Often remembered.

Levine, Peter

He is in the airport. Palm Springs. He's finished a golf weekend with a buddy who was getting married. They were all old friends from school, and they'd had a time.

He's sitting outside on a small patio having a beer, reading the USA today they left for him in the hotel room, and he sees a woman that he thinks he recognizes. She has come outside as well to sit before her flight. She's got one of those long glasses full of Weiss beer. It's about 8 p.m. The sun is going down. The woman sits near him. She is in cream-colored slacks and a sleeveless cream top. She looks professional. She rests her carry-on beside her and places a computer bag on top of the table.

There are smells--the desert plantings that the airport has set around the small patio, the dry air, and a smell from her--her perfume, he thinks. He watches her. He pretends not to. She sips her beer, looks at the glass, checks her watch, and then--and this is what reveals her to him--she stretches her long legs out in front of her, and reaches back, gathering her hair in one hand. An accomplished look. It's the gesture a women's college swimmer would make after a meet.

He remembers that he met this woman at a work conference when he was twenty-one, almost a decade ago. It was his first job out of school and he was working as a consultant, and she was too, and they had an annual retreat in--here he can't remember--was it Houston? Phoenix? Tampa? He can't remember, only he does remember that it was very warm. Nice, but warm. And he met her at the bar. Someone had introduced them, a former colleague of hers from Philadelphia, where she'd worked. The colleague had gotten transferred to Chicago from Philly, and they all spoke. But the colleague saw some other people he knew, and left them alone.

He recalls that she had gone to Temple and had studied business and was thinking of going back to earn her MBA. She was not a swimmer, but actually a lacrosse player. Her hair was very dark, her name Caroline. He remembers all of this.

That night of the conference, they talked for a long time. They told each other about themselves. Both of her parents were water engineers for the city. She was quieter on the matter of her background, which, it was clear, she felt insecure about. She made a point to say she made good grades in school. She was very nice.

At the time, he would listen for hours. He was young, listening was one of his powers. It worked with her, because later on, they went to his room. Somehow, even this he remembers, he had been mistakenly placed in one of the partner's room's, a suite, and he went up there with Caroline. They had a few drinks from the minibar and laughed that the partner would get in trouble.

They joked around about work, motivational speeches given at the retreat, and then they made love. After--it was late but they didn't care--they took their drinks out onto the balcony. She was a little worried that colleagues would see them--it was her reputation as a businesswoman that concerned her, but they did anyhow. Then they went back inside, made love again or maybe two times more.

The day after, he found a silver hoop earring of hers on the bathroom countertop, and he gave it to her at the final lecture before they all went home. They were in touch once or twice and then never again.

But--and this says a lot about him--once he realizes he knows this woman, he wants to say hi. So he does. He just says, "Caroline?'

She turns around.

"Yes?" she says.

"It's me. Tom. Mahoney. From--" and here he names the firm where he started his career.

"Oh," she says, but it's clear that she has no idea who he is. He doesn't feel badly; it was a long time ago already.

"We met in--" he starts, but he can't remember what city it was, so he just says, "at the conference. I was twenty-one or twenty-two. The big--the national conference? I was working in the Chicago office and you were from the Philly office."

"Yeah," she says. "We met there?"

She still doesn't remember what they did together.

"Yeah. You knew Mike Carter. Mike had gone to Fordham, I think."

"I knew Mike Carter," she says, somewhat quietly. "Sure. But--I'm so sorry. I just don't remember meeting you. I mean, I remember the conference. But it was huge. They spent money--you would think they'd have known better. Boy."

He realizes that he's not getting through to her, and thinks drat maybe it's because of the sun going down, because in spite of ten years, he still looks good--she would certainly recognize him in full light, and people have told him that he hasn't changed a great deal. So he stands up and goes to sit beside her. She sits back a little. She puts her hands around the beer.

He doesn't t know exactly how to say it. He doesn't want to embarrass her. He himself is not really embarrassed. But he thinks that if the situation were reversed, if a woman that he had made love to recognized him, and saw him, and if for some reason he couldn't remember being with her--he would want her to say something.

So he says, "You know, we hung out that night. We--I'm sorry," he says.

"Wait," she says, leaning in. "We slept together? Is that what you're saying?"

He feels better. Her face--she is still pretty. In a way, he finds it all exhilarating.

"Yeah," he says, chuckling a little. "Yeah. I guess I wasn't such a top performer, but yeah."

"Oh," she says, putting her hand to her chest, and then up to her mouth. "Oh, my God," she says, and places her hand on his arm and laughs. I'm sorry, Tom. Oh, God. That's terrible. That's really terrible of me."

They have a good laugh at this. He brings over his stuff to put on her table. He brings over his beer.

I'm sorry," he says. "I just--I just would have felt badly if I hadn't said something to you."

"No, no, I'm glad you did say something, Tom. Boy. So . . ."

"Yeah, no, he says, raising his hand as if to dismiss her evident concern. "So, what are you doing in Palm Springs?"

Oh, I was here for a conference. Another conference," she says, laughing a little, taking a sip of her beer. Even this he remembers--a great, big laugh Caroline had.

She tells him that she moved firms--she lives in Minneapolis now--and is a partner in her office. He tells her that this is great, and he feels it, too. His own career has been good overall, but he has bounced around a little bit.

"That's funny," he says, about the conference.

"I know. Don't get the wrong impression," she says, patting his hand. "I try to limit it. Only once or twice a year, at the most. I do a keynote called 'Beyond Roth.' I mean, they fly me in, put me up, I get a small honorarium, and it's just really nice. It's a great networking opportunity and to be honest, it's kind of a boondoggle."

"That's great," he says.

"My husband is jealous, but I tell him it's terrible and that I'd rather be home, though it's not really true. It's kind of a nice break.

She begins to tell Tom more about this husband. She met him earning her MBA, and then she got the gig at the big shop in Minnesota. Her husband is a great guy. A great father. For instance, when they had kids, he set up his own outfit, and it was agreed he would be the stay-at-home dad.

"I was skeptical at first," Caroline says, sipping her beer. "He was doing very well, and we didn't know if it would be the right move. When I got pregnant, I had planned to take a year, but he wanted to make the move. So he did. And it's worked out. We have this big farm outside of the city. There are all these trails that we bike on and the kids can play on. It's a far cry from Rittenhouse Square. David--" that is her husband's name, "actually grows vegetables and sells them at the farmer's market on the weekends."

She explains that they're making money in spite of the economy, which left a few people he knew, including himself, in a bad spot. She opens her purse to show him pictures of her children and David.

During this time of her telling about her life, loin is putting away his drink and thinking about the night they spent together--how she was at first seemingly inexperienced, but how she made love in a way that belied that; certain directions she gave him, and how it was she who indicated that they ought to do it again when they were finished. He remembers her body, stretched out on the wide bed--the casual, confident, almost masculine look of the swimmer that struck him at first and made him ask if in fact she was.

Someone calls a flight over the PA system, and she looks up into the desert sky.

"Oh," she says. "That's me. I gotta run."

What Tom wants to do, and wants to do badly, is ask if she wants to stay over another night. He would say that they should just continue talking, and even though she didn't remember, they'd had a pretty' fun time those years ago.

But Caroline has gotten up and gathered her things.

"I'm really sorry," she says. "That I didn't--you know. But I'm glad that you said something to me. It was great catching up," she says, though the way she says it seems to him to mean that she's not really sorry' that she doesn't remember but instead doubts his claim that it happened at all.

"Yeah. You bet. Say, do you ever hear from Mike Carter? I should give him a call and get in touch. We used to go out, he and I--well. We were pretty tight for a while. He was a super guy."

No. I mean, Mike died. He got--it was such a sad story. He-apparently he was really sick and didn't know it. One day he was in the garage doing work, and thought he pulled something, but it turned out to be--it had been there for a long time, he just didn't know it. Well, at least that's what I heard from a friend. He had a wife and a kid, too."

"Oh. Oh, man," Tom says.

Caroline cocks her head to the side and smiles. The light from the terminal is on the side of her face. It's getting dark. They call her plane again. She looks back.

"Go," he says. "Don't miss your plane."

She leaves the patio area. And he doesn't feel that bad. Well, he feels badly about Mike, who he recalled was a good guy. Maybe he only feels a little bad that Caroline didn't remember what they'd done, and maybe only a little bit bad that he didn't even bring up the possibility of them staying the extra night, but it's okay. Her drink is mostly full, and he finishes it, putting his lips where her lips were, smelling it and running his tongue upon the rim to see if he can remember her even more fully.

Five years later, Tom is in Miami. He's only there for a day--it's a brief meeting with a client. It's evening. He's at a hotel bar after work, having a drink, watching the rebroadcast of SportsCenter, and a woman comes to sit near him. She is not paying attention to him--she is looking at her phone--and as she tries to push one of the cushioned barstools aside to make room for herself, it tips over, falling in Tom's direction. He grabs it, and she does too, dropping her phone. Her hands are tanned. She is wearing pink lipstick. Her nails are thick and, he thinks, pretty. He picks up the phone for her.

"I'm sorry," she says.

"Don't worry about it," he says, righting the stool between them. She sits down. The hotel bar opens up onto the street. The air feels tropical, very warm. He likes it, and thinks for a second that perhaps he could extend his business trip one day or maybe two.

He orders another drink and watches the television. The woman is still looking at her phone. It appears as if she has dressed up to come out. Her hair, which looks as if it were recently washed and blown dry, her nails--a French manicure, and her outfit. She has a black skirt on, her legs crossed at the ankles below, and a tank top.

As she checks her phone, she makes little clicking noises--a sort of a smacking of the tongue against the teeth. As she does this -this small gesture--it feels very familiar to him. In a way, it's not a gesture that a woman would make. She looks up at the TV, watches a wrap-up of the Braves' loss, and makes the same noise again.

This woman--her name is Margaret Klein--was a lawyer that Tom went out with for a very short period perhaps six years ago. He had been seeing a woman for some time, but they were forever breaking up and getting back together, and he wasn't sure where things were going to end up, so he wanted to keep his options open.

Tom and Margaret met at a Cubs game with friends, then they all went to an early dinner in Lincoln Park. They had stayed to drink beer and to chat after everyone left the dinner, then they went home to her place, a beautiful condo--he recalled she came from money--and they made love there. They made plans to meet up again, and did, a proper date, and they went to see a movie, which she didn't care for, and then they went to dinner, and again went to her place to make love for the second time.

She made that gesture--the cynical, derisive click, often during their date: when he told her at the Cubs game he wasn't good at baseball himself, but just liked to watch, for she knew he had played Dr baseball; during the movie, which she found corny; when he told her that he didn't often date; when the waiter gave her resistance about taking back a drink that she said didn't have the right kind of gin in it; and then finally, on their last date, a lunch date, when she asked him why it had been a week since he had reached out to her--she thought they had been having a nice time, and he told her that he had gotten back together with his ex.

But at the bar, he says to her, coyly: "Hey, did you happen to catch the Cubs score?" thinking that once he says this she will recognize him, and they can have a few laughs and maybe, then, who knows?

She doesn't even look at him, probably thinks that he's hitting on her and just says, quietly, "No."

He puts his hand out to her, tapping it on the granite bar. He wants her to look at him.

"Well, I'll tell you," he says, "I've always liked taking in a Cubs night game and then going to get a cold beer at--" and here he names the restaurant where they first met.

She looks at him.

"A Cubs game?" she says.

"And a beer at--" and he again names the bar.

"I know that place. It's okay. Yeah, the food is good. I'll give it that."

And then she looks back at the television, swirling the ice in her drink a little. And for a moment he is bewildered and in some part of him--destroyed. Of course, he remembers the incident with Caroline a few years back, the woman he met in an airport and made love to a long time ago, but who didn't remember him. He connects these two incidents--the one with Caroline and now the one with Margaret--together, and something feels conspiratorial about it.

"Margaret," he says. "Margaret Klein."

"Pardon," she says.

"It's Tom Mahoney. We met at the Cubs game. We went to that restaurant on our first date. We--do you remember?"

"I remember the restaurant. Sure. Well. Wait--I'm sorry, you're going to have to refresh my memory."

"We met through Dana and Scott Coleman. Scott--you worked with him at your firm. You're a lawyer," he says. "Aid Dana, I used to play softball with. We used to--we dated for a bit," he says, though lie's not quite sure this is the right term--"dated" might be too formal. "We went out a few times." He feels his voice quicken, and he has become warm.

She turns to him. She has grown prettier in the intervening years. She has come into possession of her body in a way that he has seen happen to women from their twenties to their thirties. Her chest is full and tan. Her hair is straight and smooth.

"We dated?" she says.

"Yeah. Sure. Yes."

And then he starts to list--in a bit of a panic--the things they did together, including the first date, the movie, where her apartment was, even some of the Ansel Adams photographs she had up and what her place looked like, a lot of exposed brick and teak.

As he lists these things, and she fails to register any of it, he stops-he doesn't list the scent of candles that she had burned, or how, at the time, her grandmother was ailing--to bring it up might be hurtful.

She herself looks a bit panicked, though she tries to conceal it. He recalls she was tough and wanted people to think she was tough--though when he had told her he was going to continue to see this other woman and stop seeing her, she had wept.

"So--um, what are you doing in Miami? Do you live in Miami? You moved here from Chicago?" she asks in an effort to change the mood.

"No," he says, "I'm here for a client visit."

"What kind of work do you do?"

"I'm a--wait a minute--" he says, "so, you really don't remember going out?"

"No--it's not drat. I--I do. But when did you say this was? Just--when exactly was this?" she asks, and he tells her, and she says, "You know, that was kind of a hard time. I went--well, I ended up going into rehab for a while," she says, leaning into him a bit. "I was using a lot at die time. So."

"Oh. Wow. I'm sorry. When we went out, you seemed fine."

"Yeah," she says, again making the clicking noise, "I guess that was what made it so insidious. But--that was a long time ago. I mean, my life," she says laughing, "is rather different these days."

"How so?" he asks, turning to face her fully. He assumes a certain interested and kind posture.

"Well, first off, I quit the law," she says. "I'm a stay-at-home mom. We have three kids."

Tom says that's terrific and asks about the kids--their ages and their sexes--and she tells him each of their names, ages, and she says that actually, she met her husband, Don, right after she was. in rehab and without him, she acknowledges, things would have been pretty different. She moved to Florida with him when he took a job there, and she decided to quit the law altogether, which was part of a general overhaul a life "that was unhealthy and which I had no business living," she says, again making that click.

"We're just here for the weekend. Don's parents took the kids and we decided to make a trip out of it. It's not far," she says.

"So, he's here?"

"Yeah," she says. "He's just getting ready."

"Wow. That's terrific," he says. "I'm glad I ran into you here. Also, I mean--I know it was a long time ago, but I do want to say that I'm sorry that I kind of--well, ended things, I guess. But if it makes you feel any better, I had been seeing someone, and we ended up getting married, so I suppose things work out for the best."

"Really?" she says. "Well, that's great. That's really--I'm so glad to hear it."

"Yeah," Tom says, but he does not explain that he only remained married for four months, and that his marriage proved to be just one even grander episode in what was a passionate but ill-conceived union.

Margaret spots Don approaching from the lobby. He looks like a quarterback from FSU; he could be Tom's fraternity' brother. He is in linen slacks, black leather sandals, and a white shirt which makes his chest look like cherrywood.

Don isn't at all threatened by Tom. He is totally glad to see him, and in a strange way, Tom is happy to have Don there too, for maybe they all three could chat and drink, share stories and have a nice evening.

"This is Tim. We knew each other from--"

"Tom," he says. "It's Tom."

"Oh. Sorry. We knew each other back in Chicago." Her husband shakes Tom's hand. "From the old glory days," she says, letting out a little breath.

"Oh," Don says, looking not altogether happy to hear her bring those days up again. "It's good to know you, Tom."

"Likewise," Tom says.

"Do you live in Miami?" Don asks.

"Nope. I'm still back in Chicago, though with this weather well, a change of scenery wouldn't be all that bad."

"Oh, well, I mean, in many respects, it can't be beat," and then Don spends about ten minutes extolling the benefits of Florida.

Tom wonders whether things might have been different had he remained with Margaret; if he and Margaret had married and if he were talking to a different woman entirely in Miami, would he hit on her and conceive of sleeping with her? Does Margaret now do in bed with Don what she did back then with Tom?

"Well, I'm going to pull the car around," Don says. "It was great to meet you."

Don goes to the driveway and gives the parking attendant the key. Tom can see him.

"Well, he's a great guy," Tom says.

"I got lucky," Margaret says, turning in her chair, knees facing Tom, placing her phone into her purse.

"Well, look," he says, "I'm glad I bumped into you and just so you know," he starts, and she makes again that strange clicking noise, signaling to him that maybe he best not say it, but because he feels desperate in a way, he cannot stop, "back then, what we did--" he says, lowering his voice, unafraid of how he might sound and realizing the importance of getting this on the record, "you should know that it left an impression." But she doesn't agree or disagree because it's clear she doesn't remember, and she only smiles and leaves to meet her husband, and it's not long before another woman sits near him and he again begins to talk.

Three years later he is at a private club in New York City, and he is on the rooftop bar. A future client has just left; the first new client that he has taken on after having been downsized for a second time one year ago. He phones his ex-wife--they are still in touch and have even been romantic since splitting, despite how tempestuous their relationship was--to share the good news, but she does not answer.

He orders a martini, and he enjoys the weather--cool and dry. The client he has met with is well-connected in IT. The entrepreneur is young--only thirty-one, and he told Tom he had just gotten married and now had a kid on the way, and Tom had said he was in the catbird seat, that he had his whole future ahead of him, and after the meeting, he reflected on how much time had seemed to pass in his own life.

Tom talks briefly with the bartender about where might be a good place to get dinner, indicating that he is in town alone, and interested in a more social scene, someplace upbeat, when a woman sits down next to him.

"Can I get a Tom Collins?" she asks the bartender.

At first Tom doesn't look at her, but he sort of chuckles to himself, for this woman is young, perhaps fifteen years younger than he is, and a Tom Collins was his mother's drink.

He looks at the bartender as he fixes the drink and he is happy. The day is beautiful. There are few people on the rooftop bar. He does not think it at all strange that among the ten or so seats available, this woman has chosen to sit directly next to him--it doesn't even register.

In fact, the only tiling he really does think about, and this only glancingly, is how and why a drink will come in and out of fashion, and why he associates a Tom Collins strictly with someone his mother's age, and then reflects that the only person he remembered aside from his mother to drink a Tom Collins was a woman he slept with a couple years ago.

He had gone fishing in Wisconsin with old friends of his, and they stopped in Madison for the day. He met a woman at a bar--maybe a girl, really--named Stephanie. She was only twenty-two or so, and he got a kick out of tine fact that, as a young person will do, she had ordered such an antiquated drink as a Tom Collins, perhaps as a way to erect an identity.

She was in her first year of graduate school in Victorian Literature at the university, short, black hair, pretty in a bookish way, and when the guys he was with went to another bar, he stayed behind to chat with her, then she invited him back to her apartment and they made love.

So that when she says to him now, "Can you please pass the ashtray?" he acknowledges that this is she--this is the woman to whom he made love not long ago, whose apartment he witnessed and slept one night in, where he noted: a poster of Jane Austen smoking a joint; a picture of two Midwest-looking parents, red-cheeked in navy and gold Nautica windbreakers on Halloween; a small Chinese jewelry box in which a young woman's things would be kept (a jade pin, a vintage necklace, a pair of amber earrings, a fifteen-year-old paper origami fortune, a small jar of purple-colored perfume she sprayed upon her wrists before making love in an act which seemed deeply singular to her); peach-colored sheets; wood beams and a canted wood floor; pictures on her dresser, her holding a tabby cat, her in a cat costume on a different Halloween when she was perhaps ten, and a photograph of a handsome young man tipped toward the adjacent bathroom so that it caught the light and bothered Tom but only momentarily. All these images surround her now like a smell.

"Stephanie," he says.

She looks up at him.

"How did you know my name?"

"It's me," he says, certain that she will remember him, though does he recall the instances of his recent past? Yes, he does, and if he is anything, he is deeply hopeful, and willing to chance it.

For a second she just looks at him and sees: a handsome man with a largish nose, looks like a salesman, athletic-looking but not overly muscular, kind eyes that are growing old--the skin falling favorably, and something registers for her, for she says quietly, "Holy shit. I can't believe it. What are you doing here?"

"I had a business meeting," he says, delighted.

"Huh," she says. "You know, I thought that--well. That's so crazy. I didn't know that you belonged here. Rick belongs, of course. I mean, it really is a Rick thing, I guess," she says, taking a sip of her Tom Collins. "I'm meeting him."

"Huh?" he says.

"He thought it would be a good business thing. I think--well, it's a little obnoxious, if you ask me, but he pays."

"Wait--" he says.

"Where is Karen?" she asks. "The last time we--well, you know--you said she was traveling a lot for work. Like, shots for kids in Ghana or something?"

"I'm sorry," he says, "I think maybe--"

Her voice becomes serious. "How are you guys doing? Are you still in the East Village? Are you still waiting to see if things work out? I mean, Memorial Day weekend--it was nice," she says, shyly.

He looks down at his lap. His hands are out in front of him and he regards them, closing them and opening them, even once holding them up to the light as he speaks. He feels his torso, his chest, his neck, and his jaw. He's no longer a young man, but he feels that way. He says, "Well, I would say things have been better with me and her. I guess I would say that."

"Well, I can't say things with Rick have been all that perfect recently. I mean, I finally get a teaching gig and I told him how much I was getting paid, and he just laughed. He thought it was funny. I tried to tell him that there's not much of a market in the city for a Victorian Lit specialist, but does he care?"

"That's too bad," Tom says, signaling to the bartender that he is going to have another.

Stephanie tells him about her life, and informs him a bit about his own life, or the life of the man she believes is him, and he takes it all in a good way. And he acknowledges that he feels okay. Good, in fact. Upon his third drink, he recognizes that he has to say very little. He sits up straight. He smiles.

And when Stephanie says what if they--if they wanted to, you know, she could call Rick and tell him that she got hung up at work, Tom says that it'd be a good idea, that they did have a pretty great time together, though of course the occasions to which they are referring are different, and she does call Rick, and tells him deftly that she can't meet, and Tom gets the bill and pays for it, touching in a pocket of his wallet rests one of the tiny, flat amber tips of the earrings he stole from her jewelry box to make the event corporeal, and before leaving he regards the city below, people are coming onto the deck, an elderly couple arm in arm and the woman saying, "But honey, you never do"; and then Stephanie is leading him by the hand and he wonders what, in ten years or twenty, of this moment they will remember.