Cosmic Hotel Read Online Free PDF

and started the rumor that he and Ann-Margret really got married.”
    I knew when Elizabeth was quiet for fifteen minutes (Elvis driving into Vegas with his race car on a trailer), movie flashing on her face, she wanted to enjoy this, and I thought it would make me happy too. All I could think about was Charles.
    In this movie, Elvis, a singer/race car driver, is after swim instructor Ann-Margret. Every scene is an excuse to sing, the band always ready, but during the first interior shot of the Flamingo Hotel, Elizabeth said, “Look at that mezzanine. They don’t make themlike that anymore. He was in love with Ann-Margret, but she was a Hollywood career woman. He wanted a mother figure.”
    Elizabeth was a sucker for the American celebrity biography, the more sordid the downfall the better. Every biography proved to her how corrupting her adopted country and success could be. She took pleasure in the spoiling and the spoils and the downfalls of the Kennedys, Marilyn Monroe, Karen Carpenter, and Elvis Presley, and I’m not sure that these stories didn’t comfort her, showing the high times, just like her younger life with her father and mother, but then everyone had to suffer the downfall just like hers, a once great business of hotels.
    In the movie, Elvis looks out his hotel window and sees Ann-Margret teaching a swimming class to kids. Her red hair reminded me of Ursula’s, though Ursula’s was deeper, nearly brown. Elvis grabs his guitar and heads down to woo her. She wears a red one-piece with buttons up the front and shuns him, though there is no reason for her to do so—he is handsome, charismatic, seems nice—but I think this was what girls were supposed to do back in 1964. Ann-Margret is beautiful, and she goes into a dressing room to change, and Elvis begins singing as he waits for her. She sings back from inside. Pretty soon they dance around the hotel pool, and everyone is watching them. Everything in a musical is perfect, and for a second I believed in Rusty and Lucky, and that perhaps things back in 1964 were really like this, but then Elizabeth’s tragic voiceover began, “He started taking amphetamines in 1958 in the army.” She put her feet on the table.
    â€œYou are using Viva Las Vegas as a teaching moment?”
    â€œLook at the people there.” She pointed to the background. “Look at those people around the pool and the number of staff serving them. There are too many people in the world today, and everyone has money. Service like that can’t be provided to everyone. Everyone expected this treatment back then and we certainly gave it to them.” She clicked her tongue.
    â€œElizabeth,” I said, my voice lower, not lifting my head off the back of the couch, “how wealthy was your father?”
    â€œHe was trained as a banker in New Delhi before he came here. He worked extremely hard for everything he had.”
    â€œI know that,” I said, “but he owned motels and hotels here. A lot even by today’s standards.”
    â€œIt was something back then,” she said, “but now, how many hotels are there in the world? Profits breed infusion of capital. The security is in the conglomerates.”
    She had been born Ekaja Sanghavi, and her father made her work at every level in the industry—housekeeping, engineering, and as a bellhop. She liked to claim to others how I’d been brought up the same way, but the truth was that my training as a bellhop had lasted one week and all the bellhops hated me, and I spent the days reading in the employees’ locker room. I had lasted about a month in housekeeping, had never valeted someone’s car, and she knew exactly how long I worked in all these positions, but she liked to tell people I had been from the ground up like her. She had one picture of the nineteen-year-old Elizabeth in her bellhop uniform, hands down by her side, not smiling but holding her chin