An Oriental Romance

In the course of my life, for reasons personal and professional, I have spent more nights in hotel rooms than in my own home. I’m usually a guest who’s easy to please; if a room has a reading lamp and plenty of ash trays, I’m satisfied. But as Trollope said, “It is because we put up with bad things that hotel-keepers continue to give them to us.” Last week I took a business trip to Bangkok, a city that I loathe, and to ease the pain I decided to treat myself with a night at a place where, according to legend, bad things just do not happen: The famed Oriental hotel.

I came from the airport via the river, and as I stepped onto the hotel’s pier I was greeted by a gorgeous woman with a smile that could turn aside a wildebeast stampede. She offered me a flower garland that was more elaborate than my mother’s wedding dress and escorted me through the gardens and up to my room. I had no first impression of the hotel because I could not take my eyes off of The Greeting Girl. When she pushed the button in the elevator it was with the flourish that Bernstein used to launch the philharmonic on Beethoven’s Ninth. She introduced me to the light switches in my room in a voice that seemed to be confiding the secrets of eternal life. When she left me I didn’t offer her a tip, because we were already so intimate that if she’d given me just one more of those smiles I would have sold my wife and children into slavery to have her. And I think she probably earns more in a year than I do, anyway.

After she left me I looked around the room like a man just awakened from a dream, only to find himself in another. There was a staircase right off the set of “Gone With The Wind”, and more marble in the floor than in half of Europe’s cathedrals. I was reminded of Kipling’s line, “More-than-oriental-splendour.” Before I had removed my shoes the beautifully packaged shower cap, toothbrush, moisturizer, shampoo, bath foam, detergent, sewing kit and cotton buds were in my bag. My wife Mem hates it if I come home from Bangkok without presents.

The whole point of staying in the Oriental was to avoid actually entering the city of Bangkok, and for the next twenty-four hours I did not once feel un-conditioned air on my face. Every time I picked up the phone to order a newspaper or a wake-up call, the operators answered with “Yes, Mr. Rosse?”. And they pronounced my name correctly, too, leaving the “e” silent, even on the graveyard shift. When the bellboy brought the newspaper, he called me Mr. Rosse, when the maid came to turn down the bed, she called me Mr. Rosse. I lived for years at 4700 Broadway and the day I moved out the building super was still calling me “Hey you, 3-D!”

Before my meeting I called room service to ask for some tea, and two minutes later called the consierge to ask for paper clips.
“Would you like a stapler, Mr. Rosse?” I was asked.
“No, just paper clips.”
“Very good, Mr. Rosse. How many would you like? Will twenty be enough?”
“No, just two. Thanks.”
“Very good, Mr. Rosse. Will there be anything esle?”
“Uh, could you wash my car?”
Without missing a beat he answered “Where is it parked, Sir?”

Ten minutes later the tea arrived, and on the same tray, a tiny ceramic cup with two shiny new paper clips in it. I was so pleased that I called the concierge back and asked for some writing paper and pencils. After a quarter of an hour with no paper coming I was about to call down and complain, when there was a discreet knock on the door and a bellman appeared. “Your paper, Mr. Rosse,” said another person I’d never met in my life.

He handed me a thick cardboard envelope, inside of which I found twenty sheets of high-quality bond, with The Oriental’s logo at the top and my name, embossed in gold, on the bottom. And my surname was even spelled correctly, with the silent “e” on the end. What the New York State Department of Motor Vehicles could not do correctly in a decade the Oriental managed in fifteen minutes.

I took my meeting in the Oriental’s flagship restaurant: Lord Jim’s. We had Japanese food made by Japanese chefs and listened to American jazz played by a black American pianist. Outside the big windows it was raining heavily, and in the pitch-darkness the lights of passing rice barges made the river look like the Milky Way. Inside the waiters were sending orders to the kitchen via wafer-thin computer consols set into over-designed Belle Epoch occasional tables. It was like eating on the bridge of the Starship Enterprise.

After my meeting I read some notes in the bar, and the girl who brought me my drink gave me a warmer smile than my wife gives me on our anniversary. I finally wandered back up to my room, and at midnight the girl buffing the lobby floor was more beautiful than the model on the cover of this month’s Vogue. I had a weird feeling that if I made eye contact she would greet me by name.

In the morning I gave the cashier my credit card and didn’t look at the bill. As I had my breakfast on the verandah, an absolutely stunning Japanese tourist sat at a table between me and the old river, dressed in sandals and a slinky black shift and precious little else. She noticed me notice her, and spent the next half hour posing and preening for me. The Oriental thinks of everything. 

© Steve Rosse. All rights reserved by the author.

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