Little Luxury

A fireplace, smoked salmon, and a comfy chair. Dare I quote the Gershwins?

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I’m not great at relaxing. I never have been. Still, there are days when I want peace and quiet but I don’t want to just sit in the house, and I often feel restless and achy. I want to do something but I don’t know what to do! I had one of these days recently, and Chris saw me twisting into myself in the kitchen. “Okay,” he said. “If you could do anything today, what would you do?” It was not quite so cold outside that it would be painful to walk around–just leather jacket cold, which I find quite reasonable.

“I would go to the Marlton and sit in the lobby by the fireplace and read my book,” I said.

The Marlton Hotel, housed in a building some 126 or so years old, was once a retreat for artists and writers who could afford only its single room occupancy rates. The Marlton counts among its historic residents the likes of everyone from Jack Kerouac, who wrote his books Tristessa and The Subterraneans in his quarters there; as well as Lillian Gish, Julie Andrews, Mickey Rourke, and countless others. It was later converted into a dorm, and unconverted in 2012 by hotelier Sean McPherson, also responsible for The Bowery Hotel, the Jane, and the newly revived Chelsea Hotel, the latter also famed for its artistic past. In short, it was once…not so grand. And now it is.

Magali told me about the Marlton back in March of 2020–oh, we were so young! I had just gotten my book deal and purchased Courtney Maum’s Before and After the Book Deal to read. I was hoping for a place to sit comfortably and ingest it. In the crispness of early March, Magali, native New Yorker that she is, suggested The Marlton. I had walked past it before on West 8th Street, but I had never been inside. I also don’t know if I had ever sat in front of a real, wood-burning fireplace before–we tend not to have a lot of those in South Florida. The feeling was…luscious. And it was free.

It was my only answer to the question of what to do this past Sunday. I arrived and found a chair amidst its cozy beige carpet and dark wood paneling, near the ornate fireplace. People sat at tables nearby conversing or working on laptops, they sat in armchairs reading. They noshed on sandwiches from white plates, picked at salads with long, slim silver forks plucked from rolls of white cloth napkins courtesy of the hotel restaurant, Chez Nous.

While I’m told the seats nearest the fireplace are reserved for hotel guests, there are still a wealth of cozy chairs and couches just outside of it, perfect for curling up with a good book. The hostess brings me to one of these seats, beige and nubby like a teddy bear coat, its back high enough to give me my own kind of cocoon. I nestle in and crack open the book I’ve been reading, nay, working on: at some 739 pages, it’s Hollywood, the oral history by Jeanine Basinger and Sam Wasson, and for the love of god I’m finally on the last 140 or so pages. By the time I have finished I will have not so much read it as conquered it.

And so I sit and read in front of the fire, in this plush, cuddly armchair and good god does it feel luxurious, this combination of being able to sit and read and to do so in such a location. I feel lucky. I’ve said it before, but New York has this way of dropping little gifts into your life, gifts that cost nothing but a subway ride, and that’s what this feels like. I get lost in the stories of Robert Evans and The Godfather and Easy Rider and Martin Scorsese and Taxi Driver. Plates clink around me. The girls across from me in leggings and Uggs document their sandwiches and books before diving in to each. A man who looks an awful lot like Wes Anderson peruses his phone. It’s warm but not too warm, glamorous in the way a vintage camel coat is–subtle and tasteful but still oozing with its own inherent splendor. It’s crowded in that New York way I love, where everyone is close by but keeping to themselves, the way we did on the subway before people started playing videos without their headphones on.

I feel a faint yearning in my stomach and pick my gaze up from my book. By the fire, a man in a dark plaid blazer, matching turtleneck, and gold rings bites into a crisp piece of multigrain toast with a smear of dark jam. I wonder who he could be, this man of style, a guest in the hotel enjoying his lunch. Also that bread, it looks amazing. In another bout of Marlton luxury, you can order lunch directly to your chair. So I do, the saumon fume, a smoked salmon sandwich with lettuce, tomato, cucumber, and tartar sauce on that bread (seven grain, as it turns out). And let me tell you–it is without a doubt one of the best sandwiches I have ever had. The seven grain was just as toasty as it looked, crisp on the outside and chewy underneath. The thinnest cucumber slices, the sweetest tomatoes, the creamiest tartar, the plushest, velvetiest smoked salmon. I wondered to myself what planet I was living on, where such a moment like this was possible. A fireplace, smoked salmon, a comfy chair, all on an otherwise gray January Sunday. Dare I quote the Gershwins? I do. Who could ask for anything more?

When I tire of reading, I trot myself down 8th Street and peruse the shops, marveling at the early 20th century architecture, eventually making my way up 6th Avenue and then home. When I arrive, I stand at the kitchen counter for a while and tell Chris about my day.

“You seem so chill,” he says. “I am,” I laugh, realizing this is only rarely a way I describe myself. The feeling is not unlike the time I spent in the sauna not too long ago.

I did it, I relaxed.