Free Hotels of North America by Rick Moody

language arts instructor on the dime of her husband the arbitrageur, is the sort of hotel where you are liable to see the occasional movie star, but I do not pay attention to this sort of thing, and I would actually see the presence of movie stars as negatively correlated with a premium lodging experience, because the presence of actors or celebrities brings with it the presence of the kinds of people who want to be seen with or otherwise be in league with celebrities, and these para-celebrities swarm around the hotel and deplete it of hair products and other amenities.
    The language arts instructor, it emerged over time, had some kinks in the delivery of romance that were unlike others I had encountered and were, in a word, disturbing. The language arts instructor, whose arbitrageur husband believed she was staying in Brattleboro for a departmental conference, liked to be lightly strangled during the practice of certain advanced kinds of venery. I cannot exactly recollect how she told me that she wanted me to strangle her a little bit. I don’t know how the strangling got introduced into the conversation, nor do I remember if there were explicit instructions as to how I might strangle a little bit. But we were on the floor of a room in the Mercer, and I was able, in those days, to get up off the floor more easily than I am now, so being on the floor does not sound entirely ludicrous. (And I should say that the rooms in the Mercer are incredibly clean, so the floor was not such a bad place to be, and I don’t recall any rug burns.)
    I remember trying to accommodate the language arts instructor, and while we could have been talking about the language arts or the department, instead, she seemed to want to be asphyxiated, though I also thought that perhaps she just wanted to feel like there was someone who disliked her enough to strangle her, and while I didn’t know if I loved the language arts instructor, I did think that holding someone and watching her shudder with pleasure, as occasionally happened in the pursuit of illicit affairs, did increase your appreciation of the person, especially if you did it frequently enough, and so I found that I could not, in any convincing way, strangle the language arts instructor, or simulate strangulation, even if that was what she wanted in order to take it to the next level, as she called it. I tried to do what she asked, in the Mercer Hotel, while somewhere nearby, mere floors away, Benicio del Toro was taking a meeting with some midlevel producer, perhaps about a biopic concerning the life of Che Guevara, and so there was a kind of a pause in the illicit affair while we took in the information that I could not strangle, asphyxiate, or otherwise constrict the airway of the language arts instructor.
    We repaired to the bathroom instead, and while you grow to assume that bathrooms in the city of New York never have generous tubs, this one did, a tub big enough for both of us to get in, and, after a few jokes and the passing back and forth of some hair-care products of the kind mentioned above, the language arts instructor, with her back turned to me while she soaped up and dunked herself, began to shudder and weep, and said, You have no idea how painful my marriage is, you just have no idea. I just can’t bear to go back there, to the house. To which I said: What can I do? How can I help? And she said: You can’t do anything, nobody can. And then she wept for a while longer, and I held her around the back, held her to me, in a kind of encircling, but not a kind of constricting, and she did have an incredibly beautiful back, just as almost every other part of her was beautiful; there were just enough flaws to make her perfect. But after a while I got bored of the tub, as one often will with shared baths, and therefore I got up and out of the tub on the pretense of getting her more premium bath salts, and I went out to the bed, hoping that she could compose herself so that we could be