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Schoolboy interprets some tiny movement I’ve made as a cue to slip off the couch and take the stool next to mine. “I’m Patrick,” hesays, those crinkly, downturned eyes slow, careful magnets drawing me toward him.
“Kit,” I answer.
He does not offer his hand to shake, so I don’t offer mine, either. “So are you here on business?” I coolly ask.
He holds up a palm to say,Halt. “Come now. We’re going to havethatconversation?”
I blink. “Pardon?”
“We’re at a hotel. We don’t know each other. We can make boring chitchat, or we could actually have an interesting talk.” He leans back and crosses his arms over his chest. He has nice forearms, I notice. Muscular. He’s also not wearing a wedding band.
“And what, in your estimation, is aninteresting talk?” I ask. “You want to talk about politics? Global warming? Health care?”
“I want to talk about who wereallywant to be.” His eyes gleam. “It’s a game I play when I travel. It’s not often that we get the opportunity to be someone other than ourselves, you know? I’m not going to tell you where I’mactuallyfrom, but where Iwantto be from. You won’t tell me what youactuallydo for a living, but what youwantto do, in your wildest dreams.”
A Tiffany lamp, perhaps authentic, sends glittering trapezoids across the marble bar. Out a long set of floor-to-ceiling windows, a rooftop deck beckons, though it is too cold to venture outside. I think of that line from “Eleanor Rigby,” one of my mother’s favorite songs. The title character puts on the face she keeps in a jar by the door whenever there are visitors. Who is Eleanor when she doesn’t have to be Eleanor? Who am I when I don’t have to be Kit Manning-Strasser?
“Interesting.” I turn away slightly. “Except I’m not feeling very creative tonight, I’m afraid.”
“It’s not a matter of creativity. It’s about looking into yourself.Knowingyourself. So you’re saying you don’t know yourself?”
In the background, the soft, unobtrusive electronica song ends, and another begins. Kit Manning-Strasser, I want to tell him, is nota woman who has these conversations.But it does beg a question: Do I know myself? Do I know what I want?
I think of all I have. But I also think of all the wrong paths I’ve taken. I think of how hard I pretend. Everything I haven’t said. Everything I’ve wanted. Everything I’ve gained and lost.
“Fine,” I say slowly, without quite realizing it. I settle back in my seat, and I ask him the very same question. “Where you are traveling from, Patrick?”
His eyes sparkle. “A little town in the South of France. It’s known for its lemons. You?”
“Marrakesh,” I answer, because I went there once with my parents when my father was on sabbatical—just a few years before I had to identify my mother’s mangled body in the morgue after a drunk driver T-boned her car at ninety miles an hour. Marrakesh was the most magical place I’ve ever been. I’ve always meant to go back, and though my new husband has the cash to make such a trip happen, it’s a little exotic for his taste. “And what do you do?”
“I’m a weather pilot. I fly into the center of hurricanes.” He answers swiftly, like he’s done this before. “And on the weekends, I race antique cars professionally. Preferably around old, crumbling cities with lots of tight turns.”
“So you like danger.” I crunch down on a piece of ice. “Thrills.”
One eyebrow lifts again. “You could say that. And what doyoudo, Kit?”
I think ofPulp Fiction,which my sister, Willa, and I used to watch obsessively in high school, especially in those months after our mother died. “I’m the keeper of the meaning of life. It’s in a box in my room right now, and I have to guard it with my life. I get paid very handsomely for doing so.”
“Did they let you in on what the meaning of lifeis?” Patrick asks.
I nod mysteriously. “If I told you, I’d have to kill you.”
“So you’re a woman who likes to hold all the cards, then.”
I shrug. “I like certainty.”
Our eyes meet. Even in our lies, we have told one another something real.
There is lime residue in my teeth. The bartender has his back to us now, perhaps having written us off as flirtatious philanderers. And then Patrick—is that even his real name?—glances at my left hand and says, “And what’s your husband like?”
I turn my fat diamond ring to the inside of my palm. “Actually, I’m a widow.” This isn’t a lie. “Doyouhave a husband? A wife?”
There is something about the way he’s looking at me that makes me feel scooped out and raw. “Neither.”
Is he serious, or is this just what hewantsto be true? I’m not sure which answer I want more.
We have two more drinks and spin tales about ourselves. He has jet-setters for parents. I have distant relations to royals. I say I committed a few stealthy murders in my youth. Patrick says he was once shot off into space and spent days in orbit before NASA figured out he was missing. Midway into drink number three, we turn somber. Patrick tells me he has never fallen in love and isn’t sure love is real. I tell him that I have, when I was young, but then I discovered it’s a fallacy. This is actually my truth, which I know isn’t the rules, but I’m tipsy, and Patrick is inching closer to me with every word he breathes, and something is happening, something I can’t quite understand.
