Aftermath of Dreaming(28)
The Ritz-Carlton Hotel announced itself in gold letters above an ever-revolving door and again with its logo, the regal profile of a lion’s head, on a red carpet that flaunted itself across the sidewalk to the curb.
“Welcome to the Ritz-Carlton,” the doorman said, as he held open the cab door while I counted out the bills, then put them in the driver’s hand. He asked if I had any bags in the trunk, and I wished for a moment that I did. Luggage to spend my life with Andrew.
I had to request his room number. He hadn’t told me on the phone and I had forgotten to ask, but as the front desk clerk called to get Andrew’s permission for me to ascend, I realized they wouldn’t have allowed me to walk in and go straight up without announcing myself first anyway. I wondered if this was the sort of experience that induced all those restaurant customers to speak to me in the coat-check room before they headed upstairs. I immediately felt less churlish toward them.
The elevator I took to the twenty-eighth floor was filled with an empty quiet. I had never been here before. Not just here-here, in the hotel, but Here, with everything that entailed. There was no reference in my life for it, so my mind had no idea what to think. It was experiencing a rare phenomenon, the completely new event, and my lack of knowledge of the circumstances I found myself in felt freeing. There was nothing for me to do. Nothing for me to think. Nothing but to give in. A bell chimed, the doors glided open, and I was released into a small hallway that contained the entrance to Andrew’s penthouse door. I knocked.
I could hear footsteps approaching after what was probably a three-Mississippi wait, if I had been counting, which I wasn’t, but I knew it instinctingly becase of all those games of hide-and-seek I had played with the other neighborhood kids, hands covering closed eyes, counting off numbers plus our state’s name up to ten to give everyone time to find a spot. I had a sudden vision of a young Andrew being a master at that game.
Then he opened the door and we looked at each other without saying a word. It was different seeing him after our journeylike phone call and the subsequent hours I’d spent with him in my head. As his eyes looked at mine, it was clear that a part of him was all for me, as all of me was for a part of him, like a branch’s relationship to the trunk of a tree.
“Hi.” He barely said it; the word was fractionally formed.
I moved into his arms. Our embrace was the ending and the beginning and we stood still in the middle. Andrew had such solid arms. Arms you wanted to detach and keep and connect around you again and again, an armor of amour, every bit of sinew and muscle and skin involved in his holding. And tall. His shoulder was at the bridge of my nose, providing many options to lay my cheek against. I forgot we had to let go.
He kept one hand across the small of my back as he walked me into the suite’s large living room. And I had been imagining him in one hotel room. Good Lord. At least I had been right about the Yankee-luxury part; this definitely was more extravagant than the Monteleon. It looked like an extremely upscale apartment vacuumed free of “home.” Andrew steered me to a yellow silk couch that I sank into as we sat down. He took my chin in his hand and turned my head this way and that. It felt more supported than it did on my own neck.
“Look at you. You’re perfect.”
I really felt I was not, but his voice was so strong and radically different than the one in my head that the shouts of protest became disarmed.
“Do you know how many beautiful women I’ve seen? You—are—per-fect.”
And he started talking, saying long things, trains of thought about himself that had to do with me, and his words became physical, bathing me, swirling around, lulling me into a state of relaxed happiness I had never known.
Then he paused for a moment and looked at me. “I’m going to be in your life for a very long time. I’ve been waiting for someone like you.” And he paused again, making sure I had heard.
“Thank God,” was what I thunderously heard in my head. Thank God, thank God, thank God. Because the empty space in me perfectly matched the empty space in him, and for some inexplicable reason, the two empties together made one whole, like that weird math rule where you subtract twice, but still end up getting an addition, which in class I could never understand, but now here it was in the form of him.
The sex lasted a couple of hours. I undressed in the living room’s light before walking into his bedroom, disrobing as easily as removing a cap that had squished my hair for too long. We were on the bed, a bed whose multitudinous softness I couldn’t before have imagined, and we moved together in the immense dense darkness that only hotel rooms have. I liked the blankness of the dark, the sole reliance on form and smell and sound and skin.
At one point, Andrew reached over me and turned on a lamp. I had no idea which way we were on the bed and was surprised at how accurately he had located the switch. In the golden light, he looked into my eyes.
“This is how you know I’m not just f*cking you, that I’m making love to you.” And his eyes stayed on mine as he moved.
Then he nestled against me, saying something small and low at the bottom of my ear.
“What?”
“You heard me.”
“No I didn’t or I wouldn’t’ve said ‘what.’ What’d you say?”
“I said…I said…” More movement ensued. “I said…I love you.” He sounded about to choke.