I See You Made an Effort: Compliments, Indignities, and Survival Stories from the Edge of 50 by Annabelle Gurwitch Page B
Authors: Annabelle Gurwitch
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have been cooked peas, cigars and leather—old money, in this case, really old money, so old it was barely there.
The hotel’s Purple Water works its magic on me and I hear myself announcing that I’m going to be so tired after the event, I will need to stay overnight. Remarkably, the event planner agrees to this and after lunch I head up to my suite.
My hotel room is well appointed and maintained in a way that my home, built in 1932, will never be, with its corners that don’t meet exactly. * Settling in the foundation leaves cracks in the ceiling paint and uneven gaps between the floor moldings and the hardwood floors.
There are no water marks on the suite’s tables, no cats have sharpened their claws on the upholstery, and the walls bear no children’s handprints or bicycle skid marks. In fact, the paint looks so fresh I have to touch it to determine it’s not still damp.
A fruit plate has been placed next to my bed for my enjoyment. It’s more like an ode to fruit. A perfectly shaped pear, two figs, and a grape rest on a single mint leaf inside a shallow Chinese porcelain tureen. It’s so exquisite it seems wrong to eat such an elegent construction, but consuming it will be the only way to possess it, so I scarf the whole thing down quickly.
The room has not one but two balconies, and the bathroom is so sparkling clean I might be the first person to ever use it. It also has a feature I always think of as the true sign of luxury: a heavy door separating the toilet from the rest of the facilities. It’s like Vegas: what happens there stays in there. In my own bathroom, mistakes were made. It was a full five years after I sprung for copper piping that water began leaking into the sink cabinetry. But why wouldn’t it? Our contractor had apparently decided that replacing the old pipes would involve too much actual contracting, so he had wrapped the rusting aluminum in electrical tape. That was ten years ago. Correcting this remains on my to-do list. We simply have them rewrapped every year.
I open a bottle of Asprey hair conditioner in the bathroom and inhale deeply. I’ve got Fitzgerald’s line stuck in my head: the rich are different from you and me and we will know them by their scent? I know that can’t be it, but it also seems true. I proceed to stuff every single bath product into my purse and call down for more. It’s a pattern for sure. I took home rolls of toilet paper from the nightclubs where I worked in the eighties, yellow legal pads from the offices of each TV series that employed me in the nineties, and there was that time I was sent to audition for the director John Hughes at a hotel in New York. I recall waiting in the foyer with an actress, whom I assessed as so plain, though I greatly admired her stage work, I was genuinely saddened that she’d never work in film or television. That actress was Cynthia Nixon. After John candidly admitted to not seeing me in the role, I thanked him and on my way out stopped to use his bathroom. I stole every amenity in plain sight and a few more from the housekeeper’scart in the hallway. I couldn’t stop myself then and I can’t stop myself now.
A card on the marble bathroom vanity reminds me that guests are invited to go to the spa, so I have to take them up on that as well. Who am I to turn down the invitation?
The spa changing area is paneled in dark mahogany, the lighting is indirect and muted and there are no windows. It’s like a tomb, a bomb shelter or the inside of a bank vault.
There are cut orchids everywhere. There’s even one in the pocket of the spa robe.
I enter the steam sauna, but it feels less like entering a room and more like I’m being drawn into it, like a black hole in space. I am the only person in the cave-like, serpent-shaped enclave. Tiny iridescent azure tiles cover the floor, walls and ceiling, the only light coming from pinpoint LED spots on the low ceiling that flicker from yellow to green and vary like the night
The hotel’s Purple Water works its magic on me and I hear myself announcing that I’m going to be so tired after the event, I will need to stay overnight. Remarkably, the event planner agrees to this and after lunch I head up to my suite.
My hotel room is well appointed and maintained in a way that my home, built in 1932, will never be, with its corners that don’t meet exactly. * Settling in the foundation leaves cracks in the ceiling paint and uneven gaps between the floor moldings and the hardwood floors.
There are no water marks on the suite’s tables, no cats have sharpened their claws on the upholstery, and the walls bear no children’s handprints or bicycle skid marks. In fact, the paint looks so fresh I have to touch it to determine it’s not still damp.
A fruit plate has been placed next to my bed for my enjoyment. It’s more like an ode to fruit. A perfectly shaped pear, two figs, and a grape rest on a single mint leaf inside a shallow Chinese porcelain tureen. It’s so exquisite it seems wrong to eat such an elegent construction, but consuming it will be the only way to possess it, so I scarf the whole thing down quickly.
The room has not one but two balconies, and the bathroom is so sparkling clean I might be the first person to ever use it. It also has a feature I always think of as the true sign of luxury: a heavy door separating the toilet from the rest of the facilities. It’s like Vegas: what happens there stays in there. In my own bathroom, mistakes were made. It was a full five years after I sprung for copper piping that water began leaking into the sink cabinetry. But why wouldn’t it? Our contractor had apparently decided that replacing the old pipes would involve too much actual contracting, so he had wrapped the rusting aluminum in electrical tape. That was ten years ago. Correcting this remains on my to-do list. We simply have them rewrapped every year.
I open a bottle of Asprey hair conditioner in the bathroom and inhale deeply. I’ve got Fitzgerald’s line stuck in my head: the rich are different from you and me and we will know them by their scent? I know that can’t be it, but it also seems true. I proceed to stuff every single bath product into my purse and call down for more. It’s a pattern for sure. I took home rolls of toilet paper from the nightclubs where I worked in the eighties, yellow legal pads from the offices of each TV series that employed me in the nineties, and there was that time I was sent to audition for the director John Hughes at a hotel in New York. I recall waiting in the foyer with an actress, whom I assessed as so plain, though I greatly admired her stage work, I was genuinely saddened that she’d never work in film or television. That actress was Cynthia Nixon. After John candidly admitted to not seeing me in the role, I thanked him and on my way out stopped to use his bathroom. I stole every amenity in plain sight and a few more from the housekeeper’scart in the hallway. I couldn’t stop myself then and I can’t stop myself now.
A card on the marble bathroom vanity reminds me that guests are invited to go to the spa, so I have to take them up on that as well. Who am I to turn down the invitation?
The spa changing area is paneled in dark mahogany, the lighting is indirect and muted and there are no windows. It’s like a tomb, a bomb shelter or the inside of a bank vault.
There are cut orchids everywhere. There’s even one in the pocket of the spa robe.
I enter the steam sauna, but it feels less like entering a room and more like I’m being drawn into it, like a black hole in space. I am the only person in the cave-like, serpent-shaped enclave. Tiny iridescent azure tiles cover the floor, walls and ceiling, the only light coming from pinpoint LED spots on the low ceiling that flicker from yellow to green and vary like the night
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