Fiction Attic

Turn Down Service

by Kevin Phelan

She had this red hair. She liked to compare it to a pack of rowdy schoolchildren, presentable one moment, and then all wild and out of control the next. Her teeth were perfect and straight, as was her back and posture. She said it was the product of operations, braces, and odd contraptions that, with the goal of making her ultimately attractive, had made her totally unattractive at a time when those things mattered the most. High school. If anything, she said, it had taught her at an early age that she was going to have to work for a living. While the other girls were meeting boys and dreaming of weddings, she was taking physics, computer science, and wood shop. Oddly enough, it all paid off. Now, she has her own company designing kitchen utensils. The money is in the forks and knives, she says, though she spends most of her time on the more intersting pieces, whisks, spatulas and rubber scrapers.

Weddings, yes. Our deal was this, she would plan the wedding, and I would arrange the honeymoon. A very easy arrangement for me. Her only request was that our honeymoon include a stay at a nice hotel, one with turn down service.

The wedding was remarkable, and not because the food was tremendous, the guest list artfully constructed, or the location perfectly chosen. No, the wedding was remarkable because it included me in such a prominent role. You see, I’m 39, and well, I just figured that the window had already closed on those opportunities. It’s not that 39 is a horrible age, I’m sure there are much worse. It’s simply that, before I met her, I had started to feel a certain way. It felt like a movie, like I had just seen the matinee and now the reels were starting all over again for the the afternoon showing. I had been having a lot of deja vu, everything seemed to remind me of something else. Nothing was new, but rather a variation on something old. Once I met her though, for the most part, the sense of deja vu stopped.

First, a word about turn down service. I can be short because I’m sure you’ve probably experienced it for yourself. It’s that thing you get at nice hotels, when the maid comes, usually while you’re gone at some lame meeting, and she straightens things up, folds your couple of shirts, puts your papers together on the desk, and then bends down the sheets on your bed with, if your lucky, a nice mint on the pillow. It’s stupid and unnecessary, yes, but nice all the same.

My wife’s request for a hotel with turn down service was really not all that odd. You see, my job requires constant travel to a bunch of different places, a bunch of different hotels. Some are good, some are bad, more often times the latter. In fact, one time in Bulgaria, I stayed in this by-the-week sort of place that had no bathrooms in the room, which is not totally unusual for me. The one down the hall, in this place, did not have a toilet but rather two porcelain footprints on either side of a small but workable hole. That was unusual for me, though not the reason I mention it. What was unusual was that it was on the third floor.

Regardless, ever since I met her, whenever I travel, I’ll call her from the hotel, and the first question she asks is whether the place has turn down service. She likes the idea of an extra added bonus, something totally unnecessary, but, to her, completely special. If I say yes, she shrieks with excitement, “did they fold your t-shirts too,” she’ll ask, and “how’s the mint?” If the place doesn’t have turn down service, she’ll quickly change the subject, as if she is trying to take my mind off of some bad news. It’s become a joke between us. I guess it’s something new to me, something I haven’t experienced, something I never saw in the matinee. In a way, it is this, not the beautiful hair, not the smooth skin, but rather this something else that is the very essence of what I love about her.

With that in mind, you understand how tricky it was for me to plan the honeymoon. Now don’t get me wrong–there are a lot of great hotels with really great turn down services. Hotel Gellert in Budapest, the Grand Hotel in Llubjana, the Serena in Zanzibar. I’ve done my research. The Palace in New York probably has the best. Still, I chose the Llao Llao, an odd but amazing hotel at the foot of the Andes. I studied their brochures, I accessed their website, I conferred with their concierge, and then I saved my money.

When we arrived, the manager, who remembered my previous correspondence with them, came out and met us in person, remembering both our names and congratulating us on our wedding. He then paused for a moment, smiled, and explained that he had been able to “work some magic” (my translation), and get us a special suite on the third floor. The room has a name, which I can’t pronounce, rather than a number. That’s how good it is.

We arrived late, so there was no turn down service that first night. Instead we found a bottle of champagne, along with an odd, but tasty spice cake, some Argentine custom I imagine. The next morning, we got up early and walked downstairs to the big, beautiful room where they serve breakfast. As we were walking into the breakfast place there was a group of people walking out. A guy, three women and a baby. The guy was my age, though tremendously good looking. He was carrying the baby, which was also tremendously good looking. The three women, possibly his wife, her mother and her sister, were relatively unmemorable. He looked like he had been the captain of the high school football, or, I should say, futbol team. That was years ago, but then, I suppose, people don’t really change all that much. The baby was no more than a year old, but I could tell that the guy and his wife had been married awhile. He had cheated on her before, I could tell right off. How did I know? I suppose it’s easy, really, if you pay attention, if you watch the details.

As we were walking in to the breakfast room and futbol guy and his wife were walking out, I noticed him subtly slow down. He casually gauged where is wife was, his sister-in-law, and his mother-in-law, and then he slowed a bit more. Without doing anything out of the ordinary, he was suddenly a half-step behind his group, out their field of vision. He shifted his baby over to the other arm, and then, casually but quickly he glanced over at my wife. It was like he wanted to take her to the high school prom. All so careful, all so subtle. It was like he had already planned a long term affair with my wife, and now he was simply being careful to conceal the evidence.

“It looks like you’re going to the prom,” I said to my wife.

“With futbol guy?” she said, smiling. “Really.”

“Yep.”

Later that night, we were in our room, still marveling at the view. We were preparing to go down to the hotel restaurant for dinner, when there was a knock on the door. I pulled on my pants and went to answer. It was the maid. She said something in Spanish, something that I probably could’ve translated from ten different languages. I turned to my wife, “The maid wants to know if we would like turn down service.”

“Turn down service!”

My wife screamed with joy, jumping up and down. Literally, she was jumping up and down–that’s how happy she was. Nobody jumps up and down, but she was. It was great!

Just then, in the hallway, behind the maid, fubol guy’s mother-in-law walked by. Then his sister. Then his wife. Then him. With everyone out of range, he quickly glanced past the maid and into our room, past me, and to my wife. She was barely dressed, her hair wildly out of control, her nails still painted white from our wedding, her hands in the air, jumping up and down, totally beautiful.

All in a second.

And in a second, I had my first full deja vu since I had met her. Okay, maybe it wasn’t a deja vu, but it was a very clear and unavoidable memory.

Years earlier, I had had this different job with a smaller company. We were nearly bankrupt, and things were looking bad. My boss, the owner, felt that if we could just finish this deal we’d been working on, it would save the company and everyone’s job. He and I would’ve probably been happy to see the company fold–he wanted to retire, and I was simply burnt out–but we couldn’t let it happen because we had this receptionist and these two accounting clerks that were depending on us. For a bunch of obvious reasons that I won’t go into, they desperately needed their jobs.

Anyway, the deal involved this slightly eccentric older guy. Everyone else was ready to agree, but he had final approval. Unfortunately, it was June, and he had just returned to his homeland for the entire summer. It was his wish that he spend one last summer at his family’s old cabin in this remote rural village. The problem was three-fold: his homeland was far away, there was a war going on, and the village had no phone service. Idiotically, I volunteered to go see the guy in person.

About the country: it was a beautiful place with an odd war. As far as I could tell, the war was between a bunch of people who all looked the same, killing each other for being so different. Or something like that. Anyway, it had been going on for two years, with almost all of the fighting then took place in the new capital. You probably saw it on television. All of the tall buildings were destroyed, windows broken, concrete missing. Snipers were hidden in every nook and cranny. The main street, the Boulevard of Heroes, was littered from one end to the other with old cars and dead drivers, all the product of one or two small bullet holes. The snipers were so prevalent and determined, that if someone was shot in the middle of the Boulevard, they would have to lay there to die because no one could risk running out to get them. Needless to say the place was a ghost town.

The eccentric guy did not live in the new and dangerous capital, but rather in a small village only six kilometers away. With great research, I learned that, after two years, some bus service was going to re-start their service to the new capital. It was a symoblic thing, a desperate, but naive hope to re-establish some normalcy. They didn’t actually think anyone would take the bus anywhere near the new capital. When I, an American, showed up on that first morning, asking for a ticket to the town just barely west of the new capital, they were a bit stunned.

When we left the first station, there was six people on board, including myself and the driver. By stop number four of ten, it was just me and the driver. He was very fidgety, nervous, but jovial in an odd sort of uncomfortable way. I tried to speak with him, but our languages had not a single word or gesture in common. He was wearing a bullet-proof vest and chain-drinking liter bottles of beer. It took hours to cross the slow and rough terrain. Every now and then a road would be out, and we would have to take an alternate detour. Around three in the morning, it started to snow. I had been traveling for thirty-eight straight hours, if you count the taxi ride to the San Francisc0 airport. I was very sleepy, utterly and totally exhausted. I was starving and thirsty. I had packed wrong, I had dressed wrong. It was snowing outside, and I was completely freezing.

Although the driver had turned up the stereo real loud, some pan-flute-type folk music with an oddly repetitive chorus, I still was having tremendous trouble fighting the urge to sleep. And that was the problem, if I fell asleep, I would miss my stop. Stop number nine. Stop number ten, the final stop, of course, was at the wrong end of the Boulevard of Heroes. Past the littered cars and bodies, past all of the determined snipers.

And that’s it. That’s the memory, the deja vu, whatever. Standing there in the doorway to greatest room in luxurious Llao Llao Hotel, caught between the futball hero and my wife, all I could remember was a late night on a freezing bus, snow coming down, sleep almost irresistible, rocking back and forth in my uncomfortable seat, repeating to myself over and over, “Don’t fall asleep, don’t fall asleep, don’t fall asleep, don’t fall asleep.”