Suite Scarlett by Johnson, Maureen
This book is dedicated to anyone who has ever played a dead body on stage or screen. It takes a big actor to lie on the ground and keep quiet. Droop on, my lifeless friends.
ACT I
The Hopewell has been a family-run institution on the Upper East Side for over seventy-five years. It is a jewel box of a hotel, just a slender five stories in the East Sixties, just blocks from Central Park. Furnished in 1929 at the very height of Art Deco style by one of the top designers of the age, J. Allen Raumenberg, it remains a bastion of classic Jazz Age New York glamour. You can practically see the flappers walking across the herringbone lobby floor.
Each guest room is individually named and decorated with the original furnishings, and though time has taken a bit of a toll, they are still a marvel. Of special note is the Empire Suite, the last and most magnificent of Raumenberg’s creations. The silver-blue wallpaper is prewar Parisian and is perfectly lit by the delicate, plum-colored crystal Viennese light fixtures and dramatically cone-shaped, rose-colored wall scones. The rosewood furniture was made in Virginia to his specifications, as was the hand-sewing of all the silver and rose-pink silk accompaniments.
The crowning glory, however, is the gigantic round mirror that sits above the dressing table—a sliver of the top smoked out, to look like a moon just on the verge of being full. There is something magical about this room. It has a spirit of romance and possibility that none of the major hotel chains can ever evoke.
Make sure to start each morning with the hotel’s signature toasted cherry bread, decadent spiced hot chocolate, and the delicate sweet almond biscuits made by the brilliant in-house baker and chef.
What is most unusual about the Hopewell, though, is the total involvement of the large Martin family who own and run the hotel. Though the service is occasionally patchy, the personal touch makes all the difference…
—THE “WHADDYA SAY WE DO NEW YORK?” GUIDEBOOK, 8TH EDITION
A PARTY BEST AVOIDED
On the morning of the tenth of June, Scarlett Martin woke up to the sound of loud impromptu rap penetrating her thin bedroom wall from the direction of the bathroom next door. Scarlett had been trying to ignore this noise for fifteen minutes by incorporating it into her dream, but it was a difficult thing to weave the constantly repeated phrase, “I got a butt-butt, I got a mud hut” into a dream about trying to hide a bunch of rabbits in her T-shirt drawer.
She blinked, groaned the tiniest groan, and opened one eye.
It was hot. Very hot. The little window unit air conditioner in the Orchid Suite, the room she shared with her older sister Lola, hadn’t really functioned correctly in years. Sometimes it left her shivering, and sometimes, like this morning, it did nothing at all except move the hot sheets of air around and give the humidity a nice fluffing up.
Hot weather made Scarlett’s blonde, curly hair into a big fright wig. What in winter were chin-length ringlets became insane, puffed-up worm creatures as soon as June arrived. One of these sprung into action and jabbed Scarlett’s eye as soon as she opened it. She pulled herself upright in bed and opened the sheer purple curtain next to her bed.
It was a well-known fact that you could almost see the Chrysler Building from the Hopewell Hotel, if the other buildings hadn’t been there. Still, she could see into the apartment buildings that backed up to the hotel, and that was always interesting. In a city with so many different types of people and so much competition, mornings were an even playing field where no one looked good or knew where anything was. There was the woman who changed her outfit four times each morning and practiced different poses in the mirror. Two windows over, the obsessive-compulsive guy was cleaning all the burners on his stove. A flight down, there was Anything for Breakfast guy who would (as his name implied) eat anything for breakfast. Today he was pouring melted ice cream over cereal.
Another neighbor, a woman of about seventy, was completely nude on the rooftop patio of the adjacent apartment building. She was reading The New York Times and carefully balancing a cup of coffee by squeezing it between her thighs, which was a completely unacceptable sight at this time in the morning. Or really, any time.
Scarlett reeled backward onto her bed. The rap got louder as the shower that had been running underneath it was turned off. The lyric had moved on to, “Got shoe and socko, get me a taco…”
“Tell me when you’re done in there!” she yelled to the wall. “And shut up!”