“I was told he’d be there.”
“He was, but he took off for Toronto. Is there anything else?”
Delorme shut the phone book and opened the room service menu. The idea of eating in the room depressed her. A heaviness settled over her chest and stomach and she heard herself sigh. Really depressed.
A desk card caught her eye. It showed a woman wrapped in a towel with a dreamy smile on her face. Delorme picked up the desk phone and dialed. A recorded voice told her the spa was closed. She opened her overnight bag and hung a little black dress in the closet, placed her other items on the shelves.
She got undressed, put a shower cap over her hair and stepped into the shower. The pleasures of high water pressure and expensive soap. She resolved to change her shower head when she got home.
She dried off quickly and brushed her hair. She opened the closet again and put on her underwear. Her reflection in the full-length mirror nagged at her and she tried to ignore it. Then she couldn’t stand it and turned to look.
Ugh. You used to have a good body. Where did that go? The twenty-year-old she had been would have hated her as she was now. Then again, that twenty-year-old bundle of ego was hardly her present-day idea of good company.
She slipped into the black dress that was shorter than the one she had worn to the party. She hadn’t worn this one for, what, five years? She smoothed it over her thighs and submitted to a train of unhappy thoughts. It looked better with the shoes, but it would take at least two glasses of wine before it looked good. She had no credible reason to get dressed up in the first place. She would have dinner by herself and come back up to the room and watch some terrible movie on TV.
She went to a restaurant a couple of blocks away that she remembered as a lively place. Naturally, this particular night it was all but deserted. A trio of men stood at the bar, too busy jawing about sports to notice her or her vampy little dress. The waiter came and greeted her in French and English, and for reasons Delorme didn’t bother to ruminate on, she chose to answer in English. Normally she was happy to speak French-it was one of the pleasures of visiting the nation’s capital-but tonight apparently she was anglophone.
The waiter had asked only if he could bring her a drink to start, but she ordered the whole meal: steak frites without the frites, double the salad instead. No point in getting even more grotesquely misshapen.
The house red had no edges to it at all and went down too quickly. She was on her second glass before the steak arrived, just the right shade of pink.
The place had gone from subdued to tomb-like. Two of the men had left the bar, leaving the last one, who looked very French Canadian, to pick at his beer label. He had a good face and seemed about Delorme’s age. A left-hander. Wedding band gleaming on the hand that held the beer. He glanced at her and her stomach tightened at the thought that he might come over and speak to her.
She ate her steak and thought about Leonard Priest and the questions she wanted to ask him. She remembered their last conversation and how he had said cock so many times. Not something men did, in her experience, outside porno films. The word repeated itself in her mind without her wanting it to.
The waiter brought the check for her to sign. The man at the bar was gone. The bartender scooped up his tip and the beer bottle with its half-peeled label.
Back at the hotel, she had to wait for the elevator. When the door finally opened, a young couple released each other, none too quickly. The girl’s dress settled against her thighs as her lover withdrew his hand. Delorme got in and the three of them rode in silence to the third floor, where the couple got out. She heard them burst into laughter as the doors closed once more.
In her room, she took the bathrobe from its hanger and threw it on the bed. She took off her shoes and started to unzip the black dress. Then she folded her arms and stared at her reflection in the TV screen. A thinner, more ethereal Delorme stared back. According to her watch, she’d been wearing the dress for less than ninety minutes. She shook her head.
“Pointless,” she said. “Totally pointless.”
She sat on the end of the bed with her hands on her knees and thought about why she might be feeling this bad. John, of course. She thought about Loach and discounted him. She thought about Reicher and the depth of her fear in that locked room. It wasn’t that. She dealt with lots of creeps. A little shakiness for an hour or so afterward, but that was it. A little anger at the idiot guard.
It occurred to her that she might have entirely misunderstood the word loneliness. She had always thought it just meant wishing there was a friend around to talk to. Especially when you were feeling bad about yourself, your character and your life. She’d felt like that often enough, but this crushing, nameless weight was new. This awfulness that seemed to fill not just her heart but the entire room.
She leaned forward and opened the mini-bar. Pulled out a bar of dark Swiss chocolate and a half bottle of Pelee Island red and put them on the bed beside her. She picked up the remote and turned on the TV. Crackle of static as it came alive. The movie selection was long, but most of the titles meant nothing to her.
She scrolled through eight iterations of Barely Legal alone, Horny Housewives, Cum-Crazed Coeds, Gang Bangs, Ass Masters, Sweet Slavery, DP Debutantes. The Info button informed her that DP meant “double penetration” and watching seventy-five minutes of this would cost $13.99. Titles, the screen promised, would not appear on her bill.
She switched off the TV and got out of her dress and hung it up. She slipped into the envelope of cool sheets and opened the paperback novel she had brought with her, highly recommended by Oprah. Page one struck her as less than engaging, and page two was worse. The prospect of losing herself in a story dimmed and went out.
She reached for the light switch and caught another glimpse of the woman wrapped in the towel, the dreamy smile. The whiteness of the towel, the smiling lips remained as an afterimage as she closed her eyes. She couldn’t remember the last time anyone had rubbed her back.
I’m not supposed to be here. I don’t even know what I’m doing here.
Two minutes, maybe three. She throws off the covers and switches on the light. The little black dress is still warm.
He was astonished by the simplicity of the place. A whitewashed attic, angular walls, slanted high ceiling, little more than one room, but whether through frugality or good taste she had managed to make it look large and inviting. She had painted the baseboards walnut brown and papered one wall with a spacious frond theme that maintained the brightness of the space but saved it from monotony.
The floor was covered with scraps of carpet in various shades of grey, fitted together in random squares and rhomboids. A single artwork dominated the place, a poster from the Musee de Cluny, bright red, showing a princess in medieval dress. Other than that, the most vivid object was a double bed draped in a spread of scarlet corduroy. Beside it, a wooden library table, with books packed into the shelves at either end. No television, no CD player, but she wouldn’t need one. In the past five days he hadn’t observed her more than twice without the white audio arteries of an iPod dangling from her ears.
An Apple laptop front and centre. He had followed her to Starbucks and watched her pull out a stack of papers to mark. It seemed early in the term for papers to be due, but perhaps she was earning extra money marking for someone else.
He had entered by the fire escape, the only way into what must be an illegal sublet. The door had a solid enough lock but he had managed to jimmy a window without much problem. It opened beside the galley kitchen, if that was not too grand a term for a built-in hot plate and sink. She had forgotten to switch off the overhead light.
The pay for a contract teacher, even at a major university, had apparently not improved much over the years. She didn’t even have bookshelves. Instead, forty or fifty volumes were lined up along the baseboard. Chaucer, Dante, Villon. Norton anthologies. Not following in Daddy’s footsteps, obviously. Not living on his money, either.
The clothing in her closet consisted mostly of neatly stacked T-shirts. A few pieces suitable for lectures, two small dresses, nothing expensive. He made a mental note of sizes.
The bathroom had no door. It was separated from the rest of the space by a curved wall. In the medicine cabinet, birth control pills, a prescription cream for eczema, allergy pills. Nothing she would die without.
He went back to the desk and opened the laptop. E-mail from students angling for higher marks or to retake tests. A couple from her father. Her calendar was more useful. It gave course numbers and times’ the locations would be easy to find. She had a conference coming up in Chicago in a couple of weeks. A doctor’s appointment
