The Way Inn Read Online Free PDF

lobbies, the foyers, the atria—are barely used, inhabited only fleetingly by people on their way elsewhere, checking in or out, perhaps alone on a sofa waiting for someone or something. To see the space at capacity, teeming with people, was curiously thrilling, like observing by chance a great natural migration. This was it: I was present for the main event, when the hotels were at capacity and the business centers hosted back-to-back videoconferences with head offices all over the planet. I could see it all for what it was and what it wasn’t. Because even when thronged with people, the lobby is still uninhabited—it cannot really be occupied, this space, or made home; it is a channel people sluice through. Those people sitting on the sofas don’t make the furniture any more authentic than the maybe-virgin seat I had seen by the lift. The space isn’t for anyone. My younger self might have been troubled by this thought, that even the main event could not give the space purpose—but now I had come to realize that the sensation was simple existential paranoia. I recognized the limits of authenticity.
    Where there are buses, there is hanging around; Maurice’s dictum was quite correct. The driveway outside the hotel was protected by a porte-cochere. Under this showy glass and steel canopy, three coaches idled while conference staff in high-visibility tabards pointed and bickered, and desultory clusters of dark-suited guests smoked and hunched against blasts of cold, wet wind. The buses were huge and shiny, gaudy in banana-skin livery; their doors were closed. Evidently a disagreement or communications breakdown was under way—the attendants listened with fraught attention to burbling walkie-talkies, staring at nothing, or shouted at and directed one another, or jogged about, or consulted clipboards, but nothing happened as a result of this pseudoactivity.
    I was about to retreat behind the glass doors, back to the warmth and comfort of the lobby, when I spotted Rosa (or Rhoda) standing alone among the huddle waiting for the buses, cigarette in one hand, phone apparently fused to the other. She had put on a brightly colored quilted jacket and seemed unbothered by the cold and the icy raindrops that the wind pushed under the shelter.
    â€œHey,” I said.
    Rosa looked at me without obvious emotion, although her neutrality could be read as wariness. “Hey.”
    â€œWhat’s going on?” I said, nodding in the direction of the buses, where frenzied stasis continued. She looked momentarily dejected, and shrugged. We would never know, of course. The cause of this sort of holdup was rarely made clear, it was just more nontime, nonlife, the texture of business travel. Hotel lobbies and airport lounges are built to contain these useless minutes and soothe them away with comfortable seats, agreeable lighting, soft music, mirrors and pot plants.
    â€œI’m sorry we didn’t get much of an opportunity to talk back there,” I said. Rosa’s edge of frostiness toward me, her shrugs and monosyllables, bothered me. I was certain we had got on well in the past, and she seemed an excellent candidate for some conference sex, if we could get past this froideur . My failure to capitalize on the coincidence in the bar last night had left a sour aftertaste. Some sex would dispel that; it would divert me, at least. If Rosa reciprocated.
    â€œYou seemed busy,” she said.
    â€œNothing important.”
    â€œWho was that man who joined us?”
    â€œMaurice? I thought you knew him. A reporter, for a trade magazine.”
    â€œI’ve seen him around.”
    â€œHe’s hard to miss.”
    â€œA friend of yours?”
    â€œNot really.”
    â€œSo this girl he mentioned . . .”
    Sexual jealousy, was it? That was a promising sign.
    â€œYou shouldn’t believe a word Maurice says,” I said. “He was only trying to stir up trouble. I was having