I’d fallen asleep awkwardly and awoken with my arm hanging like a sandbag from my shoulder. It felt not like my arm, but a stranger’s—in fact I’d started to feel like a stranger entirely—and getting out of bed, I jostled it back to memory of myself, working the fingers, trying to feel them as my own. I walked out onto the balcony. It was the middle of the night, but you could hear the dull thump of music from Bourbon Street, just a block behind us, dampened by the enclosed structure of the Hotel St. Denis. Orange and yellow leaves collected in the copper gutters, and below in the courtyard a fountain gurgled, a cool autumn night. 

We were in New Orleans for the weekend, we came two or three times a year, living only a few hours away. We were celebrating my wife, who had recently gotten a promotion at her law firm, and we were supposed to be celebrating me, who finally had a story accepted for publication, and at the New Yorker, no less. But I say “supposed to” because on the drive into the city, stopping for a restroom break, I’d checked my email and found one from an editor at the magazine. It said in effect that the editor who had accepted my story had been let go or else had resigned—the wording was ambiguous—and as a result the fiction department would be moving in a new direction, consequently they would no longer publish my story. They would be more than happy to give me priority consideration with another submission, they recognized how unfortunate this was, please accept our deepest, etc. 

I was devastated. I’d have to begin resubmitting the story all over again and to wait the four, five, sometimes six months to hear back. I had nothing else to send them or anyone. 

I’d written numerous stories over the years, but this one had felt uniquely authentic. In a way this verisimilitude was unsurprising because it was not a fiction at all, but an experience from my college days as a country-club waiter, and all I’d done to fictionalize the account was supplant “myself” in the story with a character named William. In another way, however, I was surprised to discover that perhaps the nearest and most profound character of my imagination was none other than myself. And after my high hopes, I was heartbroken at this rejection. Finally I had a story that rang true, and an editor had confirmed it, but now it appeared it wasn’t good enough, and if even this story failed, perhaps nothing of mine would ever succeed. 

Trying to make the best of it, I thought, “Well, there’s no better place to have received this news than in this great city full of distractions.” Here I could escape from my heartache. And so I had swallowed my disappointment and said nothing to my wife, waiting for a better opportunity to announce my curtailed expectations.

When we arrived at the hotel, a valet opened our doors and snapping his fingers, conjured a ticket. Immediately a bellhop, a young man, began to unload our suitcases. From outside, the hotel reflected European charm: wrought iron balconies and ornate stonework embellished the modest structure. Inside, the elegance mirrored the outer, marble floors and heavy oak furniture, French finery. The bellhop accompanied us to our room with demure respect, both politely distant and deeply attentive. “Anything else for you, Mr. C—?” he asked, after unloading our bags. That would be all, I said and thanked him. As I pulled out my wallet, I had a strange moment of dissociation. “Mr. C—,” the email from the New Yorker had begun, and wanting to escape that disappointing name, I said, “Please, call me William.” I extended the tip, and with a stupendously calculated bow, the bellhop said, “Thank you, Mr. William.” After he left I realized that in my confused mental state, I’d mistakenly handed him a large bill, and though such largesse was not what I’d intended, I thought perhaps William—Mr. William—had. 

The egregious tip did not cause me much concern. I’d brought a wad of cash. Really it was my wife’s cash—the checks deposited into our joint account were in her name. I’m not ashamed of the facts. For every Shakespeare or Chaucer who received his patronage from an Earl of Southampton or a John of Gaunt, there surely were a hundred nameless minstrels in the patronage of minor lords and ladies, lost to the ages. And I recall Ralph Ellison stating that while he wrote Invisible Man his wife earned the steady income, and he endured the pejorative “sweetback” from the less civil occupants of his New York City neighborhood. It seems the writer has always been patronized, whether in earnest or in ridicule. Anyway, I was intent on tipping protocol, on following the customs scrupulously, having once worked in the service industry myself. Everyone would get theirs, I intended.

We had a fine dinner that evening in the restaurant attached to the hotel. We sat at a small table situated against long shelves lined with books, floor to ceiling. The books were merely decorative, but I took one down, 18th Century Naval Battles, and sure enough there were printed pages within the binding. It reminded me of the moment in The Great Gatsby when the owl-eyed man in Gatsby’s enormous library is surprised to find real books on the shelves, not counterfeits but real books with real words in them. “What realism!” he exclaims, marveling at the totality of James Gatz’s façade, his mask, Jay Gatsby. We drank champagne, and my wife toasted to our good fortune—her promotion, my story—and I evaded my complicated feelings by upending the flute. I looked away, into the windows, and saw my reflection somewhat transparent and fading, as though I were really outside and disappearing into the night, and someone else’s hand held the glass and brought it to his lips. 

Back in the hotel room, my wife said, “That champagne was delicious.” The alcohol had numbed not only my sadness but my better judgment, and I said, “Why don’t we order up a bottle?” The room-service menu listed the bottle for $200. “My God,” I said, “but let’s do it.” This was uncharacteristic of me. I was cheap, plainly put, but on virtuous principles: I tried often to recall Seneca: “Cupidity and not poverty causes suffering.” When brought to extravagant dinners by my wife’s colleagues, I often quoted to myself Shantideva, the Buddhist monk: “When shall I live,” he cries in exhaustion, “a clay bowl my only luxury, in a robe that thieves would not use?” A bowl and a robe, that’s all we really needed, whatever the protests of our selfish, lower existence. In other words, to stop myself from wanting was not about frugality so much as about seeking authentic happiness. I often thought of this aversion to wanting relative to my literary aspirations: for example, was it not enough just to write? Why did I want the New Yorker’s approval? Could I not be content with the joy of the moment’s creation? In other words, what was it I really wanted, if the writing were not an end in itself? Though I wanted to be happy, perhaps I didn’t know what would make me happy. I was like a dog chasing its tail. This was the central dilemma of man, as I understood ancient philosophy to conceive it, and eastern philosophy concerned itself with the problem too, seeing our trouble located in the very idea of happiness, something to be looked for, attained, when every passing moment promised peace, if only we could disregard the illusion of this wanting self. Stop going in circles after your tail, was the idea: you already possessed it.

Anyway, the indulgence was uncharacteristic of me, but then I was feeling out of character—and into another, as it were. She smiled, a look that said, “No, we shouldn’t...but should we?” I said: “We’re celebrating. Let’s splurge. It’s a special occasion.” I called, placed the order, and the voice on the other end, obscured by a thick accent, said: “Right away, Mr. William.” I found this funny, but also a little unsettling, as if my reputation—his reputation, Mr. William’s—was growing freely, taking on a life of its own.

Ten minutes later there was a knock on the door. An older Hispanic man with round glasses who took great care of his hair, silver and coiffed in the pompadour style, stood with a severe expression. “May I come in?” he asked, but my wife was dressed already in her robe, and I said it wouldn’t be necessary and took the platter from him: two flutes and the champagne in a bucket of ice, a black cloth tied around the neck, and a bowl of raspberries, “Fresh fruit complements of the hotel, sir.” I returned to sign the bill. He handed it over as though it were a disdainful thing, a dirty sock, an annoying formality. I opened the leather checkbook to find a charge for $250. Immediately I thought there had been a mistake. But wanting to maintain the elegant mask of Mr. William, I kept my composure while quickly scanning the receipt. At the bottom: All in-room dining is subject to a 25% service charge. I felt the ten-dollar tip in my back pocket puff up in smoke, and I signed quickly, noticing with gall that on the receipt there was a Tip line. I handed the check over, no tip, and thought, “That’s the end of Mr. William.” Fifty dollars to cart up a bottle of champagne? I mean, he didn’t even have to carry it, he carted it. “Thank you, Mr. William,” he said, turning to leave. I began to shut the door, he quickly turned back, and repeated, “Indeed, thank you, sir.”

In the room my wife untwisted the champagne wire. The cork popped into the cloth, and the mouth of the bottle smoked. We drank our expensive champagne and joked of the subtle oak finish, the perfume of vanilla, the cherry bouquet, these elusive characteristics promised by the pink label. We sat on the claw-footed loveseat and ate the fruit from its silver bowl.

“These raspberries,” I said, “see how they’re furred? They’re covered with these small, fine hairs. Like you find on a baby’s cheek.”

“Lanugo,” she said, plucking one from the bowl. “That’s the medical term for it.”

“Oh, I like the word down. ‘The raspberries were furred with a fine down.’ I’ll have to use that somewhere.” Maybe in the next story, I thought, and almost told her the news, but I couldn’t, not at that moment, not as our evening came to a pleasant end and we relished this foreign luxury.

So hours later I found myself sitting on the balcony, playing the part of a young married man of means out for a weekend of indulgence and known by the staff as “Mr. William.” I was pleased that tonight I had contrived a successful narrative, whatever might be said of my rejected manuscript, yet it was dizzying to think that here my fiction was taken for the real, while in literature I had posited the real as a fiction, and the legitimacy of either depended on its reception as the opposite of what it was. 

*

In the morning I had a monstrous headache. My wife sat at the desk across from the bed, applying makeup in a vanity mirror. “Feeling any better?” she asked. But everything lagged: I sat up, and then I sat up. I stepped over the threshold into the shower, and then I stepped over the threshold into the shower. The warm water and steam soothed my headache, but without the throbbing pain, I became acutely aware of a humming anxiety. It resided back of my molars and tingled down to my stomach

Out of the shower and toweling off, my face obscured by the steamed mirror, suddenly it occurred to me.

“I think last night,” I called to her, “when the waiter brought the champagne, I may have written the total on the tip line. I may have written out a $250 tip. I think I tipped him $250.” I repeated myself as though by dint of insistence I could comprehend the absurdity of my mistake. “I was hurrying. I maybe wrote $250 on the tip line.”

As she dexterously applied mascara to her lashes, she laughed, not missing a stroke. She had a surgeon’s hand at the vanity. “You know what, darling,” she said, “if you did, you made that man’s week.” Her laugh was splendid—Latin, splendere, be bright, shine, gleam—and indeed that laugh, capacious and charming and generous, adorned her with the bright radiance of a jewel. Perhaps she knew the intensity of my self-severity, that I would scold myself plenty over this mistake for the both of us. Either way, I was deeply grateful for her patience and grace, which as the spouse of a writer was necessarily deep. That was the art behind the artist, I thought: the helpmate who creates the semblance of a composed life to allow the creator’s composing. 

If I had in fact tipped the man and doubled the bill, then half a grand had leapt from my hand—pop!—like a champagne cork, fizzed away like so many bubbles in the flute. I blamed myself, but Mr. William, too. If not for him, would I have reviewed the bill with less haste, less anxiety about maintaining my munificent appearance, and so signed with a more careful review? Had my double sensed the threat to his existence and determined my hand to the wrong line of the check? How easily he came to life! So easily that again I suspected reality itself to be already and endlessly comprised of these masks and deceptions.

“Did you see his hair?” I joked with her, trying to lighten my oppressive self-reproach. “It added a foot to his height. A coif like that, it’s not cheap.” 

“It may have been a toupee.” She twisted the cap onto the tube of mascara as she turned to me, batting black lashes elegantly lengthened. “It’s hard to tell, you know, in a town like this, what’s not a costume.” 

*

When the waitress arrived I ordered a gimlet. I thought it would help with the headache, after the ibuprofen I bought at the convenience store didn’t. Standing on a shelf behind the crowded counter where the sleepy-eyed cashier mumbled the total, the same bottle of champagne flashed a mocking price tag of $90, which now seemed a bargain, though before yesterday evening I’d never purchased a bottle of wine for more than $40. Now we were at brunch, a place down Canal Street, sitting beside one another at a round, white-clothed table. The waitstaff made arabesques in the dining room, a delightful rhythm. Across from us a group of four sat around a large dish of oysters on the half shell, fending off hangovers of their own, perhaps. Loud voices, glasses clattering. The waitress set the gimlet down, a lime slice floating on the cloudy surface.

As she watched me take a sip, my wife said: “I recall you said you were abstaining the rest of the weekend, that last night cured you of any further desire to drink.”

“Oh, but that was earlier,” I said. “I’m hardly the same person. In the moving present, ‘I’ am always slipping away. Think of it like this: yesterday’s self racks up a tab and disappears before the check is due: he sneaks out and leaves my present self to pay the bill. But why should I pay it?”

“According to that logic,” she offered, “the one who would hold you accountable for the receipt hasn’t arrived yet.”

“That is tomorrow’s self, hungover, who scorns me, but by then, I’m beyond his grasp, aren’t I? I am no longer me, and he has only himself to be frustrated with.”

“I’m dizzy from the logic.”

“It’s not the logic making you dizzy.” I handed the gimlet to her. “Here, this’ll ground you.—Anyway, lately I’ve felt this kind of merry-go-round of the self. It has great precedence. Buddhism argues that past and future selves are an illusion, there is only the present self, this moment, yet we can’t seem to grasp the moment, so where is the self? And St. Augustine famously argued on that point: every act of perception is of a present that has just disappeared. It wouldn’t be too much to say that in theology, and philosophy, too, there is an enduring sense of the distinction between a false, ephemeral self and a ‘true’ self intuited in something timeless and eternal. Ironically this true self begins to look like no self at all, attained by selflessness. The Sufi mystic Rumi compared us to reed flutes: we are our true selves only when empty, letting the breath of God blow through us. Our everyday self, filled with small cares and wants, is like a mask....” There was a glazed look in her eyes. “Speaking of masks, you are not doing a good job of feigning interest.”

She smiled. I did not hold it against her. What interest could she have in my rambling? Still early in her career, she was a medical malpractice lawyer, concerned with the legal issues regarding the care of the body, meanwhile I read philosophical and religious books that insisted the body, lawyers, hospitals were an illusion.

After our meal, she went to the ladies’ room, and I began to wonder whether the behavior of the hotel staff this morning indicated I really had left the $250 tip, had not merely imagined it. In the hallway going down, a housekeeper smiled and said, “Good morning, Mr. William.” Her knowledge of myself—but not me, that mask—made me suspicious. And then there was the concierge, who nearly confirmed my fears: a small man in an all-black suit, he approached us on the way out to brunch, “Mr. William, good morning sir and madame!” He explained that a wonderful restaurant in the Garden District, always booked up on the weekend, had an open table for two, and with a call he could book us the table. “They have a wide selection of champagne,” he said with a knowing smile. His insistence belied common hospitality, close to obsequy, but I could not be sure. Nevertheless, flattered by the concierge’s earnestness, we said, “Why not?” He bowed and said, “I will have a taxi ready for you at seven,” and I tipped him, feeling quite regal, if more than a little false.

Sitting in the restaurant now, as the waiters carried on their arabesques, I thought of the concierge, the bellhop, the waitress here: they performed no less than the buskers outside, though they did not sing or dance, and though they had no bucket or jar at their feet, compensation for a good performance was nevertheless the aim of their theatrics. For each of them, and for me as a writer no less, as for my wife in the courtroom, for everyone, really, when you got right down to it, a profession was a performance. 

Leaving the hotel after speaking with the concierge, as we walked down brisk, breezy Toulouse toward brunch, my wife had said, “Mr. William?” I explained that vacationing among all this foreign opulence, I might as well heighten the estrangement: donning the persona, I was vacationing from myself.

*

After our late brunch we spent a long time in the Quarter, strolling, window-shopping, people-watching. I loved no place more than New Orleans. Back home I strove at the desk to write characters, to contrive stories, while here characters proliferated naturally, and stories unfolded on every street corner. You didn’t need to create fiction in a city so theatrical, you only needed to observe and document: the real was fantastic enough. Anyway, I was here now, in dizzying proximity to the entire human comedy, the high and the low, and on every level of experience, sensual and intellectual and spiritual, one encountered the vibrant mixture: potted geraniums stood at curbs overflowing with gray water, a guitarist sat on a street corner and plucked dreamily as the romping thump of club music battered his chords, and a few blocks over, inside the St. Louis Cathedral, the pious prayed and lit votive candles, while just outside a bawdy magician told dirty jokes and heretical palm-readers divined futures. There was intense beauty here, signs of a higher existence, but it was always trailed by its counter, as though the city were a kind of gnostic whirlpool spinning out from the mouth of the Mississippi River. I delighted in the contrast, the confluence.

We crossed Canal St. toward Dauphine, and waiting at the crosswalk, were obliged to listen to an older, heavyset black man shouting millenarian rhetoric from a megaphone. Squatting on a stool, white hair frizzled up as though he’d touched an electrical socket, he ranted. His voice screeched from a hi-gain amplifier, and the amp hissed and sputtered with an outrage of its own. A young man leaned against a traffic pole, mesmerized by the old man’s gravelly rage, and smoked a joint. “He, I said HE! brought you here to New Orleans! HE made it happen, and for a reason....!” I couldn’t understand him over the sound of his own rage, but the rage was the point, I understood. He berated us with his voice, and on the other side of the crosswalk I felt dazed, bludgeoned, cudgeled by his shouting. I put an arm around my wife, a required support as much as an act of affection, and just a little further down Dauphine, we sought refuge in a bookstore.

The door to the little shop was stiff, it stuck without entirely shutting, and the old, thin windows smothered the outdoor din but still let in a small, homeopathic dose of noise. I was surprised and relieved to find in this bookstore the neat separation of books by genre, not the chaotic mixture outside. We browsed among the worn spines. In the Philosophy section I found a copy of Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, the Staniforth translation, a favorite of mine. “Reflect how often all the life of today is a repetition of the past.... The performance is always the same; it is only the actors who change.” Actors, indeed, I thought, playing out our stories, our fictions, peering out from whatever masks we wore.

I thought again of how easily my acting in the role of Mr. William had been accepted, and again what that might mean, that if embodying a fiction were so easy, it was because we were already well-versed in the process: it was our daily routine, this becoming someone at all. As the philosophers said, we were transient things, passing, and the moment we took a name, we existed in an illusion. And I resolved as I stood in the quiet of the bookstore that I would continue to write of myself, for if I were indeed a fiction, and this visit to New Orleans, no less than the philosophers, suggested the fact, then I had my subject, myself. And even if this resolution, coming to me in the symbolically tidy shop, appeared conventionally epiphanic in the way of a short story, a fictional contrivance, nevertheless it was true. I would lick my wounds and back at my desk, take up my pen and try again. Perhaps it would take time and entail more disappointments, but I felt in light of Mr. William’s illusory substance, his substantial illusion, that I could not deny reality’s fictionality, nor my continued interest in it. After browsing a little more, I purchased the copy of Meditations, and we left.  

It started to get late, and we walked back to the hotel. We came across a crowd circling a folk band that performed in the street, and the frontwoman twirled around the circumference holding out a bucket for tips. She wore a mirrored carnival mask, and as she danced and nodded her head, the mask caught the sun and reflected a warm, orange light. When she twirled our way, I dropped a few bills in her bucket, and she grabbed my hand and pulled me into the center. She spun me three times around, the audience cheered, and as we spun, I saw myself in the mirrored mask she wore, but not really myself, for I was contorted and misshapen, estranged in the curvature of glass, an inflated nose, compressed eyes, with ears elongated and drooping. It was like seeing yourself in a funhouse mirror. As she let me go and I dizzily stepped back to my wife, I thought I had winked at myself. Or rather the reflection in the mask, myself looking back, had winked at me. 

*

The next morning I sat alone in the hotel lobby with a coffee and my Meditations of Aurelius. My wife was sleeping in. Coming down I had passed two housekeepers pushing gray carts piled up with blankets and towels. “Good morning, Mr. William,” they said with a smile and nod. I wondered whether one of them had left the flowers for us. Last night as we went out, the concierge said, “Your taxi will be here any minute. Is there anything else we can do?” I said no, and that we appreciated the flowers at turndown. “Flowers, sir?” he said smiling, but his lips drew back, and his skin tightened. An ill-fitting smile, I recognized, it was insincere, he merely wore it. “Yes, well, we’re pleased you enjoyed them.” It was clear he knew nothing of the flowers, and this in turn made something clear to me: I really had left the $250 tip. Why else this eccentric gesture by the housekeeping staff, unless my reputation, or rather Mr. William’s, was ridiculously inflated by that excessive tip?

I became more suspicious of every gesture of the staff, as if they were motivated only by Mr. William’s reputation for prodigality, as if they might even contrive a service, like the flowers, in hopes of contriving a tip. Not that my suspicions made me any less openhanded. Stepping outside to wait for the taxi, I sneezed, and the bellhop said, “God bless you, sir.” I mumbled a thanks and with eyes downcast gave him a few dollars for his trouble. He received the tip with confusion, and when the taxi arrived a few moments later, he said, “Well, God bless you, sir,” and like a Pavlovian dog, automatically there was another bill in my hand, and with a gracious and slight bow, he took the tip, said “God bless—. But thank you, sir,” and shut the door of the taxi behind us. 

Alas, the bills I handed over were real, all too real, meanwhile the hand from which they passed was counterfeit.

By the end of the evening my wallet was empty. So I had come down early this morning to withdraw cash from the lonely ATM at the end of a utility hall. Initially on discovering my wallet empty, I thought, “Well, nothing to be done, the housekeepers are unlucky this time.” But how could I leave nothing? They recognized my face, even if I did not recognize my face, and known by the staff under however false a pretense—the persona an impulsive joke, the purchase of the champagne an uncharacteristic indulgence, the hefty tip a pure accident—I could not disappoint. I had a reputation, and to think I could acquit myself of it now was as dishonest as that character to whom the reputation was owed. And if, after all, I had successfully worn a mask, why not follow through? The New Yorker could reject my fiction, but so long as I finished out my generous tipping, the hotel staff could not reject my reality, however fictitious.

The squat ATM was an eyesore, rigid and gray in the opulence of the hotel. When I inserted my card, it greeted me, and after I input my information, it notified me of a $3 service fee. A tip for the machine! After it worked the cash from between its steel gums, I mumbled, “Thank you,” and the machine chirped with pleasure.

Walking back to the room, I reflected that soon all the champagne we consumed would complete its humble transformation, filtered through the liver and excreted from the body, just as Marcus Aurelius in the pages of the Meditations reflects on the origins of our apparent pleasures: “These foods and dishes...are only dead fish, birds, and pigs; this Falernian wine is a bit of grape-juice; this purple-edged toga is mere sheep’s hairs dipped in the blood of shellfish.” Of more lasting value was my reputation among the hotel staff as a big spender, a generous tipper, a ridiculous but openhanded man. But even that, admittedly, would fade after a few days, the staff forgetting all about me, their minds metabolizing and burning away the inessential no less than the body. Aurelius reflects that the greatest reputation is still a small thing, “dependent as it is on a succession of fast-perishing little men who have no knowledge even of their own selves, much less of one long dead and gone.” I would be forgotten, replaced by the next guest of that room, who would sleep where I slept, shower where I showered, dream where I dreamed, long where I longed, perhaps to think where I thought: who is this self I’ve taken up residence in for a while?

In the room my wife still slept. She was a deep sleeper, even loud noises rarely woke her. At home we had a spray bottle at the bedside, for only a spritz of water to the face was guaranteed to return her to the land of the living. I often joked that I wished she’d take me with her, wherever she went. I stepped out onto the balcony.

It was a cool, Sunday morning, gray, and after a few minutes the church bells began to ring out over the rooftops, and I listened with pleasure to the lingering tones as they died away. For now Bourbon Street remained silent, and the ethereal chimes as they blanketed the city seemed to empty it of distinctions, everything unified under the gentle weight of the bells. I had flown from myself over the weekend, and when we returned home, I would tell my wife the unfortunate end of my story. But that, of course, is a different story. And here all along I’ve been chasing after another, like a dog after its tail. So then—all that was later, at the desk again, struggling again, wrestling with words and hoping they might be published again. Right now, with the church bells ringing, I’d enjoy the moment, enjoy inhabiting the role of Mr. William, and like those going to the Sunday services, I would practice a spiritual exercise of my own: occupy the present, this passing moment, breath by breath, for even the moment was a fiction, the cognitive processing of an experience already gone, by a self who has already disappeared.