Layover - Hardcover

Zeidner, Lisa

 
9780375502866: Layover
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0375502866 ISBN 13: 9780375502866
Verlag: Random House Inc, 1999

Inhaltsangabe

Tired of coping with an unfaithful husband, the death of a young child, and fertility problems, Claire decides to abandon her previous life to confront love, loss, and the mysteries of life on the road. 15,000 first printing.

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Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Lisa Zeidner is the author of three novels, most recently Limited Partnerships, and two poetry collections, one of which won the Brittingham Prize. Her stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in many publications, including GQ and The New York Times. She is a professor at Rutgers University and lives in Haddonfield, New Jersey, with her husband and son.

Lisa Zeidner is a professor at Rutgers University.

Aus dem Klappentext

your idea of a heroine, and meet Claire Newbold. Despite hardship--a young child's death, infertility, an unfaithful husband--wry, ferocious Claire has been trying to soldier on. But then she simply checks out of job and home to confront love and loss on the road. During the leave of absence she takes from her usual life, her behavior ranges from the illicit to--she fears--the deranged. She develops a scam for staying in hotel rooms without paying. She seduces a teenage boy at a hotel swimming pool. Armed with a dangerous amount of medical lore (her husband is a surgeon), she pursues a diagnosis that might explain everything.

Claire even comes to believe that she is clairvoyant--able to "read" the souls of people she encounters on her travels. And eventually she begins to see into her own soul. Some might call her sexual exploits "casual"; to Claire they are anything but. As she struggles to repair her marriage and her life, she surprises herse

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        I packed for homelessness the way I would pack for a week
        in Europe--wrinkle-free, in a carry-on. Traveling light is
        easy in summer. Everything I owned that year seemed to be beige or gray, the palette of Roman tombstones, and airy enough to dry in a breeze, or by fan in a windowless hotel bathroom. The homeless people in cities pushing shopping carts, with their splayfooted, third-trimester walks: I saw no need to be manacled to my past, weighed down by it, when I had so little left. I floated away with no regrets. By then I was a ghost in my own life anyway.

I had no plan. The first time, I simply missed a flight. I'd been traveling for business, and had taken to packing a bathing suit for hotel pools in Scranton, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia. On weekdays, midmorning, the dollhouse-sized pools were always empty, like sets from moody foreign films. No flirting, no kids. I tried to do enough laps to lose count.
People kept telling me to take advantage of the gyms. Even the hotel clerks praised the equipment, always confidential and leering, as if sharing the address of the local S and M joint. I knew exactly the kind of men I could find bench-pressing there, but I didn't want to socialize with them or with anyone else. I just wanted the freedom not to think. The chlorine felt soothingly medicinal. And one day I swam too long, missed a plane.
Only when I was back in my room, in the shower, did I wonder about the time, but I didn't rush. Even when I saw that it was too late to get to the airport, I didn't panic. My trajectory was infinitely adjustable.
This is not the attitude I had been encouraged to cultivate in sales. But for some time I had been silently recalibrating my attitude toward my job. My "career" was old enough, rooted enough, to be allowed to grow or not on its own, as my child would have done if my child hadn't died. I was not less involved with work because my child died, though that's what everyone thought--I felt their edgy tolerance, their benevolence and the predictable backlash from their benevolence, their confidence that they were cutting me some slack even when I was performing perfectly well.
So now I told no one who didn't already know. There wasn't anything to say, unless I wanted to discuss theology with strangers in airport lounges, meditate on whether one could find meaning in the statistics of highway fatalities, and I wanted to do this so little that when forced to discuss family status, I lied: I had a grown son in college, and was suffering from a mild case of empty-nest syndrome.
He was at Brown. He didn't know his major yet. If pressed, I would add that he played tennis. If I'd had children at the old-fashioned time, right out of college myself, my son would have been college-aged.
Nothing was repressed. My husband, Kenneth, and I had clocked in the requisite hours in therapy, singly and collectively, cupping the coal of grief in burned hands, fanning our grief as it turned to ash. The therapist was a tall man with very bad vision. I could barely see his eyes through his glasses, and their magnified, amniotic softness was oddly comforting. I thought of him, sometimes, while swimming. I could still summon forth his number on my laptop, and had been told I could call him whenever I needed to talk.
But at the time, I felt fine. I called the airline, changed the flight. Still numbly tingling from swim and shower, I lay down, fell asleep.
In retrospect, I understand that my bodily clock must have already been off, the battery low or spring overwound. Since there was no reason to hurry back, to snatch a child from day care, I'd revised how I set up appointments--eliminated some return trips so I could go straight from city to city, make my days less crammed. Avoid airport rushes. Swim in the morning and nap until checkout time, or not even sleep but just drift, waiting to be hungry enough for lunch.
That day, however, I slept past checkout. The maid came in her white uniform, like a nurse. Waking, I took the hotel room for a hospital room, cringed from her tray full of hypodermics and ministrations.
I knew Ignatia from three years of business in that city, that hotel. She knew about my son. We'd actually had a scene--this was earlier, when I would still confess, because I still cried unexpectedly--when I told her about the accident and she held me, smelling of gardenia and ammonia. Then pulled out a snapshot of her grandchildren, identifying each by name and age, which I thought was interesting. Most people will try so hard not to mention their own families, and you can feel their pride to be so restrained in the face of your bad luck, but she seemed to feel it would help me to witness her abundance. "What was boy's name?" she asked. I told her. She repeated it, smiled, and never mentioned him to me again. But she was always cheerful.
I must have looked stricken. "Oh Miss, is okay," she assured me. "Sleepy," I apologized, and she said, "Oh, yes. Work hard," meaning I did, she did, or both. Then she backed herself and her cart out of the room, nodding.
Her wordless concern felt almost psychic, as if she knew about Ken, forgave him for his perfectly understandable little affair as I did, but realized that I needed some extra solicitude.
She must not have alerted the desk that I was still there. Nor did I. When I reached the lobby early that evening, the clerks were busy. I slipped my electronic key card into my purse and left. There was no thought of avoiding the charge for the extra day. But I knew instantly that I wouldn't be charged.
I was a hard-core wage earner of the type hotel ads target. My husband was a cardiothoracic surgeon. My wallet was a garden of credit cards budding possibility, the holographic birds' wings glinting as if poised for flight. No one would ever suspect me of fraud, though I knew enough about the rhythms of that hotel, the staffs' frenzies and downtimes, the secret pockets, to take advantage.

        Over the next week I found myself returning to this idea as
        I made my appointments and did my rounds, greeting
        housekeepers and clerks cordially as I had for the years I'd covered this territory selling medical equipment. Across a swath of country, defined as a brewing storm on a weather map, hotel clerks were friendly enough to say, "Ken called to see if you'd gotten in. Said it was urgent." And I could retort, "No pot roast tonight," though Ken had always been the cook in our family; he liked dishes where he got to wantonly chop and toss, as antidote to the precision of surgery. I could wave to the plainclothes detective in the lobby who was reading, just to be inconspicuous, the latest issue of Security Management, with revealing articles on methods for controlling "access-related incidents" that result in "guest property loss."
Dollars and frequent-flier miles accrued. I was on the up-and-up, a true friend to "the lodging industry." But more and more often, I seemed to be neglecting to return my card to the desk, until I'd developed quite a collection--pathetic, like people who save restaurant matchbooks.
Meanwhile, I'd begun to sleep later and later, until I was doing appointments in the morning and early afternoon, taking a siesta, and swimming in hotel pools at ten, eleven at night. Then midnight. (The posted signs prohibited this, but at that hour there were no pool police.) Calling room service at 2:00 am, checking my voice mail at dusk.
Ken: "Where are you?" Ken: "I called Pittsburgh, just for fun." Flirtatious...

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Verlag
Random House Inc
Erscheinungsdatum
1999
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0375502866
ISBN 13 
9780375502866
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
267
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Purmerul LTD
https://strengholt.nl/en/

22 Liuleburgaz Str., floor 4, app. 9
Plovdiv
Bulgarien

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