James Collins - Love In The Air

She was smiling and she looked flushed and bright-eyed from having hurried to arrive without being too late, and from the pleasure of seeing them both.

“Hello, boys,” she said.

Jonathan and Peter stood up.

“Hello, luv,” said Jonathan. They hugged and kissed, more than just a token public peck.

“Hi, Holly!”

She gave Peter a kiss on the cheek, and in returning it Peter had to put his hands on her bare shoulders.

As they settled into their seats, Holly apologized for being late (“It took me longer to get ready than I expected”; she and Jonathan exchanged conjugal looks, mock sheepishness on her part, mock exasperation on his), and she told Peter that it was so nice to see him but that she was so sorry Charlotte couldn’t come.

“She was really sorry to miss you both,” Peter said.

“Well, say hello to her for me, will you?” said Holly. She ordered a glass of wine. “Oh, Peter, weren’t you supposed to be giving some kind of presentation today?”

“Did I mention that?”

“Yes, I think so, when we were arranging dinner. I think you said that tonight would be good because you’d be done with that, or something.”

“Oh.”

“So how did it go?”

“I killed,” Peter said.

“Really! That’s great!”

“It wasn’t a big deal at all.”

“I’m glad it went so well,” Holly said. “Jonathan, did you hear? Peter killed.”

“Yes, I heard. Congratulations, Peter. What was it all about? Debentures?” Jonathan thought it was funny just to say the word “debentures.”

“Oh, it was nothing worth talking about.” Peter shook his head dismissively.

“Okay,” said Holly, looking at Peter with a tiny frown.

“And how was the play?” Peter asked. Holly taught eighth- and ninth-grade Classics at a private girls’ school, and she had helped with the eighth-grade play, which had been performed that night.

“It was wonderful!” Holly said. “The girls were great. They were so funny! The boys too. And boy, let me tell you, there is nothing quite as intense as a thirteen-year-old Hermia who really is in love with her Lysander.”

The girls had performed A Midsummer Night’s Dream with students from an all-boys’ school. As the rehearsals progressed, complicated romantic dramas had, of course, arisen among members of the cast.

“Well,” said Holly, nodding at Jonathan, “and how about Anton Pavlovich here? Did you see the review?”

“Oh God,” Peter said. “Charlotte read only part of it to me. Don’t tell me it made that comparison.”

“It did. And I have to live with him.”

“Please” said Jonathan, “you know me. Unworthy as I am to receive such praise, I accept it with the deepest humility and gratitude.”

Holly asked about the reading. It went well, they told her.

“So we all have something to celebrate,” she said, and they talked some more. Then the waiter came over and started describing the specials, ingredient by ingredient, and at about the third appetizer (“fava beans …”) Peter’s mind began to wander. It drifted back … back … back to that fateful night three years before …

After he graduated from college, Jonathan lived in a one-bedroom apartment far downtown, but then his stepfather died (as Jonathans father had before him) and his mother inherited an apartment in a hotel on the Upper East Side. She and her husband had used it only on visits to the city but she decided to keep it—more accurately, Jonathan convinced her to keep it—as an investment. While it appreciated, it only made sense for someone to live there—Jonathan, say. He could not afford the monthly maintenance, so she handled that as well as the room service charges, which the hotel simply sent her as a matter of course. The apartment consisted of a bedroom, a library, a dining room, a sitting room, and a kitchen (which saw little use). Meanwhile, Jonathan kept his old place to use as an office (and it didn’t hurt his social life to have some geographical diversity). It was from these precincts that his tales of human struggle issued forth.

One day Jonathan called Peter and said that he was having a few people over that night and that Peter should come. It was an invitation Peter readily accepted, for the people Jonathan had over were usually women whom Peter found very attractive; of course they were pretty, but they were also either smart or a little tragic or rich or minor geniuses at something or other—or all of these. Beautiful, taken-seriously painters who came into a vast fortune as infants when their parents were murdered, these were Jonathan’s specialty. Moreover, at Jonathan’s, a fume of amorousness always hung in the air, and, so, well, who knows?

“Sure,” Peter said. “What time?”

“Around ten or whenever.”

“What can I bring?”

“Just your fascinating self, that’ll be fine.”

Peter asked who was going to be there and Jonathan mentioned a few names. “Oh, yeah,” he said, “and this girl I met at a campus thing.” A prestigious university had invited Jonathan to spend a term in residence. “We’ve kind of been hanging out a lot together up there.”

“Uh-huh.”

Jonathan paused for a moment before continuing. “I’ve got to say, she’s, well, she’s kind of fantastic, actually.”

“She is.”

“Yeah, she is.”

“So what’s her name?”

“Holly.”

Holly.

Peter reacted with a start. His heart began to pound and he flushed. Four years before he had sat next to a girl named Holly on a long airline flight and had fallen deeply in love with her; he had lost her phone number and had never seen her again, but he had thought about her hourly ever since. But what were the chances that Jonathan’s Holly and Peter’s Holly were the same person? He wanted to ask Jonathan more about her. But it was crazy. There were a million Hollys in the world.

Jonathan’s apartment was already crowded when Peter arrived. How glossy everyone always looked at parties there, how loud and vibrant was the cacophonous talk. Peter got a drink and chatted with some people, and then he looked around for Jonathan. He found him easily, for he was sitting on the sofa in the living room. A young woman sat next to him, and she and Jonathan were holding hands. It was the young woman whom Peter had met on the plane. She looked almost exactly the same, except that her hair was shorter. The sight of her stunned Peter, knocking the wind out of him.

He needed a moment to recover, but Jonathan had seen him and waved him over. The introduction. Exclamations. We’ve met before! You have? Yes, years ago on a plane. How amazing! Holly was excited and very friendly, but Peter felt nothing but despair, for she gave no indication that she had spent every waking moment since their parting thinking about him. She was wearing a rather low-cut silk blouse and extremely narrow black pants with a faint chalk stripe. She looked fantastic.

Peter and Holly told Jonathan their story. They had bonded over Thomas Mann, of all things! Then their narrative petered out.

“Well, so,” Jonathan asked, “you never saw each other after that?”

Peter took Jonathan’s question to be a challenge. Of course, any halfway competent male who flew across the continent sitting next to a young woman like Holly would have managed to get her phone number. Peter felt compelled to stake his own claim to Holly, to show Jonathan that he had not failed in this respect, and to make sure Holly knew what had happened, whether she cared or not. True, in achieving these aims, he would make himself look idiotic, but that was not too high a price to pay.

“Actually,” he said, “we were going to see each other again. Holly wrote her number on a piece of paper, and we were going to have dinner.” To identify the piece of paper would be to give Jonathan too intimate a detail, Peter thought. “But … uh … well …” He paused, turning red. “Well, I actually lost the piece of paper.”