The Commander tries to be cool as he shows the hotel room key to Offred as he leads her to the hotel room. Offred notes that the hotel room looks exactly the same as when she would meet Luke here. (Think of the contrast: meeting your secret lover and future husband here versus being forced to sleep with an old man in a make-shift brothel.) Fake flowers and fruit everywhere. Offred spends quite a while describing the artificiality of it. Flowers and fruit so far have been a metaphor for the reproductive process. Here, it’s artificial—just like reproduction in Gilead, perhaps. Or even the artificiality of relationships altogether. Offred gathers herself in the bathroom and sees the white towels in the hotel bathroom that once gave her a bit of excitement. It’s a throwback to seeing the white blanks of where heads once were on the men hanging on the wall in Chapter 6: “The heads are zeros…outlines of features under the white cloth” (32). Offred recalls Moira telling her she’d seen Offred’s mom in a video about the Colonies—wearing gray (gray...