The Big Dream (19 page)

But someone joined them. Slouched towards each other on their bar stools, with hands loose on their beer steins, they looked only moderately engaged. A wet-looking sales rep joined them for
some industry wisdom from the real actual CFO. This young man looked at the executives with the eyes of one coping with loneliness with a grim fire for professional advancement, warm only for ad sales, networking opportunities, firm handshakes.

The senior marketing manager could only leave gracefully, and she did. She went to her room knowing the number of his. It was 10:30 in the evening. He had a drink with the lost corporate soul, and then he went to his room knowing the number of hers. It was 11:09 in the evening.

To be in one's assigned room and then to go back into the hall felt like a heavy step on an avalanche-freighted mountain. Everyone knew that she was alone, he was alone, but at least they had their key-card doors to hide behind. To go out and wander the halls was an admission of loneliness rather than simply aloneness. Anyone seeing either of them padding down the hall would know this loneliness. Could that be borne?

She slid the chain and flipped back the bedspread and slid her palm at an angle between her thighs. He flipped the channels and sipped his tap water and looked for the porn not quite vivid enough to count as pay-per-view.

A declaration or confession begged to be made, lest energy that was as brilliant as single candle in a dark room go dead and dull as a flashlight. It is difficult to discern who finally took the point. Her, in lightly suggesting, into her flimsy silver phone, that he might attend the Canadian office's Holiday Soiree? She risked his awkward demurral, his too-loud laugh of apology. Or was the risk more his, for arranging the trip when his fellow executives thought it pointless and his children had hoped to ski? She said the entire company would like to see him there, plus he could see the social committee's accomplishment. He said it would be good for Canadian morale in these troubled
economic times; his eldest son could be responsible for the car keys and grocery money.

Almost as strange as his RSVP was hers. To colleagues she said, why shouldn't she attend, though she hadn't in the seven years of employment? To herself she said, why shouldn't she wear a dress that plunged and glittered, though normally she shunned dresses that indulged in verbs?

Why shouldn't she sit next to him in the fir-strewn ballroom? There was no executive table; this was a free-thinking company, though generally executives liked to sit with executives, designers with designers, marketing staff with . . . But she sat with him, uninvited, except his wide-eyed glance across the ballroom, mid-conversation about real estate. Her colleagues and nearly-enough friends saw her drift past and sit far beyond the holiday tree. They said to each other that she would soon be promoted. She would be missed both in the office and at that dinner table, her arch chatter and penchant for drinking less than her share of the wine.

The CFO felt shame that the conversation he invited her into was only about housing prices, and would be for the entire evening, and there was nothing he could offer her, besides a compliment, and his napkin when hers fell to the floor. Only this.

He said to her, out of the corner of his mouth, “You look great,” and she, without eye contact, having no real concept of what he was wearing, said, “You, too.” The pink twist of his mouth, a touch of black-grey bristle missed by the razor, was all she watched.

There was a Portobello mushroom stack, a speech, supreme of chicken, speech, mango flan, speech and then the DJ took the podium and put on Bruce Springsteen. She whispered towards his shoulder, “Heaven help us – dancing.”

They had to stay, since he at least had ostensibly crossed time zones for this celebration. But after having watched each other's mouths opening – parted lips, flash of teeth, slip of sautéed mushroom iridescent with butter – and closing – press of lips, the
circular chew, slow clench of swallow – it was hard to sit quietly through the Jingle Bell Rock and the Macarena.

But he was from head office and she had her admirers and all would talk. So they talked, too, only occasionally with each other, and allowed wine, and then coffee, to be refilled. Their complicity was only that they did not allow themselves to be separated, drawn to distant tables, though several times they had to speak over each other.

So the evening went, as their lives had gone, colleagues, impressive wit, laughter, wine, but lurking at of the end of the evening, this one evening, perhaps something other than loneliness. Perhaps.

When she left, she smiled at him over her right shoulder (bare). He raised his mug (decaf, and he was embarrassed by it) and let someone who was no one in particular finish a sentence, and another two besides, before he followed her out.

She got her coat from the coat check and sat on a bench in the foyer that was secluded enough that she would not need to wave anyone goodbye. She thought she had probably made a mistake, imagined an opportunity where none existed or a protocol she could never know. She thought she would sit on the grey vinyl bench until she wilted, the spray-sheen evaporating from her hair, the perfect shade of blue from her dress, and the glow from her face. She would turn nothinger and nothinger, until there was eventually no need to drive herself home, because she could float, or fly, or not care where she was.

She was thinking about zooming through the brownish night sky over Toronto when the foyer doors swung open and he loomed grey-suited, coming towards her without seeing her. He had his right arm in his coat, the other sleeve trailing behind. This moment of imperfect communication – the anxious skitter of his gaze made clear he thought she'd left or was leaving – made her sad, for they really knew no more of each other than chatter and résumés and coffee cream. He didn't know if she'd issued the
invitation or would want to, anymore than, until that moment, she knew if he'd seen it or cared.

And still in that crowded ballroom, she had tried to toss a flirtatious glance, despite her shelves full of Russian novels and closets full of orthopaedic shoes. And he had tried to accept it, despite his monochrome ties and fear of car mechanics. So she stood, and he saw her, and his gaze went smooth on her face, and he put on his other sleeve so he could offer her his arm.

It was late, it was dark, not many had stayed to the bitter battered end; perhaps no one saw them as they went through the parking lot to his rental car. She thought it best not to mention as they passed her snow-swaddled Prius. Perhaps they were seen and, in other cars, commented upon, laughed at for their prim middle-aged debauchery, their weak defenses against loneliness. She felt only the inside of his forearm over the inside of her forearm. But for two coats, his suit jacket and dress shirt and her moisturizer – but for all that, touch.

It was only when the engine was warming and seatbelts were buckled that he said, “I will drive you home,” and she said, “Yes.”

Her home was a condo on the southern hem of the city and she had wanted it desperately until she first slept there, high and expensive, drifting over the lake, dreaming of mortgage payments.

He didn't really know the city, didn't know on-ramps, exit signs, and had no internal compass to know west, east, lake, city. She had to direct him, and thought briefly that the dull marital-ness of “You're going to want to get over, it's a left merge,” would dim the thing that had been sharp and glittering in the air between them all evening, all year, always.

But her voice seemed to him bellish and clearish and dimmed nothing. He wished he didn't need directions, he wished he had somehow practiced this beforehand, but to indicate turns she touched the inside of the elbow, warm through all those layers of cloth.

Idling outside the condo tower when she said, “Here, right here,” he suddenly felt a whirl of inexperienced years, marriage and before, always. What did he say, what did he assume and deliberately not say? Exhaust fumed into the gutter and the eyes of cats. He said, one thousand years old, feeling like a child, “I hate to – Would you . . . could I come up for a while?”

She might have, just might have, rolled her eyes, but he caught it only in the rearview and couldn't be sure. That hand on his arm again, eyes full of... something less ironic. She handed him a blank plastic card. She said the magic words, “Visitor parking is underground.”

When he parked badly and babbled on, when she couldn't find her key and babbled on, when there was nothing in the world to say in the elevator, they were both embarrassed, and united in this.

It was a relief to be inside her modest white condo, their chilled feet curling into the modest pile of the living room carpet. It was a relief to do something, at last, that was wordless, was only themselves.

No.

It wasn't
only
, nor wordless. Even as they walked sock-footed towards each other on the carpet, each remembered that night in words, in the language of a self-told story that each would tell silently against the cold loneliness of future nights, all the nights that might ever come. Their memories were words.

Even as she rocked against him she was remembering how he tucked her weight into him. She remembered. Even at his first shock at how cold her lips were – how could they have chilled inside his warm rental car? – he remembered the warm-cool, the pressure, her hand on his arm.

But she did warm up and he pulled her in tighter and it became a moment where they wondered what came next. He wondered how to ask where her bedroom was. He wondered if that was to ask too much, to imply he'd spend the night when the living
room floor seemed much more one-night-stand-ish. His hand cupped the outside of her left breast almost unsuccessfully, so thoroughly was that breast cupped by her strapless padded underwire bra, which was almost all he felt. But still he felt her a little, too, soft and thrilling. He had never had a one-night stand; the protocol could have been anything.

She didn't want to make love on the carpet, under the ceiling light from Restoration Hardware, their limbs tangled and cold, backs twisting and spasming. She didn't know if he'd ever looked closely at her eyes or her waist or her job description, but she was a
senior
marketing manager, and it showed in all the ways she bent gently in yoga class, sat down to take off her boots, made love in the dark.

And so she tugged his tie and took his hand on down the condo-sized hallway. The bed was perfectly made, for she had expected, hoped, something. And then there they were.

He unzipped her dress. He knew how to do it in a long graceful sweep; he had been married for something. He'd always admired the silvery sound of a gown splitting open.

The fabric fell away from her fast, too fast, she hadn't realized she would be bared so quickly and the duvet still tucked in. She felt the whoosh at her knees and, before he could look down, she pressed herself tightly to him, her nylon hips a jolt, bra cups crumpling, ripples of stomach invisible.

He was startled, pleased by her ardency and also by the pressure of her lingeried body against him. She kissed his mouth, to keep up the show of passion that was becoming fact, slowly, nearly, anyway. She slid her palms up his dress shirt, past the droplet of red wine beside the navel, the smear of butter beneath his left nipple. She slid her hands under the silky (not silk) lining of his jacket and up over his rounded, unmuscled shoulders.

He let his arms go slack, and heard his dry-clean-only jacket crumple to the floor. Immediately fingertips to bra-clasp. As if to make up for every high-school fumble in the dark, the hooks
uncoupled easy as breath, and in another instant the tip of her clay-dark nipple brushed the butter stain. He thought of the bun he'd dropped, then eaten anyway. Soft, white and sweet.

Both were aching, damp and hot, tangled in her bra strap and his tie, waiting. Finally, he pulled back impatiently, yanking his tie and toeing off his socks simultaneously. She, bereft, underwire-less and seven pounds above her ideal BMI, dove underneath the fluffy white duvet.

She watched his chest appear (the tie was on the floor by the time she was covered) from the stained shirt. He regretted the white hairs sprigging through the chestnut, the paunch of ice cream in front of the TV; she didn't. He unbuckled his belt. It didn't make that rattling sound that she thought all male belts made.

While he undid the button hidden cleverly in the fabric at the top of his fly, she squirmed a hand under her pantyhose at the centre of her belly, more imitation than self-stimulation. She rolled down the waistband as he slid his slacks to the floor. She was writhing under the covers to free her feet as he rounded the bed, eager now without the chaste pale cotton boxers. He was also raw with visibility, though, wanting to touch her partly so she'd stop watching him.