“A color preference. Our rooms feature six different color themes. We have refreshing blues, uplifting yellows, energizing citrus, exhilarating reds, peaceful neutrals, and serene greens. What are you in the mood for?”
What was I in the mood for? A juicy hamburger and a hot shower were the only things I was truly in the mood for. I felt overwhelmed by the pressure to choose. “I’m so used to boring beige,” I told her. “So the rooms are all basically the same? Only the wallpaper’s different?”
“Oh, it’s not just the wallpaper,” she chirped. “The entire color palette is coordinated—the walls, the art, the bedding, the flowers.”
I asked her to repeat the colors. “Okay,” I said, “since I’m in Florida, I’ll try energizing citrus.”
“Good choice.” She smiled approvingly, her fingers clattering across the keyboard energetically. Then her smile faded. “Oh, I’m so sorry; we don’t have anything available tonight in citrus.”
I shrugged. “Okay, how about green? What was it—serene green? If I can’t have energy, I’ll take serenity.”
Again her fingers clattered; again she looked disappointed. “Oh, dear, I’m afraid there’s nothing in our serene greens, either.”
“So, what is there?”
She did a search. “I can put you in peaceful neutrals.”
“I’m feeling ambivalent about the neutrals,” I joked. Her brow furrowed; either she didn’t get the joke or she thought it was lame. “Peaceful neutrals will be just fine,” I assured her. She brightened and made me a key card.
Peaceful neutrals, I learned when I opened the door, were variations on a theme of boring beige.
Angie and Ned had offered to take me to dinner, but I’d declined; Angie was upset—she’d lost her sister, she suspected her brother-in-law of murder, and now she and her family had been denied even the chance to bury Kate. The last thing Angie needed to spend her evening doing was making small talk with me. I was getting hungry, though, so I called the front desk to ask about nearby restaurants. The Duval, it turned out, had both a steakhouse restaurant and a rooftop bar. The sun was going down and the temperature was dropping by the time I settled peacefully and neutrally into the room, so I decided to take in the view from on high and hope that the rooftop bar’s menu included variations on a theme of burger. The bar was on the eighth floor—not exactly the Empire State Building, but then again, Tallahassee wasn’t exactly New York, so maybe eight stories high was high enough.
In Tallahassee, eight stories proved to be plenty. The Duval inhabited a slight rise, and the rooftop terrace offered a pleasant view of downtown Tallahassee, the stately old and ugly new capitol buildings, the campus of Florida State University, and the lush, woodsy neighborhoods to the city’s west and north. It couldn’t compete with the vistas from Knoxville’s highest buildings, which offered sweeping panoramas of the Tennessee River, Neyland Stadium, and the Great Smoky Mountains. But the Duval bar offered other scenery, I soon noticed, as a series of strikingly beautiful waitresses paraded past: lovely, leggy young women, possibly FSU students, though they might well have been models. They wore stretchy black dresses that fitted so snugly, it appeared each dress had been custom-knitted onto a waitress at the beginning of her shift. A textiles engineer and an anatomist must have collaborated on the design; the high hemlines managed to show every available inch of leg, but nothing more, even when the women bent over to deliver drinks or food. I tried not to stare at these remarkable fusions of form and function, but I didn’t entirely succeed.
And even though the desk clerk hadn’t been able to put me in a citrus room, I felt energized.
It must have been the cheeseburger my waitress had brought me—thick and juicy, topped with crisp, smoky bacon—that restored my flagging energy.