We had a 10:05 a.m. flight. I picked Toni up at seven-thirty. She had baked some cranberry-walnut muffins, using her grandmother's recipe.
I ate a muffin on the way to the airport. It was hard and dry. Annabel was a better bridge player than muffin maker. Or maybe it was Toni who couldn't follow directions, but then again, who was I to complain? It wasn't as if I had baked any muffins for her.
We had no surprises at the airport. Toni had no problem using her standby ticket, and the seat next to mine was vacant, as we'd known it would be.
"So what did you tell Cliff?" I asked as we taxied to the runway.
"About what?"
"You, me, Chicago."
"I didn't tell him anything."
"What do you mean, you didn't tell him anything? My parents think he's with me checking out colleges."
"Here, have another muffin."
A moment later we were off the ground.
Cliff is smart, I realized. He's probably smarter than me, and definitely a quicker thinker. If my mother happened to run into him, I felt pretty certain that he'd figure it out and duck smoothly, like I had done on the phone with Katie. After all, he wouldn't know I was with Toni. I was fairly confident he'd come up with some good reason why, at the last minute, he hadn't been able to go with me to look at colleges.
Toni and I mostly spoke bridge gibberish from takeoff to touchdown as we went over the sixty-one pages of notes, eighty-one pages if you include her previous e-mails. There were three seats in our row. I had the aisle, Toni was in the center, and next to her was a man with a computer who glared at us from time to time because our constant yammering kept him from doing his work.
Our only luggage was carry-on. We were both feeling pretty excited when we deplaned and went looking for the shuttle bus to the hotel.
"Can you believe we're here?" she asked me.
"No," I said. "I just hope Trapp and Annabel made it too."
Every single person on the shuttle bus was a bridge player. They were going over their bidding systems, or discussing bridge hands, or just talking about the tournament in general. It felt exciting to be a part of it.
The hotel was abuzz with bridge gibberish as well. It was like some kind of scary sci-fi movie where everywhere you turned, people were muttering weird sentences.
"… MUD from three small."
"… upside-down count and attitude."
"She was squeezed in the black suits."
I didn't know which was scarier, so many people speaking bridge gibberish or the fact that I understood most of what they were saying!
I had no problem checking into my room, and when Toni used Teodora's name, the clerk didn't ask for any ID. He did ask her when she expected a Mr. Lester Trapp to arrive.
"Sometime soon," said Toni.
I hoped so.
A problem arose, however, when he asked us for credit cards. I didn't have one. Toni did, but it was in her real name.
"The rooms are already paid for," I pointed out.
The clerk said he needed to have a credit card on file for incidentals, in case we charged a meal to our room, or made a telephone call, or watched an on-demand movie.
"We won't do any of that," said Toni. "We'll be playing bridge."
"And we both have cell phones," I added, showing him my phone.
Toni showed him her phone too.
In the end we each left one hundred dollars cash as a deposit, which we'd get back when we checked out.
We were lucky, I think, that the hotel was crowded and there were a lot of people waiting to check in. Otherwise he might have given us a harder time.
Our rooms were on the twenty-seventh floor. Toni turned right when we exited the elevator, and I turned left. We agreed to meet in an hour, after we'd had time to unpack and freshen up.
It took me all of three minutes to unpack, and as far as freshening up goes, I took a leak and stuck my hands under the faucet. The hotel soap was too much of a bother to unwrap.
I turned on the TV, but I felt too restless to sit and watch anything. The National Pairs Championship wouldn't start until the next day, but I decided I'd go down and check out the playing area.
I called Toni's room first, to let her know where I'd be.
"I'll go with you," she said. "I'm going crazy just sitting here!"
If you've been wondering whether I was disappointed that Toni and I didn't have to share a room, I don't think so. I think if we'd shared a room, it would have been really awkward, and we would have needed to get out to escape from each other. Coming from different rooms, we weren't escaping from each other but seeking each other out.
I had also decided it was good that Toni hadn't told Cliff about this. She obviously didn't want him to be jealous.
Based on my very limited experience, if someone is feeling jealous, it is because he has a damn good reason. Before Katie and I broke up, I could sense a certain vibe between her and Cliff. The way they looked at each other. The way she laughed when he teased her.
Don't get me wrong. Cliff wasn't coming on to her. He was just being the boyfriend's best friend, making conversation, kidding around. Still, I felt jealous, and well, you know how that turned out.
Put another way, if Toni had thought it was no big deal to tell Cliff that she was going to Chicago with me, then I was about as much of a threat as a wet sock.
When I turned the corner, I saw Toni waving at me from the elevator. I think I've already told you how it made me feel to see her smile and wave at me. You can have your sunsets and waterfalls. If a piano were to suddenly fall on my head, that's the image I'd want forever engraved in my mind.