The Morning List, Part Two
The Flowers
The blue envelope arrived at nine.
Maron had already put a clean page into the typewriter. Jonas was standing at the window with yesterday’s photograph of the Hotel Rio held against the glass, as though daylight might reveal something the studio lamps had withheld.
Leda entered carrying coffee and a book.
Jonas looked at the book.
“No.”
“I haven’t proposed anything.”
“You brought Virginia Woolf into a story meeting.”
“She came voluntarily.”
Maron leaned sideways to read the cover.
“Are we making an English picture now?”
“We’re making a Celia Vale picture.”
“Celia doesn’t think in semicolons.”
“No one thinks in semicolons,” Leda said. “They’re added later.”
She placed the book beside the blue envelope.
On the board remained yesterday’s work:
A VEHICLE FOR CELIA VALE
SHE RETURNS TO A HOTEL SHE HAS NEVER VISITED.
SHE HAS ALWAYS OWNED IT.
Beneath that, in smaller writing:
THE WRONG PEOPLE ARE ALLOWED.
And beside it:
NEVER TRUST A HOTEL THAT PLACES THE PIANO BESIDE THE FIRE EXIT.
Maron pointed at Woolf.
“What are you taking?”
“The day.”
“We already have a day.”
“We have an afternoon.”
“We can extend it.”
Jonas turned from the window.
“Taking what day?”
“One ordinary day in which a woman prepares to receive people while everything she has refused to think about insists on accompanying her.”
Maron looked at the board.
“That sounds expensive.”
“It requires flowers.”
“Flowers are cheap.”
“Not the way Celia buys them.”
Jonas smiled.
“She’ll buy the flowers herself.”
Nobody spoke.
Then Maron said, “Too obvious.”
“Yes,” Leda said.
“Then why did you say it?”
“To get it out of the way.”
Jonas put the photograph down.
“She orders the flowers.”
“Too passive.”
“She refuses flowers.”
“Too symbolic.”
“She moves them.”
Leda looked at him.
“What?”
“They’re already in the lobby. Huge arrangement. Wrong place. She enters, looks at it, and moves one vase.”
“One vase?” Maron asked.
“One stem,” Jonas said.
“That’s worse.”
“No,” Leda said. “Keep it.”
Maron began typing.
INT. HOTEL RIO — LOBBY — AFTERNOON
The revolving door moves once.
CELIA VALE enters carrying no luggage.
The CLERK looks up.
CLERK
Welcome back.
CELIA
I’ve never been here.
CLERK
Your room is ready.
He stopped.
“The flowers?”
“On the desk,” Jonas said.
“No. In the center of the lobby.”
“Blocking the entrance?”
“Not blocking. Instructing.”
Maron looked at him.
“Flowers instruct?”
“Most hotel flowers do.”
Leda walked toward the board.
“Too much red.”
“In the arrangement?”
“In the sentence.”
“There is no sentence.”
“Good. Celia crosses the lobby. She removes one red flower and carries it with her.”
“Why?”
“She doesn’t know yet.”
“Does the audience?”
“No.”
“Does the flower return?”
“If it wants to.”
Maron did not type.
Jonas opened the blue envelope.
“Morning statements.”
Leda sat.
He read the first:
“A party is a room in which everyone agrees to be seen incorrectly.”
Maron raised his hand.
“Keep.”
“Too finished,” Leda said.
“It’s on the list.”
“The list is not the picture.”
Jonas shortened it with a pencil.
“Everyone agrees to be seen.”
Leda considered it.
“Who says that?”
“The woman who has not been invited,” Maron said.
“Better.”
Jonas continued.
“The city knows what happened, but it has no one mouth with which to say it.”
Maron looked toward Woolf’s book.
“That one came with her.”
“Probably,” Leda said.
“Keep?”
“No. Use it.”
“How?”
“Let the city know.”
Maron sighed.
“You understand we only have one camera.”
“Then point it at more than one person.”
Jonas read the next statement:
“She had reached the age at which every room contained someone she had once intended to become.”
This time no one spoke immediately.
Maron touched the typewriter keys but did not press them.
“Celia could say that.”
“She would never say it,” Leda said.
“Then how do we show it?”
“The mirrors.”
“Too obvious.”
“The guests.”
“Too many.”
“The hotel rooms,” Jonas said.
Leda turned.
“What about them?”
“Each room is prepared for someone. Celia walks past open doors. In one, a young woman is fastening a dress. In another, an old man is asleep before the party. In another, a couple is arguing quietly. She sees pieces of lives she might have entered.”
“Does she know them?”
“No.”
“Then why do they matter?”
“They don’t.”
Leda smiled faintly.
“Keep that.”
Maron removed the page from the typewriter.
“We need structure.”
“We have one day,” Leda said.
“We have an afternoon.”
“Then start in the morning.”
“At the hotel?”
“No.”
“Where?”
Leda looked at the photograph.
“On the street outside.”
Jonas said, “She sees the hotel and keeps walking.”
“Why?”
“Because she isn’t ready.”
“Celia Vale does not fail to enter buildings.”
“She isn’t failing. She is buying time.”
Maron returned the page to the machine.
“Doing what?”
Leda touched the Woolf book.
“Buying flowers.”
Jonas laughed.
“You said it was too obvious.”
“It was. Now we’ve earned it.”
⸻
At ten twelve in the morning, Celia Vale stood across the avenue from the Hotel Rio and pretended to examine gloves in a shop window.
The hotel’s reflection appeared behind her.
Long rows of identical windows. Dark horizontal bands. A nearly blank side wall. Its name above the roof, large enough to be read from several blocks away.
RIO.
She had seen photographs.
She had signed documents.
For nineteen years, statements had arrived each quarter showing occupancy, maintenance, wages, linen losses, broken glasses, food costs, and the revenue from rooms she could picture only as numbered rectangles.
She had never entered.
A man beside her in the shop window adjusted his hat. In the reflection he appeared to be standing inside the hotel, six floors above the street.
Celia turned away.
The flower shop was two blocks east.
She had not intended to go there. The hotel had staff for flowers. There would already be flowers in the lobby, selected by someone who knew what flowers were supposed to say when a famous woman entered a building she owned.
Still, she went.
The florist recognized her and tried not to.
That was one of the courtesies Celia valued.
“I need something for a hotel,” she said.
“What sort of hotel?”
“One that has been expecting me too long.”
The florist looked toward the buckets.
“Lilies?”
“No.”
“Roses?”
“No.”
“What do you like?”
Celia looked around.
“That hasn’t helped so far.”
The florist waited.
On the pavement outside, a delivery boy stopped his bicycle to allow an elderly woman to cross. A bus passed. Somewhere nearby, a dog barked from an upper window.
The city continued without arranging itself for her entrance.
Celia pointed to a bucket of plain white flowers whose name she did not know.
“Those.”
“How many?”
“One.”
The florist assumed she was joking.
Celia did not correct her.
⸻
Maron stopped reading.
“One flower?”
Jonas said, “It’s too literary.”
“It’s cheap,” Leda said. “The studio will approve.”
“What does she do with it?”
“She carries it into the hotel.”
“We already had her remove a red flower.”
“Now she brings a white one.”
“Why?”
“Because the picture changed.”
Maron looked at the page.
“Is the red arrangement still there?”
“Yes.”
“So she brings in the wrong flower and removes the right one?”
“Who said which is right?”
“The hotel.”
“The hotel doesn’t speak.”
Jonas glanced toward the line pinned beside the photograph:
SOMETIMES A ROOM REMEMBERS THE PERSON WHO WAS EXPECTED.
“Not yet,” he said.
Leda opened the morning list.
“What else?”
Maron read over her shoulder.
“The dead are sometimes admitted to parties because no one remembered to remove them from the guest list.”
Jonas laughed once, then stopped.
“Too dark?”
“For Celia?” Maron asked.
“For the first reel.”
Leda read it again.
“Don’t use the dead person.”
“Then what do we use?”
“The news.”
“What news?”
“That someone has died.”
“Who?”
“We don’t know him.”
“Then why do we care?”
“We don’t.”
Maron groaned.
“You are building an entire picture out of people who don’t matter.”
“They matter to themselves.”
“That is difficult to photograph.”
“Then give one of them a window.”
Jonas moved to the board.
“A man in a room across from the hotel.”
“Guest?”
“No.”
“Employee?”
“No.”
“Then why is he in the picture?”
“He sees Celia enter.”
“Everyone sees Celia enter.”
“He sees something else.”
“What?”
Jonas looked at the Hotel Rio photograph, at the tiny windows repeated across its façade.
“A green light.”
Leda said nothing.
Maron looked from one to the other.
“Are we sampling another picture now?”
“Maybe,” Jonas said.
“What does the green light mean?”
“Nothing yet.”
“Does the man die?”
“No.”
“Then why did we read the line about death?”
“Because it opened the window.”
Maron leaned back.
“That is not how scripts work.”
“It may be how mornings work,” Leda said.
⸻
By noon, the hotel lobby was crowded with arrangements.
Roses beside the elevators. Lilies near the desk. Ferns beneath the staircase. A wide bowl of red flowers stood in the center of the marble floor, exactly where an arriving guest would have to walk around it.
The assistant manager had approved everything.
The general manager had approved the assistant manager’s approvals.
The publicity office had sent instructions for Celia Vale’s arrival.
The clerk had been told what to say.
The doorman had been told when to open the door.
A photographer waited near a column with his camera concealed beneath a folded newspaper.
At twelve fourteen, Celia entered carrying one white flower.
The revolving door completed a turn after she stepped away from it.
The clerk looked up.
“Welcome back.”
“I’ve never been here.”
“Your room is ready.”
She looked at the red arrangement in the center of the lobby.
Everyone waited.
Celia crossed to it. She studied the flowers as if one of them had made an accusation.
Then she placed the white flower among the red ones.
She did not remove anything.
The photographer took the picture too early.
The flash lit the lobby before Celia had finished arranging the stem.
For a moment, every surface became visible at once: the marble, the brass desk bell, the dust above the chandelier, the clerk’s hand gripping the registration book, the doorman still holding the door open for no one.
Then the light withdrew.
The lobby returned to itself.
Celia looked toward the hidden photographer.
“Was that the opening?” she asked.
No one knew whether she meant the hotel, the party, or the picture.
The clerk answered because he had been given the next line.
“Your room is ready.”
Celia looked at him.
This time, she smiled.
“Then show me what it remembers.”
WE&P by: EZorrillaMc&Co.
Travel in Life 