The "Perfect Guests": Who Would You Be If You Walked Away from Your Life?

A local news story has reanimated a guilty fantasy of mine: throw away the rules, max out the credit card at a fancy hotel, damn the consequences.

According to the Boston Globe's "'Perfect Inn Guests" Swindled Proprietors, Police Say," Jane and Benjamin Wolff have been caught and arraigned "on charges of defrauding an innkeeper" after staying in a series of tourist hotels. They allegedly ran up big bills—such as $3,600 at the Hawthorne Inn in Concord for 19 days—then split without paying:

"They lingered over breakfast, raving about the homemade granola and chatting amiably with other guests at the richly appointed 19th-century bed-and-breakfast. They kept their room spotless, whiled away afternoons over books and brownies, and entertained their hosts with amusing stories."

"They seemed like your grandparents," another innkeeper is quoted in the Globe. This week the local Fox News station hyped the victimization of these trusting B-and-B owners and ran footage of the Wolffs in court.

The Globe notes that the "reasons such a couple would go to those lengths...have so far eluded authorities." The story points out that Jane Wolff filed for bankruptcy in 2005.

I can think of lots of motivations for this scam, from skilled con artistry to desperation. If you made the movie, you could portray the Wolffs as schemers (Marlon Brando and Joan Collins) or as dreamers on a spree before getting free room and board in jail (Dustin Hoffman and Shirley MacLaine). One person calls them "an elderly Bonnie and Clyde."

"At this point, they are homeless people knowingly breaking the law," a Concord police detective told a TV news reporter. "They do have family. It's just an odd case."

I see 79-year-old Benjamin's hunched back and stiff movements in the courtroom, and I wonder about why they might feel estranged from their family. The Wolffs are my parents' age, and if my mom and dad weren't so ill, I can imagine them saying, what the heck, let's live high off the hog for a few days.

The TV news reports present their departure from the usual roles played by "sweet" seniors as disturbing and titillating. The lack of a clear-cut explanation seems to make everyone nervous. So far, the reports don't contain quotes from the Wolffs—just shots of Jane hurrying away from a thrusting microphone—although a piece from another local paper notes that Jane's son decided not to to pay the money they owe; apparently they've been pulling such stunts for years.

A salon owner in Newburyport who got stuck with two bad checks laughs and says, "They are a team."

So the perfect guests are probably schemers. But it does give me a little thrill that the couple managed to fool innkeepers who often charge more than $200 a night. Benjamin claimed to be a doctor who "worked at home," as well as a Goldman Sachs executive who was just waiting for a $20 million bank transfer.

And the story—which ran on the Globe's front page—got me wondering where I'd go if my life became a financial and emotional train wreck.

The dreamer in me has to admit that I've thought about starting life fresh with a new identity. Well, not really thought about it in a premeditated way, such as figuring out the logistics and calling some friend of a friend to help me with getting fake ID. I'm basing this on mystery novels now and also qualifying wildly, because in no way do I truly want to take a powder and leave everybody I know to become a river-boat gambling queen or a waitress in Key West.

Yet years ago, when I read Anne Tyler's Ladder of Years, before I even had a child, it did give me another kind of vicarious thrill.

In that novel, during a low-rent beach vacation, a mother just decides to walk away from the house and become somebody else—somebody free of the demands of squabbling, irritating others. As Cathleen Schine writes in her 1995 review of the book in the New York Times:

"If the reader is never quite sure why Delia deserts her life, neither is Delia herself. All she can say to explain herself when her family finally tracks her down is, 'I'm here because I just like the thought of beginning again from scratch.'"

Shocking as it may seem, I've felt overwhelmed by laundry and arguments over ice cream cones and one too many episodes of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. My husband is a total mensch and gorgeous guy, but we butt heads on occasion. I've also quietly steamed over long-time conflicts with other family members whom I'll just call "difficult."

I'd like to say that the fantasy has me traveling the world, flirting with dangerous people or descending into a racy alternate existence. Call this the Don Draper approach in Mad Men. But I'm more captivated by the thought of solitude. I'm a hermit in a cottage on a rugged seacoast, scribbling in my notebooks, accepting the simple gifts of food and drink brought by villagers because of my renowned wisdom.

Or for a few seconds, I'd like to be the perfect guest—the person who's a cipher, who you can never get too intimate with‚ pampered by luxe sheets and complimentary brownies.

Of course, Don Draper's multiple identities don't make him happier. And Delia of Ladder of Years discovers that she can't escape herself. She establishes a new identity in a new town, but soon enough new people are relying on her.

We parents may fantasize about escape, but most of us are wired to care for others. But, oh, to have a night or two in the Musketaquid Room room of the Hawthorne Inn, with the free videos and breakfasts. Here's a description of the room from the inn's website:

"Sunrise filters through a sieve of ancient maple boughs and breaches the bay window sill; a new morning embraces you. The flood of warmth charges the room with a glow of burnt umber, sienna and rust as walls and carpets and the burnished wood of antiques awaken."

What was that about carpe diem?


This piece has been cross-posted on Open Salon.

Oh California...I'm Not Coming Home

In the 1970s, when I left the Bay Area to go to college, Joni Mitchell's "California" was my anthem. I was a wraith of a girl, a straight-A student. I was never a surfer, but Beach Boys songs reminded me of home, too. Back then, being from California seemed essential.

Here's Joni singing with all that youthful longing:

But my heart cried out for you California
Oh California I'm coming home...

I still love California. But I can no longer come home to it in a romantic swoon, and it's not just because the Golden State has been tarnished by economic and natural disaster. It's because I've lost the sense that any place can "take me as I am." My loss is personal and profound, and in it I recognize the calls for a return to an older dream of America.

I support the Obama administration, but this emotional recognition worries me. On Saturday, September 12, thousands will participate in the "Taxpayer March on DC." I hope White House staffers are paying due respect to the feelings under all the crazy talk. I fear they are not.

It's hair-trigger, the way so many leap from their own grief to political rage. I know my lack of security has everything to do with the fragile health of my parents. I'm outraged at the government, but letting my anger spill over to governors and presidents does me no good. Maybe it feels good for a few seconds, but then it doesn't, not at all.

If you look at websites for groups like the Tea Party Patriots, there's little content about policy. I tried to pull a quote with substance, yet all I found were references to "our Founding Fathers," "free markets," and "limited government." It's all about mobilizing, speaking up, resisting.

It's relentlessly personal. It's feeling-driven, just like a pop song, and what an irony that the language of lefty organizing—all that attitude about "Sunset pigs," in Joni's words—now does service for conservatives. Our supposedly lost country is a long way from 1971 and Laurel Canyon on her album Blue. Yet in that California dream, everyone wanted their own freedom, too. They wanted to sink into a reverie of pleasure.

No bourgeois values. No war. That was just a dream some of us had.

California has always had a libertarian strain. My dad the political-science professor understood this well, starting with the election of Ronald Reagan as governor in 1966. But I didn't get the zeitgeist shift earlier this summer, when my family happened across a "tea party" rally in Times Square. One block was suddenly packed with white skin, and there were exhortations about "not taking it anymore" from revved-up guys on megaphones.

I did feel the shift by the end of August, however, in San Diego. An old friend we visited in La Jolla says that on election night, when she ran out her door to cheer for Barack Obama the minute the polls closed, she heard only one other answering yodel blocks away.

There was far more cheering in the Bay Area and Los Angeles last November, but the aggrieved conservatism is also California. As a teenager, clutching both Blue and David Bowie's Diamond Dogs as identity totems, it was easy to sneer at Southern California. Yet its dreams of beaches and surfers and casual hook-ups most evoked what I called myself then.

We're all culpable in our desire for a metaphorical home. The longing for a golden past is easily manipulated by conservative interests, who use code words like "individual liberties" and "fighting change." But existential angst is what I'm talking about here—a complex brew that can send the strongest of us running to a cause. Progressive politicians reveal their own biases when they don't see how much the current dissent is animated by hurt.

Oh California. You symbolize more than you know.

My home is elsewhere and has been for years. But I visit the Bay Area often because my parents are both ill. My father, in particular, is slipping into the frozen darkness of Parkinson's Disease. On a good afternoon, he and I might spend ten minutes under the lemon tree in his backyard, an occasional hummingbird buzzing in the leaves. I smell my past there: the scent of the dry hills. I smell my dear father, in his baggy sweatshirt, as he talks about letting go, about having lived a good life, about his worries for my mother.

Yes, I'm scared that one season is ending as another begins. But to conflate my loss and fear with the state of the country would be to lose my soul—and these days, my soul is the thing I come home to.

Joni has lost her amazing young voice, too. But some would say she's attained something richer and more hard-won. Even by 1976 and her album Hejira, she was on the endless road again. Ron Rosenbaum's paean to her transcendent song "Amelia," about the "ghost of aviation," explores longing in a far more complicated key:

I was driving across the burning desert
When I spotted six jet planes
Leaving six white vapor trails across the bleak terrain
It was the hexagram of the heavens
It was the strings of my guitar
Amelia, it was just a false alarm

As Rosenbaum notes of the many meanings of false alarm, "when used colloquially, [it] is more often taken to be analogous to—if not synonymous with—'false hope.'"

Joni was never a romantic swooner. In a review in NOW Magazine, Susan Cole complains of a difficult interview with her in 1994. Cole quotes Michelle Mercer, author of the biography Will You Take Me As I Am: Joni Mitchell's Blue Period, as saying, “Joni Mitchell is not like us. She’s driven to recreate herself as an artist in ways that very few people do. She’s been through so many stages of regeneration.”

Last week in La Jolla, I took a walk to the beach by myself before heading to the airport. At the end of a cul-de-sac, among all these deceptively modest bungalows in a million-dollar neighborhood, I stepped out on a ledge between houses. There was the blue Pacific and the white sand and a watery haze in the air. I expected to feel a last "ah," a sweet snort of Southern Californian fun and sun to take back with me to the east coast.

Instead I was suffused by sadness. My eyes blurred. I watched several surfers up the beach, black crescents in their wet suits. The swells were large but orderly, and when one surfer stood, he or she descended into beautiful white froth, then paddled back out to do it again.

I kept watching them, counting seconds, daring myself to wait until they took another wave—and two did, cutting down the same swell and into the same sparkling froth—not graceful, but fully alive and present.

I thought of myself, getting up and roaring down another wave, of the need to keep getting up and splashing down into the cold froth. I thought of my father, who often needs a push to get started out of his chair just to take a few mincing, wobbly steps forward, who needs my help now to lift his legs onto the bed before descending into sleep.

Oh it gets so lonely
When you're walking
And the streets are full of strangers
All the news of home you read
More about the war
And the bloody changes
Oh will you take me as l am?
Will you take me as l am?
Will you?

Oh California. I will remember you. I watch the surfers and also feel ecstatic. The day I don't find myself yodeling down a wave is the day I die—or so I tell myself, under a misty blue sky, my body still brown and whole and able to lift me up.