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which was room service, and my lower back, maintenance and security. It takes constant vigilance to be a hotel. Much coordination. When the guests emerge from the revolving doors, my index finger and thumb, they expect everything to be shipshape, which is why my Adam's apple, the escalator, is developing a case of nerves.
    How I became the Westin, I cannot say. But I was not always like this. My heart, the concierge, would like to inform the guests that not all that long ago, say twenty-five or thirty years, I might have been taken for the Grand Hotel Villa Serbelloni with its high burnt-ochre walls that stretched to twenty-four-foot ceilings, with playful cupids painted on them, and with the enormous open windows cut in stone that looked out upon the gardens where the German nannies watched over children of false nobility and out upon Lake Como and the Villa Serbelloni itself, once the home of Pliny the Younger—the blue, still shell of the lake and the orange-tile roofs beyond and beyond that, the snowy Alps. To be sure, I was not really the Grand Hotel Villa Serbelloni, but I might have passed. In any case, I was certainly classier than I am now. First class. Ask anyone.
    Chaucer slept here. And Shakespeare. Donne and Marvell dropped by the tavern, my liver, more than once; and Milton, though he needed the help of strangers, would stroll around the ballroom and hear the tinkling of the vast crystal chandelier, my throat. Swift, Pope, Johnson, they all knew my place and would regularly book rooms in my tongue for a night or two. In later years, Jane Austen took an apartment in my ribs, and when George Eliot saw how comfortable Jane was, she did the same. Musicians, painters, philosophers—they all thought of me as their home away from home. You should have seen the silverware in those days, how heavy it felt in one's hands. And the thick, cool linens.
    Now look at me. It's not that I have anything against the Westin I've turned into. I could have become a Marriott, I suppose, or a Hyatt, or a Hilton, and not felt any different. I'm no Motel 6—not yet. No complaints. Fact is, I'm not sure how I became a hotel in the first place, because I can remember way back—long before the Villa Serbelloni days—when I thought of myself as a guest, as one for whom all services were created. But then one day I found myself making accommodations, small ones at first, then more ample, more elaborate, until ... ah, well.
C'est la guerre,
as they say. And, frankly, there is simply too much for me to do to worry about where life took a detour or any such self-indulgence. Only I wish that there weren't quite so much upkeep when one is a hotel these days. People expect everything.
    I'm thinking of changing my toes, the pizzeria, into a Japanese restaurant; everyone is crazy for sushi. My feet are working on becoming trainers for the gym. Hands, masseurs; lips, a hotel playroom for kids. A kennel, even, in my right thigh. They take their dogs everywhere.
    Sometimes at night, when my lungs, the registration desk, have stopped throbbing from anxiety, I wander about my jaws, the kitchen, and dream of being something else. But then night softens into day, another day, and there are all the guests' demands to attend to. They complain that they are unable to turn off the clock-radios in their rooms. They want square, not round, chocolate mints on their pillows. The most difficult part will come not when I have shaved my awning face or brushed my elevator-bank teeth, or even tied my tie around my WELCOME TO THE WESTIN sign, my neck. It will be when I begin to smile my smile, which has become my smile.

Cliff's Other Notes
    Cyrano
    Don't for a moment believe that it was Cyrano's nose. Anyone can see that it wasn't his nose. Women actually found it alluring, kind of sexy. But he deluded himself and blamed the nose. If only someone, Roxanne, for example, had told him the truth—that what women could not take was his ardor, his