It was after midnight, and we were standing on the flat tar roof of the Marriott Marquis in Times Square, fifty-six stories above the street. The light cast from below was the color of embers. We were so high just a few other buildings rose above us, and we couldn’t hear the taxicabs moving through the square below, but from the short knee wall we could see them, small as dried kidney beans, though she had only glanced down for a second before pulling back.
Her hair was long, brown, and curly. She wore gold earrings, and it was late spring and chilly so she must have been wearing a jacket. She was twenty-six, and I was twenty-eight, and twelve hours earlier in Massachusetts she’d sat next to me in the backseat of my friend’s car, and now we had known each other for less than one day. We’d been walking through the Lower East Side looking for a place to dance, but we got lost and ended up in a dark neighborhood, empty crack vials crunching under our feet. She had to stop to bend down and adjust the strap on one of her shoes, and she reached out her hand to me and I took it, telling myself I shouldn’t, but I did anyway.
We continued walking. I kept her hand in mine, and we held hands all the way to Times Square and its unapologetic assault of neon where she needed to find a bathroom, and so we found ourselves in the grand lobby of the Marriott Marquis, where I waited for her, staring at the glass elevators sitting in the center of the carpeted lobby. Then she came out of the bathroom and looked so beautiful, walking with the straight-backed poise of the dancer she was, and I took her hand again and said, “Let’s go up.”
The elevator rose fast, and we could look out and see each floor of the hotel fall away beneath us. She stepped closer to me, close enough I could smell her hair, and that did something to me, and when I stepped out onto the carpet of the fifty-sixth floor I took her hand again, and said, “Let’s go to the roof.”
What I did not know is that she was afraid of heights, and what she did not know is that for months I had been trying to get over a longtime girlfriend by seeing more than one woman at the same time, trying to feel something substantial for each and failing, and so just a day earlier I’d cut it off with all three of them. I vowed to spend the next year alone, and so why was I holding the hand of this woman less than one day after leaving the others? Why was I pulling her up to the unlocked rooftop of the Marriott Marquis in Times Square?
Because hours earlier, sitting in the backseat of my friend’s car, she told me that all she wanted to do was what she was already doing, which was to dance and to draw, and I wanted to look away from her dark eyes looking directly into mine, but I could not, for I had known this woman before, maybe many times, before my births and after my deaths, and now I wanted her to feel how high we were; I wanted her to see those tiny taxicabs of New York City. I could feel the knee wall pressing against my shins. I could feel the lighted city far below, faint car horns rising up like wisps of smoke.
She stepped back quickly. A small voice inside me said, You’re supposed to be alone now. It’s time for you to be alone. But when I turned away from the roof’s low wall, she hugged me, and I could feel how afraid she’d been of falling, and then we were drawing closer and then we were kissing. It was soft and warm and lasted longer than I knew it should, for this wasn’t my plan at all, it just was not. But I kissed her again, and I kissed her last night and this morning, too, twenty-eight years fallen away behind us, our three children grown and living elsewhere now, doing their own falling, one ride and climb and fateful kiss at a time.