by Will Wiles
John-Paul smiled—and this, I believed, was a real smile, not a service smile. It was an outward sign of true pleasure in cracking the problem. “Certainly, sir. I’ll call you when it gets here.”
“Excellent, John-Paul, excellent. Thank you. I’m going to get an espresso—I’ll be in the bar.”
The thought of a taxi—my taxi—heading toward the hotel lifted my spirits. Taxis were a personal service of a kind I adored. Even though they were a routine part of my working life, they still felt wickedly decadent and grown-up, a wild and daring prodigality. They were the realm of my father and his expenses. And my few childhood memories of taxis are also memories of my father. My mother, when she was present in the back of the cab, could not have been more out of place. Every drawn line on her face and tensed muscle screamed of a desire to be elsewhere. She would watch the progress of the meter as if its every accumulating flicker was an insult.
That stare of my mother’s: I remember it so clearly, her severity in the face of the slightest expenditure, the icy laser with which she strafed supermarket shelves. Even today, tearing a piece of clothing makes me fearful; a memory of her exhausted anger if I damaged one of the few items in my wardrobe. All-new outfits still have an almost mystical significance for me. Her watchfulness for extravagance and hypervigilant conservation of every last dull copper in the household budget was essential, of course. We had very little. Expenses were the problem—my father’s expenses. His basic salary was never large, his employers preferring to reward him with a generous travelling budget as compensation for having to spend the bulk of his life away from home and loved ones. But this left the marriage unbalanced. While he ate in restaurants and slept in comfortable hotel rooms, my mother was stretching postage stamps of cling film over half-cans of baked beans and resisting turning on the central heating until past the first frost. We were not poor—not in any sense that keeps the word meaningful—but my childhood was one of constant secondhand and second-best. What made this unbearable for me was its obvious necessity. There was no parental illogic or arbitrariness or double standard to rage against, just blunt, gray, unarguable household facts, picked over at length during the continual acrimony that accompanied my father’s sojourns in the family home. All the tawdry details of budgets and economies and pleasures downgraded or deferred were paraded in front of me at the dinner table as my parents growled and hissed at each other. To my gravest embarrassment, I was dragooned as an ally by my mother: my involuntary sacrifices, my diminished experience of life, exhibited as the result of my father’s choices and unwillingness to change course. I suspected that to be obliged to spend one’s life travelling, away from the hearth and family life, might not be such a sacrifice. The dreams I fostered in these dreary circumstances were modest indeed: taxis, hotels, to buy something as small as a drink and think nothing of it.
Then the arguments stopped: the marriage was over, a few weeks before I reached my teens. Although the paperwork wasn’t formalized for two or three years, my father never set foot in that small house again. The privation did not stop, of course; my mother went out to work and strained every particle to ensure that my conditions did not worsen. But my father’s permanent, engulfing absence was a new and unbearable, inconceivable impoverishment. Unlike the others, I saw it as one my mother had chosen, one she had deliberately and unnecessarily brought down upon us. And resentment took root.
Coffee was the primary scent in the air of the Way Inn bar, backed with a hint of a chemist’s approximation of a pine forest. I ordered an espresso—consciously thinking nothing of it—and scanned for somewhere to sit.
She was there. The redheaded woman. She was neglecting a cappuccino, hunched over a sprawl of papers covered in excitable doodles. Her hair was tied back, and everything about her pose said deep thought. It was as if the designs in front of her had just unexpectedly danced on the page, and she was waiting to see if they would repeat the trick.
I hesitated. I wanted to approach her very much, but I was wary, after what had happened with Lucy, of making another blunder. This was the second time I had seen this woman in this hotel—not counting my vision of her sun-worshipping in the light well—and we were almost acquaintances. Almost, but not. We were still in the default interpersonal mode: strangers. The best kind of strangers, maybe—old, close strangers—but strangers. And the protocol for one stranger to approach another in a public place is delicate and fraught with risk, especially if one stranger is male and the other is female. I did not want to be a pest, not with her. But while my frontal cortex measured the situation, my instinct, and what felt like every other part of me, howled its eagerness to go on, go ahead, talk to her, this is what you want, the thing you want most, she’s sitting right in front of you, what are you waiting for? How many other chances are you going to get? Do it however you want, but do it, don’t delay! In the past I would never have waited long before yielding to that more base voice, confident that the embarrassment of a rebuff would be short-lived and I would soon be on to other places, other hotels, other women. But my purpose here wasn’t a quick liaison; I was seeking a lasting connection.
“Can I help?”
She had seen me prevaricating and intervened, solving my immediate problem. But her expression was not kindly and her inquiry seemed intended to move me along rather than inviting me to linger.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “We spoke the other night. About the paintings.”
“I remember,” she said, not exactly smiling, but no longer frowning.
The barman appeared with my espresso. “Are you sitting here, sir?”
“Do you mind if I join you?” I asked, trying to keep it light. “Only for a moment, I’m waiting for a taxi.” I hoped this lessened the sense of intrusion—I wouldn’t be around for long.
“Sure,” she said. And this time I did get a smile—or part of a smile, a limited half-mouth lip-twitch, which might have been a smirk at my puppy-dog deference. Somewhere in this social fog were boundaries separating the pathetic from the winning, and friendliness from creepiness. Their location was hard to pinpoint.
I sat, and the barman arranged the tiny coffee cup, a nanojug of milk and a thimble containing misshapen brown sugar lumps in front of me. A slip of paper was proffered—I signed next to my room number. The barman receded.
“I didn’t mean to interrupt you . . .” I said, indicating the sheets of graph paper she had been working on. They were covered in columns of numbers and interlocking circles.
“It’s nothing,” she said, swiftly squaring the sheets together, folding them twice and stuffing them into the front pocket of the sweatshirt she was wearing. She was dressed for the gym. When her eyes returned to me, they were piercing and interrogatory. “But you clearly did intend to interrupt me, didn’t you? Let’s not gloss it. That’s what you wanted, yes? It’s not a problem, I just want to be clear about that.”
“I was considering the etiquette of a situation like this,” I said. “A public place, someone you’ve met before, but you don’t really know them . . .”
“What did you conclude?”
“I didn’t conclude anything, you interrupted me.”
“Right,” she said. “My fault. I didn’t mean to. If I had known that I was intruding on vital work in the field of social anthropology . . .” It was hard to read her mood. She was not wearing makeup. Her eyebrows matched the cinnamon dust at the rim of her coffee cup and her lips had a ghostly suggestion of arterial blue about them.
“I’m sure I would have concluded by saying hello,” I said. “You know, when you’re in a hotel, unlikely to see a person ever again, where’s the harm?”
“Yeah, I’ve noticed guys are less inhibited about striking up conversation in a hotel bar. Guys in general. In hotels in general. I’ve always assumed there was some slow-witted male equation at work. Unaccompanied woman in hotel bar equals prostitute. Or slut, anyway.”
This remark didn’t seem to be pointed at me, so I smiled in response. “Co
uld be. For some men.”
She shrugged. “It’s a building that also contains beds. Maybe that confuses them. They think, well, this woman is already sleeping somewhere in this building, surely it won’t make much difference to her what bed she’s in or who’s in there with her.”
“I think it might be related to my anthropological conclusions,” I said. “Where’s the harm? There’s less danger of lasting social embarrassment from saying hello to a stranger in a hotel bar, because if it turns out badly you can go and hide in your room and the next day you both check out and that’s that. It’s a completely disposable moment. And prostitution promises a similar deal, in its way—it’s completely disposable sex, no lasting traces, no aftermath.”
“For the man, anyway,” she said with a grimace. “Apart from a nice STD, maybe. And, I should hope, a hell of guilt.”
“Well, as I said, that’s the promise of prostitution, not the reality.” It was time to steer the topic away from the street corner. “Not that I would know, of course.”
“Of course.” She said this with a completely straight face. “As a matter of fact, I think you’re right. The hotel generates a bubble of exceptionality.”
“How is your research going?” I asked, with a slight nod toward the baggy pocket into which the notes had disappeared. The pocket was troubling me for reasons I could not discern. A red pocket in a red sweatshirt, a sweatshirt that had WAY INN written across the front in official lettering above said pocket. Not an unusual piece of clothing at all.
“Fine.” She shifted uncomfortably in her seat. I had looked too long at the words WAY INN, though it was the sweatshirt that had my total attention, not the physique beneath it.
“Were you up last night?”
“Excuse me?” She was scowling now.
“Last night,” I said, “I think I saw you—you were in one of the courtyards, those little pebble-gardens, meditating. You were wearing that sweatshirt. It was about 3 a.m., but somehow you looked as if you were in daylight . . .”
Her expression was hard to read, but it certainly wasn’t approving.
“Impossible,” she said.
“I know, I don’t understand it,” I said. “But you were wearing that sweatshirt—I’ve never seen you wearing that before, and if it was a dream, how come I dreamed you in an item I had no idea you owned? One you’re wearing right now, the morning after?”
She took a moment to think before answering. “You might not remember it at all. Your subconscious might be retrospectively adding it to a half-remembered dream. That’s what sleep does, what dreams do—iron out the inconsistencies in our experience, reconcile tattered bits of memory . . .”
“But it wasn’t a memory because I had never seen it before, and it certainly isn’t half-remembered. It was as real as this conversation is now.”
We had, in the course of this exchange, leaned in closer to each other—me so the other bar patrons wouldn’t hear my talk of dreams and visions; her mirroring me, adopting a conspiratorial hiss. But now she leaned back, puffed her cheeks out and widened her eyes.
“You call this a real conversation?”
“OK, fine, granted,” I said. “Fair point. But I haven’t heard you actually deny being in the courtyard last night.”
She wasn’t looking at me anymore—her focus had shifted behind me. A sickening jolt of déjà vu hit me. Again? How could the same lousy luck strike the same guy three times in three days—twice in the same place with the same woman? I turned, my lips already pressed together to form the M of Maurice, to see John-Paul standing at the threshold of the bar. Behind him was a short, dark man in blue jeans and a leather jacket.
“Mr. Double? Your taxi is here.”
“Thanks,” I blurted. I had forgotten about the taxi. “I’ll just be a minute—can you ask him to hang on?”
“Sure.” John-Paul turned with a smile to talk to the man in the leather jacket.
“Where are you going?” the woman asked.
“The center,” I said.
“Ah,” she said. “Aren’t we all.” She wasn’t scowling at me anymore, perhaps because she knew that my disappearance was imminent and probably permanent. But this was my precious second—third—chance with her, surely my final opportunity to make a lasting connection, and there was no way I could let this moment pass by without playing every card in my hand.
“Look,” I said, investing my words with the smallest portion of the urgency I felt, which was still enough to make me sound thoroughly panicked. “I know I haven’t made the best, the, er, sanest, impression, but I’d like, if you’d let me, to see you again.”
She raised her eyebrows.
“You see,” I continued at speed, not giving her an opportunity to decline me before I had fully made my case, however desperate it might sound, “I’m sure that the fact that we keep seeing each other, keep running into each other, means something, maybe something important, and I don’t want to lose the chance to find out what that might be. I’m not crazy, or even superstitious, but I do believe that sometimes the universe tries to tell us things, and when that happens we should try to listen. And I think the universe might be trying to tell me something about you.”
I found I had run out of rhetorical road much sooner than I expected. Was that it? Was that the sum of the case I had to make to this woman? Was there nothing more to say?
To her credit, she didn’t laugh at me or terminate the conversation. Instead she seemed very still and very serious.
“Maybe it’s the hotel trying to tell you something.”
“Hotel, universe, fate, whatever you want to call it.”
“So what is it you want from me?”
“Maybe your mobile phone number?” Mention of mobile phones jogged my memory. “In fact I have something for you—I took a picture of the painting in my room. Maybe I could send it to you? For your collection.”
“May I see it?”
“Sure.” I took my phone from my pocket, summoned the picture to its screen and handed it across the table.
“Very nice,” she said.
I stood. The taxi driver was still in the same spot, staring at me with bored animosity. “So, if you give me your number, I can send it to you. And maybe we can meet for a drink some time?”
“Well, maybe,” she said, also standing. A curious change had come over her—she seemed suddenly irresolute, possibly nervous. Her eyes darted between the screen of my phone and the lobby at my rear. “We’re not going to fuck, you know.”
For precious seconds I was sure I had misheard her. “Excuse me?”
“We are not going to fuck, you and I,” she repeated. To emphasise her point she raised my phone and showed it to me, as if she were a teacher, I was a schoolboy and the phone was a contraband packet of cigarettes.
“I didn’t—”
“That isn’t where this is going.”
I was awash with futility. If that was how she saw my attentions, then she was already decided and I could say nothing to change her mind. Inevitably, my denials would sound insincere and tactical. Was she wrong at all? It was generally sex I wanted, even if a woman made for pleasant or stimulating company on the way there. But how true was that with the redhead? She was different, in every way she was different, though I could not place or define that difference. Was that love? Was love the total certainty that someone was unlike all the others, and total mystification as to the nature of that difference? The hotel generates a bubble of exceptionality, she said, and whatever that meant, she was certainly exceptional.
“Honestly, that’s not what I thought,” I said. “I just . . . all I wanted was to find out where this is going. You seem to be a very interesting person and I would like to get to know you better.” Inwardly I cringed at the interesting and cursed the generations of male liars—my brothers, my comrades!—who had used those words as a euphemism for I would like to get you into bed; I had been free with those words in that meaning myself, and now that I needed them for
their original sense I found them tainted.
She did not appear to take my clunky line the wrong way. Her eyes sparkling, she smiled down at me—not a pleasant smile, I realized, but before I could parse it, she had hooked her right hand behind my neck and kissed me on the lips. A small, closed, experimental kiss. She pulled back.
I stared at her. I felt I might never be able to speak again. Her eyes blazed with energy and delight. With mischief.
“You’ll have to catch me.”
And she ran.
Her long legs had carried her out of the bar before I fully grasped what had happened. As she sprinted through the lobby, conversations stopped and heads turned. The desk staff stared, John-Paul’s mouth a perfect O.
She had my phone.
“Fuck!” I said, just a useless ejaculation. “Hey, stop!” She had reached the stairwell. My body was filled with misdirected energy, firing everywhere but where it was needed; my limbs suddenly seemed to require an elaborate start-up procedure I had forgotten. The barman and his patrons were looking toward me. I stared back at them, helpless.
Energy redirected. I ran, out of the bar, through the lobby and past the taxi driver, who raised his hands in exasperation as I passed. Behind me, someone called out, maybe John-Paul, but I ignored them.
As I approached the stairwell, I heard the echo of the woman’s pounding feet. At the bottom of the stairs I looked up, thinking I might somehow be able to tell which floor she had run to—and I was rewarded with the sight of her face, looking down at me from three storeys up. The instant she saw I had seen her, she dodged from view and I heard a fire door bang.
Had I not seen her, I might have given up on that spot, at the bottom of the stairs. If she was simply attempting to escape me, then she would already have an insurmountable advantage. Not only did she have the lead generated by surprise and my subsequent paralysis, she was dressed for running and I was not. And I suspected that even if the playing field was levelled, she would still be able to outrun me; she had inches on me and was clearly in superb shape. But she had waited for me—she didn’t want to disappear. Perhaps she was goading me; perhaps this was her way of flirting. For my part, I just wanted my phone back. I needed my phone back.