I waved my hand at them by way of answer, staggered out of the car and into our cabin, where I flung myself upon the bed.
CHAPTER SIX
EVERY NIGHT WHEN Grant goes to bed he lays out his clothes in exactly the places and positions where they will be easiest to get into in a hurry. (Except on the nights when all the cabins are full by bedtime; then, knowing he won't have to get up to answer the doorbell, he reverts to type and tosses all his things in a heap on the floor!)
But on the nights when our "vacancy" sign is on, he likes to be prepared for the inevitable summons. He wears his underclothes to bed. His trousers hang over a chair beside the bed, and are the first garment he grabs when the bell rings. He thrusts his legs into them quickly, hobbling across the room toward the office at the same time. In the middle of the room is his shirt, hanging on another chair which has been carefully placed halfway between the bed and the doorway to the office. Halting his clumsy gait long enough to seize the shirt, he puts it on and tries to button it with one hand while he zips his trousers with the other. By this time he has reached the doorway which separates the office from the living room; and there wait his slippers. He steps into them hastily, hurries to the outer office door, and opens it--to face a customer who is on the verge of giving up and leaving.
I've often tried to talk him into going to the door in his robe, which wouldn't take a tenth as long to slip into. But he insists that that would look sloppy.
"Any sloppier than going with your pants half zipped, and your shirt buttoned into the wrong buttonholes?" I ask. I don't complain or make suggestions too much, though, because I realize how lucky I am that he takes it for granted it is his job to wait on the customers who come during the night.
Mr. Featherbrain probably never had to untangle his tall frame from the bedclothes to wait on nocturnal customers for the first couple of months after he opened his place. The people who were attracted by his little place were very few and far between. One morning, though, Mrs. Featherbrain called me over, and I sat with them in their nicely furnished living room. It was the day after a highly advertised celebration had been held in the desert northeast of Banning, to which movie stars and humbler creatures had flocked to watch the laying of the cornerstone of what was to be Pioneertown, the future setting of the cream of Hollywood's horse opera crop. Every motel in town had been full.
"We wented four cabins last night!" Mrs. Featherbrain told me ecstatically, waving one of her ever-present cigarettes. She is a plump, dark woman with a very mobile face. She smiles, frowns, raises and lowers her eyebrows, and blinks rapidly while she talks. She is probably twenty years younger than Mr. Featherbrain.
"That's wonderful!" I said warmly. And then I realized what she had said. "Four?" I repeated. "Why, you only have three units to rent."