1. Hotel Rosarito — Part 1
I am serializing my collection Stories from The Last Basin currently available on Amazon. The stories are best read in the order of Table Contents collected here for easy access:
Hotel Rosarito
by John Anthony, 2021
Part 1
“I was simply suggesting that as we are in a foreign country, we might try acting a bit foreign,” Josephine Sidwell said as the three Americans crossed the lobby of the Hotel Rosarito. “For fun!” she added as if that was all the explanation ever needed. Henry Constantino, baptized Enrico, a name lost when he entered grammar school, looked at his wife Annmarie for direction, but noted she remained in the mood she had maintained throughout the long and hot drive from Los Angeles to Rosarito Beach located near the town of Ensenada, Mexico. Lacking the desired guidance, he somewhat bravely responded.
“We are acting, and are actually foreign, having crossed the international border,” he said, “Are you suggesting we speak Spanish? I suppose that would make us less foreign.” But Jo, the name she preferred, and who wore her hair in a boyish bob which served only to highlight the femininity and beauty of her face was not to be deterred.
“Absolutely not!” she said with the heartbreaking smile she used when logic needed breaking. “That’s simply gauche! I was thinking more along the lines of cheering up Annmarie with local color. A tequila cocktail, just the two of us perhaps?” Another rhetorical trick she used to force Annmarie out of her silence, for Annmarie considered Jo to be her friend, her confidant, and not someone she had intended to share with Hank, which was her pet name for Henry. An invitation to abandon Henry in preference to Jo was always tempting.
“My dear,” Annmarie said in response to Jo, “I simply need a short rest in my room. That will lift my mood.” Henry knew the true problem. He had used the GI Bill to successfully hold off marrying Annmarie until after he had finished college in ’49, just five years past. Now he had come to know her intimate quirks. Earlier in their journey, when they had stopped for gas, both he and Jo had used the available facilities, but Annmarie had insisted she had no need. Of course she had a need, Henry thought with some resentment. Biology was destiny. It was a stupid reason to spoil the fun. He wished she could be as uninhibited as Jo.
Jo was, as Henry and Annmarie were, from New England and they had grown up not far apart, at least that was how Henry felt. During the war he had traveled halfway around the world and back, so he knew what distance really meant. He has also learned there were other measures of distance to be taken into account and was uncomfortable where this friendship with Jo was leading. Jo came from a Boston family with roots grown deep before the Revolutionary War. In contrast, Annmarie’s father was a small-town grocer. Jo had spent summers at their family’s compound on the Maine coast. Annmarie had spent summers helping her parents at the family store. Jo had gone to prep school and graduated from Vassar. Annmarie had taken a few classes at a local college while waiting for Henry to graduate from the state university but had not been inspired to finish.
“Sure, Sweetheart,” Jo said looking directly into Annmarie’s eyes. “A little siesta before cocktail hour is all you need.” Henry stepped up to the front desk.
“Bienvenidos, Señor,” the smartly dressed and pretty young woman behind the desk said while the bellhop hovered behind them with the luggage, “Soy Sofía. ¿Cómo puedo ayudarte?”
“Hello,” Henry said hopefully. “Reservations for Constantino?”
“Señor Constantino?” she asked.
“Yes, that’s me . . . Th . . . that’s I . . . I am he.” The young woman smiled at him, and she did this trick where her darkest brown eyes smiled at him as well, making Henry uncomfortable and he looked down at his shoes, noticing they were dusty from the parking lot. Doing her job, she looked down simultaneously with Henry. He took off his glasses and absentmindedly started cleaning them with his handkerchief.
“Yes, sir,” she said, scanning the reservations book. “Yes. Here you are. Two rooms for one night,” she said in perfect English.
“Yes. Thank you,” he said.
“Those rooms would be attached,” Jo said, interjecting her preference. Sofía looked up and scanned her three guests, then looked down at her register.
“Yes, of course, Señor…?”
“Señorita,” Jo said. Then, with a respectful flourish towards Annmarie, “Este es Señora Constantino.”
“Sí, Señorita. Perdóname, por favor.”
“Eso no es necesario,” Jo assured her. Annmarie remained silent throughout.
“Señor Constantino, here are the keys to your rooms. I have placed you in two adjacent rooms. Both have ocean views compliments of management. We wish to show you our gratitude for choosing el Hotel Rosarito.”
“Of course. Where else would we stay?” Henry asked clumsily with a flirtatious smile that earned him a scolding look from Annmarie. The truth, of course, was the hotel was half-full in late July, with Hollywood’s aristocracy finding sanctuary in cooler climates, so room rates had been adjusted accordingly. Still, Hotel Rosarito was a well-known playground for the famously wealthy studio denizens, as it was both convenient and offered an air of continental sophistication without the expense. The service was well-trained, the lobster was pennies on the dollar, and Jo insisted they take a weekend trip before she traveled east for the rest of the summer and enthusiastically suggested the Hotel Rosarito.
There was a bit of reorganization and then Miguel, their bellhop, led them to their rooms. They sorted the luggage for Miguel, whose English wasn’t nearly as proficient as Sofía’s, and he dutifully placed the suitcases in each room. Henry tipped Miguel a dollar.
“What the hell’s wrong with you, Mr. Big-shot?” Annmarie asked Henry after Miguel had left, walking across the room and opening the large window with the promised ocean view but paying scant attention to the beach, the waves, and the deep blue water that stretched unblemished to the horizon. She lit a cigarette and blew the smoke out through the window’s screen. “The boy would have been grateful with a quarter.”
“Yet we’ve earned his everlasting loyalty,” Jo said before Henry was able to offer a defense. “Annie dear, let’s have some fun. You’re so beautiful when you smile.” This was enough to actually make Annmarie glow for the first time in several hours. She was very pretty in her way. Not glamorous or sophisticated, but a young woman someone such as Henry would feel proud to marry. She had many suitors, but only one promised to help her escape from that little mill town she had been raised in, so she waited and Henry had fulfilled her dream.
“You’re so sweet, Jo,” Annmarie said, lifting her cigarette to her lips.
“Am I?”
“Well, sugar and spice and everything nice, of course.”
“I hope I’m not simply considered a dessert, dear,” Jo said with mock indignation. “You should get some rest now. I’m going to take a swim in that lovely pool.” And the pool truly was lovely, situated at the edge of sandy Rosarito Beach, adorned on three sides with bougainvillea, bottlebrush, and brilliant lantanas of varied colors, and the fourth side opened to the expansive Pacific with the Islas Coronado to the northwest breaking the razor-sharp edge of the horizon. “Will you join me, Henry?”
“I . . . I . . . perhaps I should stay with Annmarie?” Henry asked, looking not at Jo but towards his wife.
“Then unaccompanied I shall go,” Jo said brightly.
Annmarie, still filled with the past moment’s goodwill toward her friend suddenly realized the uncomfortable situation in which she had been placed. “Please, no!” she said. “Is it safe?”
“Of course it’s safe,” Jo said, laughing off Annmarie’s concern. “Although if it isn’t, well, you know I thrive on danger.”
“I couldn’t bear the thought of you going alone to the pool. Henry will escort you, won’t you, Hank?”
Henry felt his position had been compromised. “Of course I’ll go with Jo to the pool, sweetheart,” he said. Jo let out a little victory cry and ran into the hall and back into her room to get ready. Henry began to undress.
“What are you doing?” Annmarie asked.
“Putting on my bathing suit.”
“You’re planning to swim with Jo as well?”
“I thought I’d at least get wet. You do remember how hot it is out there.”
“Go ahead. Do what you want,” Annmarie said, stubbing out her cigarette and laying down on the bed with her back to him.
“To be fair, it’s not what I wanted,” Henry said but Annmarie had gone silent. I’m doing what you want, he said to himself, and you’re doing what Jo wants he added, completing his thought. He finished preparing for the pool, then left, making sure the door was locked behind him.
* * * * *
Henry took off his shirt and settled back in a chaise lounge. His arms were tan, but the tan stopped midway up his biceps and from there it was glowing white all the way to his toes. He and Jo had said little after meeting in the hall outside their rooms and what they did say was functional: I think the pool is this way and Where shall we sit? The seating question itself was pro forma; no one was at the pool as common sense dictated that the hotel’s guests abandon their sun-bathing outposts and smartly retreat from the blistering mid-afternoon summer sun to take comfort either under the fans of their rooms or in the coctelría, sipping icy Conga Coolers and Margaritas (both drinks having originated in Ciudad Juárez then migrated west to Hollywood and south of the border again to the Hotel Rosarito bar). Henry watched as Jo removed her light silk chiffon robe. To him, her every movement seemed carefully conceived and always well executed. To her, it was routine. Jo’s young body with slender arms and long legs looked more youthful than fully matured — evenly tanned as if she’d spent the summer at camp rather than in the lab and library as he had — her one-piece bathing suit was subtly more revealing than anything Annmarie might wear, but he would be hard-pressed to identify exactly why. Without a word she walked to the deep end of the pool, and as would be fitting, she deliberately failed to test the temperature with her toes before executing an elegant dive, barely causing a ripple on the surface. She swam the length of the pool and then walked up the steps and out of the water.
“Is it cold?” Henry asked when she reached him.
“Is the sun hot?” she answered, then to affirm her answer she shook her head, spraying stinging icy water drops over his body. Henry rolled onto his side defensively, but Jo simply laughed and dived back into the water. Henry analyzed, hesitated, and then as impulsively as he could muster, jumped in after her.
The initial shock of cold quickly melted into a comfortable temperature. Jo was right, of course, the sun was incredibly hot, and nothing under it could be cold or even cool. This was a place born and forged in the inferno of a distant radiant heat; it was hot and for once he forgot his training, the treatises he had read and written on the proton-proton fusion burning deep in the planet’s lone star and thought instead of the generations of his family before him, living and laboring under the same unrelenting rays. Treading water, his thoughts made him feel very distant from Jo.
“What in the world are you thinking about?” a voice from behind him asked and Jo surprised him by throwing her arms around his neck and clinging to his back. Light as she was, she pulled him under and he let her.
*****
