THE LONELINESS OF LARGE BATHROOMS

With nothing else to do, in almost any situation, I count things.

Hotel lobby. Twelve people. Four couples. Remove eight from the equation. One man, three women. Two of the women, forty-plus. Remove three. One woman remains.

I smile at her from across the room. I stand and move to the bar. She follows, a few seconds behind. When she arrives I have already ordered two drinks. Vodka cranberry. It’s a drink I’ve found most everyone likes well enough, especially women who follow strange men to bars. She sits on the bar-stool, shimmies into a comfortable position. The position does not actually look more comfortable, but it allows her to lean forward and rest her elbows on the bar. It is a position that thrusts out her chest. Perhaps this is a request for further thrusting?

There is a glossy black baby grand piano in a corner of the bar. A white-haired, white-mustachioed man plays familiar songs in unfamiliar arrangements. I have never heard “Take Five” orchestrated so lushly. Its carefree bounce is replaced by a forced, false emotion. We are told how to feel, and for the sake of convenience we allow ourselves to feel that way. Like a shot of alcohol, it is a shot to the system. Immediate effect is favored over the delicacy of the flavor.

“Are you in town for the conference?” asks the woman.

“No, but I like meeting new people. That’s all a conference is, anyway. A chance to meet.”

“The shaking of hands and the reading of name tags.”

“After so many meetings, you still drink at the bar alone?”

“Are you going to leave me here?”

“I’ll be leaving here at some point,” I say. “Whether you are left is up to you.”

She smiles and sips her drink. I have already finished mine, which makes it not much better than a shot. The bartender offers me another. I order bourbon instead. Whiskey in a glass, I call it. No mixer, no ice. The smell stings. The sting is like a toothpick slid between the teeth, a mixture of pain and pleasure and the promise of release. I take a toothpick from a bin on the bar. It is plastic and shaped like a sword. It is not designed to pick teeth but to garnish martinis. To slay tiny pirates. I slide the tooth-sword into my drink. I count twenty different types of whiskey behind the bar.

“My name is Natalie,” says the woman.

I do not respond with my own name. Like an ancient fairytale, tonight my name is the source of my power, and to reveal it after only one drink would be irresponsible. That’s the kind of information that is blurted out only at the end of the night, drunkenly, to the shock and embarrassment of all. I am a little disappointed to know Natalie’s name. It came too easily. She tilts toward me. Drooping neckline. A small slice of shadow.

“I like this hotel,” I say.

“I like to watch people pass by in the lobby,” she says. “They all have a look of disorientation.”

“This place, the hotel, is their temporary home, but they recognize nothing of home in it.”

“Sometimes you see a frequent traveler, one who moves through the lobby with confidence.”

“He has seen this lobby and a thousand like it.”

Natalie touches my hand. “You have that same look. One of unflappable familiarity. Have you been here before?”

“I never visit the same hotel twice.”

“Do you want to go up to your room?”

“I don’t have a room here. Your room?”

“I don’t have a room, either.”

“The lobby, at least, is ours.”

She wraps her fingers around my hand and pulls me from the bar. I follow a step behind, like a child being led through a department store by his mother. We pass the elevator. It dings. Four men step off. They wear blazers with elbow patches and khaki pants and shirts unbuttoned too low. The white hair on their chests pokes out. One of them winks at me. He remembers his own youthful trips to hotels. The women he left hotel bars with. Somewhere an old wrinkled wife waits for him. I think fondly of her wrinkles, their depth a sign of permanence. I do not think of them for long. The smooth flesh pressed to my hand is of more immediate importance.

Natalie leads me into the men’s room. Bottles of cologne and lotion are lined up on the counter, arranged by color. Sixteen bottles, from red to blue. They all contain substances scented like flowers so the bathroom smells of a distant garden. An old blind man sits by the sink. He is dressed sharply in a tuxedo and wears obsidian black sunglasses that reflect back nearby images as if from the void of space. His face is round with protruding jowls. His breaths come out raspy, as does his voice.

“Go ahead,” he says, “all the stalls are free.”

Natalie leaves me for a moment and takes the blind man’s hand in both of hers. She lifts it to her mouth. She plants a light kiss there, on the back, the skin drawn and papery. I can see through the skin to his tendons. His arteries and veins. The shapes of the tiny bones inside. There are twenty-seven of them. Natalie comes back to me and takes my hand. In it I see none of those same components.

Natalie opens the first stall. It is less like a stall and more like a walk-in closet, walled from ceiling to floor and sealed with a slatted door. I count fifty-four slats. There is a toilet inside. Thick quilted toilet paper spins on a brass dispenser. Above the toilet hangs a print of a generic landscape. We move to the second stall, the third. Each one Natalie opens reveals a similar setup. It isn’t until after she opens the fifth door that I begin to wonder. She is searching for something. The row of stall doors stretches indefinitely into the distance. I can see at least forty stalls, and I don’t doubt that there are more beyond my perception. Each looks like the same door set in the same floral-papered wall. There is no mark, scratch, or smudge to distinguish one from the next.

We inspect several dozen stalls, not stopping at any of them. Air-conditioned mist puffs from the vents. I shiver. Natalie wraps her arms around me and hugs me like she would a brother. Like a brother she has not seen in a very long time. I appreciate the warmth of her body, but I do not like feeling like family. My thoughts, until this moment, have focused on the shadow between her breasts. This new familiarity, this comfort, is uncomfortable. I pull away. She smiles and slides her hand down my chest in a way that is not sisterly.

She opens the next stall. It is the forty-seventh. I have been counting.

“Through here,” says Natalie.

This stall is not like the others. It is not a stall at all, but a hallway. I cannot tell how long it is. It is long enough to be a hallway and not a stall. I step inside and Natalie follows. The walls are hung with photographs. Each is a picture of me. None of the frames match, different sizes and shapes, materials and moldings. In each picture I am sitting in a hotel lobby. The first is of me as a child. I sit in an overstuffed chair, which looks ready to swallow my tiny body. I am five years old. I remember that lobby. I remember the number of people there. Twenty-seven.

The photographs are arranged chronologically. As I walk deeper into the hallway, I move forward through time, seeing in frozen black and white each and every lobby I have known. I don’t know how many photographs there are. Lobbies are maybe the one thing I have never counted. They exist one at a time. It is only now, counting the pictures, that I begin to realize the vastness of their number.

In the photographs, the chairs on which I sit change. From squat and contemporary to ornate and wingbacked. Sometimes just a stool. How often does one consider the variety of chairs? The background in each picture is different: bare walls or picture windows or the blur of distant objects. The only consistency is my expression. I am observing. I am counting.

We have passed many of the photographs before I notice the small brass plates beneath them. On each plate is a number. I recognize immediately that this is the number of people in each lobby. 7, 16, 32, 5. The numbers go on and on. I stop looking at the pictures, paying attention only to the brass plates and their numbers. I add them together in my head. I divide the sum by the number of photographs. By the number of lobbies. Natalie follows close behind. She looks at me and not the walls.

Ahead, I can see the end of the hallway and in it a door. Light escapes from the crack underneath. I look at the last picture on the left wall. It is a picture of the hotel lobby that we just left. The plate beneath it reads 12. This photograph is taken from a wider angle than the others. I bear the same expression, but my gaze, the calculation of my eyes, is directed across the lobby at Natalie. In the picture she is dressed differently, in unassuming clothes with a modest neckline. A sweater slopes down her shoulders. Her skirt flows out and hangs past her knees. The promise of her figure remains, but it is concealed. It is wrapped like a gift. I look at her in person, in the hallway next to me, and she is dressed in the same clothes as in the picture.

There is an empty frame on the right-hand wall. The frame is white and perfectly square. The brass plate below it is etched with a number: 2. It is the only instance of this number in the hallway. Every other lobby was occupied by several people at least. In my memory there is no lobby so empty. It is contrary to the nature of lobbies. They are a place to meet. A place to converge. And while they are most often passed through, enough people are passing with enough regularity to keep them full. Can anything less be called a lobby? Is two enough?

“Open the door,” says Natalie, “move on to the next number.”

I open the door. I step through. It is another lobby, small and quaint, like a secluded inn. The furniture is mismatched. I can’t see out the windows because they are bright with the sun. There is no one else there. Natalie moves beside me. I count us. We are the only two. I count us again to make sure. I sit on a sofa next to the fireplace. The fire burns low but steady. Natalie sits beside me and leans back against my chest. In my mind I see us in the picture missing from the frame.

The scent of cedar fills the lobby and Natalie, up close, smells like a distant garden. With nothing else to count, I talk to her. Even as the hours accumulate toward night, we continue talking, until, with her head cradled to my chest, we sleep.

To my last question, the answer is yes.