Dead Letters Anthology (30 page)

I had woken up that morning with the sad, empty feeling of having done something irrevocable. His letter offered what I thought I wanted: the chance to part as friends.

But it was already past noon, getting close on to one o’clock. I had no idea what time he’d stopped by with the note. Would he still be drinking his coffee, or smoking his cigarettes, or had he given up on me?

I was wearing my usual outfit for a weekend laundry run – ragged cut-offs, a promotional T-shirt, and flip-flops. I thought of going inside to change, at least to put on eye make-up. But what if that five-minute delay meant I missed him? Did it matter what I looked like, even if this would be his last memory of me? After all, I wasn’t out to seduce him – quite the opposite.

Deciding that speed was of the essence, I hurried to my car just as I was, threw my bag of dirty clothes into the trunk, and headed for the café.

Being a Sunday, the place was packed. I recognised a couple of cars belonging to people I knew before I saw him, grinding a cigarette out under his heel and giving me a shy, crooked grin.

‘You got my letter. What’s the plan?’ he said, opening the door on the passenger side.

I drove off as soon as he was buckled in, thinking that it would be just like Fate to have one of Marshall’s friends – or maybe the ex-girlfriend who carried a grudge – see me giving a lift to a strange guy, a musician I shouldn’t even know.

My plan was to get out of town. ‘You said something about sight-seeing. I thought we’d head for the hills. There’s a state park, and some cute little towns, markets, a German bakery, good barbecue… I’m just going to stop off at home first to change my shoes.’

‘A lot of walking?’

‘Could be.’ Mostly I wanted my make-up.

* * *

Those cute little towns, and the state park, attracted a lot of visitors, especially on the weekends, but it was a very different crowd from the people Marshall and I knew. The last time I’d taken this route I had been with my parents, when they came to visit me during my first year of college.

Going there with him felt strange; it made me feel different, like I was playing a part. I
was
playing a part, and like an actor who can’t get to grips with it, I kept wondering, ‘What’s my motivation?’

Why had I agreed to meet him? Why were we here? Before, at night, it had been like a shared dream. In daylight, part of the crowds strolling around the quaint town square, walking into the pottery, or investigating the dim recesses of a room stuffed with old junk optimistically described as ‘Collectibles and Antiques’, our being together was all wrong. I tried to think up an explanation, in case I was asked. He could be my cousin from out of state… but not if it got back to Marshall, who knew the names and ages of all my cousins… The safest thing would be to connect it to work. If my boss had asked me to entertain a visitor for her… It was unlikely, but as Marshall knew, she had once asked me to take her mother to a doctor’s appointment.

Soon I was treating him as if we’d met for the first time that day. I ‘made conversation’, asking him about the band, their touring schedule, and he obliged with answers and anecdotes. He tried to take my hand, and I flinched.

We had a late, heavy lunch in an ostentatiously German restaurant, and talked about food, our favourite dishes, the fact that neither of us knew how to cook. Then we talked about recent movies we had seen.

Driving back to the city, the sun going down behind us, we were silent, exhausted by the effort of working through every possible subject for conversation. I noticed, as we drove through the practically deserted back road leading into town, that there was a new development on this western outskirt. In addition to the houses, town-homes and a shopping mall still under construction there was a brand new hotel, towering over the landscape from its hilltop perch, its multitude of windows glittering like faceted gems in the last rays of the sun.

‘Turn here,’ he said suddenly and I did; off the highway, onto an empty access road which wound around and around and brought us into the parking lot in front of the hotel. Although the building looked finished, and there had been a sign advertising it, I wondered if it was actually open yet, as there were only four cars in the vast concrete expanse of parking lot around it, and no one to be seen. I stopped the car and gave him a quizzical look.

‘Why here?’

‘From the top floor, we can look down and see the whole world spread out before us.’

I was slow; not getting it, I craned back my head and looked up. ‘You think there’s a restaurant up there?’

‘Let’s spend the night together.’

My heart lurched. ‘You’re going to Houston.’

‘They are. I don’t have to. I could get on a bus tomorrow… unless you want me to stay. We could have one more night – or forever. What do you say?’

It had taken Marshall three years to decide he wanted to marry me, and this guy, who hadn’t even set eyes on me three days ago, was talking about ‘forever’.

I didn’t say anything. I took my foot off the brake and steered the car around to drive back onto the highway.

He sighed deeply. ‘I mean it. I want to spend my life with you. But if that’s too much – I know you’ve got a man, you love him and he loves you, and you’d probably have a better life with him than I could ever give you – he’s—’

‘Don’t you talk about him,’ I growled, feeling my face flame.

‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean… Of course. It’s nothing to do with him.’

‘That’s right.’

‘I was just going to say – if you don’t want me for all the time, I’m happy to be your wayfarin’ stranger, see you when I’m passing through. If you’re lonely—’

‘I won’t be. And it would be wrong, when I’m married.’

‘Okay.’

We went for a little way in silence before he said, ‘Can we be friends?’

I wanted to say yes, and I wanted it to be true, but I didn’t see how that would work.

‘If I came back…’

‘Then I’d have to make up some story about how we met. I’d have to lie… I’m not good at that.’

‘Leave it to me. I’m good at making up stories. Stories and songs,’ he said cheerfully. ‘You know, it’s just as well we didn’t go into that hotel. It had a hungry look about it. I have a feeling that if we went in, we might never have come out again.’

I was happy to let him change the subject, and to listen to something that was not about us. The fanciful story he began to tell turned into a song. I wondered if he was making it up as he went along, like he did with his song for me, although it seemed so much more polished and clever, it must have been something he’d already written. But I think I was the first, and maybe the only person to hear it.

I wish I could remember the words now, or even the tune.

All I can recall is the title – ‘The Hungry Hotel’ – and that it was somehow both whimsical and sinister, scary and sweet at the same time. But how did it end?

It cheered me up, it wiped out the whole estranging experience of the afternoon and the unhappiness we both felt at what was a necessary, unavoidable final parting, and it also filled most of what remained of our journey, down into the city, and back to the parking lot of the bar where we had first met. There was nothing going on, and only a couple of cars parked out back at that hour on a Sunday evening.

‘You sure this is where you want me to leave you?’

‘I don’t want you to leave me.’

‘Stop it.’ I was only annoyed with myself for that unfortunate turn of phrase.

He sighed. ‘I know you don’t want to hear it, but I have to say it—’

We spoke at the same time, our voices overlapping:

‘No you don’t.’

‘I love you.’

Tears started in my eyes. I had to bite my lip not to say it back to him.

One last time we kissed, and then we parted.

A year later he was touring Europe with his new band and I was honeymooning with Marshall in Mexico.

A few years after that, when I was a wife and mother, juggling work and family life, too busy and too happy to have any regrets or even think about the past, I would have forgotten all about him if he hadn’t suddenly gotten famous.

Fame is relative, of course; he was already well-known in certain circles, as a performer and a songwriter, and he’d written a couple of hits that had made him rich. I’d sung along to one of them in the car never knowing, or even wondering, who had written it. It was only when he married a real celebrity – the mega-talented, sexy young singer who’d made hits of two of his songs – that his face as well as his name began to appear all over the place.

I saw him on TV very late one night, as I was trying to feed the baby, my dull eyes fixed on the screen where a music video flashed hypnotically. At first I thought I’d fallen asleep and only dreamed it was him I saw playing the keyboards, dancing (badly) with the singer, dressed like Charlie Chaplin, doing the funny, cane-twirling walk as the music swelled and the singer laughed, and finally in a clinch with the beautiful, sexy singer, the camera zooming in on their lips as they kissed.

And after that – he was with his wife on the red carpet at some event; snapped by the paparazzi; bounding onto the stage with a big grin to accept an award; speaking earnestly to a popular talk-show host; his picture in magazines like
Heat
and
People
; on the Internet, popping up, usually with her, whether I wanted to know or not.

I wanted to say that I had known him – that it was me he had picked before he met her. But if I could not tell Marshall (and I couldn’t; more than ever, now, I did not dare) I could not tell anyone. It had to stay my secret.

That was probably just as well. Even if I had confessed all to Marshall before we were married, and if he had admitted in turn to some small infidelity of his own, and we had agreed to forgive and forget, and truly had – even if I could now, in good conscience, talk to others about this famous person I’d bedded – well, how could I? What price reflected glory? I was no groupie, to brag about the notches on my bed-post.

Anyway, his stardom was fleeting. The marriage ended; he moved to Berlin to be with his new girlfriend, a designer of bizarre and expensive footwear, and although he continued to write songs and published a book of whimsical short stories, his fame now encompassed a smaller, or at least a different, sphere, and made no impact on the world I lived in.

The club where we had first met was demolished to make way for a towering bank building, and after we moved to Montana, I no longer drove past it, or the intersection where I’d watched him walk away. Before long, there was nothing to remind me of that particular weekend so long ago.

The kids grew up so fast. It had seemed like a lifetime before they started school, but after that, the years went by like months. And then Jesse went away to college. Sarah was still at home, but it would not be long before she moved out, and then Marshall and I would be left alone, to finally have that long-delayed conversation about our marriage. I knew things were going to change, one way or another.

One day I got a letter.

A letter! Who wrote letters anymore? Sometimes charities would try to fool you with an envelope that looked hand-addressed, but this one really was. My name and address were written in blue ink, in a looping casual hand that was naggingly familiar.

Inside, though, there was no note, no explanation, nothing but a grey plastic card with a magnetic strip on one side and an arrow on the other. A hotel room key, offering no clue as to what room in which hotel it belonged.

I looked again at my name on the front of the envelope, and suddenly remembered the letter left in my apartment door twenty-two years ago, and – and I thought of the hotel on the western edge of the city where he had wanted me to stay with him.

But how had he found me now? We had no friends in common; I didn’t think he even knew my married name.

But it should be easy enough to find him. I had not heard anything of him for years, but when I entered his name in a search engine, right below his Wikipedia entry (which read to me as if it had been hacked by a malicious joker) was his own website. It had not been updated in over a year. He did not blog or tweet. The most recent ‘news’ I could find was a three-year-old interview: he had moved to Brooklyn following his divorce and was writing a novel. I could find no clue to why he should have gone to the trouble to find me.

I returned my attention to the envelope, stretching it open and peering inside, as if somehow I could have missed an enclosure. But the only thing I had missed was the number pencilled in a bottom corner; a number, it now occurred to me, that might be a room number.

In what hotel? Surely not the one we’d stopped outside twenty-two years ago, the one that had inspired a song I might think of as his gift to me, if I could actually remember it. But that was in another state, and besides… he knew where I lived.

The postmark on the envelope was local.

He had sent me his room key.

I was sure of it. I still didn’t know why, but the idea that he still thought of me after so long was balm to my soul. And I knew where to find him.

There weren’t that many hotels near where I lived. In fact, until recently, I would have said there were none within thirty miles. The area had been still pretty wild and unspoiled when we bought the land to build our house, but since then, the surrounding acres had gradually filled up with houses, and with the expanded population had come restaurants and banks, a big store, a new school, a church, offices and boutiques, and most recently the ground had been broken for an upscale shopping mall. And near the mall-to-be – I had noticed the sign for it just the other day – a hotel.

He was waiting for me there.

How unlikely; but I so wanted it to be true!

Like the impulsive, thoughtless kid I’d been two decades before, when I had imagined the whole universe conspired to bring us together, I responded to his desire. I left without so much as a note to tell my family where I had gone.

I parked near the entrance and went in boldly, hoping to look like a registered guest, clutching my key in case anyone asked, but the woman behind the desk didn’t even look up as I marched past to the elevators.