I was twenty four and it was springtime.
The important thing is the ‘kiss’, the one meaningful reward that befell me, the one memory that makes this brief episode worth recording, the one poetic splash of color in a gray world, and the unforgettable beauty that gave it.
First I’ll need to describe the setting of this incident, and the details. My title was night auditor. My post was behind the reception desk of a luxurious eight story hotel. There were two restaurants and two lounges in this complex, one large restaurant/lounge filling the second floor, with fine dining and a huge wrap-around patio overlooking the steep, main street and the Falls, with live music booming out and beckoning in all meandering tourists. Then a quieter one adjoining the lobby, for a family dinner by night or morning breakfast, and finally an equally quiet, dark, cozy lounge at penthouse level, with very expensive drinks, for the more amorous, serious, late-night trysts.
And so there were five hostesses, nicely dressed, Maitre D’s, all of them closing around two a.m and coming to the counting room behind my desk with their tills. There they’d sit at a long table and tally up their cash receipts, place that amount with the tapes and receipts into a large, brown envelope, seal and sign it and drop it into the slot above the vault. They’d then slide their till into its appropriate slot on the same wall, turn their personal key to lock it, and their day was done. They’d collect their coats, smile at me as they went by my counter seat and then out into the night. As the last of them left, I’d dim the lobby lights, resume my chair, tilt back, place my shoes on the desk and enjoy the silence, the solitude and the grand lobby all to myself, free to do whatever in the next four hours, undisturbed.
This part of my job I enjoyed. I was the one man in charge through these eight hours. I held the keys to the V.P.’s office behind me, all the emergency and alarm boxes and even his personal home number, never to be used except in the most dire event, like some out of control fire.
I never asked for this responsibility, but I enjoyed the prestige, from the bell-hops, valets and especially the pretty cashiers.
My first duty was to accommodate all the late night arrivals, rent them rooms, receive payment and hand them their keys. That was easy. My tasks as auditor involved filling in large sheets called hotel and restaurant reconciliations, adding up all the income for the day, the totals from every shift of every venue for the accountants to check over each morning. But because it was still mid-Spring and the hotel half-vacant, I could dispatch this work in a few hours, usually put off to just before dawn, leaving the dead of night all my own.
What bothered me in this position of command, this luxurious setting, was my low pay, minimum wage, and my barren till, which contained one hundred dollars for the purpose of change.
Some rare nights I would collect three or four room rentals in cash, close to three hundred dollars. But that amount was supposed to be deposited each morning, and was the first few nights, until I cleverly adjusted the system. After that my till slowly blossomed, soon holding many hundreds of dollars, complementing my regal status in all other respects, and correcting my weekly salary at my whim. I had the only key to it, so no one else knew, for many weeks.
Of all the pretty, perfumed, well dressed cashiers who paraded by me each night to finish up their tallies, one stood out, the youngest and loveliest of them all. Besides her stunning good looks, which turned all heads wherever she passed, she dressed to the hilt, more carefully and thoughtfully than all the others. This was her first job. She was only nineteen and wanted to impress. And she did.
The only dress requirement for her position as hostess was a tight red vest, her uniform. Whatever she wore in conjunction with that was her own choice, as long as it was elegant, and variety was encouraged to please the patrons.
As we both were new at our jobs, starting the same day, I took this bond as a pretext to engage her in brief conversations when I could, asking her how she liked her work, or if she needed any help in her paperwork and deposits, which she sometimes did. Then I’d lean over her shoulder at the table and help organize her paperwork, double check her tallies and reassure her that all was in order. She was the slowest in this task and usually last to leave.
It was all polite attention, which she reciprocated with sweet looks and ‘thanks’. I didn’t press myself on her. She had a boyfriend. He would pick her up each night, never coming in but parking his car right outside the front doors, as everyone else had left, sitting there, revving the engine, till she came out to him.
She had one outfit that was absolutely striking. It was a frilly, white, long-sleeved blouse over which went the red vest. She complimented that with a mid-length skirt that exactly matched its color. Then stockings and red high-heel shoes. To enhance this elegance even more she’d wear bright red lipstick, with a hint of rouge on her white cheeks, with long black eyelashes and manicured, painted eyebrows to match her lovely dark auburn hair that framed her face and flowed and played in curls a few inches on both sides of her shoulders. She must have spent an hour before work each day at her vanity, with tweezers and brushes and palettes of colors.
I could imagine a table lined with lipsticks and vials, perfumes and nail polishes, standing in glass rows like so many toy soldiers a boy would set up on a floor. Yet such beauty deserved such attention. The final touch to this perfection was a string of tiny, white pearls, not hanging but tight around her slender neck, like a collar.
The first time I saw her in this outfit crossing the lobby towards me as she finished her shift, I was amazed. I had one more fine view of her backside, equally ravishing in its curves, as she passed me on her way out. I dimmed the lights that night more than usual, leaned back and with closed eyes pondered her image for a long while, letting my imagination run wild.
It brought to mind this poem.
My Love in her attire does show her wit,
It does so well become her;
For every season she has dresses fit,
For Winter, Spring and Summer.
No beauty doth she miss
When all her clothes are on:
But Beauty’s self she is
When all her robes are gone.
Anon.
I was about eight weeks into this job when I heard a sad, quiet sobbing coming from the counting room. I’d been busy checking in a guest and all the other cashiers had finished and left. I went back and found her sitting there alone in her lovely, red dress, staring at her receipts and frantically shuffling them around on the table with her pretty hands, trying to lay each one beside the match from her register tape, rolled out right down the middle of the long table, trying to place them in order but evermore in a panic, the tears smearing her make-up, a pitiable sight.
Somehow her till was more than three hundred dollars short of the receipts, well over a week’s pay, and she couldn’t make her deposit, couldn't even come close with all her tips and the spare hundred. She was only nineteen and had an almost trembling fear of losing her first job. I sat down beside her and poured over her receipts and the tape and cash, all the while trying to console her with kind words, but soon enough I realized someone must have pilfered her open drawer when she wasn’t looking, grabbing a handful of larger bills on their way out, leaving some behind in each bay so she wouldn’t notice.
I asked her if anything unusual had happened and she told me that one man, towards the end of shift when almost everyone was gone, had somehow fumbled and dropped his wallet behind her cash wrap and then leaned over it to help her find it as she bent down to pick it up. That was the obvious rip-off.
I told her not to mention this to anyone, as her managers might think her incompetent. But I also told her not to worry, that I could easily fix it and she wouldn’t lose her job.
The perfume, the imploring eyes and face, looking down at the papers then to me as I tried to help, her tears melting her mascara, ever lovelier in her distress, had its full effect and pierced my heart, like a Cupid’s arrow.
When Phoebe formed a wanton smile,
My soul! it reached not here!
Strange that thy peace, though trembler, flies
Before a rising tear.
From midst the drops my love is born
That over those eyelids rove;
Thus issued from a teeming wave
The fabled queen of love.
William Collins.
We counted her till and figured out the exact amount she was short. She seemed embarrassed at the large figure, exactly three hundred and forty dollars. I walked over to my till and collected that sum and put it in her hand. She looked up into my eyes as if a miracle had just happened, but said nothing, a bit shocked, not knowing what to say. But I made her take it and make her deposit.
She gathered her jacket and purse in a hurry and was about to leave, still confused. She must have thought I was management or a relative of the owners. I stood leaning by the doorway, just watching her, proud of my good deed. I even stepped aside so she might pass. And she was about to but suddenly stopped, turned and looked me in the face. Then she pounced on me, threw her arms around my neck, pulled my face to hers, and gave me one tight kiss on the lips, a long one, as if glued to me.
Then she let go and walked off, even more flustered, either wondering who I was or embarrassed over the impromptu kiss and perhaps its impropriety.
I know this unusual and noble deed didn’t go unmentioned among the other cashiers, whispered in their change rooms. I saw it in the smiles I received from them in the following days. The story spread even further, as valets and bellhops whose names I didn’t know started befriending me.
I knew it would soon reach the ears of management and that my days were numbered. But I was ready to leave and two weeks later I quit, to travel back to California once again with a pocket full of money, back to my artist friends and the bohemian life, far away from this miserable, dead-end, degrading job, counting pennies for millionaires.
I left them scratching their heads, wondering how I had the money and the character for such rich generosity. They never did unravel the mystery.
Postscript.
Any job in the hospitality industry that doesn't pay really well, in tips or wages, sucks. You might be given a fancy uniform, but you bow and smile for scraps. You’re a dressed up modern day lackey serving tourists and managed like a slave with a whip, so you retain a bowed humility with a painted smile. I saw this in many of the hotel employees and it made me sick and angry enough to break the rules. I knew I could never continue there long and acted accordingly, almost arrogant with the accountants, impossibly balancing each night, puzzling management, and so popular with my co-workers something was definitely amiss. If I hadn’t precipitously quit I would have been fired within a few weeks. But they never did discover my trick.
It was too perfect a scheme not to try out. It was placed almost complete in my lap without my asking. The small amount I purloined was never even noticed amidst the millions the millionaire owners constantly raked in. And it culminated in a kiss which I shall never forget and was far more luxury to me than anything that any luxury hotel could possibly offer.
It was a spontaneous kiss, as inexplicable and unasked for as was my helping her out of her dilemma that night. It may very well have been the purest kiss, from the deepest and most heartfelt well of emotion that she gave in her whole life, and she gave it to me.
I’m carried away by such chance gestures. They engage all my powers of description, tax my vault of words, empty its treasury so to speak, calling forth all my faculties to depict feelings so complex and subtle and moving that words fail to explain that brief, overpowering gesture, that kiss, with its fleeting hints, perplexing the mind, doubly so because it was unexpected, uncalled for on both sides, the giver and receiver, awkward and beyond the realm of the normal, a spontaneous act we can hardly fathom.
To capture and contemplate it is possibly a steppingstone into some alter universe. I might seem to wax poetic here but I’m not the only one:
Jenny kissed me when we met
Leaping from the chair she sat in.
Time, you thief, who likes to get
Sweets into your list, put that in.
Say I’m weary, say I’m sad,
Say that wealth and health have missed me,
Say I’m growing old, but add,
Jenny kissed me.
Leigh Hunt.
