Page 34 of Still Me
“That’s a good line.”
“Took me most of the flight.”
I gazed at him as he fed the key card into the door and, for the five-hundredth time, marveled at my luck in finding him when I’d thought I could never love anyone again. I felt impulsive, romantic, a character in a Sunday-afternoon movie.
“Aaaand here we are.”
We stopped in the doorway. The hotel room was smaller than my bedroom at the Gopniks’, carpeted in a brown plaid, and the bed, rather than the luxurious expanse of white Frette linen I had envisaged, was a sunken double with a burgundy-and-orange checked bedspread. I tried not to think about when it might last have been cleaned. As Sam closed the door behind us, I set down my bag and edged around the bed until I could peer through the bathroom door. There was a shower and no bath, and when you put the light on the extractor whined, like a toddler at a supermarket checkout. The room was scented with a combination of old nicotine and industrial air freshener.
“You hate it.” His eyes scanned my face.
“No! It’s perfect!”
“It’s not perfect. Sorry. I got it off this booking website when I’d just finished a night shift. Want me to go downstairs and see if they have other rooms?”
“I heard her saying it was fully booked. Anyway, it’s fine! It has a bed and a shower and it’s in the middle of New York and it has you in it. Which means it’s all wonderful!”
“Aw, crap. I should have run it past you.”
I never was any good at lying. He reached for my hand and I squeezed his.
“It’s fine. Really.”
We stood and stared at the bed. And I put my hand over my mouth until I realized I couldn’t not say the thing I was trying not to say. “We should probably check for bedbugs, though.”
“Seriously?”
“There’s an epidemic of them, according to Ilaria.”
Sam’s shoulders sagged.
“Even some of the poshest hotels have them.” I stepped forward and pulled back the covers abruptly, scanning the white sheet before stooping to check the mattress edge. I moved closer. “Nothing!” I said. “So that’s good! We’re in a bedbug-free hotel!” I gave a small thumbs-up. “Yay!”
There was a long silence.
“Let’s go for a walk,” he said.
We went for a walk. It was, at least, a great location. We strolled half a dozen blocks down Sixth Avenue and back up Fifth, zigzagging and following where the urge took us, me trying not to talk endlessly about myself or New York, which was harder than I’d thought, given that Sam was mostly silent. He took my hand in his, and I leaned against his shoulder and tried not to sneak too many glances at him. There was something unexpectedly odd about having him there. I found myself fixing on tiny details, a scratch on his hand, a slight change in the length of his hair, trying to reclaim him in my imagination.
“You’ve lost your limp,” I said, as we paused to look in the window of the Museum of Modern Art. I felt nervous that he wasn’t talking, as if the terrible hotel room had ruined everything.
“So have you.”
“I’ve been running!” I said. “I told you! I go around Central Park every morning with Agnes and George, her trainer. Here—feel my legs!” Sam squeezed my upper thigh as I held it toward him and looked suitably impressed. “You can let go now,” I said, when people started to stare.
“Sorry,” he said. “It’s been a while.”
I had forgotten how much he preferred to listen than talk. It took a while before he offered up anything about himself. He finally had a new partner. After two false starts—a young man who’d decided he didn’t want to be a paramedic, and Tim, a middle-aged union rep, who apparently hated all mankind (not a great mind-set for the job)—he had been paired with a woman from North Kensington station who had recently moved and wanted to work somewhere closer to home.
“What’s she like?”
“She’s not Donna,” he said, “but she’s okay. Least she seems to know what she’s doing.”
He had met Donna for coffee the week previously. Her father was not responding to chemotherapy, but she had disguised her sadness under sarcasm and jokes, as Donna always did. “I wanted to tell her she didn’t have to,” he said. “She knows what I went through with my sister. But”—he looked at me sideways—“we all cope with these things in our own ways.”
Jake, he told me, was doing well at college. He sent his love. His dad, Sam’s brother-in-law, had dropped out of grief therapy, saying it wasn’t for him, even though it had stopped his compulsive bedding of strange women. “He’s eating his way through his feelings now. Put on a stone since you left.”
“And you?”
