hotelLast week I went back to the Algonquin Hotel. The visit is a periodic ritual. The whole lobby is now a bar, I suppose because everybody who knows of the Algonquin Hotel wants to drink there.
The usual gang wasn't there munching on celery stalks. As often as I now go to the Algonquin, the usual gang has not been there.
An unusual woman sits half way across the room from me drinking from a bottle labeled Poland Spring. I am drinking rum and Coke through a straw so I shouldn't compare our relative levels of sophistication.
I wish I were forty-one again when I would walk up to the reception desk and the clerk would say, "Hello, Mrs. Kaye - we are so happy to see you back" and I would put all those drinks on my expense account. I was drinking gin then.
But I am not forty-one and now the whole lobby is a bar and the golden cat is gone and people push baby strollers around the tables as they are seated in the soft green upholstered armchairs. Everyone is clean shaven. No, there is a man with a beard but he is sitting with the woman rocking the stroller so he doesn't really count.
I love this hotel. Every time I have come here I am able to pretend that I am one of them - waiting for my friends to join me.
They will come up to my little round table with its spindle legs and say, "Em, you are early. You look so sad sitting here so alone." They will call me "Em" because we are such intimates and my public, published name is on for hangers on. To these, my friends, I am "Em."
My train leaves in less than an hour. When I was forty-one I merely took out my key and went to my room on the seventh floor. Now I must rush to the Pennsylvania Station and hurry to New Jersey -- where I now stay with my daughter, who doesn't know Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley or Edna Ferber and doesn't drink gin and sleeps in a bedroom suite on the second floor of her million dollar house and isn't as happy as I. I sleep in my imagination.
The tone is so burnished inside the Algonquin. So still. Standing, throwing my coat over my shoulders, I spot a dusky Underwood typewriter on the window sill in the corner of the room. An Underwood. The spirits hover.
A man sits typing at a laptop next to the Underwood and sees my eyes light up. "Yes, it's an original Underwood" he nods and goes on to tell me how his uncle bought up a warehouse full of Underwoods during the war and sold them to the Army. Made a lot of money so he has a soft spot in his heart for Underwoods. He wanted to give me his uncle's telephone number so I could contact him for paths to parts that my original Underwood needs and we decide together that the internet might be a better source.
The waiter brings my check and asks if he can charge my room. He thinks I am staying here. I still look right. I still belong. I love this waiter. I love this room. I love this hotel. I love this street. I love this city. And I look like I belong to it. I tip him heavily. Hell, I've just dropped a hundred for a seat in the Walter Kerr Theater, a ten for a rum. What's another bunch of bills? I am going home where there is no place to spend money.
