The Hour Before: Anna’s Story
The house was quiet when I started getting ready. David had taken the kids to his mother’s for the night. We’d planned it that way. He’d asked at breakfast if I wanted the place to myself for the hour before, and I’d said yes please, and he’d kissed me on the forehead like he understood every layer of what I meant.
I didn’t want to walk into that bar already different. I wanted to become different in front of him. He’d earned that part.
I poured a glass of cold white wine and carried it into the bathroom. The light through the window was that thick gold late-afternoon light that makes everything look like a painting. I stood for a minute just looking at the woman in the mirror. Not yet who I would be at nine. Still the woman I’d been at four, who’d made the soccer pickups and folded the laundry and read three emails from work I should have answered. That woman wasn’t who was walking into the hotel tonight, but she also wasn’t separate from her. I needed both. I sipped the wine.
The shower took a long time. I’d thought about this for weeks. The exact sequence. Hair first, then the body wash with the fig and cedarwood scent David had given me two anniversaries ago and that I almost never wore because it felt too deliberate for grocery store days. Tonight was a deliberate day. I let the water run hot and the steam pool. I shaved everywhere I’d planned to shave. I conditioned my hair twice. I stood under the spray and breathed, and somewhere in the third or fourth minute I felt the woman from four o’clock thin out and the other one start to take shape.
In the towel, I sat at my vanity and did my makeup slower than I’d done it in years. Not heavy. Just a little smoky around the eyes, my mouth in the deep wine color I’d been saving. I left my hair half up, the way Marcus had asked when we’d talked on the phone two days ago. I thought, as I pinned it, about how strange it was that this man I’d met only twice already had a vote in how I wore my hair. Stranger still that I’d given him the vote. Strangest of all that I liked it.
The lingerie drawer was the part I’d thought about most. David and I had picked it out together the previous weekend, in a slow grown-up afternoon at a boutique downtown. He’d sat in the dressing-room chair and I’d come out in three options and watched his face shift each time. The black silk slip with the lace detail had been his clear favorite, and mine too. We’d looked at each other in the mirror and known. He’d paid for it himself and handed me the bag and said, “Wear this for him.”
I laid it on the bed now, next to the dress. The slip was barely lingerie at the surface, more like a layer that lived under a dress, but the lace at the bust and the deep slit up one thigh made it unambiguously not just underwear. I ran my hand down it. The silk was cool. I thought about Marcus’s hands on it later and felt the kind of clench in my stomach I’d forgotten was even possible at thirty-eight.
The dress went on over it. Deep emerald green, tailored close through the waist, falling just above the knee. Long sleeves. Modest at first glance. The slit in the silk underneath would only be visible when I sat down, when I crossed my legs at the bar and the fabric shifted just enough. David had laughed when I tried on the combination at home. He’d said, “It’s an iceberg of a dress. They have no idea what’s underneath.”
I put on the anklet last. The thin gold chain with the small heart, the one he’d given me for our tenth, before any of this had been on the table for either of us. I’d asked him months ago, in the soft careful way we’d learned to ask each other things, whether he wanted me to take it off tonight, replace it with something else for the lifestyle, keep the marriage symbol separate from this. He’d thought about it for two days. Then he’d come back and said no. He wanted me to wear it. He wanted Marcus to see it. He wanted the night to happen with that anklet on my ankle the whole time.
I clipped it on now, in the soft light of the bedroom, and felt the cool metal against my skin, and for the first time all afternoon I wanted to cry. Not from sadness. From the size of what David had handed me when he said that. I sat on the edge of the bed for a minute, breathing, holding the moment.
The heels were the last thing. Suede, almost black, with the strap across the ankle that I’d chosen specifically because it framed the anklet without hiding it. I stood up in them and felt the height settle into me. The mirror gave me back a woman I recognized but had never quite been before. The dress was right. The hair was right. The slow shift had completed.
I picked up my purse and the keys and went to the car.
The drive was twenty-two minutes. I took the long way, through the older part of town where the streetlights have those amber bulbs that make everything look filmic. The city felt different from the driver’s seat tonight. Or I felt different in it. Same streets, same intersections, but my body was running on a current I hadn’t felt in years, since maybe before the kids. There was a song David had put on a playlist for tonight, weeks ago, and I let it play on repeat the whole drive. He’d known.
The hotel was downtown, in the lobby of a building from the nineteen-twenties. I valeted. I walked through the marble foyer past the front desk, past the couples having quiet drinks in the lobby lounge, past the elevator bank, into the bar at the back. Low light. Brass fixtures. A pianist playing something I couldn’t quite place. The kind of bar where you don’t see what time it is unless you check your phone, and you don’t want to check your phone.
Marcus was already there.
He stood up when he saw me. Tall, charcoal suit, the watch I’d noticed both other times. The grey at his temples had been one of the first things I’d liked about him, the way it made him look like a man rather than someone trying to be one. He let me cross the room toward him at my own pace. He didn’t rush it. When I reached him he leaned in and kissed my cheek, slow, not theatrically slow but just slowly enough that I felt his breath warm on my skin a half-second longer than a polite hello would have allowed.
“You look extraordinary,” he said.
“Thank you.”
“What are you drinking?”
“Champagne. The driest you have.”
He ordered for both of us, French, asking the bartender questions I half-listened to. I watched his hands. They were the second thing I’d noticed about him, after the grey hair. Long fingers, clean nails, a small old scar near the knuckle of his right hand that I had wondered about both times and was going to ask him about tonight. The bartender poured. Marcus turned and handed me the glass and said, “To the rest of the evening,” and his eyes held mine while he said it, and I had to look at the bubbles in the glass for a beat to steady myself.
We talked. Not about anything important. The book he was halfway through, which I’d also read. A trip he’d taken to Lisbon the previous winter. The pianist, whose name he knew. I kept catching myself wanting to lean in closer, to put my hand on his forearm to make a point, and each time I let myself do it instead of pulling back. The slit in the silk slip rode higher as I shifted on the barstool. I felt him notice without looking. I felt myself want him to notice.
After the second glass, he said, very quietly, “I have a room upstairs. Whenever you want.”
I’d known he would. We’d planned it. But hearing him say it out loud, in that voice, in that bar, with my husband home and waiting and trusting, did something to me that the wine and the lingerie and the drive and the song had all been preparing me for. I set down the glass. I looked at him properly. I said, “Now.”
He stood. He held out his hand. I took it. He paid the tab without looking away from my face. We walked together back through the marble lobby to the elevator. He pressed the button for the fourteenth floor. The elevator doors closed. He turned to me and we stood facing each other in the brass-walled little box and the lights of the floor numbers climbed and neither of us spoke. Halfway up he reached and traced the line of my jaw with one finger and said, “I’ve been thinking about you for two weeks.” I said, “I know.”
The room was on the corner. The view through the window was the entire downtown, lit up. He closed the door behind us and turned the bolt. I stood in the middle of the room and let him come to me. He set his jacket on the chair. He poured two glasses of the wine that was already waiting on the table. He handed me mine and stood a foot away and just looked at me for a moment, taking the whole of it in.
Then he set down his glass. He stepped close. He put both hands on my hips and the heat of them came right through the green silk of the dress. He said, very low, “Is this still what you want?”
I thought about David, at home, on the couch maybe, knowing what time it was, knowing what was happening, having made room for it. The anklet was cool against my skin. I felt every bit of what I had walked into this room to do. I said, “Yes.”
He kissed me. Slow at first. Then less slow. His hand found the zipper at the back of the dress and the small metallic sound of it opening was the loudest thing in the room. The green silk fell to the floor and the black slip stayed where it was, and the lace at my chest moved with my breathing, and his fingers traced the edge of it lightly, and when he kissed me again I let myself stop thinking about anything but the kiss and the slip and the man in front of me.
The rest of what happened in that room is mine.
I drove home at nearly two in the morning. The streets were empty. I had Marcus’s scent still on the slip under the dress, fig and cedarwood mixed with something else now. I sent David a text at the first red light. Just two words: “Coming home.” He replied before the light turned green: “I’m awake.”
He was. He was on the couch in his t-shirt with one lamp on and a book open on his lap that he hadn’t been reading. I came in and stood in the doorway in the green dress with the heels in my hand and the lipstick mostly gone and I think I started crying, the way you cry when something has finally landed that you’ve been carrying for a long time. He stood up and came to me and didn’t say anything. He just held me. For a long time. Then he led me to the bedroom and helped me out of the dress and saw what was underneath and what was missing, and he understood. He’d known I would tell him later, in our own time, with our own words. Tonight wasn’t for words.
I lay in our bed with my husband holding me, and the slip still on, and the anklet still on, and I thought about how I’d thought the lifestyle would be a thing I did separately from my marriage. A side journey. A compartment. I had been so wrong.
Marcus had been kind. The night had been everything I’d quietly wanted. And I was home, in my own bed, in my husband’s arms, exactly where I had wanted to come back to.
The night didn’t take me away from David. It brought me back to him with more of me, not less. That was the part nobody had told me when we’d started talking about this six months ago. The part I’d been afraid wouldn’t be true.
It was true.
