Chapter 6
CLINT
Iput the pen down on the folio and didn't move.
She'd said I'd be somewhere else. Then, she'd stood there behind that counter like a woman who'd walked into a room and forgotten why.
She was beautiful. Dark eyes, a long throat, and a mouth that she'd been holding in a shape for so many years that the shape had started to look like her. Somebody had ironed a pale pink blouse to within an inch of its life and buttoned her into it. She wore it the way a soldier wears a uniform.
But that wasn't what stopped me.
What stopped me was the four seconds after the question. She'd gone somewhere. Something came up in her face and got about halfway and then got put down. I watched her put it down.
I know that move. I've done it in a lot of rooms.
There was a whole sentence sitting behind her teeth. She'd swallowed it, and I wanted it. That was the trouble. Standing at that marble with my hand still on the pen, what I wanted to say was:
Then let's go. Right now. I'm the best there is at being anywhere but here. Get your bag.
I didn't say it. A man doesn't say that to a woman he's known ninety seconds. And anyway, it wasn't true the way she'd need it to be true. I'm not good at going somewhere. I'm good at leaving. Those are different, and I've only ever had the one.
So, I put the pen down.
I ought to have taken the key and gone upstairs. That was what she was standing there waiting for. I could see it in the set of her shoulders—the small brace, the readiness for me to be finished with her.
I've gotten good at asking questions.
That happened somewhere out on the road, even though I didn't plan it.
When you don't talk much and you don't want anything and you're never going to see the person again, people will tell you things.
They tell you things they haven't told their own families.
A trucker at three in the morning in a Waffle House outside Lubbock told me about the daughter he hadn't spoken to in nine years.
He cried, and shook my hand, and got up and drove away.
Nothing in this world got fixed. But something came out of that man, and he went down the road lighter than he came in.
It's bloodletting. That's the closest I've come to a word for it. You open a small place and let the bad blood run and the fever comes down.
Nobody had opened one for her. That much was written all over that lobby. She was the one who did it for everybody else, all day, every day. She'd been doing it so long that her own arm had gone hard and white with scar.
And I had nowhere to be. That's not a small thing. It's the only real currency I've ever had.
"Would you walk me up?" I said.
She hesitated.
It wasn't coy. Nothing about the woman was coy. It was a hitch, half a beat. Her eyes went for one flick toward the empty stretch of marble on either side of her.
I read it wrong at first. I thought she was working out how to say no, which meant she'd been taught she couldn't, which put a foul taste in my mouth.
"I'll be right back," she said.
She went through a door behind the concierge stand and came out with a kid, maybe twenty-two, straightening his jacket and trying to look like he'd been standing there all along. She said something to him with her hand on his sleeve. He nodded, and she came back around the end of the counter.
She didn't come near me.
She kept a good three feet of air between us the whole way across that lobby, and she did it without ever once making it look like she was doing it. Not a flinch. Not a hurry. She simply walked a line that was hers and left mine to me.
I gave her every inch of it.
I've spent my life crowding people. It's most of what the job was. A woman who puts three feet on the table without saying a word has told me a great deal about how she's been walked at. The least I owe her is to not be the next one.
We went to the elevators. She pressed the button. The doors opened. We got in, and they closed.
"Where would you rather be?" I asked.
She turned and looked at me like I'd spoken Farsi.
"I'm sorry?"
"Downstairs. I asked you what you'd be doing if you weren't standing behind that desk." The car started up. "You said, I'd be somewhere else."
Her lips parted.
And I watched a thing happen to her face that I didn’t expect and would be a long time getting rid of. She looked surprised.
Two floors went by while she got her face back.
She got it back. She pulled a breath in through her nose, and her chin came up. I could see her deciding.
"I haven't taken a vacation," she said, "in years."
"They won't give you the time?"
"No." She shook her head hard, and something like anger came through.
It was the first honest thing she'd let me see.
"No, that's not—I have the time. I have months of it.
It's banked. It just sits there. Every year, they send me a little statement about it, like a bank telling you about money you're never going to spend. "
"So, spend it."
"On what?"
She said it fast and flat. Then she heard it, and I watched her hear it.
The car hummed.
"Work is what I've done," she said. "It's what my family does. My mother worked in this building. I've worked in it—" she stopped. "A while. That's the whole thing. This place is me."
She was looking straight ahead at the doors.
"I don't think I know how," she said.
It came out of her like something coming out of a wound. Fast, and surprised, and with too much force behind it, the way a thing comes out when it's been in there under pressure a long time.
She stood very still afterward. She had said it to a stranger in an elevator, and she was not the kind of woman who said things.
The elevator dinged.
I stepped out. She followed me, half a beat late, moving like a woman who'd been woken up. I could feel the shame coming off her. That's what it was. Not embarrassment. Shame—the deep kind, the kind that comes when you've let somebody see the thing you've been pretending isn't there.
So, I threw her a rope.
"Traveling is the only thing I do," I said. I said it easy, to the carpet, walking. "That's it. That's the whole résumé."
She didn't say anything.
"And I'll tell you the truth about it, because I don't figure anybody else will.
" I stopped at the door of the suite and turned around.
"Most of it isn't anything. Most of it is a bus with a bad air conditioner, and a man beside you who wants to talk about his back.
It's a room that smells like the last person in it.
Half the places I've been, I couldn't tell you one thing about them now except the name. "
Her eyes came up.
"Sometimes, it opens up on you," I said. "Sometimes, you come over a rise at the right hour and it's worth every mile you ever traveled and every one you didn't. That happens. It doesn't happen a lot."
"Then, why do it?"
"Because I don't know how to do the other thing." I let that sit. "Which puts us in about the same shape, doesn't it?"
She looked at me for a long moment.
"There's probably a middle," I said. "Somewhere between never going and never stopping. I've never been able to find it. But I expect it's out there. I expect it's got a real nice porch on it."
And she laughed.
It came out of her before she'd cleared it. Short, low, startled. She put her hand up like she meant to catch it and put it back.
We stood there a minute.
She didn't move. I didn't move. Neither one of us said anything and the hall was very quiet. Then, something came over her face and she reached into the pocket of that pink blouse and came out with the key.
"Oh," she said. "I—God. I'm sorry. I have your key."
"I noticed."
"That is—" she was already at the lock, and her ears had gone dark. "That has never happened. In fifteen years."
Fifteen years, I thought. She'd said a little bit of time downstairs. Now she'd handed me the number without meaning to, and she didn't even hear herself do it.
She got the door open and held it. She put the key in my hand, and stepped back into the exact three feet of air she'd been carrying since the lobby.
I took the door.
"Ms. Benning."
"Sasha."
"Sasha." I looked down at the key in my hand. "If you could go anywhere—anywhere at all—where's it going to be?"
She laughed again.
And this one—this one was different. This one didn't get caught. It came up out of her whole body and it took ten years off her face. She leaned her shoulder against the doorframe like a woman who'd forgotten she was at work.
"Anywhere outside a ten-mile radius," she said. "I'm serious. I have lived and worked inside a ten-mile circle. That's my answer. Anywhere else."
"All right. And then?"
"And then what?"
"You've broken your ten miles. You're out. Where do you go?"
She thought about it.
That was the thing. She actually thought about it, standing in a hotel hallway with her arms folded, taking it seriously.
"Dubai," she said.
"Dubai."
"Don't do that."
"I'm not doing anything."
"You're doing something." But her mouth had gone crooked.
"They build hotels there like they're trying to prove a point.
And I want to see it. I want to walk through one and see how they've solved things.
" She was talking faster now. "Because there's a hole in this city, and I've been staring at it for years.
Charleston sells you history. That's the whole product.
And so every good house in town is a two-hundred-year-old building with a boiler that's dying and a service stair from 1890, and everybody just accepts that, because it's charming. "
"But."
"But it doesn't have to be." Her hand came up and cut the air.
"You can have the good bones and the good bar and the porch and the story, and still put a mechanical system in it that works, and a floor plan where housekeeping doesn't walk eleven miles a day, and a back-of-house that doesn't make the people who run the place feel like they're not supposed to be seen.
Nobody's done it. Everybody's picked a side.
Old and broken, or new and soulless. There's a hotel in between those two and this city is starving for it, and I could—"
She stopped.
I let the quiet sit.
"You're looking to start your own thing," I said.
And Sasha Benning blushed.
I watched it come up her throat and into her face, and she looked away down the hall, and she pulled that blouse straight with both hands like the blouse had done something.
"Maybe in my dreams," she said.
"That's where they all start."
She didn't answer that. She stood there a second, and then she straightened up—her whole spine, her shoulders going back, her chin coming level—and looked me in the eye.
"Maybe I should learn to take a break," she said. "Before I go trying to build anything." She shook her head slowly, at herself. "Maybe I should learn how to be bored. And how to like it."
She was something to look at, right then.
Not the way she'd been at the desk. At the desk she'd been beautiful the way a good building is beautiful, which is to say deliberately, and at some cost. This was different.
She stood up out of herself for about four seconds in a hotel corridor and told the truth.
I stood there with a key in my hand and had absolutely nothing to say.
I liked her.
That went through me plain and simple and without any fuss, the way water finds a level. I liked this woman.
"Thank you for the escort," I said.
"It's my job."
"It isn't. I could have carried a key." I put my shoulder against the frame. "Thank you for the rest of it, then."
Something in her went quiet.
"If we run into each other again," I said, "I'd like to hear the whole list. Where you'd go. All of it."
She nodded.
She didn't say anything, and I don't believe she had anything to say. Then, I watched her reach for the thing she reaches for. It came up over her like a shutter coming down. The chin. The hands. The voice.
"Have a nice stay, Mr. Dane."
"Clint."
She stopped.
"Please," I said. "Clint."
She looked at me across three feet of hallway carpet in a hotel that had eaten fifteen years of her life. Something went across her face that I couldn't read and wanted to.
"Okay," she said. "Clint." A breath. "Have a nice stay."
She turned and went back down the hall toward the elevator. I stood in the doorway of that room with the key in my hand and watched her go. I didn’t check the corridor behind me, or the stairwell at the end of it, or anything else at all.
I figured I would.