1. Ace Hotel

stephen alesch

Ace is a gift from my good friend Beetle. For a few months, she used to work for an unreal company in the city. She's made it her goal in life to find the sublime everywhere; while she was here, she dragged me along for the journey. So I offer a shining example of the sublime: a hotel lobby.

When Beetle moved from California, we decided to meet for macaroni and cheese.  This turned into a string of brilliant dates. While she lived in the city, I enjoyed a few refreshing weeks of non-loneliness. Together, we ate num pangs and investigated old Subway cars. I watched Beetle take arresting photographs of city models and fragile bridges at the Transit Museum. We poked the spines of ancient books at the Morgan Library, and allowed our hands to hover -- tentatively and nowhere near close enough to touch -- over a Degas ballerina.

Beetle's perfect. Being around her is the functional opposite of standing next to a smoker. Second-hand smoke inhalation can kill you. Beetle, on the other hand, will make you unstoppable.

She took me to Ace on our third or fourth date. Or was it our fifth? "It's this place I found? Or read something about?" Beetle thought hard, too, desperate to catch that wisp of memory.

The Ace Hotel is a stunning boutique hotel in Flatiron. I was apprehensive, but come on, it's Beetle. And maybe I forgot there's a rich, historical precedent when it comes to dicking around in hotel lobbies. I spent a lot of time in the CNN hotel lobby during my cousin's wedding, curled up with Manhattan Transfer by Dos Passos and covered in lime chiffon, trying to cool off after having marinated in the Atlanta heat. In Madras, my seven-year-old legs ran roughshod over the Park Sheraton's gilded lobby. I lost $15.60 while playing poker at the Taj Krishna in Hyderabad, and I watched a group of genteel Southern women exchange awed looks at each others' dripping diamonds in Philadelphia while I enjoyed a post-coital victory sprawl on a lobby sofa.

(The love motels don't count. Motels have roaches, ashy carpets and stiff bibles hidden in crumbling cabinetry, but no lobbies.)

The Ace is sexy. It's dark, crowded and noisy. Intimate and a little claustrophobic, like a deep kiss. It is a non-exclusive exclusive place for the young and rich, and the old and bored. My first thought was thank God places like this exist.

I fell in love with this fairytale combination of dungeon, treehouse and ship cabin. The lobby is high-ceilinged and flanked by thick columns. They've draped the American flag across the back wall. The entire space is filled with low couches with elegant, curved legs. And everything is covered in moody upholstery. The chandeliers, too, provide ambiance but fleeting light. To the left is the Breslin, the hotel restaurant.

The nice thing about Ace is that you can be a bum here and still feel sophisticated. Hanging out in this lobby is totally free. No cover charge.

When Beetle and I reached, the DJ had just begun spinning. I remember the refreshing, thumping beats that offered ambient depth but no real melody.

As we talked I sat close to Beetle so that I could hear her. Sometimes there was that awkward intersection of feet, but I liked that, being close to someone who doesn't mind if I occasionally touch them. I just liked having her around. All of this was about having a friend; someone as receptive to my secrets as I could be about hers.

Not just secrets about our lives or our boyfriends but about our sacred ideas and thoughts and dreams. About the way our souls work.

*

A few days after Beetle and I went, the New York Times covered the Ace in a full front-page splash on its Metro page. After that, I resolved not to go for a while. Too many hipsters read the Times. And visiting post-Beetle made me feel depressed.

I even resisted bringing my boyfriend. Ace is a den for the intrepid, and my boyfriend just isn't an adventurous man. Or he used to be, but he's mellowed. Maybe our previous adventuring had been a concession to my restlessness. So when I went, I went by myself.

But summer hit us with the subtlety of a gas tanker, and the world outside was luxurious. My boyfriend visited me in the city three weeks ago and it seemed right to kick back in the darkness on our last stolen day together before he had to leave the country. And again, though I love him, I realize there are some things that are pleasures sweeter in the company of friends.

After a little resistance I took him with me. He had a moment of discovery, I think.

"Didn't expect this," he said. I made him wait for twenty minutes while he settled down with his computer. I brought a hot chocolate and tart. At first we sat, stupid with the heat, and then a little horny, because we made out on the couches. We'd been relentlessly cockblocked because of visits from his family and threats from mine, so we starved for it. Nobody paid attention.

*

Now I'm alone here. I'm sitting near the door in a short, plump chair. I've tried the harder, high-backed chairs but they're not as comfortable. A dog and I have tranquil eye-conversation. (Ace is very dog-friendly).

Two smoking hot German ladies sit down in the chairs next to me. Their faces are delicate and long; one is wearing a dress made of angles and planes. Her chestnut hair is not thick but it is luscious and obeys a tuck behind the ear. She looks like Dominique Francon. And, though I have no love for Ayn Rand, I admire Dominique's physicality and brittle beauty; in my mind, I'm always trying to cast her. She smiles too much to be a Dominique, but I call her that anyway.

The other woman is a blonde. Less striking but more regular, more beach ready. Every movement and word is relaxed. Even her clothes breathe onto her skin.

I introduce myself.

Their English is a little halting, but they are competent. They ask me what I do for a living and I ask them. They are in Public Relations. They can't clarify beyond that -- they talk over one another, excited, about a man named Henry who did something in their glassy Gramercy office. I'm trying to follow the threads of their conversation, but soon they lapse into German. They're lost to me.

But before they go, Dominique Francon extends a hand for me to shake. I shake it, and she says, "We hope to see you soon".

Does it mean she'll come back to Ace? She and her fellow pair of impossible legs, laughing on the stiff-backed chairs, waiting for me?

(Sultry women waiting in a cool dungeon, sipping ice water and mochas in quick succession. I like that idea.)

edit: Beetle would say it this way: