20. Lena
LENA
Ibuy the dress myself, on a Tuesday, in a shop with a sale rack and a girl at the till who has no idea who I am.
It’s green. Not the green from the dinner with Andrew, a darker one, with sleeves and a neckline that doesn’t ask anybody’s permission, and it’s the sort of dress a woman wears when she intends to stand up for three hours and be looked at while she does it.
I try it on in a curtained cubicle with a wonky hook and I look at myself under terrible light and I think, yes, all right.
It costs what a dress costs. I pay for it out of my own account.
No garment bag. No courier standing in the doorway waiting to hang it himself.
No card on a jewel case in handwriting that carries like a raised voice.
I take it home in a paper bag with the handles cutting into my fingers, and Marisol steams it over her bathtub while shouting at me through the door about her landlord.
I get ready on Marisol’s bed with my makeup in a cosmetics bag and my hair up because I like it up, and I put on my grandmother’s earrings, the little gold ones, the only jewelry in this world that has ever actually belonged to me.
Marisol stands in the doorway with a glass of wine and looks at me for a long moment.
“You’re going to ruin some evenings tonight,” she says.
“That’s not the plan.”
“No, but it’s going to happen, and I want you to enjoy it.”
The mixer’s in the ballroom of a hotel that isn’t ours, thank God, one of the mid-range chains with a function floor and a carpet that’s seen things.
Lidia meets me under the awning. She’s in black and flat shoes and she looks at my dress and says, “Good,” and that’s all of it, and then we go in.
Rita’s on the badge table. She’s done the badges at this thing since before I was allowed to drink at it, and when she sees me her whole face opens up.
“There she is,” she says, and hands me my badge, and then she holds on to my hand for a second. “You look lovely, sweetheart. Don’t let them start with you.”
That nearly does it before I’m through the door.
And the first stretch of it is fine.
Better than fine. A man from a linen supplier I’ve known for years wants to talk about a new terry weight and doesn’t mention a single other thing.
A regional woman from a chain I nearly went to work for at twenty-eight tells me about her divorce, unprompted, in detail, at a volume I’d call generous.
Somebody’s junior, a boy in a suit that fits nowhere, comes over pink to the ears and tells me he read a talk I gave about front-desk staffing and that it’s why he got into hotels.
“Which talk?”
“The one about—you said the front desk isn’t the face of the hotel, it’s the hotel’s judgment.”
“I did say that.”
“It’s on my wall,” he says, and then looks like he wants to die.
I stand there in a green dress with a warm glass of white wine I’m not drinking and I feel almost normal, and that’s what makes the rest of the night so much worse. If it had been hostile from the door I’d have had my armor on.
One man does ask me about it, and he’s the only one all night.
Gordon Pike, who runs the Regent and has been in this business since before I was born, plants himself in front of me with a whiskey and says, “Terrible business, that video.”
“Yes.”
“My wife said to me, that girl’s making a joke, any fool can see it.” He drinks. “I said the same to a few people, for what that’s worth. Not that anybody asks me.”
And that’s all. He asks me what I’m doing now and I tell him about Saugatuck, and he tells me a long story about a wedding at the Regent that ended with the groom’s brother in a fountain, and he doesn’t lower his voice once the entire time.
I could kiss him. I’d take a hundred of that over the sympathy.
Fiona Brennan is by the window with a group of them.
We were on committees together. She’s been to my house. She sat at my table at that same anniversary dinner where Walter took the chair, and afterward she squeezed my arm and said he’s a lot, and I loved her for it for about a year.
She sees me coming from across the room. I watch it happen. There’s the flash of recognition, and her face is already moving into a smile, and then a shutter drops behind her eyes and the smile stops halfway and sets. Polite. Fixed. A door with a chain on it.
“Lena.” She air-kisses in the direction of my cheek without her body coming any closer. “You look well.”
“Thanks. How’s Michael?”
“Fine. Busy.” Her eyes go over my shoulder, then past me, then to her own glass. “God, it’s warm in here.”
She turns a few degrees toward the woman on her left and asks her a question about a supplier, and I’m standing at the edge of a group I used to be in the middle of, and there’s no way back into the conversation that doesn’t involve me forcing it.
I say something pleasant and I go, and my face is hot all the way down my neck.
Beth Sullivan is worse, because Beth doesn’t even make me stand there.
Beth calls me every winter about the committee.
Beth has cried on my phone about her mother.
I get close enough to say her name, and she looks up, and she sees me, and she puts her hand on the arm of the man she’s with and says something and they both move—not fast, nothing you could point at, just a drift, a natural little migration toward the far end of the room where the food is.
I stand where I am and watch two adults relocate rather than say hello to me. It goes through me like a nail.
Then Louise.
Louise Tanner is by the doors, and I’ve already started toward her before I’ve decided to, because it’s Louise.
Years ago my father had a cardiac event in a supermarket in Ohio, and I got the call late at night and couldn’t get a flight until morning.
Louise came over. She sat on my kitchen floor with her back against the dishwasher and drank tea and did not once tell me it would be fine.
She stayed until the airport car came. She brought me a phone charger, because she’d thought about the fact that I’d be in a hospital all day.
I have loved that woman ever since, without complication, the whole time.
She sees me.
And she lifts her phone.
That’s what she does. She takes her phone out of her bag and lifts it up in front of her face and turns her shoulder, and she starts talking into it, to nobody, before it can even have connected, and she walks out through the doors to the corridor with it pressed to her ear.
I stop in the middle of that carpet.
There’s this long hollow moment where I’m just standing there with a glass in my hand watching the doors swing back, and the noise of the room comes at me from all sides, and my ears have gone hot and my eyes are stinging and I have to look up at the light fixture and hold very still.
I want to go after her. I want to walk through those doors and plant myself in front of her and ask what she thinks I did—what she could possibly believe I did, she sat on my floor—and I stand on the carpet and do nothing, heart slamming, the glass sweating in my hand.
She wasn’t even on a call. She didn’t dial anything. She raised a phone at me like a woman warding something off.
Lidia appears at my elbow with two glasses.
“Drink that one,” she says. “It’s the good one from the other bar. I stole it.”
I take it. My hand isn’t steady and she pretends not to see.
“That was Louise Tanner,” she says.
“Yes.”
“I don’t know her.”
“She sat on my kitchen floor when my dad had his heart thing.” My voice comes out horrible. “She brought me a charger.”
Lidia looks out over that room for a while. Then she says:
“The ones who run aren’t the ones worth keeping.”
“That’s a bumper sticker, Lidia.”
“Most true things are.” She takes a drink. “I went through a bad patch in the nineties. I know exactly which of these people crossed the street. I’d give you their names but you’d be shocked.”
“Does it stop hurting?”
“No,” she says. “It stops mattering. Different thing, takes about a year, and there’s nothing you can do to hurry it.
” She sets her glass down on a passing tray.
“Now. I need you for a minute. There’s a bar manager over there who is very unhappy at the Regent, and I want you to talk to him about what it’s like to work somewhere that lets you fix things. ”
So I do that.
And I’m good at it. It’s what saves the night. I stand with a young man with tired eyes and I ask him what he’d change if nobody stopped him, and he talks and talks, and Lidia stands there with her arms folded looking like a woman who’s about to get her way.
I don’t stay late. I get my coat myself, and I say goodnight to Rita on the badge table, and I walk out of that room with my chin level and my back straight, because there are people in there watching, and because my grandmother told me once that the walk out is the only part anybody remembers.
Then I get into Lidia’s car and put my hands over my face.
“Don’t cry in the car,” Lidia says, pulling out. “It’s leather and I’m sentimental about it.”
I laugh, wetly, and take my hands down.
She drops me on Marisol’s block and waits at the curb to see me in, and that’s when I see him.
Connor’s sitting on the steps of Marisol’s building. Not in the car. On the steps, in his coat, with his elbows on his knees, and he stands up when the headlights hit him.
Lidia doesn’t move the car.
“Do you want me to stay?” she says.
“No. It’s fine.”
“Is it fine, or is he your husband?”
“Both,” I say, and she snorts and lets me out.
My stomach does the thing it does. I hate that it still does the thing it does, tonight especially, in these shoes, with my face still hot from a room full of people who wouldn’t look at me.
He waits at the bottom of the steps while she pulls away. He looks better than he did. Still tired, but shaved, and the coat’s buttoned, and he’s standing straighter than he was on the sidewalk.
“You’ve been out,” he says.
“The fall mixer.”
His jaw shifts. He knows what that room is. He’s been in it.
“How was it?”
And I have a decision to make right there on the pavement, and it takes me about a second. The anger about tonight is mine. I’m not handing it to him to be useful with. I can still feel Louise’s shoulder turning.
“It was fine,” I say.
He looks at me a moment too long. He knows—not the specifics, but he knows something happened in that room—and I watch him decide not to push, and I’d be lying if I said that didn’t land.
“Okay,” he says.
“Why are you sitting on my friend’s steps at nine at night, Connor?”
“Because there’s a thing I’m about to do.” His hands go into his coat pockets and come out again, like he can’t decide what to do with them. “And I’m not having you find out about it secondhand. Ten minutes. That’s all I’m asking.”
The wind’s coming up the street. My feet hurt. Somewhere above us a window’s open and there’s a television going.
I look at him for a long time.
“Ten minutes,” I say.