Source Material:
Sara Majka Considers Booking a Room

Sara Majka's story "Saint Andrews Hotel" appeared in A Public Space 8.

Years ago, I became fascinated with a hotel in Portland, Maine, though I’m not sure why. The Inn at St. John is a basic hotel near the bus station, not gritty enough to explain my fascination. I’ve never been in, but pictures on the website show velvet curtains and furniture that’s meant to look Victorian. Quotes promise that it’s "comfortable and a good value" and “CLEAN!” It offers three room tiers: pet-friendly rooms, economically priced rooms for extended visits, or romantic luxury accommodations for weekend getaways. If you want any of these things, it says, the hotel is exactly what you’re looking for.

There’s something touching in this accommodation. I like how the hotel wants to be everything for everyone, and can’t hide this. How eagerness and sincerity linger a millimeter beneath its reach for class, and lurking beneath that is what I imagine is the truth—it won’t be as shabby as I had hoped, and it will cost more than I thought to find this out. Maybe I like how it misses every sort of mark. But what I like best is that it rents rooms by the week, offering a home to people, however temporary.

For a while I thought I might stay there. I wanted to live in Portland for a week or two and write, and I talked about this frequently. I had a friend who lived in Portland who offered her spare bedroom, but I wanted a hotel. The Inn at St. John was the cheapest place I could find. My friend was working for a crisis hotline and said that many calls came from there. I imagined all the solitary rooms with all the telephones, stretching through the hotel, trying to reach someone. It made me want to stay there more, but I never did, because of the money, and inaction, and other things.

I was married back then and living seventy-five miles north of Portland, inland, in an isolated college town. I had also become interested in antique nautical maps, and I had planned—if I’m remembering correctly—to spend time in a map library while staying at The Inn at St. John. Later I was talking to someone at a bar, trying to account for this period of my life, and said something like, “Something happened and for some reason I became very interested in maps.” He nodded at my shorthand, and I think he understood what I was trying to say.

I’ve still never been to The Inn at St. John, and considered going so I could describe it here: the woman who checked me in, the walk through the halls, the view out the window. I've noticed that sometimes original and unintelligible urges play themselves out later in distorted forms. Perhaps the building where I now live appealed to me because it was run-down and I was told, when looking at it, that it might have been a hotel once. It was the cheapest place I could find, and it’s a little sad—people yell in the halls, bare bulbs burn out—but there’s also an innocence to it, mostly people live there in ways you can't quite guess at.

SAINT ANDREWS HOTEL

Peter stayed in the hospital until he was twenty-one. He would have left earlier but nobody could find his parents, and the hospital had put him to use in the kitchen. When he left, he couldn’t find the island on any maps. In the place where it should have been was a sprinkle of land, most of it not much more than rocks. The most promising landmass turned out to be nothing but sandy slopes and beach grass. He was told someone had tried to start a leper colony on it years ago, but it had proved inhospitable. He traveled the coast for some time, taking on construction jobs or working the docks, looking for anything familiar.

He finally took the bus up north and got off in Portland, Maine. He stood there, a medium-sized boy with pale coloring and a slow, coltish walk. Across the street he saw an old brick building with SAINT ANDREWS HOTEL lettered in faded white paint. Inside, a threadbare green carpet spread across a large, mostly empty lobby. A cluster of sofas and upholstered chairs huddled at the center; several of the residents sat there. The hotel rented rooms by the night, but also long-term, and many of the people had been living there for years.

He took a room for a month. When the month was up he paid again. He liked it there; he liked to sit idly with the other residents. In the hospital, they had sat for hours on the long, narrow sunporch, everyone squished in with African Violets and end tables. All the old men leaning on canes, their eyes in the light as opaque as glass marbles. No sooner had Peter left the hospital than he found another one. How strange we are. How different we are from how we think we are. We fall out of love only to fall in love with a duplicate of what we’ve left, never understanding that we love what we love and that it doesn’t change… The way they sat on tattered velvet chairs—the old men with crooked legs and the couple arguing in sleep-starved voices and the boys, too skinny, wearing their hair in delicate shapes along their temples.

He took a job at a fish stall in the Portland Public Market and would come back with the belly of his white T-shirt—the place where he leaned against the counter—stained watery red and orange. What have you been up to, Petey? Betty would call out. She worked behind the desk, and always had shadows of mascara under her eyes, even during the morning shift.

He would shower, then return to the lobby, the low tide smell still clinging to him. The people talked lazily back and forth. A man drinking from a coffee-stained paper cup turned to him, and said, I used to have a wife from Chicago. Know what she did?

No, Peter said.

Fell in love with the butcher, the man said.

Another man said, Don’t pay him any mind.

Things went much as they had in the hospital, until one day a girl came in. She was beautiful—fourteen, fifteen, slender, knock-kneed. She used to live on the island, used to ride up and down the dirt road on her bicycle, her wispy hair flying after her. She wore a lavender skirt instead of cutoffs and her face had lost some of the boyishness, but otherwise she hadn’t changed.

No, man, someone said when Peter started to walk over. That one’ll put you in jail.

No, he said. I know her. He froze before he got to the desk. Something was wrong. He realized what it was and backed away: she should have been older than him. She should have been nearly thirty.

In the morning, he followed her from the hotel. She walked to the old port section of town, along cobblestone streets and down to the ferry terminal. She walked through the building and out into the fenced-in area where people waited. She put down her bag and stood there, a cardigan folded over her arm. She must be mistaken, he thought, standing like that in front of a boat that never left the harbor. It must have once been a nice boat, with a cream-colored canopy and dark wood accents, but the hull was leaking rust; a dozen wooden park benches had been dragged under the canopy. He thought there was no sense in it, but then an old, silver-haired man emerged from the cabin, and took the girl’s ticket. She boarded.

When Peter tried to board, the captain said, We don’t sell tickets on this end. This is the return boat.

Peter asked where it was returning to, but the captain shook his head, then tied the rope, pulled in the metal ramp, and disappeared the same way he came. Soon the engine sounded.

To read “Saint Andrews Hotel” in full, buy APS 8 or start a subscription today.