33. Lena
LENA
The thing nobody warns you about a full house is the noise.
I’ve been in this lobby alone in the dark with a headlamp on.
I’ve been in it with a plasterer whistling upstairs and nobody else in the building.
I’ve stood behind that desk before dawn with a coffee going cold, imagining what it would sound like, and what I imagined was something dignified.
Murmuring. A little music. The occasional civilized laugh.
What it actually sounds like on the first Saturday is a bar fight in a good mood.
There are people on the stairs. There are people sitting on the arm of the sofa by the window, which I will be having a word about eventually and not tonight.
Somebody’s put the music up and somebody else has put it down again and the first person has clearly gone back and put it up.
Ruth goes past me carrying a tray of glasses she was not supposed to be carrying, and gives me a look that dares me to say something.
I stand at the end of my grandmother’s desk with my hand flat on the oak and let it come at me.
It’s louder than I ever let myself imagine, and warmer, and my whole chest goes hot with it.
There’s a woman on the stairs telling a story with both hands.
There’s a man in a terrible jacket who’s found the guest book on the desk and is reading it out to his wife in a voice.
I have to go and stand in the office for a minute again. That keeps happening tonight.
The keys are brass.
That was the fight I picked and the one I won, and it cost more than it should have.
Every room has a card reader in it because we’re not lunatics, and every room also has a brass key on a fob you couldn’t lose if you tried, weighted so it sits in your hand like it means something.
The card lives inside the fob where nobody can see it.
You walk up to the desk late at night and somebody puts a piece of metal in your palm and it feels like being handed a house.
Erin thought this was insane. She thought so out loud, on a call, in a spreadsheet, and then when they came in she stood in the middle of the lobby turning one over in her fingers for a long time and said, “Fine. All right. Fine.”
And the blue tile in the ground-floor washroom is repaired and not replaced, and the repairs show. You can see where it’s been done. There’s a patch by the door where the glaze doesn’t match and it will not match if it sits there another century.
I take people down to look at it that night. More than once. Like a lunatic, with a drink in my hand.
There’s a chair by the fire that nobody sits in.
It’s the wing chair we found under a sheet in the basement and had recovered, and it’s angled toward the hearth with a small table beside it, and on the table there’s a whisky, poured, untouched, with a coaster under it because I’m still my grandmother’s granddaughter.
Ruth put it out. I came down before the doors opened and it was there and neither of us said a word about it.
Nobody sits in it all night. That’s the part I don’t understand and don’t want to.
There’s no sign on it. Nobody’s roped it off or made an announcement, and the room is packed to the walls, and people walk past that chair all evening and around it and nobody puts a coat on it or a glass down on that table.
I keep catching myself looking over to see if anybody has, and nobody ever has, and each time my breath snags high under my collarbone. Missing him, that’s all it is. Even tonight. Especially tonight.
He’d have hated the fuss and he’d have loved the chair. He’d have sat in it with his back to the fire so he could watch the door, and he’d have told me the music was too loud and then made me leave it.
Marisol holds court by the fireplace and I do not intervene.
She’s got a semicircle of hotel people around her, most of whom she’s known for about an hour, and she is telling them the story of the night I turned up at her apartment in a dress that cost more than her car.
She’s telling it very well. She’s telling it with the leaking toilet in it.
There’s a regional director from a chain with tears running down his face.
“And she says to me,” Marisol says, “I think I have to sell the earrings, and I said, baby, you don’t sell the earrings, the earrings are the last thing, you sell the shoes?—”
“That is not what you said.”
“That’s what I said in my heart.”
Lidia arrives late and stands in the middle of the lobby with a glass, surveying my staff like a woman at a horse sale, and then does not poach a single one of them, which from her is a bouquet.
“Nothing?” I say.
“I looked at your night man and I have decided against it.”
“His name’s Peter.”
“I know his name.” She takes a drink. “You’ve done a nice thing here. Don’t get sentimental about the shoulder season.”
Gordon Pike catches me by the sleeve at the desk to ask, dead serious, whether guests can book the sofa by the window, because his wife’s been on it all evening and he’s lost her to it.
Louise comes early and stays late and washes glasses in the back for an hour because she doesn’t know what else to do with herself, and I let her. Harold Bishop turns up with a plant.
Genevieve Foster sends a note, and it’s a good one, and she doesn’t come, and I think that’s probably right for both of us.
And my husband works the coat check.
He asked for it. He asked for it a week ago, in the kitchen on Perrin Street, standing at the sink.
“Give me a job. A real one.”
“You want a job.”
“I don’t want to stand in that lobby being somebody’s husband all night.
I’ll be shaking hands with people who’ll be looking over my shoulder for a story and you’ll spend the whole evening managing it.
” He turned around with a plate in his hand.
“Put me somewhere useful where nobody’s expecting me. ”
So he’s in the little room off the entrance with a rail and a book of numbered tickets, in a plain white shirt with his sleeves rolled, and he does it all night without a break and he’s good at it.
There’s no name badge. There’s no name on the door. There’s nothing anywhere in that room to tell anybody who he is, and half the city walks past him. People hand him a coat without breaking stride. Somebody tips him and he takes it, because I told him the staff pool it and he’s not above the pool.
And then Fiona Brennan comes in.
I see her get to the door. I see her shrug out of that coat and hold it out sideways without turning her head, still talking to the woman she’s with, and I see my husband take it off her and hand her a ticket and say something perfectly pleasant, and she says thank you to a spot somewhere around his collar and walks straight past into my lobby.
She never looks at him. Not once. The man’s face has been on every phone in this city since December and she hands him her coat and never looks up.
Later I ask him if that was as funny as it looked from where I was standing.
“It wasn’t funny at all,” he says. “It was the best hour I’ve had in years.”
“Connor.”
“I’m serious.” He’s got a hanger in his hand.
“Nobody in that room wants anything from me. Nobody’s deciding whether to be seen talking to me.
I’m the man with the tickets.” He hangs the coat up.
“I’ve been in rooms my whole life where the first thing anybody knew about me was my last name.
In here I haven’t got a name at all, and it’s the most relaxed I’ve ever been at a party. ”
The last of them go home in the small hours.
Ruth wants to start on the glasses and I send her home and she goes, under protest, after telling me exactly where the glasses are to be put.
Connor and I do the lobby ourselves. It takes a while. He goes around collecting and I do the sofas, and neither of us says much, and at some point he puts the music back on low and we work through it.
The whisky by the chair is still sitting there.
I look at it for a while with a tray on my hip.
Then I set the tray down and pick the glass up, and the smell of it comes straight for me, peat and smoke, and my throat slams shut.
I miss him. It’s that plain and that enormous.
He ran one last play with an oxygen line under his nose and asked after my linen room while he did it, and he isn’t here, and he’d have pretended not to be pleased tonight, and he’d have been so pleased.
My eyes flood so fast I have to stand still and let them.
I carry the glass to the fire, which has gone down to almost nothing, and I pour it in, and it goes up with a soft blue crack. I stand there with the empty glass held against my sternum until the flame drops back down.
Connor has stopped what he’s doing. He stands across the lobby with a stack of plates and watches me do the whole thing and doesn’t say a single word, and I love him for that with everything I’ve got left tonight.
Then we finish the room and lock the front door and go home.
Sunday morning we have coffee at the kitchen table on Perrin Street with the radio on, and it is the most ordinary hour of my life.
I’m in one of his shirts. He’s reading something on his phone about a supplier and making noises about it.
There’s a bag of good beans because we’ve decided that’s a thing we care about now, and the toaster is a disaster neither of us is going to deal with, and my feet hurt in a way that’s going to last until Wednesday.
The doorbell goes mid-morning.
It’s a courier with a small stiff envelope, hand-delivered, no stamp. My name on it. Not typed.
I know that handwriting before I’ve got the door shut.
Connor knows it too, from across the kitchen, off the back of an envelope. His face does something and then goes carefully still.
“Do you want me to leave the room?” he says.
“No.”
I open it standing at the counter.
It’s a card, the good kind, thick, with nothing printed on it. There’s no Dear. There’s no signature and there doesn’t need to be.
The lobby looks exactly the way I always thought it should, and I never once told you so.
That’s all. One line, in the middle of a plain card, and nothing else anywhere on it.
I read it over and over. She was there. She came, at some point, on some night, into my building, in a coat, and stood in my lobby and looked at it, and nobody at the desk knew who she was or thought to tell me, and she went away again.
“Is it bad?” Connor says.
I hand it to him.
He reads it, and puts it down on the counter, and puts both hands on the edge of the counter and looks out the window at the yard for a long moment.
“That’s an apology,” he says. “That’s the closest thing to one that exists.”
“I know.”
“She’ll never say another word about it.”
“I know that too.”
He looks at me. He’s not asking me for anything. It took a public disaster and a beige office over a dry cleaner’s to get him here, but he stands in our kitchen with his mother’s handwriting on our counter and doesn’t ask me for one single thing.
“What do you want to do?” he says.
“I don’t know yet.”
“Okay.”
“I’m not going to know by lunchtime, either.”
“That’s fine.”
I take the card upstairs to the room at the front, the good one with the window, where the desk is.
The shallow drawer on the left. The old brass key from Rowan Street lives in there, the original, the one that sticks, the one I never had cut down or fixed, and my thumb finds its worn shoulder before I’ve decided to touch it.
Under it is the deed in its envelope, my name on it and nobody else’s, and I straighten it even though it doesn’t need straightening.
I lay the card in beside them and leave my hand flat over all of it for a moment, the metal cool under my palm.
Then I slide the drawer shut and go back down to my kitchen, where the radio’s still going and my husband is losing an argument with the toaster, and I sit down and put my feet on the chair opposite and pick up my coffee while it’s still hot.
Whatever that card is the start of, it can be the start of it on Tuesday.
This morning I’d like to stay exactly here.