The Way Inn Read Free Page A

the horrible chasm that had opened in the conversation, I asked why she was photographing the paintings.
    A hobby, she said. The paintings were all over the hotel—in my room, here in the restaurant, out in the lobby, in the bar. And so it was in every Way Inn. They were all variations on an abstract theme: meshing coffee-colored curves and bulging shapes, spheres within spheres, arcs, tangents, all inscrutable, suggestive of nothing. I had never really examined them—they were not there for admiring, they were there simply to occupy space without distracting or upsetting. They were an approximation of what a painting might look like, a stand-in for actual art. They worked best if they decorated without being noticed. All they had to do was show that someone had thought about the walls so that you, the guest, didn’t have to. An invitation not to be bothered. Now that she had drawn my attention to them, I could see that she was right—they were everywhere. How many in total? I felt uncomfortable even asking.
    â€œThousands,” she had said, as if sharing a delicious secret. “Tens of thousands. More. Way Inn has more than five hundred locations worldwide. They never have fewer than one hundred rooms. Each room has at least one painting. Add communal spaces. Bars, restaurants, fitness centers, business suites, conference rooms, and of course the corridors . . . At least a hundred thousand paintings. I believe more.”
    I could see why this was a calculation she delighted in sharing with people—the implications of it were extraordinary. Where did all the paintings come from? Who was painting them? With chairs, tables, carpets, light fixtures, there were factories—big business. But works of art? They weren’t prints; you could see the brush marks in the paint. It was thoroughly beyond a single artist.
    â€œThere is no painter,” she said. “No one painter, anyway. It’s an industrial process. There’s a single vast canvas rolling out into a production line. Then it’s cut up into pieces and framed.”
    As she said this, she showed me the other photos on her camera, the blip-blip-blip of her progress through the memory card keeping time in her conversation. She was tall, taller than my six foot, and leaned over me as she did this, red hair falling toward me—a curiously intimate stance. The paintings flicked past on the little screen, bright in the gloom. The same neutral tones. The same bland curves and formations. Sepia psychedelia. A giant painting rolling off the production line like a slab of pastry, ready to be stamped into neat rectangles and framed and hung on the wall of a chain hotel . . . there was something squalid about it.
    â€œWhy?” I asked. “Why collect something that’s made like that? What’s so interesting about them?”
    â€œNothing, individually, nothing at all,” she said. “You have to see the bigger picture.”
    â€œLate night?”
    A second passed before I realized that I had been addressed, by Phil. His conversation with Rosa (or Rhoda) had lapsed. She prodded at her phone. Not really reading, not really listening, I had slipped into standby mode and was staring into space.
    I made an effort to brighten. “Quite late,” I said. “I got here at midnight.” And then I had talked to the woman—for how long?—until Maurice detained me even later. Hotel bars, windowless and with only a short walk to your bed, made it easy to lose track of time.
    â€œI got here yesterday morning,” Phil said. “We’re exhibiting, so there was the usual last-minute panic . . . got to bed late myself. Slept well, though. Did you get a good room?”
    â€œYes,” I said. In truth I was indifferent to it, precisely as the anonymous designers had intended. Indifferent was good. “It’s a new hotel.” The same faces, the same conversations. People