The Night

Chapter 4

The valet had stopped. The doorman had his hand on the door. Everybody was watching.

"Get in," he said again, and I got in.

Not because he told me to. Because it was eleven degrees and my coat was open and my clutch was in both hands like a shield and if I stood there one more second I was going to say something I couldn't take back in front of a man whose job was to open doors.

The car was warm. That was the first thing. Warm, and black, and so quiet that when the door shut it sounded like a safe closing.

"Where to," the driver said.

"My place," I said. "Baxter and Ninth. The gray building with the bad awning."

"Baxter and Ninth," the driver said, and pulled out.

Daniel didn't say anything. He sat on his side of the seat with his coat open and his hands on his knees and he looked out the window at the hotel going by, and I sat on mine with my arms crossed and my heart going like a rabbit and my mouth tasting like his mouth.

"You're not going to say anything," I said.

"Should I?"

"You just told a table full of people what I paid."

"You told them first," he said again.

"I was joking."

"You weren't," he said. "You were testing him. You wanted to see if he'd defend you. He didn't. He told the room to get you out."

The car went around a corner. The driver's eyes stayed exactly where they were supposed to.

"That's not—" I stopped. My throat was doing something. "You don't know anything about Morgan Hale."

"I know he didn't stand up."

"He did stand up. He knocked his chair over."

"To leave," Daniel said. "Not to help you."

I looked out the window. Streetlights. A guy walking a dog in a suit. Two women on a corner laughing at something on a phone, and I hated them for it, briefly and unfairly, the way you hate anybody who's having a better night.

"You're very good at this," I said.

"At what."

"At making me feel like I paid for the wrong thing."

The driver turned the wheel. Quiet. Cold night going by.

"I'll tell you what you paid for," Daniel said. "You paid for a man who'd walk in there and make Morgan Hale look small. That's what you wanted. That's what the money was for. Nobody's pretending."

"Then why didn't you do it?"

"Because he was already small," he said. "You just couldn't see it from where you were sitting."

I turned and looked at him. He was looking at me. The car's lights were going across his face in slow stripes, and there was nothing in his eyes that I could name — not pity, not heat, something quieter and worse, like he'd already read the whole book and was waiting for me to catch up.

"Pull over," I said.

The driver's eyes came up in the mirror.

"Sir?"

"Keep going," Daniel said.

"Pull over," I said. "I'm getting out."

"Where," Daniel said. "It's a mile to your building. You've got no phone. You've got no cash — don't tell me you do, I watched you pay with a card that had nine dollars on it two hours ago."

"You watched—"

"You said it out loud in a lobby," he said. "You said a lot of things out loud in a lobby."

The car stopped at a light. The driver's hands were at ten and two. A cab went by with its window down and music coming out of it.

"I want you to know," I said, "that this is the worst two thousand two hundred dollars I've ever spent."

"Then we agree on something."

And then — I don't know. I turned. He turned. My hand was on the seat between us and his hand was on the seat between us and the light turned green and the car pulled forward and neither of us moved.

He looked at my mouth.

I looked at his.

"Your building's the gray one," he said. "With the bad awning."

"Yeah."

"It's got a doorman."

"He's asleep by midnight."

"It's midnight," Daniel said, and nodded at the window, and there was my building, and there was the bad awning, and there was Luis in the lobby with his feet up and his cap over his eyes, dead to the world.

The car stopped at the curb.

"Thanks," I said, to the driver, to nobody, and I got my hand on the door.

"Mia."

I stopped.

"You're not going to invite me up," he said. It wasn't a question.

I looked at him over my shoulder. The car was warm and he was sitting in it with his coat open and my lipstick on his mouth like a bruise.

"I paid for four hours," I said. "It's been two."

He looked at me for a long moment. Then he got out of the car, came around, and opened my door from the outside.

"Then let's not waste them," he said.

The elevator in my building has a mirror in it and it smells like the lemon cleaner the super buys in bulk. We went up eleven floors in that elevator and I watched him in the mirror and he watched me in the mirror and neither one of us said a word. My hands were shaking. I put them behind my back so he couldn't see.

The door of 1104 opened on my apartment — my coat on the hook, my mail on the floor, the blue light of a dead laptop on the counter — and I turned around and said, "It's not much," and he said, "Don't," and shut the door with his foot, and then his hand was at the back of my neck and my back was against the door and my purse hit the floor and neither of us cared.

I want to say I made a decision. I didn't. There was no decision. There was his mouth and there was the sound of my own coat sliding off my shoulders onto the floor and there was my hand in his hair and the whole apartment tipping sideways.

"This is a transaction," I said, against his jaw. My voice was wrecked already.

"Okay," he said.

"It's still a transaction."

"Okay," he said again, and lifted me, and I did not argue with him, and the light in the hallway clicked off.

---

Somewhere in the night I woke up and the city was doing that orange glow through the blinds and his arm was across me like it had always been there. I lay very still and listened to him breathe and told myself this was fine, this was simple, this was a service, this was money and a receipt.

I told myself that three times.

Then I turned my head and looked at him in the dark and something in my chest turned over like a dog in its sleep and I thought, oh no, and I closed my eyes and pretended I hadn't.

---

The phone was what woke me the second time.

Not mine. His — on the nightstand, buzzing, screen up, some name I didn't read because I was half asleep and the room was gray and my mouth tasted like two hundred dollars of hotel wine.

He was out of the bed before I could sit up.

"Where are you," he said, into it. Not a question. Flat. The voice with a floor and no ceiling. "No. I said no calls." A pause. "Then pull them."

He picked up his coat off the floor and there was a sound like paper in it.

"What?" he said, and then the silence got long, and I lay there with the sheet up to my chin and listened to a man have a conversation in a room that was half mine.

"Seen by who," he said.

Another pause. Then:

"Then get to the lobby. I'm coming down."

He hung up. He stood at the window with his back to me and the phone in his hand, and I watched his shoulders come down once, the way a man's shoulders do when he decides something he doesn't like.

"Something wrong," I said.

He turned. He was already dressed — coat open, phone in his hand, my lipstick still on his mouth, which was somehow the worst part.

"Something came up," he said.

"At four in the morning."

"At four in the morning." He came back to the bed, and he pulled the sheet up over my shoulder — one move, careful, a thing I would think about for months — and then he leaned down and put his mouth on my forehead.

"I've got to go," he said.

"Then go."

"I'll send you—" He stopped. He stood up. "I'll send you the rest."

"The rest of what?"

"Of the four hours," he said, and I swear his face did something then, one flicker, like a fish under ice.

And then he went.

The bedroom door. The hallway. The front door — which he pulled shut behind him, but quietly, so quietly that it was worse than a slam.

I lay there for a long time.

Then I got up and I walked into the kitchen in his shirt and I put my hand on the cold counter and I stood there and let myself feel it, one full minute of it, all the way down — the room, the door, the mouth on my forehead, the way he'd said I'll send you the rest like I was an invoice he was behind on.

The money didn't buy me anything.

It bought me four hours of being somebody else, and now it was over, and I was still me, standing in my own kitchen in a shirt that didn't belong to me, with my whole chest hollowed out.

I took the shirt off. I put it on the back of the chair. I told myself I was going to throw it away.

Then I went back into the bedroom to get dressed, and I stopped dead.

The bed was made.

Not made — smoothed. The sheet pulled up flat and folded back at the corner and my side and his side and the pillow where his head had been, all of it set right, like nobody had ever been in that room at all.

And on the pillow there was a piece of paper. Hotel paper, torn at one edge, folded once.

Two words in black ink, hard and fast, the way a man writes when he's already halfway out the door.

Thank you.

I stood there with it in my hand and my heart going and the sky going gray behind the blinds, and I had the worst thought I've ever had in my life.

I was sorry I hadn't asked his name.

---

Chapter 4 Ends