"Because hotels aren't cheap anywhere in New York City except exceptional ones"
"Exceptional? I was there, man — one glorious night. Okay, marginally better than back packer guest houses in Bangkok and Jakarta with bare bunk mattresses and table fans without any tables in something less than closets. This one's more of a spacious closet —American style for beggars and Bolsheviks." She knew that her bantering had some snobbishness in it as if she had never lived in a tiny little room with a crock-pot on the floor in Tijuana. She noted how perception was ensconced in one's environment and lifestyle and that an ensconced thing became the thing it was ensconced in. Even now, naked like she was, ostentatious diamond earrings bounced from her earlobes—an extreme pendulum shift from the days of painting caricatures for extra pesos in the pure dirt colonias and the man made waste of downtown "centro" Tijuana (TJ).
"I've offered to give you — lend you, however you care to think of it — any money you need for expenses in the Big Apple."
"Thanks but I really didn't mind that room we stayed in last time."
"Okay," she sighed and threw up her hands. "But I can't see how that is possible."
"A little possible — like the sign in the bathroom. Remember? It said, 'Dear guests, detergent harms the environment by going down the drain and ultimately killing the sea life of our oceans. Use fewer towels.' The message is warm like being with a beautiful woman." His mouth dived into her neck like a toothless vampire.
"God, I have married an imbecile," said Gabriele. She giggled in the sexual giddiness of a woman when intimate with a man; and yet thinking that the body was merely the crucible of feelings, and that thoughts, a refined and distancing appraisal of reality, were nonetheless feelings in origin, and that this was all there was.
"None of that baloney would work with me. I would only scoff at it — capitalists caring about the fishies of the sea. Give me a break! Give me brutal honesty anytime rather than tactics like this. If a business is honest, I might continue my patronage regardless of the type of service they provide or, in this case, the type of rat hole it is—honesty being in such short supply in the world that when someone gives it to me—even in rude doses—I am grateful for it. They would just need to say, "You wasteful fucks, we are niggardly corporate bastards eager to hoard any red cent we can get our hands on. Please note that we have a one shower a day policy here. Extra showers will incur extra charges should we see dripping from the shower nozzle. That being said, you will see that there are fewer towels on the rack. Don't make phone calls to the front desk demanding more towels and do not bribe cleaning ladies or make any sexual advances toward them. If you slyly take an extra shower at 2 a.m. or such ungodly times you will have to dry your wet butts by hanging them out the window.' Now if they conveyed this maybe—"
They heard two shells of petrous, ice-glazed snow simultaneously strike into a lower part of the faade of the house unlike a one-time thud of a bird or the distinct sounds of thawing ice when falling from the roof and gutter. The man with the unmemorable name got up, drew the curtain, and opened the window. Then he, the nude, dangled there staring at his stepson who sat on a limb in a tree that was a hundred yards from the house. The boy was holding a brassiere as his slingshot.
As more of a recurrent feeling rather than a philosophic framework, which he had constructed for himself on that silent car ride from Sharon's home to his own, he believed that subtle inconclusive looks could help him extort that which he knew could never be gained in compensation, and that by it being something that could never be compensated and extorting it all the same, he had found the means to achieve power. Without really thinking so much as feeling it, for the past two weeks there was this notion that subtle looks without hostile words would make the hated propitiate to him with expensive gifts or at least a willingness to please him whereas to hate a person with the more conclusive medium of words would make the anathema hate him, and hate was a weapon that he did not care to hand over to his enemies. He cared to keep it in his domain.