And I didn’t care. I was here. New York, where it was all going to start happening soon for Cindy Jakubek. I didn’t care about the thread-count on the sheets or how thick the carpet pile was or whether I could get BBC World News on the radio. This place was just fine. As soon as I was unpacked and had left a voice mail at Learned’s number I took a shower—not so much because I really needed a shower as because it gave me an excuse to wrap my squeaky-clean self in a decadently luxurious Hilton room robe while I swigged ice water and posted all the naïve exuberance you just read on my blog.
I had finished the post and was pulling my jeans back on when my mobile phone chirped. Paul’s number blinked at me in the window. I had offered to buy Paul a plane ticket from Philly, but that didn’t jibe with the live-by-his-wits, street-smart hustler narrative he’s been writing for himself since Harvard cashed the last big check his grandfather’s trust fund would ever write. Paul had cadged a ride from a buddy who could get him as far as Newark International, and figured he’d take a cab from there.
“What’s up, tiger? Did Newark work out okay?”
“Perfect. Had to say no to some guy who offered to carry my computer bag and show me where the cabs are.”
“Good move.”
“He must’ve thought I was from Indiana or someplace instead of Philly.” Paul sounded buoyant. “Anyway, I found the cabs all by myself and we’ve made it to Manhattan, but the cabbie is having trouble locating midtown.”
“If he’s a Newark cabbie you’re lucky he found the George Washington Bridge. How hungry are you?”
“I’m starving. Hold on a sec.” In my Technicolor imagination I saw Paul pressing his nose up against the Plexiglas screen between the front and back seats and addressing the cabbie with urgent exasperation. “Hilton Midtown….Hil-ton Mid-town. It’s a hotel….No! Not Lex. Sixth! Just because they both have an x in them….Sixth Avenue!….Jesus!”
“Try Avenue of the Americas,” I suggested.
“That’s just for tourists.”
“Doesn’t sound like your guy is a native.”
“Not far from Thirty Rock.” Paul was addressing the cabbie again. “You know where Thirty Rock is, right?”
“How about Saint Patrick’s Cathedral?” I offered this helpful suggestion just before I dimly heard a cabbie voice saying something that might have been Allah Akbar! “No, second thought, scratch St. Pat’s.”
“He’s calling his dispatcher for directions. I’ll bet Damon Runyon never had to put up with this kind of bullshit.”
“Tell you what.” I checked my watch. “It’s pushing four thirty. How about if I order room service in ten minutes. You and the food should arrive about the same time. We can eat an early dinner and talk about what to do tonight.”
“Deal. Ibn Saud here just found a street going uptown, so I might even have time to freshen up before they wheel the table in.”
“New York strip medium rare, right?”
“Roger that,” Paul confirmed. “See you sometime between now and midnight.”
I clicked off my Droid and dug out the room service menu to see if I could find something tasty that had never had a mother. Waldorf salad. Close enough. When I punched the In-Room-Dining button on the room phone, I got someone who sounded like she was just a tiny bit tired of talking to people who speak louder and more slowly when they hear a Latina accent. I don’t do that. I got the order placed, absorbed her promise that it would be up within twenty-five to forty-five minutes, cradled the phone—and suddenly saw a red light blinking.
Couldn’t be Paul, because he would have called my mobile phone. Learned, maybe? Except I was sure I’d left my mobile phone number for him as well. I pushed a button above an exquisitely anachronistic envelope icon.
Not Learned. Turns out I’d gotten a fax—which didn’t make a lot of sense. Hmm. Ordinarily I would have gone down to get the thing myself, but I didn’t want to risk missing the room-service delivery if it came early. I asked the sort of nice person who was talking to me to have someone bring it up.
Then I went back to doing the hotel thing. Making the most of a hotel experience involves both art and science. I’d gotten a taste of it during recruiting season, when half-a-dozen firms had put me up overnight on callbacks, and I’d refined my technique while traveling a few times with Judge Mercado. By now I had it down pretty well: Two thick pillows plopped vertically against the headboard with Cindy’s head and shoulders nestled in them; raspberry Snapple bought from a CVS during my walk (instead of bottled water taken from the grotesquely overpriced minibar) within reach on the nightstand; Kindle in my lap and TV remote beside me; tube on and flipping at my whim among WABC, CNN, and whatever college football contest ESPN had decided was this week’s Game of the Century.
That’s it. Unstructured time. Vastly more self-indulgent than dropping almost a hundred bucks on dinner for two, as I’d be doing within an hour. Pure me-time. For twenty minutes I was going to make Marie Antoinette look like a Calvinist.
Paul made it before the food. I gave him the room number when he called from the lobby, muted U.S.C. versus Washington or whatever it was, and bounded to the door when I heard his knock. He was wearing a Navy peacoat, an olive drab watch cap, and khaki pants, all while carrying a duffel bag with camouflage coloring. Military surplus by Benneton. The only thing he had that didn’t look like he’d picked it up at a Pentagon rummage sale was his black leather computer bag.
I could have restrained myself but I didn’t. With an elated yelp that would have scandalized Jane Austen I leaped on him to hug his neck with my arms and his hips with my legs as soon as I’d swung the door open. He barely had time to drop the duffel bag and computer satchel. He caught me with a game and delighted OOF!, wrapped his left arm around my back, and wedged his right arm underneath my fanny to hold me in place for a kiss full of passion and longing. I hungrily filled my nose with the scent of Dial soap, Old Spice, and Head and Shoulders, pressed my upper lip into the bristles of his moustache, and tasted the McDonald’s french fries that still lingered in his mouth despite the breath mint he’d popped.
“Someone is going to tell us to get a room,” Paul whispered.
“We already have one.”
“Race you there.”
He carried me into the room and let me slide down his body to the floor.
“I win by a tush,” I murmured, since my fanny had crossed the threshold before the rest of me and all of him. “Don’t forget your bags.”
It took Paul less than ten seconds to truck his modest luggage into the room. While he was doing that I checked the clock. We had a maximum of eighteen minutes left on the room service delivery window, and what Paul had in mind figured to take about seven of them. When we locked eyes after he closed the door behind him, the only question I had was whether he’d bother to shuck his coat first.
Paul peeled off the watch cap and started to remove his coat—you can always tell an Ivy Leaguer. He had the coat down to mid-bicep on both sides when a knock sounded and a lilting voice called, “Roooom service!”
Paul’s face fell like a ten-year-old who’d just been served carrot cake at his birthday party. I went to get the door while he hustled out of the way. The room service guy wheeled in a linen-covered cart. He flashed me a suggestive little I-was-young-once-myself smile implying that he knew exactly what was going on. While Paul finished shedding his coat and got his computer plugged in, the waiter took half-dome covers off our entrées with a showy voila gesture, and then handed me a cute little leatherette folder.
I examined the bill, because that’s the kind of thing you do if your dad was a machinist. $39.95 for the steak, natch. $23.95 for the salad. Ouch. On the plus side, they didn’t charge us for the glasses of ice water. $11.50 for “Gratuity,” thoughtfully computed for me by the In-Room Dining people at 18% so that I wouldn’t have to do any math. (The
y’d left a blank space for “Tip” in case I wanted to improve on the “gratuity,” but I figured 18% was plenty for taking off two plate covers.) Tax of $7.54. And $5.50 for a “Room Service Charge.”
$88.47. Well over a week’s groceries for the five of us when I was growing up. Pang! The thing that really griped me was the separate room service charge. I was paying the Hilton New York Hotel $5.50 to have a guy who probably wasn’t bringing home $10.00 an hour take a five-minute elevator ride. It wasn’t that I couldn’t afford it or hadn’t realized that it was part of the package. It just seemed wrong, a kind of greed-is-good excess for its own sake, like lighting a cigar with a ten-dollar bill.
Oh well, welcome to New York. I signed the chit with a flourish and smilingly returned it, as if spending the GDP of Botswana on dinner was the kind of thing I did every day.
The door closed. Paul looked directly at me. Then he turned his head thirty degrees and looked directly at twelve ounces of well-marbled beef on a plate. When he looked back at me, I had a pretty good idea of which way this one was going.
“Personally,” he said, “I think steak at room temperature tastes great.”
I felt waves of temptation pounding relentlessly against the leaky dike of my conscience. At that moment I wanted sexual intimacy with him more than I’ve ever wanted chocolate, and that’s saying something. But I knew that Paul had been living on Big Macs and baloney sandwiches since our last meal together, and steak at room temperature sucks. Sex is important, but not as important as love.
“We’re grown-ups.” I hoped he’d recognize my primness as self-mockery. “We can prioritize our appetites.”
He folded me in an embrace that took my breath away—that’s a physical observation, not a metaphor.
“I love it when you talk dirty. Say it again.’”
“Prioritize our appetites,” I repeated in a breathy voice. Then I bit his earlobe.
“Ow!” He clapped his right hand over his ear. “I thought you were a vegetarian.”
“I make exceptions. Let’s eat while the meals are still fresh.”
We sat down at the service cart with all the finesse of a couple of ninth-graders copping feels at a mixer behind the chaperones’ backs. Paul swung a desk chair over to the salad end of the cart and gallantly took the corner of the bed as his own seat. I let him swallow three generous slices of steak before I introduced the next topic on my Paul agenda.
“So, after we’ve wallowed in carnal lust for a while, what would you like to do for the rest of the evening?”
“It wouldn’t exactly break my heart to wallow in carnal lust until dawn.”
“Interesting thought.” I tried not to sound judgmental, but a novelist is an observer and Paul picked up the subtle cue.
“I know,” he said, acknowledging my unspoken demurrer. “We’re in New York City. We’re within walking distance of Broadway and a subway ride from the Village. We shouldn’t spend all night in a generic hotel room that could just as easily be in Philly or Cleveland. You’re absolutely right.”
“I couldn’t find any tickets at the discount booth. But we could go online and see what’s still available at full price. Everything on Broadway can’t be SRO, even if it is Thanksgiving weekend.”
“We could.” Paul sliced some steak. “ Or there’s probably an indie-cult film festival going on in Tribeca or something where we could see some stuff that’ll never show up at your local multi-plex. Or—what’s that?”
“What’s what?”
“Someone just slipped a white envelope under your door.”
“Oh, that’s gotta be the fax someone sent me. I told them to send it up.”
“Should you check it out? I mean, could be from your boss or something, right?”
What he meant was, check it now while I’m still eating steak instead of fifteen minutes from now when I’m planning on doing something else. I grinned at him around a juicy bit of apple from the salad. Then I fetched the envelope. Inside I found a Hilton fax cover sheet and one other sheet of paper:
Cynthia Jakubek, Esq.
Greetings!
You have been selected—by the Selective Legal Services System! Bring this paper to 75 Park Avenue, 40Th Floor, at 8:00 Tonight—Saturday, November 27th—For admission to a reception for New York’s next generation of legal superstars!
Meet, greet, eat, drink, and network!
Sponsored by the Association of the Bar of the City of New York, in Cooperation with the Leading Firms Listed Below:
A list of twelve law firms on anyone’s A-List followed. Calder & Bull was one of them.
I started to hand it to Paul, and then realized that that would be inconsiderate. I laid it on the table where he could read it without slowing up his knife-and-fork work. As a future Wall Street associate, I could appreciate the value of multitasking. He looked at it while he swallowed a piece of steak, speared another piece, looked back at it while he chewed that one, and then looked up at me.
“Command performance?”
I am deeply ashamed to admit that I didn’t say no instantly. For five long seconds I actually thought about whether I should say yes, even though I’d hate myself in the morning. Then a little blue-collar pride asserted itself. Okay, I was selling out. But I was selling out for a hundred-and-a-half a year, not for a free cosmopolitan. You want to give me three hours notice that I’ll be working all night on a preliminary injunction brief—fine. But not for a cocktail party when you’re not even paying my health insurance premiums yet.
“No. Tonight belongs to you.”
“God, I love it when you talk dirty.”
“You already used that line.”
“It keeps working.” He polished off more steak. “I wonder how they tracked you down here.”
“Good question. They have my numbers at Mendoza’s office, and I left contact information there for this weekend. Maybe they faxed it there and it got forwarded automatically.”
“You have an automatic forwarding app?”
“I have every app there is. I bet this Droid could shine my shoes if I told it to.”
“If you’d been in charge of the D-Day invasion,” he said gravely, “we would have captured St.-Lo at H-Hour plus six—and we wouldn’t have shot any prisoners.”
Warmed by that charming blarney, I returned to my salad. Sexual tension sharpens the senses. Have you ever noticed that? The lettuce tasted crisper, the silverware felt heftier, the incidental sounds in the corridor seemed clearer, and every morsel of the dead steer that Paul lifted to his mouth seemed sharply defined.
Also, deferral enhances desire. That’s my second Searing Insight of the Day. You see a slice of chocolate cake and you think it would taste good. But make yourself put off eating it for half-an-hour. Watch it become an obsession. Feel yourself salivating at every thought of it. Notice with clinical interest as the minutes tick away how you get to the point where you’d kill for the thing. As I sat there nibbling my rabbit food and watching Paul savor every juicy bite of his steak, the sense of breathless urgency spreading through my body got hotter and more volatile with each passing second.
I laid my fork down beside the almost empty salad bowl.
I took a sip of ice water.
I stood up deliberately, trembling with the effort at self-control.
Turning feverish eyes toward me, Paul hacked at the rapidly diminishing steak with the ferocity of a medieval knight trying to slice through enemy armor.
“Take your time.” I walked around the bed to its far side, shoved the pillows out of the way, and turned down the cover and the top sheet with decisive briskness, like a medical examiner whipping the sheet off a corpse in preparation for an autopsy.
Paul’s silverware clattered on his plate.
I undid the top button on my blouse.
Paul stood up and turned around.
I undid the second button.
Paul clambered onto the bed and began knee-walking across it toward me.
The room phone rang.
A scream of primal frustration erupted from Paul as he snapped his head back and smacked his fists with punishing force on his thighs.
Savvier than Paul in hotel-craft, I knew the call would be from In-Room Dining, asking if we were ready to have someone come after our table. I held an unconcerned index finger up toward Paul in a just-one-minute gesture with one hand while I answered the phone with the other.
“Hello,” a cultivated voice said. “This is Walter Learned. I’m in the lobby. Is this a good time?”
Chapter Twelve
So that’s how I found out that the one thing on Earth Paul wanted even more than sex with me was a decent New York apartment. For Paul’s benefit, I slowly and distinctly repeated “Mis…ter Learn…ed” into the phone, like a special education teacher on a lame sitcom. Paul stopped in mid-pant. He nodded vigorously and gave me two thumbs up.
“Uh, yeah…sure,” I said. “This is a great time. Just finished dinner. Room eighteen-oh-five.”
“Look for me in five minutes.”
I hung up the phone and focused on Paul.
“Five minutes isn’t enough for a cold shower. Think of something anerotic, like Sarah Palin gutting a moose.”
After primly rebuttoning my blouse and flicking a few insubordinate strands of hair back into place, I got the room service table out into the hall. I accomplished that just in time to see Learned striding from the elevator corridor with his oxblood attaché case swinging slightly in his right hand. His outfit today bore no resemblance to the country squire look he’d been sporting on Tuesday. He was wearing caramel colored cargo pants, Nike cross-trainers, and a Pendleton black-and-red plaid shirt, all under a parka that looked suitable for above the timberline.
But Remember Their Names Page 10