Take notes? Before I could ask Mr. Vargas what he meant by that exactly, he gave me an awkward hug that made me think this must be what it felt like to have your father send you off to college if you happened to have a father to send you off to college. “Go Big Red,” he said, and left me at security without looking back once. I know because I watched him walking away until I lost him in the crowd.
When I unwrapped the package I found a U-shaped inflatable travel pillow emblazoned with the seal of my college, the University of Nebraska. I got a full scholarship to study accounting with a minor in studio art, receiving an education there equal to anything you’d get at Harvard, though not much of anybody I’d met in New York would agree with me on that. Except Mr. Vargas, SUNY New Paltz class of 1969. We’d bonded at the computer store when he passed this chestnut along to me: “You can always tell a Harvard man, but you can’t tell him much.”
Go Big Red. Ah, Mr. Vargas. It said so much about him that he’d know the name of your college team even if he never watched football. Not that I watched football, either.
For the first time in my life, I slept on an airplane. Of course, before that night I’d never been on an airplane.
AFTER MIMI SHOWED me to my room, I got in my pajamas and crawled into bed with my laptop to e-mail Mr. Vargas. Her son, I wrote him, has the same brown eyes and auburn hair so I doubt he’s adopted. Frank’s exquisitely handsome but—
But what? My eyes wandered the room while I considered my next sentence. It was nicer than I’d expected after the fugitive decor of the living room. Beige walls, nubby beige carpet, fluffy white double bed, blond bureau, big closet, minimalist console desk. The one colorful touch, a scarlet love seat arranged in front of the floor-to-ceiling blond curtains, was a bright, true red that stood out like lipstick on a woman so rigorously elegant that she refused all other makeup. There wasn’t a framed photo or a book anywhere. So when I say the place was nice, I mean hotel nice, not homey nice. And way too quiet. Outside as well as in. What kind of city doesn’t grumble to itself at night? Even Omaha was noisier than this.
Then I heard someone bumping around out in the hall and voices murmuring and, softly, the piano. I got out of bed and crept to the door to listen. I heard Frank’s drone, mostly, interrupted now and then by Mimi. I couldn’t hear what she was saying, but by the cadence I was pretty sure she was trying to herd Frank back to bed.
I felt sleepy and my feet were cold, so I got back in bed myself. I erased Frank’s exquisitely handsome but, pressed “send” and lay back and closed my eyes. What else was there to say? His fingernails are dirty? He stumbled into our century through a wormhole in the space-time continuum? I’m worried he’ll julienne me in my sleep?
That last bit occurred to me thanks to what Mimi said as she bid me good night. “If you get hungry, help yourself to anything in the kitchen. Plates are in the cabinet by the sink, silverware in the drawer underneath. Big sharp knives in the drawer next to that in case you need to cut something up. Just don’t open an outside door or any windows at night. I set the alarm before I go to bed and I won’t turn it off until morning.”
I’d been looking forward to opening a window to let in the night breeze. Even the air smelled rich here, with top notes of jasmine and ocean and orange blossom, without bottom notes of garbage and cat urine. “Is this a dangerous neighborhood?” I asked.
“It’s Frank,” she said. “He sleepwalks. Well, not ‘sleepwalks’ so much as ‘roams the house when he should be sleeping.’”