Russell Banks - A Permanent Member of the Family

“Maybe not.”

She had quickly become the only person at the convention he wanted to talk and drink with and sneak out onto the terrace to escape the crowd and smoke cigarettes with — the same brand, he remembers, American Spirits, which she jokingly claimed were good for you because the tobacco is organic. They were both trying to quit. Without stating it, they felt smarter and sexier, especially when together, than the people surrounding them. Whenever they spoke of the conventioneers and their wives, they spoke with irony and slight, but not unkind, condescension. Neither of them took the convention or the plumbing and heating supply industry seriously.

To him, regardless of which room they happened to find themselves in, Ellen was definitely the most desirable woman in it. And looking around at his colleagues, most of whom were overweight, badly dressed, red faced and loud, he figured he was the most desirable man in the room. At least to her. The competition wasn’t exactly stiff, however.

He knew by then that Ellen was thirty-four, fifteen years younger than he was, divorced, and her parents lived in Charlotte, North Carolina, where she’d been raised. She’d come to Miami to study marketing at Florida International University. The week after graduation she’d eloped with a man a decade older who had been her statistics professor. “We lasted four years. Luckily there were no kids. Turned out the professor still had a thing about sleeping with his students,” she told him. “Male as well as female,” she added.

“Weird.”

“What, sleeping with students, or swinging both ways?”

“Swinging both ways, I guess.”

“Not so weird. You’d be surprised how many handsome male college professors swing both ways. It’s not about sex. They’re scared of sex. They want acolytes. But maybe it’s Miami,” she added and laughed.

“Miami is a pretty sexy city.”

“That’s marketing directed at northerners, Stanley. Don’t fall for it. Miami’s no sexier than Saratoga Springs, New York.”

His turn to laugh. “Yeah, right.”

The last night of the convention they slipped away from the closing party, crossed the lobby and stepped outside and lighted cigarettes. He remembers the moist smell of the Gulf Stream in the warm offshore breeze. A pair of palm trees clattered in the wind. The driver at the head of a line of waiting cabs flicked his high beams at them.

“You want to go somewhere?” Stanley said.

“No.”

He waved the driver off. “Where’s your place?”

“The Gables. Coral Gables. It’s a ways.”

“Want to go up to my room and raid the minibar for a nightcap?”

She looked away and then down at her feet, turned and rubbed out her cigarette in the standing ashtray next to the door and said, “Sure.”

When they turned to reenter the hotel, five of his colleagues, all men, came jostling out the revolving glass door. Stanley guided Ellen around them by the elbow. He knew one of the men slightly, a beefy guy in his fifties named Bernie who ran a supply house in Syracuse.

“Hey, Stan, c’mon out with us!” Bernie said. “We’re going over to the beach and do a little sightseeing. South Beach, man! The night’s still young!”

“Thanks but no thanks, Bernie. I’ve got an early flight out tomorrow.” He gave the revolving door a push and Ellen walked through and he followed.

Bernie laughed and said, “Yeah, sure.”

His room was on the twenty-seventh floor with a wide, floor-to-ceiling view of Biscayne Bay and the port where the cruise ships, parked like pale dirigibles, waited for their passengers to arrive from the north, and beyond the bay the glittering lights and pulsing neon of South Beach. East of the condo towers, hotels and clubs of South Beach, beneath the scraps of cloud lit pink from below, he could see the Atlantic Ocean, a long dark arm speckled with moonlight.

He opened the minibar and took out an unopened half bottle of California chardonnay, unscrewed the metal cap and poured the wine into two glasses. He counted how many drinks he’d already had tonight. Two scotches at the reception and at the final dinner four glasses of wine. He didn’t feel drunk but knew he probably was.

“Nice view to wake up to,” she said. She sat on the bed and, pinning her gaze to the view, reached down, unstrapped her shoes without looking and flipped them off her feet. He walked to her and placed her wineglass on the bedside table and went back to the window, turned toward the sea and watched her reflection in the glass. She wore a simple black sleeveless dress, he remembers, and a necklace of rough, heavy, semiprecious stones on a leather cord. She had beautiful slender legs. She removed her hooped earrings and laid them on the bedside table next to the wineglass. She took a sip of the wine.

“Are you going to just stand there?”

“I don’t know.”

She was silent for a moment. Then said, “You don’t know.”

She reached down and slipped her shoes back on and buckled the thin straps. He had asked for this, had engineered it, with her help, of course, but he could have blocked it anywhere along the line, just flirted over a weekend, basked in the glow of attention from an attractive younger woman, maybe even indulged in a sexual fantasy or two, all harmless, and caught his early Sunday flight home with a clear conscience, no complications, no secret entanglements. But instead he’d let each step lead to the next on a meandering path that he knew all along would end at this moment. She hooked her earrings on and stood up.

Was he really as lonely as he’d let her believe? If not actually suffering from his marriage, was he bored by it, feeling invisible in it, like an old piece of furniture that can’t be moved or replaced without moving or replacing everything else in the room, so you just leave it where it is and ignore it? It wasn’t his age, he assures himself, the so-called midlife crisis men go through in their late forties and early fifties. He was young for his age. Especially then, five years ago. He had no desire to trade his minivan for a red Porsche, join a health club, abandon his striped Hanes boxers for black Calvin Klein low-rise briefs. And it wasn’t just any attractive younger woman he’d been courting — but not actively seducing — all weekend, as if to prove a point about his desirability to himself and the other guys like Bernie. It wasn’t male vanity. It was Ellen herself, a very specific woman whose smoky low voice, green eyes, dry humor and bright, interesting words, and yes, her slender legs, that had got to him. That, and the way she made him feel about himself.

She was angry, he remembers now. Which is probably why he wanted to forget that night, why he actually succeeded in forgetting it and the way Ellen had made him feel, until here she was again, five years older, yet still that very particular woman who made him visible to himself, funny, smart, good looking, and lonely. These were feelings about himself that he had lost bit by bit over the years of his marriage and middle age, small increments of loss, so that he wasn’t even aware of the loss, until that night when they ended up alone in his room at the Marriott. Lost and, because of her, found. And then all of a sudden lost again. Until now.

“It’s okay, Stanley, you don’t have to pretend. I know you didn’t recognize me at first. And maybe still don’t. I know you don’t remember.”

“The truth is, I didn’t want to remember. Me, I mean. Not you.”

“Why? You didn’t do anything wrong. You almost did. But you didn’t.”

“Maybe that’s why. I didn’t want to remember what I lost that night. And what I found. I wanted to forget that too.”

She gave a hard little laugh and stepped back. “I wish I believed it. What do you think you found and wanted to forget, Stanley? Not true love, that’s for sure.”