“How did you get so cynical, Jack? I thought only those rundown middle-aged cops were like that.”
“I was born with it, I guess.”
“I bet.”
It seemed even colder on the walk back. I wanted to put my arm around her but I knew she wouldn’t allow it. There were eyes on the street and I didn’t try. As we got close to the hotel I remembered a story and told her.
“You know how when you’re in high school and there’s always this grapevine that passes information on about who likes whom and who’s got a crush on whom? Remember?”
“Yes, I remember.”
“Well, there was this girl and I had a thing, a crush on her. And I was. . . I can’t remember how but the word went out on the grapevine, you know? And when that happened what you usually did was wait and see how the person responded. It was one of those things where I knew that she knew that I had this desire for her and she knew I knew she knew. Understand?”
“Yes.”
“But the thing was I had no confidence and I was. . . I don’t know. One day I was in the gym, sitting in the bleachers. I think I was in there early for a basketball game or something and it was filling up with people. Then she comes in, she’s with a friend, and they’re walking along the bleachers looking for a place to sit. It was one of those do-or-die moments and she looks right at me and waves. . . And I froze. And. . . then. . . I turned and looked behind me to see if she was waving to somebody else.”
“Jack, you fool!” Rachel said, smiling and not taking the story to heart as I had done for so long. “What did she do?”
“When I turned back around she had looked away, embarrassed. See, I had embarrassed her by setting the whole thing into motion and then turning away . . . snubbing her. . . she started going out with somebody else after that. Ended up marrying him. It took me a long time to get over her.”
We took the last steps to the hotel door silently. I opened the door for Rachel and looked at her with a pained, embarrassed smile. The story could still do that to me all these years later.
“So that’s the story,” I said. “It proves I’ve been a cynical fool all along.”
“Everybody has stories from growing up like that,” she said in a voice that seemed to dismiss the whole thing.
We crossed the lobby and the night man looked up and nodded. It seemed as if his whiskers had grown even longer in the few hours since I had first seen him. At the stairs Rachel stopped and in a whispered voice designed to leave the night man out of earshot told me not to come up.
“I think we should go to our own rooms.”
“I can still walk you up.”
“No, that’s okay.”
She looked back at the front desk. The night man had his head down and was reading a gossip tabloid. Rachel turned back to me, gave me a silent kiss on the cheek and whispered good night. I watched her go up the stairs.
I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep. Too many thoughts. I had made love to a beautiful woman and spent the evening falling in love with her. I wasn’t sure what love was but I knew acceptance was part of it. That’s what I sensed from Rachel. It was a quality that had been a rarity in my life and I found its nearness thrilling and disquieting in the same instant.
As I stepped out to the front of the hotel to smoke a cigarette the feeling of disquiet grew and then infected my mind with other thoughts. The ghost story intruded and my embarrassment and thoughts of what might have been still grabbed me so many years after that day on the bleachers. I marveled at the hold of some memories and at how well and precisely they can be relived. I hadn’t told Rachel everything about the high school girl. I hadn’t told her the ending, that the girl was Riley and that the boy she went out with and then married was my brother. I didn’t know why I had left that part out.
I was out of cigarettes. I stepped back into the lobby to ask the night man where I could get a pack. He told me to go back to the Cat & Fiddle. I saw he had an open pack of Camels on the counter next to his stack of tabloids but he didn’t offer me any and I didn’t ask for one.
As I walked Sunset alone I thought about Rachel again and became preoccupied with something I had noticed during our lovemaking. Each of the three times we had been together in bed she had been fully giving of herself, yet I would say she was decidedly passive. She deferred control to me. I waited for the small nuances of change on the second and third times we made love, even hesitating in my own movements and choices in order to allow her to take the lead, but she never did. Even at the sacred moment when I entered her, it was my hand fumbling at the door. Three times. No woman that I had been with before on that number of occasions had done the same.
There was nothing wrong with this and it did not bother me in the least, but still I found it to be a curiosity. For her passivity in these horizontal moments was diametrically opposed to her demeanor in our vertical moments. When we were away from the bed she certainly exercised or sought to exercise her control. It was the sort of subtle contradiction that I believed made her so enthralling to me.
As I stopped to cross Sunset to the bar, my peripheral vision picked up movement to the far left as I glanced back to check traffic. My eyes followed the movement and I saw the form of a person ducking back into the shadowed doorway of a closed shop. A chill raced through me but I didn’t move. I watched the spot where I had seen the movement for several seconds. The doorway was maybe twenty yards from me. I felt sure it had been a man and he was probably still there, possibly watching me from the darkness while I watched for him.
I took four quick, determined steps toward the doorway but then stopped dead. It had been a bluff but when no one ran from the doorway, I had only bluffed myself. I felt my heartbeat rising. I knew it might only be a homeless man looking for a spot to sleep. I knew there might be a hundred explanations. But just the same I was scared. Maybe it was a transient. Maybe it was the Poet. In a split second a myriad of possibilities took over my mind. I was on TV. The Poet saw TV. The Poet had made his choice. The dark doorway was on the path between me and the Wilcox Hotel. I could not go back. I quickly turned and stepped into the street to cross to the bar.
The blast of a car horn greeted me and I jumped back. I had not been in any danger. The car that sped past trailing the laughter of teenagers was two lanes away but maybe they had seen my face, seen the look, and known I was easy prey for a scare.
I ordered another black and tan at the bar along with a basket of chicken wings, and got directions to the cigarette machine. I noticed the unsteadiness of my hands as I lit the match after finally getting a cigarette into my mouth. Now what, I thought as I exhaled the stream of blue smoke toward my reflection in the mirror behind the bar.
I stayed until last call at two and then left the Cat & Fiddle with the exodus of die-hards. There was safety in numbers, I had decided. By loitering behind the crowd, I was able to identify a group of three drunks walking east toward Wilcox and fell in a few yards behind them. We passed the doorway in question from the other side of Sunset and as I looked across the four lanes I could not tell if the darkened alcove was empty. But I didn’t linger. At Wilcox I broke away from my escort and trotted across Sunset and up to the hotel. I didn’t breathe normally until I entered the lobby and saw the familiar, safe face of the night man.