The Ramblers (3 page)

“Come.”

A
nd there it goes,
Clio thinks as the elevator ascends. The happiness she felt earlier falls away. She feels her pulse quicken. Her temples ache; her shoulders tense.

A surprise? What kind of surprise? The racing after her, the cryptic insistence that she wait up for him . . . This is all so strange, so unlike him. She's grown accustomed to Henry's thoughtful gestures—inventive dates around the city, small trinkets, near-daily overtures of affection that she's come to expect and enjoy as part and parcel of what's been an almost old-fashioned courtship—but everything about tonight is different and this behavior unsettles her.

When the elevator doors open on the hotel's top floor, Clio staggers out.
Just get into the room,
she thinks.
One foot in front of the other.
It's late
after all. She's been awake for almost twenty-four hours. She had a few too many glasses of champagne. She probably just needs water and rest. She peels off her heels again, the awful toe-tangling stilettos that have left her feet feeling fuzzy and numb, and walks the length of the quiet hall, a honey-hued runway mottled with light that spills evenly from crystal sconces. Framed
New Yorker
covers line the wall. She notices for the first time that the rich wooden plaques are up, hanging by each closed door, colossal room numbers etched in the handsome font she helped Henry select.

At the door to Henry's suite, she waves her keycard in front of the sensor. A red light appears. She tries again. The red light again. Shit. She looks around, suddenly wondering if it's the right door, if he's changed the lock. She tries again and the green light blinks and she hears the familiar click of the door unlatching. Inside the room, she drops her shoes by the door and tosses her clutch on the bed. The bag flies open and her phone tumbles out. The screen is lit with a text.

Smith: So sorry I bailed early. It was lovely and: Lena!! Squeeee! Need to focus on self-care this week and rest. Hope you understand. Xx PS—You were luminous tonight. So glad you let me play stylist. And so glad you're home! I missed you.

Smith. Her closest friend in the world. They met sixteen years ago as freshmen at Yale and have lived together since, those four years on campus and the last twelve in Smith's apartment in the San Remo, on Central Park West.

Clio laughs at the self-care bit. She can't help it. Such a Smith-ism. Ever since she started talking to this new life coach, there's been a lot of “self” talk (self-esteem, self-care, self-compassion . . .). Ordinarily she'd tease Smith about it, but Clio has to cut her friend some slack this week. Smith's younger sister, Sally, is getting married on Saturday and it's a miracle that Smith is still vertical. It will be a big, extravagant affair at the Waldorf and Smith insists she's okay with this, that she's “delighted” for her sister, that she simply “adores” her sister's
suitably dull fiancé, Briggs, but Clio knows better. Smith was meant to go first. Smith had the emerald engagement ring, the ethereal vintage lace dress, the dashing Pakistani neurosurgeon, the first baby's name all but chosen
.

Clio will never forget the day it all fell apart last December: how puffy-eyed Smith sulked around the apartment in a daze, how Clio followed in her wake, helping her eliminate all traces of the man who had just blindsided her. They threw out his organic peanut butter, his electronic toothbrush, his favorite Harvard sweatshirt. Then they sat in the bay window in the living room for hours, sipping wine and trying to decipher his cryptic parting words:
I love you too much to continue this.

Clio responds to the text.

Clio: No worries about tonight. I survived. Sleep tight. xo C . . .

She sets down her phone, stands and scans the space for clues, but the room appears just as it did three weeks ago when she left town. She's grown fond of this cozy haven with its faux-fur throws and crisp white linens. Sunday nights in this room are her favorite by far; she and Henry have started a tradition of room service and robes and marathon television watching.

She pulls Smith's dress over her head, drapes it carefully on the chair by the window. In her bra and underwear, she studies herself in the full-length mirror next to the bed. Her body is fuller now, the curves of her hips a bit softer; she's gained some of the weight back.

She walks to the closet and takes out her ivory robe. Henry had the lapel monogrammed with “BG,” short for “Bird Girl,” his nickname for her. She slips it on and walks to the window. The night sky is a soothing chalkboard black. The stars are hiding, but the moon is big and bright. An airplane dots the sky, and she finds herself thinking of all the people inside it, strapped to their seats, surrendering to what will be, floating between here and there.

She glances down at the street. Three flags—an Irish tricolor (a nod
to his Dublin-born mother), a Union Jack and an American flag have been hung above the hotel entrance and now duke it out in the howling wind. People are still out and about even though it's late and bitterly cold. They pass by in electric droves, bundled and determined, leaving glass-muted puffs of laughter and conversation in their wake.

Clio loses herself for a moment but comes to feeling foolish and inexplicably sad. She's dizzy. Her head is light and aches subtly. Doubt wraps her, disorients her.

It's still not clear how any of this happened, the successful older man, the glittering New York City existence, the cocktail dresses and late-night champagne. This is the stuff of fairy tales and she knows this, the makings of other people's outlandish dreams. This isn't Clio. She's worked hard all of these years to focus on her career, on securing grant after grant for her departmental work. She's been fine without a man. She accepted that her life would be one of research and being on her own, but here she is, waiting and deeply uneasy, anticipating what might come next.

Clio should have known something was amiss when she didn't immediately jump on the chance to join the expedition to the Ecuadorian Andes, to study a rare species of hummingbird that lives in the oxygen-deficient, snowcapped Antisana volcano peaks, a miracle of adaptation that they say would have impressed Charles Darwin himself. Arthur, her museum department head, a cantankerous genius with a bite far softer than his bark, chafed at her reluctance. “This research is your
baby,
Clio. And a priceless opportunity to rub elbows with the Chimborazo Hillstars? You'd be crazy to pass this one up.” The expression on his face said it all:
What's gotten into you, Clio Marsh?

And he was right to be perplexed. Field research has always been her favorite part of her work, but this time she felt hesitant, even slightly resentful. She was anxious about leaving Smith alone before the wedding, yes, but more than that she didn't want to abandon Henry, particularly during the stressful weeks before the opening, and
her ambivalence bothered her. Never before had anyone or anything competed with her birds.

But Smith assured her she'd be busy with a few new clients, not to mention her maid-of-honor duties, and Henry was anxious and preoccupied in the final weeks before the opening, so off she went, though she insisted on three weeks instead of her usual six or eight. The team included ornithology colleagues from the museum, a team of UC Berkeley geneticists and a scruffy young photographer from
National Geographic
. Arthur's granddaughter, Angie, one of Clio's most promising students at Columbia, tagged along too as a fresh-faced and eager apprentice, her eyes permanently wide, her little notebook always open, her unending questions riddled with keen detail and enthusiasm. Angie went wild when they caught a close glimpse of the White-tufted Sunbeam,
Aglaeactis castelnaudii
. Clio will not forget the look on Angie's face in that moment, the purity of her awe
.

The first few days of the trip were grueling. They ascended too quickly from Quito to their high-elevation field site located just above the tree line near the Antisana Ecological Reserve and did not have enough time to acclimate properly. Clio lost her appetite and struggled to catch her breath; she huffed and puffed while setting up the delicate mist nets and snagged her backpack on one, breaking the very fine nylon threads, a rookie mistake she hadn't made in more than a decade. But she pushed through and soon enough slipped into her Zen-like concentration, becoming so absorbed in her work of collecting tissue samples that she came to ignore the constant throbbing headache that was her companion throughout the entire trip. At dawn, when the birds danced around her in the hazy morning light, twirling in the air like tiny acrobats, Clio thought she might never come home.

But at night as Clio tossed and turned on her cot in the freezing-cold tent, her mind slipped first to images of her father alone in their house, surrounded by moving boxes, the guilt flaring inside of her, a familiar fire. But then she would leap, with a speed and effortlessness
that startled her, to Henry. She imagined him, his crooked smile, his hearty laugh, but mostly his touch. She pictured the two of them together walking through the park or around the Upper West Side, but she also closed her eyes and saw the two of them together in the hotel bed, her body loose and ecstatic under the weight of his. She ached for him. She missed him in a way she'd never missed anyone except for her mother, and with an intensity that unnerved and embarrassed her. Each day Clio was gone, Henry seemed to vaporize a bit more. Doubts simmered; what if she was just imagining this other glittering world so many thousands of miles away? The human mind, she knew all too well, could play the cruelest tricks.

Walking into the hotel lobby earlier this evening, Clio caught a glimpse of Henry for the first time in three weeks and felt an enormous surge of relief that he was a living, breathing person. She watched him for a few moments before he noticed her. He appeared elegant in the new tweed jacket she'd helped him pick, the silk bow tie he practiced tying on his thigh through fits of hiccuping Guinness-soaked laughter, the fedora like the one E. B. White wore on the little book's front cover. He leaned against the bar, his dark brow furrowed, eyes darting as he nervously scanned notes for his welcome speech. When he looked up and saw her, he lit up and bounded over, arms outstretched. He swallowed her in a hug and kissed her neck.
Christ, Clio, I've been a bloody wreck,
he said, his eyes shining.
But I'm better now that you're here.

He was real.

Is
real.

But now what? Now he says he has a surprise.

Clio considers the possibility that the surprise is a ring, that he wants to marry her.
Shit shit shit.
She's never consciously wanted this, she never allowed herself to want this, at least not in any concrete way. She thinks of her parents. Married at seventeen because they were in a bind, Clio being the bind. She thinks of her father hunched in defeat over her mother's grave almost a year ago, his eyes hollow and wet.
There's so much about her that Henry doesn't know. So much that she hasn't been able to tell him.

She looks around for a hidden box. It's a small room, and there aren't many hiding spots. She runs to his bedside table and throws open the drawer, but it's empty. That would be too obvious anyway. She checks the marble shelves in the bathroom but finds only fresh towels. She rifles through the pockets of his jackets and pants. Looks through his briefcase. Nothing. What's wrong with her? Snooping like this? This is not who she is.

She casts her gaze back around the room, the plush cream carpet and the impossibly large bed dressed neatly in white linens and topped with an excess of plump white pillows.

The bed. All she can think about now: their first time. She made him wait even though she didn't want to. Two full months, months of rich conversation about hummingbirds and hotels, charming jokes about bottled lust, electric brushes of the hand, longer and longer kisses in front of the big shadowy building, and then she couldn't wait another minute.
Meet me now.
Daytime in this room, sunlight bold through pristine glass. A fumbling prologue. A careful undressing. The welcome weight of his body on top of hers. Soft skin. Sandpaper stubble. A laboring for breath. A biting of pillow sham, futile attempts to muffle the scream.

She looks up now, catches her reflection in the twin mirrored bedside tables, fruit of a Sotheby's estate sale. Earlier, she marveled at how together she looked for once, how coiffed and perhaps glamorous, even, but now she looks tired and worried. Her sandy hair, so sleek before, is now full of static. Her mascara has left dark circles around her eyes. Her cheekbones are sharp, jutting from her face. She figures it out, what's haunting her; she looks just like her mother.

She looks away.

She shoves her hands in the deep pockets of her robe. Her right hand closes around something jagged and hard.

A key.

She pulls it out, studies it. It's an old-fashioned brass skeleton key. Along its side, a single word, all caps: HOME.

She holds it up in the moonlight. Turns it over in her hand. What in the world?

She hears something and startles.

A cacophonous banging followed by song. Verdi. Henry belts out
Falstaff,
his favorite of all, and fumbles with the door. Light falls in from the hall and he crashes through, all six feet two inches of him tumbling in a fit of laughter to the carpet. He crawls over to her, an impish grin splayed on his face. He pulls up on her knees, his blue eyes ablaze.

“No stoicism tonight. No
thank you,
” he slurs nonsensically. “When I saw you I fell in love, and you smiled because you knew.”

“Okay, Don Juan, how many more drinks did you have?” she says, nervous laughter escaping her.

“Oh, my bird nerd . . .
When I saw you I fell in love . . .
such brilliance is Arrigo Boito's. That libretto of his was downright divine,” Henry says, then spins and falls back onto the bed.