Hotels. How I loved them. The intoxicating combination of anonymity and privilege, as though living in New York could be made somehow portable, bearable. There were times, of course, when I needed that feeling even in New York. Midweek, in the slow times, I would leave husband and daughter and the apartment and the building and take a cab to Midtown and wander without luggage into the lobby of the Park Lane or the Hilton out of the chaos of my life into the cool echoey atmosphere of marble and steel, the lobbies with their heavy upholstery and mirrors and chandeliers and fresh-cut flowers winter and summer and the silent tread of the uniformed employees and the laughter of temporarily unrumpled businessmen and visiting wives as they traipsed in and out to the cabs or over to the elevators or across to the winking comfortable cavern of the bar. Sometimes it was enough for me to sit, just sit on one of the sofas by a white telephone, as if waiting for a call, and to read the newspapers and brochures I'd find lying there, or even the occasional discarded paperback. The skin on my neck prickled against the possibility that I'd be discovered, asked to show my key, asked to leave, but it never happened. I looked like a traveler, I suppose, or less flatteringly, like a tourist. Other times I'd walk right up to the front desk and ring the bell, if necessary, and some cleanly young man with brilliantined hair or a dignified older man with a carnation in his buttonhole would assume the proper distance from me to be heard without shouting, to assume the friendly impersonal intimacy of hotels, and I would take bills from my purse and place them on the counter between us and he with a faint formal gesture of precisely calculated embarrassment would pick up the bills as though they were litter and make them disappear in a drawer, and he would hand me a key, in those days an actual bit of glossy metal, which you would as a courtesy hand over to the desk clerk whenever you left and which he would return to you, wordlessly, without having to ask your room number when you came back. With prize in hand I'd deflect the suggestion of luggage, but anyway a bellboy would escort me to the elevator and we'd both receive the drily welcoming nod of the elevator operator (for there would be such a personage, an immaculate older black man with the South gentling his voice; never white in the 70s, never a Dominican or a Slav as is typical now), and we'd be carried up up up (I always asked for the highest floor I could get) and the door would open onto a whisper-quiet carpeted hallway with its glowing sconces, a kind of silence and antiseptic grace over everything, so different from even the best-appointed Upper West Side buildings people like me were expected to live, and the bellhop would lead me to the room, bearing my key in place of a suitcase, and use it to open the door to what was invariably a small, almost cramped room with a single queen-sized bed and an armoire (rarely were there closets) and a television and a window, and he would busy himself drawing the curtains or lighting the bathroom or pointing out the telephone while I stood there breathing in the pure, false, expensive air, until at last a small bill would find its way from my hand into his and he'd step out with a little bow that reminded me thrillingly and fearfully of uniformed men from my childhood (train conductors, customs officers, soldiers) and close the door behind him with the quietest of clicks, and I would stand in the window for a while looking at the city from an angle unavailable to me from our apartment, a taller bleaker more brilliant city than the sleek fat domestic cat of an Upper West Side that lies perpetually purring with its tail wrapped around Riverside Park, or lie on the bed fully clothed after carefully removing the bedspread (it's there you'll find the bedbugs and all varieties of dead matter, the maids never wash them until they are vigorously and permanently stained), looking up at the ceiling, listening to the faint sounds of traffic and the occasional timbrel of sirens from below, or the muffled voices in the next room (the finer the hotel the thinner the walls, or so has been my experience in New York), sometimes accompanied by the creak of furniture, or the empty high-pitched whine of a television, or of course, more frequently than not, the sounds of people making love. I remember once coming into the room with the bellhop while my neighbors were at it, a comic opera of bedsprings and low moans and lumping thumps that shook the large bad painting over my own chaste bed, and the bellhop, who was very young, perhaps not even eighteen, turned scarlet to the roots of his hair and rushed out of the room without so much as unhooking the drapes or extending his palm—it probably didn't help that I was laughing loud and hard and painfully and for so long that I imagine the lovers could hear me, for they subsided without audible climax and I went on laughing until the tears came.

What did I do afterward? Almost nothing. Listen to the radio or turn on the TV. Take a shower. Sit in the single armchair by the window listening to the hotel breathing, to the city grumbling and grating to itself. Sometimes looking at the door where no lover would appear, comfortable in the knowledge that one would, could appear if I so chose, if I ever wished to surpass the possible. But then again there is no surpassing the possible. The actual is cheap, experience had taught me that. Too often I'd gone to see for myself and returned disappointed in the oldest sense of that word: an appointment that had failed to be kept, the messenger was only a man with an empty envelope up his sleeve, a maddening sort of helpless shrug, like my marriage. No, look at the door, a solid rectangle of wood with its brass-covered peephole that I might lift to survey the fishbowl the lens made of the hallway, which was empty: it was emptiness I paid for. It would end with me in the bed, bedspread folded and tucked into the bottom of the armoire, lying on top of the blankets, fully clothed, listening. Dawn would wake me, not with sunlight (even the highest hotel windows rarely offer an angle by which the morning sun might penetrate) but by the change in tone, an impalpable waking presence of life in the streets, the gurgle of pipes feeding showers, the sober murmuring of adjacent solitary guests talking into phones. I'd wake dry, in a wrinkled dress, under my coat if it was cold, a taste in my mouth, the stale self I hadn't after all escaped for a single moment. It would have been simpler to take up drinking. It would have been easier to forget. But for a few hours I'd been, not your mother, no one's wife, no singer or survivor, no one's daughter. Only no one. And I knew, as I slipped out the door like a woman fearful of waking her husband on her way to meet her lover, that I'd be back.

Joshua Corey is the author of Severance Songs and two other books of poetry. He keeps a blog, lives in Evanston, Illinois, and teaches English at Lake Forest College. This is his first fiction publication.