SHE WASN’T in love with him at the beginning, that didn’t happen till she was well into it. She wasn’t a complete idiot. She wouldn’t have let him into her hotel room that night in Mexico if she thought he was someone she might fall in love with. They were working together.
She let him in that first night because there was no way she would fall in love with the guy. Besides he had a fiancée back in New York. That made it safe. Nothing would come of it.
So she let him in that first night. Later she wondered, was that her first mistake? No, she decided. One way or another they would’ve ended up here, here in her bedroom in New York on an afternoon in June, having traveled more than three years from that couch in the room of a Mexican hotel.
She had let him in. It was no one’s doing but her own.
He went straight for the minibar and extracted little bottles of rum and whiskey and mixed them with Pepsi and sat cozily beside her, joking about his worries for filming the next day. He made her laugh. He was not unflirtatious. She didn’t stop him. She was trying, at that particular junction, to do some forgetting of her own.
He made her laugh. That was the main point. Though later she wondered whether anyone would have made her laugh. She was sort of ripe for it.
It had been late when he knocked and now it got later. She told him she was exhausted and needed to sleep. He ignored her and kept talking. She was tired, but she liked his talking.
For the third time she said, ‘Really, I’ve got to go to bed.’
He flopped forward into her lap. ‘Can I come?’
‘You are insane,’ she said, but she was laughing.
‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Let me stay. I’ll keep very still and lie very quietly beside you.’
They were both laughing. Laughing made everything harmless and carefree and sweet. That’s the sort of idiot she was, taken in by an easy laugh. Laughter took the danger out of it. It was one way to get a woman: make her laugh. It disarms her and distracts her from the perils that may, and most likely do, lie ahead. Laughing throws a person’s balance off, and in that state she is more easily toppled.
Why not laugh with this guy? she thought. Maybe her recent bad luck was the result of being too serious. The animal trainer she’d met when he brought in the lions for that car commercial had said she was too rigid. (This was a man who hadn’t wanted any major thing.) Maybe here was a time to loosen up. If she continued to steer herself too stiffly, she’d never grow or expand. One shouldn’t try always to be certain and sharp and right. It probably did a person good to go slightly against her principles. A person could maybe learn something. Maybe in certain situations it could do both people good. And how would she know till she tried? This was her chance to branch out. Though this rather drunk, boyish, groping man might not look on the surface to offer her expansion, Kay saw there was, tucked inside him, a call to adventure.
But she was still on the fence.
Then he pulled a guerrilla tactic. Into the joking and the laughter he introduced a serious tone.
‘The first time I saw you I knew my life was going to be different.’
She held the smile on her face, waiting for the punch line. She would have rolled her eyes at him if he’d looked at her, but his head was bent forward.
‘I know that sounds like a line and you’re probably thinking, Who is this asshole?’
Her smile sagged. He was sounding different and his face was changed. His face was not looking happy.
‘And I thought, I don’t know what I’m going to do about this. Because I already have someone in my life.’
Kay had the ghost of a smile.
He looked down into the can of Pepsi between his hands. ‘The only reason I’m saying this is because I’m drunk.’ He shook his head. ‘I couldn’t stop thinking about you. Isn’t that ridiculous? And want to know something even more ridiculous?’ He looked at Kay, angry, as if this were her fault. She had stopped smiling now. She was doing her best to make her face placid and not reveal the strange physical effect his words were having on her. ‘I kept thinking about you and I thought to myself, If she asked me to throw everything away for her, I’d do it.’
Kay got the same disconcerting feeling one has listening to the ravings of some lunatic on a street corner when, in the midst of the screaming, one hears a profound truth.
Despite her appreciation for loosening up, Kay had not, since the moment she’d first let him in the door, since the first moment she met him for that matter, abandoned the deep and hidden skepticism which underlay all her relations with men. That part of her remained as alert as a watchman, quick to spot strange movements and to anticipate possible strategies. Of course, the fact that she was giving him so much attention should have been the first indication that she was letting her guard down.
She had learned that when you believe everything a man tells you, you are lining yourself up for a direct hit of disappointment and heartbreak, so it was best not to believe certain grand pronouncements. But she was human. And there was still an unjaded place in her thirty-four-year-old self that allowed for the slight tiny possibility that what he was saying might turn out to be real and that this might, in fact, be big. You never knew when the big thing might happen. It might happen anytime. (That it would happen was a given. You never heard anyone say, ‘You know what? In some lives the big thing just never happens. Some lives simply miss it.’ No, the big thing was like death, it happened to everyone.)
Somehow she relocated herself to the bed—she had an overwhelming urge to lie down—and somehow he had followed her. She was under the sheet and a flimsy blanket. She allowed him to lie on top, but she kept the sheet taut over her chest, barring him. He managed to nudge himself under the bedspread. They were laughing again. They were chummy, cozy.
Then he did something. He proprietarily wrapped his arms around her and drew her close to him. He did it in a way that was nonchalant and robust. She was shocked how nice it felt. She was always surprised how good a person felt. It was shocking. It was one of those rare instances when reality outstripped imagination. Up to that point in their acquaintance he’d been very much a foreign entity, a person making her laugh, a person she did not, in any great degree, fathom—i.e., what was he doing in her bed at four o’clock in the morning, with a fiancée back in New York? No, he was not understood. But once he put his arm around her, he became inexplicably familiar. She’d had a preview of this feeling that night at the opening with Liesl when she stood next to him in the crowded elevator. She felt something radiating from him. For a fleeting moment she had the strange sensation that she was standing next to herself.
You couldn’t be sure which way it would go, the first time you touched someone. Either the person would be familiar and the way he held you would sort of take your breath away, or he would remain a stranger and though your breathing would be affected, the way he held you would be odd and unknown, like arriving in a foreign country and being hit with its smells, which are intoxicating but about which you remain uncertain. It was not the all-consuming feeling which comes when you arrive at a place you’ve known well, after being away a long time, so that some things are changed, giving you a new thrill, and since you see it with new eyes, it is both old and new, both familiar and strange. That is always more powerful.
