I looked back at him. He smiled again. Up close, I saw he was a little older than I had first thought. He had gray eyes with red rims, and a dark little mustache that had gone too thin. His lips were purple.
I returned his smile, then looked away. The elevator door closed. He kept looking at me.
I cleared my throat.
“Do you like my hat?” he said.
“Excuse me?” I said, looking at him again.
“Do you like my hat?”
I didn’t know what to say. The elevator was moving now. “Yes,” I finally said. “I do.”
“It’s rather old,” he said. He kept looking me right in the eye. He kept smiling.
“I figured.”
“Would you like to know how old my hat is?”
The elevator came to a stop.
“No, sir,” I said. “I don’t need to know that.”
“Very well.”
The door opened. I got out. Room 601 was just a few steps away, so I didn’t have time to notice that the old man was still standing in the elevator. I was just about to knock, my hand in midair, when I looked back. He had stayed in the elevator, one arm extended to keep the door from closing. He was still smiling. Finally, he gave me a little nod of his head, pulled his arm away, and let the doors close in front of him.
I stood there for a moment, trying to figure it out. Then I thought, to hell with it. An old man slightly off his nut. Never mind.
His eyes, though. They were clear. They were focused.
Never mind, Alex.
I knocked lightly on the door. Natalie opened it and let me in. She was wearing blue jeans and a red sweater. I had never seen her in red before. “You look great,” I said.
“Your hair,” she said.
“Oh God.” I touched it, like I was verifying it was still on my head. “Okay, here’s the thing. The box said it was supposed to look totally natural.”
“You dyed your hair.”
“No, no. It wasn’t dye. Come on. It was, what do you call it, a rinse.”
She came over to me and put her arms around my neck. “You dyed your hair,” she said. “Who’d you do that for, you jackass?”
I wrapped her up. “The box said-”
“Yeah, I know,” she said. Then she kissed me. Everything seemed to run downstream at that point, right onto the bed. I lifted the red sweater over her arms and then she went to work on my shirt buttons.
“I wasn’t going to do this,” she said.
“Why not?”
“Because. God, Alex. I think we need to slow down a little bit.”
“Too late.”
“Why does this happen?” she said. “Every time I see you?”
She seemed genuinely angry this time. At me or at herself. I didn’t know. I held her down and kissed her hard, and then everything happened again, just like the first time and every other time after that, like there was nothing either of us could do to stop it, even if we wanted to.
Afterward, as we were both lying there in the tangled-up sheets, I looked out the window and saw the snow falling. “Oh great,” I said. “Just what we need.”
She didn’t say anything.
“Are you okay?” I said.
“I don’t know.”
“What is it?”
“We should talk about this.”
“So go ahead.”
“I need some air first,” she said, sitting up. “Come on, it’s not too late. I want you to show me around.”
I laughed. “There’s not much to see. Not this time of year.”
But she was already putting her clothes back on. A few minutes later, we were both downstairs in the lobby, wrapped up tight in our coats, ready for our evening stroll. I looked around for my friend from the elevator, but he was nowhere to be seen.
“What is it?” she said.
“Oh, there was just a man down here before. He was acting kinda strange.”
“An old guy, right? All dressed up?”
“Yeah, did he say something to you, too?”
“No, I just saw him in the dining room yesterday. When I was having dinner alone. He walked by and tipped his hat to me.”
“I think he’s got a screw loose.”
“I’m sure he’s harmless,” she said. “He sort of fits in with the place, doesn’t he? All these old artifacts in the display cases.”
The young doorman opened the door for us. He still had the shovel, and it looked like he had almost finished the sidewalk. Until this new snow had started falling. Whatever they were paying him, today it wasn’t enough.
We walked down Portage Avenue, toward the locks. They were closed for the winter, of course, so there were no ships to see. The entire river was frozen now, all the way across to Canada. I told her this street would be busy in the summer, when the shops were open and the tourists were walking around and watching the locks from the observation deck. It was hard to imagine now.
“What did you tell me?” I said. “That you’ve never been over here before? All those years you were living across the river?”
“I drove through a couple of times,” she said, “but I never came into town, no. I heard all the stories, though.”
“What stories?”
“About Soo Michigan. What a wild town it is. At least, when I was growing up.”
I looked down the empty street. The snow was falling and the wind was kicking up clouds all along the high snowbanks. Some wild town. At that moment, it was hard to imagine anyone even living here.
“My grandfather never wanted me to come over here,” she said. “He told me there were gunfights and prostitutes and all sorts of bad stuff going on across the bridge.”
“I think maybe he watched too many Westerns.”
“Yeah, well, some Canadians think all of the States is that way.”
We walked some more. The sun went down. From the end of the street we could see the International Bridge, the lights glowing in the darkness. It started to feel a lot colder.
We made our way back to the hotel, holding hands like schoolkids. What she had said back in the room, about wanting to talk-I kept waiting for it to happen. But it didn’t. The lights were on outside the hotel and the doorman was there shoveling the snow.
We went inside with faces red from the cold air and snow all over our shoes. It felt good to sit down in the dining room and to feel the heat thawing us out. The room was elegant, with chandeliers and big windows overlooking the river. On a different night in a different season there would have been ships moving through the locks just outside, great seven-hundred-foot freighters on their way to Lake Huron. But on this night all we could see outside was the snow falling. Endless snow, that’s what this winter had become.
When we had ordered our food, I noticed the old man again. He was sitting on the other side of the dining room, facing us, with a big cloth dinner napkin tucked into his collar. We were the only three customers in the place. He gave me a tip of his hat.
“There he is,” I said.
“Who?” She turned to look and then gave the man a little wave when she saw him.
“Maybe he’s a ghost,” I said. “He died in this hotel and now he haunts all the guests.”
She smiled for just a moment, then looked out the window. We were both quiet for a while. Just as she was about to say something, the waitress appeared with a bottle of champagne.
“Compliments of the gentleman,” she said, setting up a stand with an ice bucket.
I looked back over at the old man. He was drinking something now. He raised his glass to us.
“Who is he?” I said.
“I don’t know,” the waitress said, pulling the cork. “I’ve never seen him before. But he sort of goes with the place, doesn’t he? This hotel was built in 1927, you know.”
When she had poured two glasses, Natalie picked hers up and raised it to the man across the room. He tipped his hat again.
“Veuve Clicquot,” she said, taking a sip. “This is the good stuff.”
“Yeah,” I said, with a little edge. “We’ll have to go thank him.”
“What’s the matter?”
“Ah, it’s nothing. Like you say, he’s probably harmless.”
We drank the champagne until the waitress brought our dinners. The wind kicked up and rattled the big windows so hard we could feel it in our bones. But it was warm inside, and a full bottle of champagne was making everything look soft in the light from the chandeliers. Natalie was a little too beautiful to be true, her green eyes sparkling. The whole night seemed a little unreal.