I scanned the room, crouching along the perimeter, my eyes adjusting. Then, in the far corner, I saw what I’d come for—my ticket down. There was a square in the floor with a wooden contraption bolted to it. It was a collapsible set of stairs. I grinned. That’s why I’d never seen them before. Because they weren’t there. I hooked my finger into the loop, pulled as hard as I could, and the stairs creaked down ahead of me, touching down on the marble. I’d never been inside the Golconda when it wasn’t brightly lit and somewhat populated, at least without the hum of the espresso machine.
I climbed down, testing each rung to make sure it was fit for human weight. I could go back up. I could always go back up. The air was still, the chandeliers dimmed to the point where their bulbs appeared to glow. They reminded me of the phosphorescent bays in Puerto Rico. I’d been once, with Boots. He insisted on staying on the beach to watch the sunset, and so I let my feet plow into the sand, surveying sandpipers chasing the tide and then the tide chasing them back, while sand fleas devoured us. I didn’t want to seem like a bad girlfriend, an unfun girlfriend. Eventually, we scurried back to the hotel before our bites became too many and too painful.
It was an odd sensation, being on this floor with no one in sight. On the one hand, I shouldn’t be here. On the other, I felt like a teenager who’d forgotten the keys to her own house. In the dark, I felt along the curved wall outside the meditation room until my fingers touched cold metal. I paused for a moment, listening, scanning the ceiling for any blinking lights. I felt, for the first time in weeks, truly alone.
Then I pushed.
The reality of an image both expands and narrows the imagination. It breathes, inhaling the new understanding and exhaling the old one.
The meditation room was two floors high and divided into the women’s entrance hall and the room for Torah study. Moorish arches delineated the space. They were the first things I noticed, the only shapes I could make out, adumbrated by the meager light coming in through a little row of stained glass windows. Beneath them was a wall lined with black binders. I could see the contrast of white strips on them. Labels from a label maker. Probably with the names of men on them. Or Golconda packages. I felt for a light switch, pawing at the wall, but the lights came on before I pressed anything.
I froze, unsure of what I’d done to trigger this flood of electricity. Had I tripped a silent alarm? I squinted. The lights in here were halogen, far less hospitable than the chandeliers. These ones also buzzed.
Then I heard my name.
“Lola.”
I was hallucinating.
“Lola.”
I was not hallucinating.
“Lola!”
How can I describe the speed with which I turned around? Did I whip or did I send my eyes sideways as they do in horror movies? My only memory is of a man who appeared in the middle of the room. A man with a size and shape as familiar to me as my own.
“Max?” I whispered.
Boots gave me a single wave, like he was brushing an image off a screen.
17
I used to have a recurring daydream about the night I met Max. I was the one making it recur, which made its frequency less compelling. Still, it had that same vivid remove from reality that unconscious dreams have. I saw myself on a film loop, almost getting hit by that bus before Pierre’s party. Each time, I stepped into the street. Each time a different man yanked me to safety. Whoosh. Yank. Whoosh. Yank. The hair blows across the face. Whoosh. Yank. The worried male expressions come into focus, one after the other, panic followed by heroism. I had the fantasy while in the shower, while at work, while at the dentist’s office. I was ashamed of the antiquated scenario of it. I am not some helpless woman who lives in a tower. Should I not be the one yanking myself to safety?
It’s just that sometimes you really need a bus pointed out to you.
* * *
Max looked even taller than I remembered after only two weeks away. And perhaps because we were in a temple, a place where people had come to learn and recite and be reprimanded by God’s law, I could feel myself in trouble. Deep trouble. Principal’s office trouble. He looked like he was about to eat me.
“Max?” I repeated.
I tried to will my feet to move. Modern Psychology once did a sidebar on the oversimplification of dividing a fear response into “fight or flight.” This duality left no room for the most common choice: freeze. Most people react to fear with stillness while the heart races and the mind disassociates. They close their eyes and hope the danger passes. Which is what I did. But when I opened my eyes, I was still in this room. Max, stone-faced, walked over to the far wall and returned with two metal folding chairs, which he kicked open.