Body Surfing (24 page)

She neglects to charge her cell phone.

She calculates how much money she has left in her personal savings account. She takes the elevator downstairs and negotiates a reduced rate with a nice young manager named Rick. Together, they decide that she can stay at the hotel for twenty-two days, which is one day longer than her intended honeymoon would have been. Sydney decides to think of her time in Boston as a kind of anti-honeymoon.

Sydney discovers that if she is careful and not reckless and leaves her room only periodically, she is not unduly reminded of Jeff or of the Edwardses. Though, in truth, they never leave her.

The feeling is similar to that she had when Daniel died suddenly. But then she had not wanted to forget Daniel.

Across the street is a residential building. For hours, Sydney sits on a silk-upholstered chair and gazes out a window in her room and tries to divine, through movements in the windows opposite, the lives within. The infrequent comings and goings require some imagination on her part, so she invents stories that occupy her for hours.

Sometimes, when Sydney is sitting in the hotel dining room or is walking the streets of Beacon Hill, she contemplates a version of herself who knew what the future held. Had she been told when she was eighteen and just graduating from high school that she would have a husband and then another and that she would be left at the altar by a third--all by the age of thirty--would she have needed to reach out a hand and grope for a chair so that she could sit down? Would she have been excited? Alarmed? Sad? Wouldn't she have wanted to know why?

One day, when Sydney is in the room, a maid comes to clean. She points out to Sydney a switch on the wall that Sydney has noted but ignored, not knowing what it was for. "It's a privacy switch," the maid tells Sydney. "When you turn it on, a red light appears outside your door, and no one will bother you."

Sydney shakes her head in amazement. "A privacy switch," she repeats with awe.

Sydney wonders if Jeff understands what he did to her. Perhaps he does, for he does not call her or make any further attempt to explain. When Sydney thinks of the Jeff she never knew entirely well--the man whose thoughts were often elsewhere--such a treacherous move seems just possible. Who could know what he had on his mind all those times she saw him looking off into the distance? And yet when she thinks of the Jeff who fixed the lightbulb, the man who asked her to marry him, such a betrayal is nearly impossible to imagine. And when Sydney can stand it and thinks about the man with whom she made love, his actions are truly inexplicable.

Sydney sometimes wakes to the memory of Jeff standing in her bedroom on her wedding afternoon, explaining to her why he couldn't marry her, that it had all been an elaborate game. She remembers her shock. It wasn't so different, she sometimes thinks, from hearing that Daniel had died on the floor of one of the best teaching hospitals in the world. The news had stunned her; she could not comprehend it. Her mind had simply refused to accept the facts. Yet she knows now that with time--for didn't this happen with Daniel?--a kind of necessary acceptance will form around her, like a lobster making its new shell, one that will be soft and easily breakable in the beginning but so hard that only lobster crackers can shatter it in the end.

She can hardly wait.

Leaving the hotel one morning, Sydney sees a middle-aged couple sitting on the striped sofa in the lobby. They are holding hands. They look alike. Sydney thinks about how it is that couples who have been together for a long time begin to resemble each other. She wonders if she and Jeff looked at all alike, if they would have come to do so over time. She wonders if the couple on the sofa have just renewed their vows.

Sydney is aware that there are matters more important than love and the loss of it. A child's incapacities. A climate of terror. Suicide bombers. As she walks the city streets, she repeats this fact to herself again and again.

She tries to read, first magazines and then a book. She is successful at neither. She cannot bear the television, and so she walks. Having brought little with her, she purchases sensible clothes. After a week, she buys a bottle of her favorite bath oil and considers this a victory.

Sydney counts out the days. First there are twenty-two. Then there are fifteen. Then there are ten. When she has nine days remaining, she leaves the hotel in her sensible shoes, prepared to walk a mile for her breakfast. If ever she lives on Beacon Hill, she will know all the best eateries.

The desk clerk says good morning. The doorman nods and smiles. Sydney passes through two parked cars on her way to cross the street.

A calamity at the bottom of the hill--a car accident--catches her attention. She steps into the street and hears the screech of brakes shortly before she feels the impact.

There is a moment of pure wonder and then a bolt of pain. Sydney is catapulted down the street.

The doorman, a cabbie, and a man who looks European hover over her. Sydney tries to sit up. The pain in her wrist is a serious matter, though she notes a slight shift in consciousness, as if she had woken up from a nap.

The European--Sydney notes that he is marvelously dressed in a dark suit with snowy cuffs--has his cell phone out even as he is cradling her head. A policeman, out of breath, bends over her as well. For a moment, Sydney sees only faces.

"It's just my arm," she says.

"You stepped between the cars," the European explains with perhaps a British accent. "I was watching you as I waited for my car to be delivered. The taxi couldn't stop."

"I should have looked," Sydney says.

"Yes, yes," the cabbie says.

Sydney gives her name, the hotel as her address.

As she is being lifted into the ambulance, Sydney notices the taxi stopped at an odd angle on the street in front of the hotel. Behind it stretches a line of cars as far as she can see.

Rick, the manager, accompanies Sydney to the hospital. A man used to making things happen, he arranges for her to see a doctor straightaway. The broken bone is pointed out on the X-ray. While the doctor sets her wrist, Rick squeezes her other hand.

When Sydney, her wrist in a cast, returns to the hotel later that evening, personnel come out from a side door to greet her. She is not allowed to get in the elevator by herself. A desk clerk and a doorman accompany her up to her room. She hopes she hasn't left anything embarrassing draped over a chair.

Already, there are bouquets. She knows the hotel flowers at once because they are ivory. The staff would not have ruined its own decor.

The card set before a second, smaller vase of pink snapdragons is signed Mr. Cavalli.

Italian, Sydney thinks.

A table has been set up with a cold meal--good cheese, flat bread, grapes, strawberries, olives, nuts--in front of the ottoman. Sydney notes that it is a meal that can be eaten easily with one hand.

She notices something else as well--something quite strange and wonderful. For the first time since the wedding-that-didn't-happen, she feels alert.

On the fourth-to-last day, Sydney receives a handwritten note brought straight up to her room by a doorman named Donald. Mr. Cavalli is having coffee in the restaurant and wonders if she might like to join him. He hopes that her wrist is feeling better.

Sydney examines herself in the mirror. She is not dressed well, but that is perhaps better than appearing to have cared. Because of her wrist, her hair has been left to its own devices, never felicitous. She sighs. It is not that she specifically does not want to meet Mr. Cavalli, or that she thinks he will pursue her. It is that in eighteen days she hasn't had a conversation lasting longer than a few sentences with any person.

He stands as soon as she enters the hotel restaurant. His suit is very fine, unlike any she is used to seeing in her universe of academia or summer folk, his shirt so white and crisp she thinks it must have been purchased that morning.

"I am so pleased," he begins in perfect, if formal, English, learned not in America but in London perhaps, the accent a mix of Italian and British. The man--she could not have seen this at the time of the accident--is quite tall. This disparity in their heights unnerves her for a moment, but he gestures for her to sit down.

Mr. Cavalli must already have spoken to a member of the staff, because there is a pot of coffee and a plate of pastries on the table. Sydney sees that Mr. Cavalli is a man who orchestrates his own future, who does not wait to be waited upon. She wishes, under the circumstances, that she had dressed in something less dreary, had at least put a comb through her hair.

"If there is anything I can do," he says as a waiter pours their coffees. She thinks, What if I had wanted tea? And then she has another thought: Did he, in advance of her arrival, ask the staff what Sydney Sklar customarily drinks in the morning?

"I would have called you earlier," he adds, "but I thought you would be resting. Are you in much pain?"

"Not much, no."

"That is good, then."

"Where are you from?" she asks.

"I grew up in London and Naples," he answers.

Outside the dark-paneled restaurant, traffic flows freely down the hill. Not thirty feet away, a taxicab came in contact with her right wrist. By the bar, a female staff member is polishing wineglasses with a white cloth. She might be listening, or perhaps she is daydreaming. Might she mind the occasional arrogant guest who demanded a restaurant be opened especially for him? Would money have changed hands?

In an hour, two hours, the room will be filled with businesspeople of both genders paying large sums of money for Chilean sea bass and salads of fruits de mer. Sydney knows the menu well, but always times her appearances in the room so that she arrives early or at the tail end of the dining hour. The salads are, of course, exceptional. Sydney has learned over the past several days how to eat even complex meals using only one hand.

"What do you do?" she asks the Italian man.

"If I might be permitted to ask a question," he says without answering hers. He brings his coffee cup to his lips. She noted earlier that he took a great deal of sugar with his coffee--so much that she imagines the sugar like silt, undissolved at the bottom of his cup. "Do you live here? In this hotel?"

Sydney has not wanted to discuss her presence in the discreet hotel. She has not told anyone why she is here, though she imagines the staff speculate. Twenty-two days is an odd number, too many for sightseeing or for a business trip. In any event, it must be perfectly clear that Sydney Sklar is not conducting business of any sort.

"I was supposed to be married," she says. "But my"--and here she hesitates over nomenclature, always revealing--"my fiance changed his mind on the morning of the wedding. I came here as a kind of anti-honeymoon."

"I am so sorry," the man says, and she sees, in his eyes, that he truly is. "This man did not deserve you," he adds.

"You can't know that," Sydney replies somewhat defensively.

Defending what? she wonders. Jeff? Her judgment? She takes a sip of coffee. "It might have been the other way around," she says.

"That you would say that means it is not true. I was correct the first time. He did not deserve you. Did he explain himself?"

"He simply didn't show up. His father and his brother had to go find him. I don't know what he hoped to accomplish by staying away. It only made his appearance more public, more shameful, though I was the one who felt the shame."

Mr. Cavalli merely nods. Of course a woman would feel the shame of abandonment. It is, he might think, her responsibility. "It seems an act of pure cowardice on his part," he says.

"He told me he had asked me to marry him for the wrong reasons. That he had done it to hurt his brother."

"His brother loved you?"

"It was more complicated than that, I think. His brother showed no signs of loving me. Quite the opposite, in fact."

"I'm sorry if this is painful for you," he says.

"It's the first time I've talked about it." Sydney folds her hands in her lap. She feels inside herself a great, and welcome, capitulation.

"I do not wish to pry."

"It's something of a relief."

"Yes, I can see that."

"It was just. . .just so. . ." She stumbles. "I was part of a family, and now I'm not. They meant something to me, that family."

"Has it been helpful being here?" Mr. Cavalli asks, indicating the hotel.

"I think so. Yes, it has. I can't imagine what I would have done otherwise."

Mr. Cavalli sits back on the leather banquette, one hand still touching his coffee cup. He inhabits his clothes with gestures as elegant as the cut of the cloth.

Sydney senses the abnormality of the meeting. The young woman polishing the glasses will think them merely one more illicit couple, though nothing has been done or said to indicate that. Still, there is an agenda that isn't entirely clear to Sydney. She could stand and leave now and not know the subtext, which might be curiosity, or simply attraction.

But the man seems, on balance, too sophisticated to make the usual pass. He would know her to be skittish now on the subject of love, a bad bet all around. Either too eager or unwilling.

"I was in love once," Mr. Cavalli says, perhaps wishing to share a confidence similar to hers to balance the equation. He has perfect manners. Anticipating Sydney's question, he offers, "She was British. I met her at university. Her parents objected."