I don’t remember him sitting down. The door opened onto a hallway that opened onto a lobby, if I’d been turning to look every time I heard footsteps I wouldn’t have been able to drink my martinis so quickly. Besides which I didn’t want to seem too desperate. I mean more desperate than I already appeared, a woman sitting alone at a bar, not looking at a book, not thumbing at her phone. It was the situation we’d all, the girls of my generation, been warned against, been warned, specifically, against getting ourselves into. In my adolescence, this was the early nineties, the women who marched with Take Back the Night were still hysterical, consent wasn’t yet affirmative, and though no means no was the standard it was also understood that it wouldn’t protect you. And so we were told to keep to well-lighted streets. To carry pepper spray, a whistle. To keep keys between the second and third, the third and fourth, the fourth and fifth fingers of our dominant hands. No short skirts and watch your drink and tell a friend where you’re going and call her when you get there and again when you get home. When we thought about sex we thought mostly about ways to defend against what we didn’t want instead of ways to pursue what we did. So that now the way I thought to attract a man was to make myself vulnerable to attack: sitting alone, drinking too quickly, my legs bare and my shoes no good for running and the hem of my dress riding up. I’d made myself a sitting duck and deliberately because men were attracted not to predators but to prey, not to strength but to weakness, this is what I was thinking when I felt a hand on my upper arm, the grip gentle but the splay wide, the fingers thick, promising. “Is someone,” he asked, “sitting here,” another hand gesturing to the bar stool next to mine. I smiled and shook my head, bowed it to indicate, Please, yes, go ahead. Thinking, Better not to speak just yet, better first to figure out what it is you want me to say.
He sat, unbuttoned his suit jacket. “Can I get you something to drink?” he asked. I tipped the dregs of my second martini into my mouth, smiled. “Sure,” I said. “That would be lovely,” I said. “Thank you.” Still trying to speak clearly without sounding like I was trying to speak clearly. He was handsome in a midlevel-chain-hotel sort of way, standard issue. Square jaw, slope of cheekbone, hair. Or that was my first impression but then he turned to me—he was waiting for his drink and he turned away from the bar and toward me and then I could see that his face had been tilted ever so slightly along the vertical axis so that his right eyebrow, his right nostril, the right half of his mouth, the entire right side of his face was a millimeter, a millimeter and a half, higher than the left. The effect was not unattractive.
It’s because of this asymmetry that I remember his face. And it’s because of this asymmetry that I then took the time to look more closely at his clothes, at the blue suit he was wearing, which was single-button and slim-cut, the legs tapered. And noticing the suit I noticed the tie, pale yellow, flowers embroidered in a baby blue thread, and the glasses case he rested on the bar, next to the rocks glass into which the bartender had poured a generous portion of Johnnie Walker Blue, and the burgundy socks, visible for an inch or so below the hem of his blue slacks before they disappeared into his shoes, which were dark brown and polished and obviously real leather. And if the shoes and the fact of his suit and the Johnnie Walker and even the hotel bar itself, if all these details pointed in one direction, the direction of finance, say, of mid-cap mutual funds, of generic business, the others, the tie and the socks and the cut of his suit and especially the glasses, pointed in another, in the direction of sense of humor, of reads novels, of was never in a frat. Also reassuring was the ring, thick and gold and on the correct finger. “So,” he said. “What brings you to San Francisco?” “Oh,” I said. “You know. Work. A work thing.” I tilted my head closer to his, blinked slowly. “You?” “Same,” he said. “Same.”
* * *
—
In his room I started laughing. He paid for his drink and the martini I hadn’t finished and the two martinis I had and he took me by the arm and he guided me to the elevator, guided me inside. The elevator ascended. He unlocked the door to his room and went in and I went in behind him and turned to close the door and when I turned back around his body was against mine, his hips against my hips, and he was bringing a hand to my face, his thumb moving down my cheekbone, and I opened my mouth and then I was laughing. I didn’t mean to laugh. What I meant to do was move my lips very close to his ear and say, Let me slip into something more comfortable. An appropriate line, ever so apropos. But I couldn’t get— I started laughing and— Not giggling, really laughing. He stepped back, frowning, the frown emphasizing the asymmetry of his face. And then I couldn’t stop. Thirty seconds, forty-five, sixty, ninety. A hand against the wall, bent over, chest almost to knees, gasping for air, water leaking from my eyes. Meanwhile he was standing at the foot of the bed, watching me.
“Are you,” he said, “are you okay?”
“Oh,” I said, “oh, god, I’m sorry, of course I am, of course I’m fine, it’s just”—now I was hiccupping, shaking my head—“I’m so sorry, it’s just—” He was still frowning but in the frown I now read not surprise but worry. I cleared my throat. “Can you,” I asked, “can you get me some water?” He went into the bathroom and I heard the tap running. When he came back he was holding a glass of water, an actual glass. I took it from him, drank. “Do you think,” I said, my head down and my eyes tilted up, this was bashful again, though now it was only partly feigned, “do you think you could order me some room service?”
He moved toward me. “You want me to order you room service.” I was still in the foyer, the hallway of whatever floor it was, the closed door at my back, a closet to my left.
“Yes,” I said, “room service. Isn’t that the deal? Buy a girl a meal first?”
“Oh, sweetheart.” He smiled, shook his head. “You’ve got the line wrong. It’s ‘Buy a girl a drink,’ and I bought you several.”
I set the empty glass down on the floor. The water was working, I’d stopped hiccupping and when I rolled my eyes the room didn’t spin. “But I’m hungry.” I reached for his belt buckle, the implication, I hoped, obvious but not explicitly transactional.
He paused. I imagined the calculation: what time it was now and how long room service would take and how long, on the other hand, he would have to wait, downstairs at the bar, for another dumb, damp duck. Possibly also the calculation was monetary: what would I want to order from room service versus what and how much the next girl would want, would need, to drink. And then a decision, him saying the word “So,” again lifting his hand to my face, again moving his thumb down my cheekbone, apparently this was a thing he did, now his thumb was moving to the edge of my mouth, to my bottom lip, “So. You’re hungry, are you.”