[From Granta]
“Another reason: I didn’t want to taint my attraction to Jack, or his to me, by taking our act on the road and playing it out in a grande-dame hotel full of high-end DC hookers on wobbly stilettos, or worse, in a poignant, freshly vacuumed room at a Days Inn, overlooking a loading dock, fluorescent lighting in the bathroom, and a hulking armoire we’d never even open, except maybe to watch CNN in the morning. I couldn’t let our thing get debased by all that earth-toned, noise-machined liminality. Why pry open the Leyden Jar and set its contents loose into a place that smelled of all-you-can-eat hot breakfast buffets or the non-smell of individually saran-wrapped apples engineered to grow big as grapefruits? If Jack slept in novelty pajamas or did Sudoko in the morning, I didn’t want to know. There are things you can’t unsee.”
MALERIE WILLENS 