An Alphabet of Inversion
My favorite artist works in this hotel, and not at the art colony in the outskirts of this city where Lenny Dachshund has set up shop.
No, my favorite artist – Lisa – lives near the very hotel where I have made my home, and she has decided to work exclusively in oil and glass.
I have never truly bought that TV show cliché that domestics dislike doing windows.
I have done a few windows myself and found that the work can be almost like a kind of yoga.
Windows in a renovated Holiday Inn do not need to be done everyday. I asked the desk, after my third night here, and was assured that I was just a lucky man.
After two weeks of watching Lisa get to her task with an eager familiarity I started to realize that this window work was something that she wanted, or needed, to do.
Lisa took her time cleaning. Granted, I have no idea how much time windexing glass and going into corners with a little towel should take, but forty-five minutes seemed a bit much. A rerun of Bewitched would end and another would start and then she was done and that is how I knew how much time Lisa spent on the glass.
Lisa knows I keep the curtains closed. I told her this when she first knocked on my door to ask if I needed any towels. I needed everything: coffee, toilet paper, extra plastic cups if she had them, a shower cap. And, of course, she had all that and brought it all in for me, and then after she made the bed, she walked towards the curtains and opened them for me.
"Oh, Ms. I prefer them closed," I said.
Which was true, my eyes are very sensitive to light and I can, in effect, see very well in the dark. I don't read by candlelight unless I am in a place with no electricity and need the warmth.
My own art is so black-on-black that I have been accused of trying to pull off one of those single color canvas odes to negative capability. Hey, it sells. Under that guise, I often allow my pieces to be purchased. But if people took the time to actually study the texture of my art they would know that I was in fact painting objects in my hotel room: the ashtray, the ice bucket, the remote control and sometimes even the TV face of whoever is trying to sell me insurance in between episodes of Sanford and Son.
I regret that in the day I almost always only see shape. Lisa has a slight one. Walking in my room I noticed she is perhaps 5'4"; her hair in a bob, the outline of her left hand as she tucks in the bed sheets reveals no wedding ring. From her voice I can tell she has never smoked and that she sings when she is alone, to the point of perfecting a kind of soubrette soprano.
For nine weeks I never saw Lisa's face. I tend not to look people directly in the eyes, as a courtesy.
Whenever Lisa is done with the windows she does a very strange thing. She seems to press her face against the glass as if she is looking for a flaw in her work. Then she closes the curtains for me and we say our until tomorrows.
The rest of my day will be me painting until perhaps 1 p.m. Then deciding which pair of sunglasses to wear when I go to the laundry room to sit by the comforting noise of washing machines and dryers going, and sometimes I will even talk to people waiting for their socks and sweaters to come out of the delicate cycle.
I make an obligatory stroll to the café across from this Holiday Inn, where prints of Lenny Dachshund's "Canned Soda" series go for forty-five bucks a pop.
There is a movie house that is dead in the day, and I watch whatever is showing at 3 p.m. or close my eyes at the screen if I dislike the visuals and just hear the show.
These habits become a full day if you let them.
Last night as I walked back to the hotel I saw Lisa leaving for home and actually (and quite accidentally) saw her face. My maid looked to me like Pola Negri, the somber-seductive Polish actress and singer who was never a triple threat in the conventional sense, but whose work in Three Sinners inspired eleven of my earliest watercolors.
I know I blushed upon seeing Lisa's face. I was grateful for the dark. I nodded at her beauty and blushed again when she smiled. I felt very lucky to have my Ray-Bans on despite it being 9 p.m.
Once in the hotel I checked my email at the workstation. I was happy to see that one of my "Black Clock"-knockoffs had sold, and at a gallery that only took forty percent of the cut no less.
It was a good day and was about to become a grand one.
Once in my room, I took a bottle of whatever beer my last patron left in the mini-fridge and looked at the closed curtain.
The air conditioner came on like a clap of thunder that settled into a kind of throat singing. I took off my sunglasses and approached the red and gray drapes and, holding my breath, parted them.
What I saw on the glass looked, at first, like a kind of moth: kaleidoscopic and symmetrical to the point of jest.
I then noticed the outline of what seemed like hands making shadow puppet bird wings, ascending into a W married to an M, creating a kind of liminal horizon point, existing between some alphabet of inversion.
A quick scan around the corners of the glass told me that every inch of this window was clean save this square where I was watching a beautiful bird hunt for itself, dive into itself, indulging in some aviary appetite for its own reflection, for there was nothing else this bird could eat, and preying upon itself had become its sole satiation.
By pressing one side of her gorgeous face against the glass one day, and the other the next, Lisa was involved in a secret and very selfless graffiti.
I took a sip from the fizzy intoxicant, and noticed my eyes reflected over the self-devouring bird, and I knew I would stay in this hotel room until the artist's work was complete.
Author Bio
Roberto Ontiveros is a fiction writer, artist, and journalist. Some of his work has appeared in the Threepenny Review, the Santa Monica Review, the Baffler, and the Believer. His debut collection, The Fight for Space, was published by Stephen F. Austin State University Press, and his second book, Assisted Living, was published by Corona/Samizdat Press.