Airbnb Art

and the people we trust

In Buenos Aires, the art in my Airbnb included side-by-side prints of the same New Yorker cover; in Milan, pretend menus from a pretend gelato shop. Over the bed in Mexico City, tassels hung in the shape of a smile. In the Texas Hill Country, oversized, out-of-focus giraffe photos dotted the living room walls. Examining the giraffes, my friend called Airbnb art “a window into the minds of the hosts.”

But which part of the mind? Or which part of the brain? Not the cerebral cortex, where we appraise aesthetics. Perhaps the danger-detecting amygdala. Hosts seem to fill their rentals with whatever they wouldn’t miss were it damaged or stolen, whatever won’t force them to count on strangers to behave.

Airbnb art makes me sad—not because it’s ugly, but because it’s a symbol of pervasive skittishness. In response to a Pew Research Center poll asking, Do you think most people would take advantage of you if they got the chance or would try to be fair no matter what?, 58% of Americans picked the former. That was five years ago. Today, surely, the percentage would be even higher.

Airbnb art reminds me that in this society we keep a safe distance, the way we should if we encounter a bear. When I enter an Airbnb, face-to-face with no one; using the key from the lock box, whose code will change as soon as my stay ends; when I’m greeted by a framed print that reveals nothing about the artist who made it or the person who bought it, I silently, defensively address the host: Fine, I don’t trust you, either.

But if I were a host, I, too, would hang cheap, bland art; I, too, have what some would call trust issues, though that’s not what I call them. Trust issues implies pathology. It suggests that weak people grapple with trust, while strong people don’t. Haven’t we all been unpleasantly surprised by people’s behavior? After enough painful surprises, blind trust becomes masochistic. I don’t consider self-preservation an issue.

I wonder if trust is more elusive for women, since we’re constantly reminded that the world is unsafe: Don’t go out alone at night. Stay sober and never lose sight of your drink. Don’t tempt men to attack you. Only park in well-lit spots. Ask a man—but not a predatory man—to walk you to your car.

I swing between trusting no one and trusting everyone, between swallowing the message that women are in danger and pushing back against that message’s subtext: Better stay home. And better keep a man around. I take umbrage, too, with that idea’s extremist contingent: Count on no one but yourself. How toxically American. How cynical. How isolating. I wish I were above it.

A few nights ago from bed, I called to my boyfriend in the next room, “Since you’re standing up and I’m lying down, will you bring me my water bottle?”

Handing me my water bottle, he said, “You can ask me for things even when you’re not lying down.”

He had noticed: Too often, I count on no one but myself. At times not even myself. My intuition, after all, has proven to be far from a hard science.

In many contexts, we all trust “intuitively,” depending on strangers to uphold an unwritten social contract. I trust, for instance, that if I stop someone for directions, he won’t intentionally mislead me; that in the supermarket, fellow shoppers won’t take groceries from my cart; that the passerby I asked for the time told me the real time. I once trusted wholeheartedly that my student who told me she was dying was in fact dying. (She was a grifter and a criminal, living her best life.)

Years ago in Tokyo while out for a run, I heard someone yell, “Hi!” At least I thought that was what I’d heard. Later, I learned that a word that sounds like hi means yes in Japanese, so perhaps he was affirming something; I’ll never know.

Without thinking, I trusted him. I trusted that we’d have a quick, polite interaction. Smiling, I looked toward the voice. And there was a guy standing partially obscured by a bush, leering at me, penis in hand.

I didn’t get a picture of him, but here’s a photo I took in Japan in 2018, on Teshima Island.

A few years later when I lived in New York, I was walking through the subway turnstile when someone grabbed my ass. My first thought was that it was a friend, even though I don’t have those kinds of friends. Again, I wore a big smile as I turned to face a stranger. I’ll never forget that I smiled at him.

During my cocktail waitressing era, men frequently told me to smile. My neutral expression unsettled them. They demanded that I wear the face of trust, to trick myself into trusting.

Madrid. What is that thing?

In his Texas Monthly story about the homogeneity of Airbnb art in Texas, Michael Agresta quotes a host saying, “There’s going to be a horse in sepia. There are going to be some pictures of cactus. And there’s going to be a ‘Live, Laugh, Love’ quote. You start to see the same thing over and over.”

Since I started travel writing, I’ve stayed in dozens of Airbnbs. I’m not saying I’ve never been urged to live-laugh-love, but I don’t “see the same thing over and over.” Nor do I frequently see “…one-of-a-kind touches that relate to the city and state” (another quote from that story). I mean, sure: gelato/Milan. But generally? What does the New Yorker have to do with Argentina? What do giraffes have to do with Buda, Texas?

In that Buda Airbnb, I imagined that while vacationing in Africa, some cousin of the host photographed wildlife and later blew up prints for his relatives. Thank you! said the relatives, thinking, What the hell do I do with giant iphone pictures of giraffes? Only his Airbnb-host cousin thought, I know just what to do with giant iphone pictures of giraffes.

Mexico City/tassels

I’ve been thinking about the people I’ve kept close for years, trying to parse out the threads of my trust. According to research, we trust people based on our perception of their expertise, performance, reliability, reputation, and transparency. But those criteria sound a bit corporate for my taste. Friends in my inner sanctum tell the truth as they see it. They don’t virtue-signal. They don’t keep score. They don’t guilt-trip. They’re unusual, a quality that makes me feel safe. They neither judge me nor suffocate me. They let me show up for them in the ways I show up, not in the ways society defines “showing up.” (I’ll never send you flowers, for example, even if you just cured a disease.) They listen and they like being listened to. They have big hearts and open minds. They let me disappear and come back, and know that I don’t mind if they disappear and come back. They are not necessarily consistent with phone calls, but they are consistent in their love.  

My standards for temporarily trusting strangers are simpler: If I read in their eyes that they’re open to helping others, caring for others, I trust them. I don’t know how to describe what goodness looks like in a pair of eyes. Maybe, as that Supreme Court justice said about porn, I just know it when I see it.

I also trust dogs.

At the end of 2015, my first year as a travel writer, I spent a month in Oaxaca in the south of Mexico. I was interested in the icon Maria Sabina, the late healer from Oaxaca who used mushrooms as medicine. A Mazatec, Maria Sabina understood neither Spanish nor English, and although she couldn’t read, she spoke in poetry. She said that the poetry wasn’t coming from her; it was the mushrooms speaking through her: Put love in tea instead of sugar, and take it looking at the stars.

In the ‘50s, an American banker named R. Gordon Wasson lied to her to gain access to one of her ceremonies, promised he’d never share images of her, and then published a photo essay about the whole thing in Life Magazine. She trusted him. He betrayed her.

Soon, hippies were pouring into Oaxaca, seeking Maria Sabina and her “magic” mushrooms. She performed mushroom ceremonies for Timothy Leary, as well as, some say, for Bob Dylan, John Lennon, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. Her life’s work was to heal the sick, and those who knew her say she healed many people. But she was also used by powerful men who were just looking to get high. In 1985, she died in poverty.

In Oaxaca, I met another woman who was traveling alone, a redhead from France. Having studied it in school, I can read French, but beyond—I don’t know—croissant and ballet, I neither speak nor understand it. Plus, I was learning Spanish, so in my brain, a structure with a two-language limit, Spanish vocabulary was replacing any leftover French vocabulary.

It’s hard to explain how we communicated (imagine rudimentary words in three languages plus Charades), but we became fast friends. Right away, we trusted each other. We could go out together at night and feel safe. Safety may be an illusion, but illusions allow us to live our lives.

One night, somehow, she let me know, “I feel a connection to you.”

“I feel a connection to you!” I said/mimed.

In Oaxaca, my Airbnb displayed a painting of white flowers in a wooden frame, an orange triptych of a tree, the head of an angel protruding from the wall like a deer trophy, and over the bed, a squiggle. But also in Oaxaca, I got to trust and be trusted. To remember how compelling trust can be. How closely it resembles love.

Love,

Diana

P.S. What are your criteria for trust? Let me know in the comments.

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P.P.P.S. A brag: I have a perfect Airbnb score.