston has her dignity, see? And when he finally finds the courage to ask me himself if I want to stay here and carry his bags at Fashion Week, instead of letting me find out from the wardrobe girl when I go to pick up my coat, when he comes to me and says, ‘Sam, listen, there’s been a change of plan. Tomorrow morning they’re going to discuss the latest developments in the textile industry and they’ve asked me to speak, would you mind staying on?’ I will say…”
*
“Of course, sure, no problem!”
I smile. A long smile that goes from one ear right across to the other and is held on my lips by the power of desperation and an inability to protect myself that’s starting to feel practically pathological.
Dave nods.
“Ok. I’ll go and get the keys to our rooms. Wait here, I’ll just be a moment,” and he heads off down the corridor that leads into the next room, the hall with the sparkling floors I glimpsed when we arrived. He moves as though he has been walking around places like this all his life. As though he was born for this world. Wearing a fabulous dark suit, he looks amazing.
“Hmph… Why the hell don’t you fall in love with me?” I whisper in the garden, hoping to find Terry exactly where I left her. Thank God she’s right there, sitting on a bench and trying to guess from the angle of my eyebrows how it went.
“So?”
How did she expect it to go? Shall we briefly sum up? Fashion Week has finally started. Three weeks have passed without me losing even one ounce. Isn’t that great? I love my tenacity, especially when it comes to trying to reach impossible goals. And so here I am, stuffed into a very expensive evening dress that barely fits me and which tomorrow will end up in a box up in the attic keeping all the other ‘for when I lose weight’ clothes that I’ve been pointlessly stockpiling for years, company. This time, though, it’s not my fault, it’s Lou’s. He couldn’t bear to see me crying any more while I tried to put on my damned dress and so he insisted on me buying something new. I would have preferred not to let him see me in that state, but realising that I couldn’t do up the zip of a dress that I’d bought only a year before made me feel so miserable. I’d taken the discovery that I wasn’t cut out for the red carpet quite well, all things considered, but not the zipper that wouldn’t close. That was a tragedy. Because you can find a thousand excuses for being rejected by a man that don’t mean you are inadequate, but a zip has no ulterior motive and so there’s nobody left to blame except yourself.
The only consolation tonight is the surroundings. ‘Beautiful?’, you ask – ‘big’, I answer. I breathed a sigh of relief when I realised that nobody cared about me. I was sure that when I walked in they would all stare at me and someone would shout, “Thar she blows! Thar she blows! It’s Moby Dick!” But nobody did. The guests at the Globe Park Hotel proved to be very discreet, I must admit, and their behaviour stopped me feeling as self-conscious as usual, something for which I thank them all unequivocally, especially because I will probably never see such an incredible display of botox again in my entire life. The place is really fabulous too! I’m not being sarcastic: they chose a different venue this time: the Globe Park Hotel, a newly opened luxury complex, that seized the opportunity to be mentioned in all the nation’s newspapers by offering to put up organisers, contestants and guests during the event. They’ve set up catwalks and stages for the shows and multimedia rooms for the conferences. There’s everything you could need. When I first arrived, I couldn’t believe my eyes – I’d never have thought I’d participate in anything like this. And then came the chilling discovery of the evening – the story of the obligatory overnight stay – and it all suddenly seemed less fascinating than I had initially imagined. I know, I shouldn’t have reacted like that.
I have the opportunity to spend the night in one of the smartest hotels in the city among catwalk shows, dancers and celebrities, but here I am chewing my nails off and looking for a good excuse to hightail it out of here. The truth is that my head is elsewhere and that fashion has never really been my thing anyway. And I can’t stop thinking about Al. He hasn’t called me since he escorted me to Nob Hill. And to that I should add that the official selections for Curvy are about to begin and that I’m barely speaking to Dave nowadays. I just don’t want to, and above all I don’t want to have to stay here with him tonight – I’d been hoping to limit my social interaction to a couple of hours of hanging around in the conference room. I was just a foot away from the cloakroom, ready to feign some kind of illness and get the hell out of there when one of the maids asked me if I wanted to put my stuff in my room. My room? I stared at her, thinking it must be some kind of mistake. But no, there was no mistake. And Dave hadn’t said anything to me. Absolutely nothing. And he’d had days to warn me!
Thinking about it puts me in a bad mood again. I give Terry a desperate look and then sit next to her on the edge of the pool. Terry immediately realises that something is wrong and that Dave is probably involved somehow. Others would try to comfort me, others would ask me if I wanted to talk about it, but she just slaps her forehead and starts nodding her head anxiously. I must look really pathetic.
“Sam, come on, how many times do I have to tell you? What did you do this time? What did you let him do to you?”
“The usual, plus a bit of extra off the cuff stuff later on in the evening.”
“I don’t know if I want to know,” she admits, looking at the crowd of people having fun around us.
“No, you don’t want to know,” I say, without adding anything else. She already knows as much as she needs to spend the next two weeks worth of coffee breaks having a go at me. “I’m going to try and get the keys to my room,” I whisper, before she can add anything I know I won’t be able to argue with. I’d rather not hear her views on my inability to do what I say I’m going to, not while I’m in this state.
“Are you coming back here afterwards?” she asks.
“No, I think I’ll take a shower and try and get a little sleep,” I say, then wish her goodbye and traipse off to the lobby, where I find Dave arguing with one of the staff. It’s light years from what I would think of as ‘making a scene’, though – he remains detached, formal and perfectly controlled.
“What exactly do you mean?” he says to the concierge.
“It is an absolutely unforgivable mistake. I’m truly, terribly sorry,” stammers the man, clearly extremely embarrassed.
“That doesn’t help much, though,” replies a furious Dave.
I can’t work out what they’re talking about and move a bit closer so I can listen in.
“I will be glad to check again, but I’m almost sure…”
“No, I demand that the issue be resolved. I cannot manage without my assistant,” insists Dave, without realising I’m listening.
“I understand, yes,” murmurs the concierge, mortified. But after he has peered at his monitor his eyes go back to Dave and there is no change in his expression: absolute mortification. “Unfortunately, there are no other rooms. The hotel is fully booked,” he admits.
“This is ludicrous!”
“Problems?” I say, moving closer and looking at them both.
“Yes, it’s a disaster,” comments Dave, barely deigning to glance at me. He seems prickly and tired. He must be exhausted, and probably can’t wait to lock himself in his room with the minibar.
“As I told Mr Callaghan,” the man at reception tries to explain to me. “It is an understandable mistake because we imagined that—”
“No, it’s not understandable,” Dave interrupts him before he concludes. “I am not required to specify the nature of my relationships to the staff of the Globe Park Hotel.”
“No, I didn’t mean to insinuate…”
“Dave, will you tell me what’s going on?”
“They’ve booked us into a suite.”
“So?”
“Into one suite, Sam.”
“You mean, one each?”
“No, I mean one for both of us,” says Dave. And when I finally realise that I’d been concentrating on the least important part of the phrase, I lose my temper too.
“That’s ridiculous! Absolutely ridiculous! I refuse!” I snap at the poor man, not thinking for a moment that it certainly can’t be his fault – but the mere idea of having to put up with Dave after everything we said to each other last night is enough to brush away the remaining trace of sanity I had been working so hard to preserve. “Find a solution. Any solution,” I demand, banging my handbag down violently on the desk. My sudden show of anger makes the man freeze momentarily, and Dave does likewise. Although he is in complete agreement he cannot hide a trace of irritation.
“Ms Preston, believe me, if there were something – anything – I could do to—”
“You can’t really be thinking that I’m going to share a bed with him?”
Dave can’t stop himself from intervening any longer, but it can’t have been anything nice because he manages to close his mouth again in time and maintain a resentful silence.
“The point is, we thought that you were… were…” stammered the concierge.
“‘… were’?”
“… Mr Callaghan’s partner,” he explains, going red in the face, and this time I have to really bite my tongue because Dave throws out his hands in resignation and cries, “Oh, that is ridiculous!”
“And why exactly would it be ‘ridiculous’?” I say, turning to him with my face bright red.
“What? It’s okay for you think it’s impossible to share a room with me but I’m supposed to jump for joy because they think you’re my girlfriend?” All his class and poise go out of the window when he wants to win an argument.
“You’re right, it would be really humiliating for you for people to see you with a woman who doesn’t spend her days licking bowling balls in a deodorant ad.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“So what should I do?” the concierge asks us, forcing himself to smile. “Confirm or cancel?”
“Confirm!”
“Cancel!”
We both answer at the same time, glaring at him.
“Erm…” he stammers, his pen still in mid-air.
“Sam, we can’t go, I’ve got things I have to do here!”
“Nobody asked you to go – I’m going!”
“You can’t go either – who’ll keep me company tomorrow morning at the conference?”
“Why is that my problem? And anyway, there are no rooms. Where do you expect me to sleep, in your bed?”
He stops and scratches his head and for a moment it almost looks as though he’s actually thinking about the idea.
“If it’s not a problem for you two, seeing as you already seem so… familiar with one another,” cuts in the hotel receptionist, “the suite has two very large rooms – a bedroom and a lounge. We could put another bed in. The rooms are communicating, but if you close the door between them…” he suggests.
“See?” exclaims Dave, with a satisfied expression on his face.
“See what?”
“You wanted a room, now you’ve got a room!” he snaps, before turning back to the man. “I’ll be fine with the couch. Give my assistant the room.”
“I am not your assistant.”
“Give Ms Preston the room,” he corrects himself with a sigh when he hears me griping. “Ah…” he remembers at the last minute, “she didn’t think she’d be staying, could you find her a change of clothes and a couple of evening dresses from the boutique?”
“Of course, it will be our pleasure,” the man answers with sudden efficiency. “Shall I put that on your card?”
“Charge it to The Chronicle.”
“Perfect. All I need now is the lady’s dress size,” he murmurs with discretion, writing a note in the register.
There is an embarrassing silence as we all stand there and they both stare at me. How sweet… they have been ignoring me completely for the last twenty minutes while they argued, and now they magically remember my existence and want to extort information that I wouldn’t even reveal under torture.
“Er…” mumbles Dave, looking at me cautiously, “I’d say a L—”
I go white. “What?” I can’t believe it. Did he really say that? I glare at him insistently, waiting for him to make some kind of excuse or to genuflect in mortification.
“Well, sorry,” he says, “if you want it tighter, you can always change it.”