A Permanent Member of the Family

LOST AND FOUND

He knows her from some other crowded room, but can’t remember which room or when. Good-looking brunette, broad forehead, high cheekbones — eastern European, he guesses. A little fleshy from drink and insufficient exercise. Fortyish, with minor evidence of wear: a younger woman’s butch haircut laced with gray that she would color but doesn’t believe she’s old enough yet for a dye job, black pantsuit to hide her muffin top, red shoes. They’re called pumps, he thinks.

He takes her in as she slips between strangers, not exactly on a beeline for his corner of the ballroom but not stopping to sniff the roses either. He likes to read people from a distance — that’s what he calls it, reading people. Speed-reading. She’s trying to disguise her intent, glancing at him as if by accident, then looking away as if she’s not coming for him but for some guy on his right or left, one of these hearty fellows, hard drinks in hand, bellowing so as to impress each other and the occasional nearby woman with their intelligence and wit and the size of their annual bonus.

Like him, they’re plumbing and heating supply sales managers, retailers and wholesalers from all over, most of them middle-aged and older men with wives at home. There are some wives here, of course, heavyset women in their fifties and sixties wearing pastel and silently monitoring their husbands’ alcohol intake from their seats at the tables while keeping a wary eye on the few female sales reps working the room for new accounts. Maybe that’s what she is, a manufacturer’s sales rep he flirted with at some other January convention in some other Sunbelt city, and she enjoyed it enough to give him a second shot at writing her a purchase order. With female reps it’s usually kitchen appliances and sinks or high-end bathroom fixtures. He’d definitely remember her if he’d signed on the first time around.

She half smiles and lets her left hand float toward his. Slight makeup overkill, large green eyes, mascara running from contacts worn only when she goes out. The nail polish matches the red pumps. No wedding ring, he notices. Recently divorced? She says, “Hello, Stanley.”

He takes her hand in his, holds it a half second longer than he would a stranger’s. “Well, hello! Nice to see you.” He doesn’t say “again.” He’s not 100 percent sure they’re not strangers. She knows his name, but why not, it’s stuck to his jacket lapel. He flicks a glance across her breasts in search of a name tag, but there isn’t one. Must not be a rep. Definitely not a hooker. Not friendly enough.

“You don’t recognize me, do you, Stanley?”

“It would help if you wore your name on your chest like the rest of us.” He flashes the smile he sometimes uses to change the subject.

“I work for the hotel. Remember? Events coordinator?”

“Right! Events coordinator.” It was here in Miami, then, the Marriott. Had to have been five years ago, the last time the suppliers’ National Business Association held their annual meeting here. Since then it’s been Phoenix, New Orleans, Atlanta, Memphis. He met her in this very ballroom. Five years ago.

Her name is Ellen, that much rushes back, but not her last name. And not much else, though he feels his face heat up as if he’s embarrassed. He’s not sure if it’s because he didn’t recognize her right away or because of something that happened between them, something said or unsaid, done or undone, something he can’t quite call to mind — like her last name — without her help. He’s sure she remembers everything, her direct gaze tells him that much, and he is afraid that she expects him — or until this moment, expected him — to remember everything, too.

She looks mildly amused by his embarrassment. Forgiving.

He says her first name, “Ellen!” as if he’s been waiting to say it since he got off the plane this afternoon. “You look terrific,” he says and means it, up close she does look terrific, smart and energetic and good humored without being one of those scary, live-wired women who live on a permanent stage. She’s a woman who keeps an interesting tension between high spirits and control. The sort of woman he’s always been attracted to. Like his wife.

That’s when he remembers. It was late the last night of the convention, and they ended up in his room, both a little drunk. How could he have forgotten? It wasn’t the sort of thing that he’s done more than once or twice in his entire twice-married life — in fact, now that he thinks of it, the first time he ended up in a hotel room alone with a woman who was not his wife was nearly twelve years ago. Not many months afterward, that woman became his second wife and eventually the mother of his three children. All the more reason he should have recognized Ellen right away, should even have anticipated seeing her here. And looked forward to meeting her again, or dreaded it. He’s not sure which. He is sure he didn’t sleep with her.

They met that first time at the registration table in the lobby. He said his last name, and without looking up she passed him an information packet and his plastic name tag. Then she glanced at him and quickly smiled, as if surprised by his good looks. He knew he was conventionally handsome. Not male model or movie star quality, just handsome for a plumbing and heating supplier.

“If you have any questions or need anything, don’t hesitate to call me,” she said. She reached into her purse, took out her business card and gave it to him. He held her card in both hands and read it, smiled back and thanked her by name. Damned attractive woman. Friendly too.

After that, they kept running into each other in the hotel, at first by accident in the lobby, then on the elevator, at the hotel gift shop where he’d gone for toothpaste and she was picking up a pack of cigarettes, and then in the evening deliberately at dinner in the main ballroom sitting next to each other as if they hadn’t planned it, ducking the after-dinner speakers and heading for the hotel bar “for a nightcap” that lasted till midnight. They met for breakfast the next day and had lunch at a sidewalk café by the bay. They kept their voices low and their heads close.

With increasing speed they had dropped into personal, almost intimate conversations, and he thought of her as his only friend at the convention, although he was more than casually acquainted with dozens of the other managers here. He talked about his wife, Sharon, and his kids and described his life in Saratoga Springs, careful not to complain, but making his cloudy dissatisfaction with his life obvious. “It’s a good town for raising kids. For owning a split-level house with a two-car garage, shopping at the malls, running a plumbing supply company.”

She got it. “Sounds a little lonely,” she said.

“Yeah, well, you can be lonely anywhere, I guess. Even in a crowd. Like here.”

“Maybe especially in a crowd. Crowds can sting your heart when you’re alone in the world. Like me.”

He liked that phrase, “sting your heart.” Not something Sharon would say. “C’mon, you’re not really alone in the world. Attractive single woman, financially independent, exotic city like Miami, et cetera.”

“Unmarried, no kids, no close family nearby, et cetera. No steady boyfriend. Just a cat named Spooky to greet me when I come home from work. That’s being alone in the world, Stanley.”

“And you’re not lonely?”

She shrugged. “No more than you, I suspect. With your wife and kids and minivan.”

“Maybe not.”

She had quickly become the only person at the convention he wanted to talk and drink with and sneak out onto the terrace to escape the crowd and smoke cigarettes with — the same brand, he remembers, American Spirits, which she jokingly claimed were good for you because the tobacco is organic. They were both trying to quit. Without stating it, they felt smarter and sexier, especially when together, than the people surrounding them. Whenever they spoke of the conventioneers and their wives, they spoke with irony and slight, but not unkind, condescension. Neither of them took the convention or the plumbing and heating supply industry seriously.

To him, regardless of which room they happened to find themselves in, Ellen was definitely the most desirable woman in it. And looking around at his colleagues, most of whom were overweight, badly dressed, red faced and loud, he figured he was the most desirable man in the room. At least to her. The competition wasn’t exactly stiff, however.

He knew by then that Ellen was thirty-four, fifteen years younger than he was, divorced, and her parents lived in Charlotte, North Carolina, where she’d been raised. She’d come to Miami to study marketing at Florida International University. The week after graduation she’d eloped with a man a decade older who had been her statistics professor. “We lasted four years. Luckily there were no kids. Turned out the professor still had a thing about sleeping with his students,” she told him. “Male as well as female,” she added.

“Weird.”

“What, sleeping with students, or swinging both ways?”

“Swinging both ways, I guess.”

“Not so weird. You’d be surprised how many handsome male college professors swing both ways. It’s not about sex. They’re scared of sex. They want acolytes. But maybe it’s Miami,” she added and laughed.

“Miami is a pretty sexy city.”

“That’s marketing directed at northerners, Stanley. Don’t fall for it. Miami’s no sexier than Saratoga Springs, New York.”

His turn to laugh. “Yeah, right.”

The last night of the convention they slipped away from the closing party, crossed the lobby and stepped outside and lighted cigarettes. He remembers the moist smell of the Gulf Stream in the warm offshore breeze. A pair of palm trees clattered in the wind. The driver at the head of a line of waiting cabs flicked his high beams at them.

“You want to go somewhere?” Stanley said.

“No.”

He waved the driver off. “Where’s your place?”

“The Gables. Coral Gables. It’s a ways.”

“Want to go up to my room and raid the minibar for a nightcap?”

She looked away and then down at her feet, turned and rubbed out her cigarette in the standing ashtray next to the door and said, “Sure.”

When they turned to reenter the hotel, five of his colleagues, all men, came jostling out the revolving glass door. Stanley guided Ellen around them by the elbow. He knew one of the men slightly, a beefy guy in his fifties named Bernie who ran a supply house in Syracuse.

“Hey, Stan, c’mon out with us!” Bernie said. “We’re going over to the beach and do a little sightseeing. South Beach, man! The night’s still young!”

“Thanks but no thanks, Bernie. I’ve got an early flight out tomorrow.” He gave the revolving door a push and Ellen walked through and he followed.

Bernie laughed and said, “Yeah, sure.”

His room was on the twenty-seventh floor with a wide, floor-to-ceiling view of Biscayne Bay and the port where the cruise ships, parked like pale dirigibles, waited for their passengers to arrive from the north, and beyond the bay the glittering lights and pulsing neon of South Beach. East of the condo towers, hotels and clubs of South Beach, beneath the scraps of cloud lit pink from below, he could see the Atlantic Ocean, a long dark arm speckled with moonlight.

He opened the minibar and took out an unopened half bottle of California chardonnay, unscrewed the metal cap and poured the wine into two glasses. He counted how many drinks he’d already had tonight. Two scotches at the reception and at the final dinner four glasses of wine. He didn’t feel drunk but knew he probably was.

“Nice view to wake up to,” she said. She sat on the bed and, pinning her gaze to the view, reached down, unstrapped her shoes without looking and flipped them off her feet. He walked to her and placed her wineglass on the bedside table and went back to the window, turned toward the sea and watched her reflection in the glass. She wore a simple black sleeveless dress, he remembers, and a necklace of rough, heavy, semiprecious stones on a leather cord. She had beautiful slender legs. She removed her hooped earrings and laid them on the bedside table next to the wineglass. She took a sip of the wine.

“Are you going to just stand there?”

“I don’t know.”

She was silent for a moment. Then said, “You don’t know.”

She reached down and slipped her shoes back on and buckled the thin straps. He had asked for this, had engineered it, with her help, of course, but he could have blocked it anywhere along the line, just flirted over a weekend, basked in the glow of attention from an attractive younger woman, maybe even indulged in a sexual fantasy or two, all harmless, and caught his early Sunday flight home with a clear conscience, no complications, no secret entanglements. But instead he’d let each step lead to the next on a meandering path that he knew all along would end at this moment. She hooked her earrings on and stood up.

Was he really as lonely as he’d let her believe? If not actually suffering from his marriage, was he bored by it, feeling invisible in it, like an old piece of furniture that can’t be moved or replaced without moving or replacing everything else in the room, so you just leave it where it is and ignore it? It wasn’t his age, he assures himself, the so-called midlife crisis men go through in their late forties and early fifties. He was young for his age. Especially then, five years ago. He had no desire to trade his minivan for a red Porsche, join a health club, abandon his striped Hanes boxers for black Calvin Klein low-rise briefs. And it wasn’t just any attractive younger woman he’d been courting — but not actively seducing — all weekend, as if to prove a point about his desirability to himself and the other guys like Bernie. It wasn’t male vanity. It was Ellen herself, a very specific woman whose smoky low voice, green eyes, dry humor and bright, interesting words, and yes, her slender legs, that had got to him. That, and the way she made him feel about himself.

She was angry, he remembers now. Which is probably why he wanted to forget that night, why he actually succeeded in forgetting it and the way Ellen had made him feel, until here she was again, five years older, yet still that very particular woman who made him visible to himself, funny, smart, good looking, and lonely. These were feelings about himself that he had lost bit by bit over the years of his marriage and middle age, small increments of loss, so that he wasn’t even aware of the loss, until that night when they ended up alone in his room at the Marriott. Lost and, because of her, found. And then all of a sudden lost again. Until now.

“It’s okay, Stanley, you don’t have to pretend. I know you didn’t recognize me at first. And maybe still don’t. I know you don’t remember.”

“The truth is, I didn’t want to remember. Me, I mean. Not you.”

“Why? You didn’t do anything wrong. You almost did. But you didn’t.”

“Maybe that’s why. I didn’t want to remember what I lost that night. And what I found. I wanted to forget that too.”

She gave a hard little laugh and stepped back. “I wish I believed it. What do you think you found and wanted to forget, Stanley? Not true love, that’s for sure.”

“No. Something else.” He’s about to tell her to forget it, whatever it was, it can’t be described. Not by him, anyhow. But instead he hears himself say, “My heart got stung. I could feel it beating, and for the first time in years, maybe in my whole life, I knew I was alive.”

“And it scared you.”

“It’s like, if you know you’re alive, you know you’re going to die.”

“So you decided to forget that you were alive.”

“Yes.”

“Which is like dying before your time.”

“Yes. It is.”

He remembers her standing beside the bed, half turned toward the door, ready to leave his room. He walked across to her and put his arms around her and kissed her gently on the lips. She kept her mouth closed, her lips tight, and after a few seconds shook free of his embrace.

He said, “I’m sorry.”

She said, “Don’t be. You didn’t do anything.”

He said, “That’s why I’m sorry.”

“Goodbye, Stanley.”

He turned back to the darkened window and watched her reflection cross the room to the door, open it, and leave. The door closed slowly behind her.

She says, “Well, it’s been good to see you again. You haven’t changed, Stanley.”

He says, “Yes, I have.”

She says, “Goodbye, Stanley,” and makes her way back through the crowded ballroom toward the exit.