In Praise of Messy Lives by Katie Roiphe Read Free Book Online Page A

seller for those who are sold to.
4
    During our eleven and a half hours on the boat, I conceived a desire to stay at the Royal Hotel in Phnom Penh. The Royal is more expensive than any of the hotels that we encountered on the trip, and we had encountered expensive hotels. In a city renowned for its lawlessness, a city where guidebooks warn that armed theft happens regularly—rumors abound that it may be the local policedoing the robberies—a city where the streets are still un-walkable at night, the rates are nothing short of astonishing. But this, of course, is part of the point. I picture a lobby with soaring ceilings, sweeping staircases, milk-white columns and marble floors; rooms with mahogany four-poster beds, burnished Buddha heads with tight gold curls, plates of croissants, fluffy bathrobes, and slippers with little insignia on them. I am feeling unsafe.
    Even under normal circumstances, I find grand old colonial hotels infinitely comforting: the rattan chairs, the potted palms, the ceiling fans, the general ambience of gin and tonics about to arrive with a slice of lime. These hotels tend to overdo themselves, like movie sets, but the overdoing itself is what makes them comforting. The bars have names like Elephant Bar. The gift shops have glass cases, where rings and necklaces nestle in velvet cushions. The doors are manned by turbaned doormen. Outside a man prods you with his stump and smiles; the air smells of incense and rotting fruit; the sound of motorcycles pierces the night like gunfire. But the bombardment of the street is somehow framed and miniaturized by a hotel like this; it is put in perspective; it is the culture that you have flown all this way to observe, manageable as a postcard.
    “Let’s stay at the Royal Hotel,” I say when we slip into the taxi. I say this knowing that my husband prefers another sort of hotel. His taste runs toward the ramshackle, the family-run. He prefers inns like the tiny three-hundred-year-old house in Hoi An where we rented a room with intricately carved mahogany walls and ceilings, and a red velvet bed draped in frothy mosquito netting. He finds the theatrical colonialism of places like the Royal off-putting, and, of course, he’s right to, but I am undeterredin my desire for the wrong sort of hotel. I am thinking about a room without lizards climbing the wall.
    “The Royal Hotel?” He raises his eyebrows. “Expensive taste for a housewife.”
    I look out the window. I am filled with rage. I am coated in a layer of dirt from the boat. My luggage is coated in a layer of dirt from the boat. Could I have misheard? Is he actually saying that I can’t choose our hotel because I am a housewife? It is true that I have spent the last year musing on my next book, reading and plotting and taking notes, and he has largely been supporting me. I hadn’t thought of it so starkly, but when it comes down to it he is paying for the trip. The money for the hotel room is his, I realize; he should decide where we stay. I am suddenly overwhelmed by my own helplessness. How have I allowed myself to slip into this maddening, 1950s-style dependence? Why hadn’t I noticed it before? A line from
The Quiet American
comes to mind: “The hurt is in the act of possession: we are too small in mind and body to possess another person without pride, or to be possessed without humiliation.”
    The car weaves through throngs of motorcycles, some of which are piled high with entire families, and stops at a red light. Outside the city menaces. The dusty, saffron-colored buildings have crumbling walls and peeling wooden shutters and wrought-iron terraces spilling over with bougainvillea. Everything looks charming and decrepit and chipped. It looks like Paris, if Paris had sunk to the bottom of the sea for decades.
    “What’s wrong?” my husband asks.
    I look out the window.
    “We can stay there if you want. I was just kidding.”
    In fact, he was only referring to my filling in the occupation