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The narrator’s room at the Excelsior Motel in Monrovia, California symbolizes fantasy. The narrator pays Davey Boutrous’s wife, Claire, $20,000 to redecorate the drab and uninspiring rented room in the style of Le Bristol, a ritzy Parisian hotel where she once stayed. Claire outfits Room 321 with ornate wallpaper, gilt mirrors, “a marble-topped table,” “a pair of [antique] chairs,” a lush carpet, and “a beautiful bosom” of a bed (39). In addition, she buys specialty towels, soaps, artwork, and appliances for the room. The curtains she hangs filter “the daylight into an otherworldly rosy-gold” (59), giving the room an ethereal quality. These aspects of the design underscore its resonance for the narrator as a retreat from her life in Los Angeles. Since she has the room to herself, she’s beholden to no one when she’s there. Her solitude and freedom reify the narrator’s fantasies and dreams.
Furthermore, Room 321 grants the narrator liberty to explore and experiment throughout the novel. Even after she returns to Los Angeles, she continues to regularly visit the room. She hosts gatherings with friends, arranges sexual encounters, or holes up in the space to be alone with her thoughts. The room thus allows her to inhabit a dream world that grants her the illusion of autonomy over her life. In this realm, she can express and explore in new ways.
However, she ultimately realizes that she can’t live in the room forever and her fantasies can’t be contained in a single space but might exist beyond it if she opens herself to this possibility; she must therefore translate the beauty she felt in the room to her lived experience elsewhere. She experiences this revelation while watching Davey dance at the novel’s end. Suddenly, the whole theater feels “eerily like the room. Safe and full of holy potential” (321). The more she channels the atmosphere of Room 321 while watching the dance, the more she realizes about herself and what she experienced in the space. As Davey rises into the air, “the warm, hallowed feeling” of the room keeps growing and expands “beyond the walls, into the street” (321). These surrealist images capture the fantastical qualities of the room and of the narrator’s magical thinking. The descriptions in turn underscore the narrator’s desire to merge her fantasies with her realities and to allow her artistic concepts to coexist with her corporeal experiences.
Repeated references to and descriptions of dance act as a motif of artistic expression throughout the novel. The first reference to dance appears when the narrator dances alone at her friends’ party. She “move[s] discreetly at first, getting [her] bearings,” but then the beat takes hold and she “let[s] [her] vision blur” and begins “fuck[ing] the air” (13). This unbridled moment conveys the narrator’s authentic self. Because her energy originates from her creative center, she can express herself in an uninhibited manner. Dance is therefore a physical way for her to access and convey her artistic self without words.
The same phenomenon happens when scenes of dance recur in subsequent chapters and sections. For example, when Davey performs his dance for the narrator, she marvels at how he has “figured out a way to show the feeling between [them]” (99). She gives herself over to “the beauty of what [is] happening” (99) before her, experiencing profound and ecstatic emotions. The purity of Davey’s dance inspires her response because he’s using the art form to communicate their inarticulable connection. Indeed, the narrator remarks that his dance “only bec[omes] more exactly the truth the longer he [does] it” (99). His movements exist outside conventional physical mannerisms and thus convey a more profound and complex experience than typical human interaction can. The same is true of the dance videos that Davey and the narrator later record and send to one another. Dance becomes a new language they use to exchange raw and mysterious emotions.
The narrator once again notices the power and beauty of dance when she sees Davey perform with Dev at the New York theater. Davey and Dev “danc[e] like two people in love,” creating “a modern pas de deux that [is] erotic without doing anything familiar” (319). In this way, their performance enacts the personal, sexual, and artistic revelations the narrator has experienced throughout the novel. Davey and Dev’s dance reifies the inextricability of the creative and the corporeal and invites the audience to enter a higher plane of experience.
The painting in the motel symbolizes transformation. It appears three times throughout the novel, but the narrator’s impressions of it change each time she encounters it. When Davey first pulls it out from under the bed in Room 321, the narrator insists it’s simply “one of those pictures that’s of nothing, so it won’t offend anyone” (132). Davey, however, theorizes that it’s the image of a woman “walking into the woods or some kind of cave” (132). The narrator is skeptical of this interpretation but later decides that Davey is right and the painting “[isn’t] abstract” and rather contains “a figure”: “The green and gray daubs formed an old woman standing before a darker area, a thicket, a hollow. A cave” (213). The narrator clearly can see the woman in the painting and therefore imagines her standing outside a sealed entrance that she “hadn’t been bold enough” to enter, “or she maybe had, maybe she had gone home and changed everything and the cave had closed anyway” (213).
This particular interpretation of the painting echoes the narrator’s experience and reinforces the novel’s underlying literary allusions to Plato’s allegory of the cave. Just as the woman in the painting has been changed by her experiences inside and outside the cave, the narrator has been changed by her experiences inside and outside Los Angeles and Monrovia. The narrator sees yet another iteration of this painted scene when she encounters the image one last time and suddenly notices “how straight up and down” the woman is, as if she’s guarding the “exquisite—almost sacred—place” in front of which she’s standing (310). The narrator’s interpretations of the cave therefore echo her own journey toward self-discovery and personal transformation. As she changes, her impressions of the woman in the painting change. The novel thus uses the painting as a way to reify the narrator’s ongoing internal evolution and to fortify its complex subtext.
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