YEARS AGO Alene walked along a wide Denver sidewalk with her arm in a man’s arm. That was in wintertime. A snowy evening. The snow was falling thickly and it was pleasant under the lights along the street, walking slowly past the city stores, looking in the windows, delaying going back to the hotel for the pleasure of being out in the cold air together. She was a young woman then, just thirty-three, nice-looking and slim and tall and brown haired and blue eyed. He was a little older, closer to forty, a tall man with the gray starting to show at the sides of his head. A principal in a school in the same district as the school she taught in. Which was how and why they met, at a district-wide school meeting. She had felt something at once. And then she had found a way of saying something to him. She couldn’t remember what it had been but it’d made him laugh and then they’d met again at another gathering and he had wanted to know if she would join him for dinner sometime in Denver. They both understood what he was saying. She said yes, she’d like that. And that was when it began.
The snow had started to collect on the sidewalk. The cars were beginning to pack it down out in the street. Going quietly by, quieted by the snow.
At the end of the block they stood waiting for a city bus to pass, the interior illuminated in the evening, the people in the bus moving past them as in a kind of movie. An old woman alone in her seat on the bus. An old man wearing a hat. A young girl at the back looking out the window as the bus passed and went on up the street. They crossed the street, she held on to his arm so as not to misstep.
Are you ready to go up? he said.
Yes. Are you?
Yes.
They turned in at the lobby of the hotel. It was a block east of the train depot, an old hotel, one of the oldest in the city, a tall square redbrick building with an ornate front. She stood near the elevator while he got the key from the desk clerk and they rode up to the third floor, another man with them, and she felt his now familiar hand pressing the side of her hip through her coat and that was something she would remember afterward, the feeling of that and the secret of it, while he and the other man made conversation about the weather. What about this snow? It might go up to a foot. Is that right? That’s what they were saying on the news, if you can believe them, and then the elevator stopped and they got out and walked down the long narrow hall, following the runner tacked to the floor, she in front, he following, and came to the room and she stepped aside so he could open the door with the key.
The flowers he had brought her that afternoon were still there on the mirrored buffet. Their fragrance was in the room. She waited as he locked the door and then he turned to her and she kissed him, she was full of joy and happiness. Then he undressed her. The bed was cold and they clung to each other until they were warm and the sheets were warm.
The room had been rich once, beautiful, with wallpaper that had dark red roses aligned up and down, and with an elaborate brass light fixture in the ceiling and a tall mirror on the wall and a narrow door letting into the bathroom, you took a step up to enter, and inside were the claw-footed bathtub and the free-standing sink with the two porcelain faucet handles, and an oval mirror with tiny silver cracks around the edges.
She rose above him in the bed and kissed him and looked down into his face. He had a good face. And brown eyes, looking at her. Oh God, she said.
I know. Don’t think about it.
I’m not thinking. I just was going to say—
She reached under the sheet and found him and made the adjustment, shifting a little.
Afterward lying in the bed in the old beautiful room, feeling warm and happy, she said, Don’t go yet.
I have to. You know I do. I still have to drive home. It’ll be late as it is. And I can’t tell what the roads will be.
Stay here. Stay overnight. Please.
How can I?
Call her. Say you’re snowed in, you can’t leave. You got delayed at the meeting and didn’t get started when you thought you would.
The meeting was over this afternoon.
Make something up.
I can’t.
Of course you can. You do already. We both do.
I can’t tonight.
When will you? When is it going to be any different? Will it ever be?
Yes.
When?
I don’t know. I can’t say that.
Go on then. Leave if you’re going to. She turned away from him.
Don’t be like this.
You don’t know what it’s like, she said. You have no idea.
She lay in the bed and turned toward him again and watched him dressing in the dim room, in the winter light from the street coming in at the window, his long legs, his bare chest and back and arms before he covered them, dressing, and watched how he stood while he tucked in his shirt, and then he came across the room and sat on the bed and bent and kissed her and reached under the cover and touched her breast again.
Are you going to say anything?
No, she said.
He kissed her cheek and went out of the room and she got up quickly and wrapped herself in the bedcover and stood at the window and saw him far below picking his way across the street in the darkening car-packed snow and then she watched him walk down the block in the snow that was still falling and go around the corner out of sight to his car, to drive home on the icy roads to his wife and children in the town where he was principal in the high school.
She imagined his arrival at home, his wife’s worry and complaint, and his consoling her, joking a little, making his excuses and explanations, and she could see them then in the familiar pretty picture walking arm in arm, looking in at the sleeping children, and entering their own bedroom, lying in bed with her head resting on his shoulder and her hair spread out like a fan, and then she saw him kissing her and doing what he had just done with her, and she realized she was crying again and after a while she got up and went into the old tiled bathroom to rinse her face.