Red Suited You Better

The first time Clara saw him, she was nineteen and too young to understand that confidence and kindness were not the same thing.

He had been standing at the end of the bar in a charcoal jacket, one hand curled around a glass he seemed to have forgotten to drink from. The place was crowded enough that people had begun occupying spaces rather than seats, leaning against pillars, gathering near the toilets, shouting over music that had been turned up to compensate for the fact that nobody was dancing.

She remembered him because he wasn't shouting. Everyone else that age seemed desperate to be heard. He waited.

That had impressed her then.

Twenty-three years later, standing beneath the hard white lights of a hotel lobby in Copenhagen, Clara watched the same man smile at a woman young enough to be her daughter.

He had not aged. For several seconds she did nothing. The receptionist was still talking to her.

Something about breakfast.

Clara nodded automatically, although she hadn't heard enough of the sentence to know what she was agreeing to. Her passport lay open on the counter between them, photograph facing upward. The woman behind the desk slid a room key into a paper sleeve and circled something on a small map with a blue pen.

"Elevators are just around the corner to your right."

"Thank you."

Her own voice sounded normal. That irritated her.

She collected the key, passport, and overnight bag without looking toward the seating area again. There were polished concrete floors, pale wood, too many plants arranged to look accidental. The lobby had the particular international anonymity of expensive hotels, as though its designers had worked very hard to ensure that nobody could remember which country they were in.

Clara crossed toward the elevators.

She could feel him behind her. Not looking at her. She was almost certain of that.

The young woman with him laughed.

Clara stopped.

It wasn't the laugh. She didn't know the woman. It was what happened immediately afterward. Nothing. No response from him. No answering laugh. No instinctive human acknowledgement of somebody else's amusement.

He let the sound hang there until she became uncertain of it. Then he smiled.

Clara turned.

He was perhaps thirty. Thirty-two at most. Dark hair, longer on top than at the sides. Straight nose. Narrow face that somehow avoided being severe. The jacket was different, of course. Navy now, over an open-necked white shirt. No tie. His shoes probably cost more than Clara's first car.

But the face was the same. Not similar. Not familiar. The same.

He sat angled toward the young woman without quite facing her. It was something Clara had forgotten until this moment, although she had known it once very well. He gave people most of his attention and made them work for the rest.

The young woman leaned closer. Clara remembered doing that too.

The elevator doors opened behind her.

"Clara?"

She stepped inside without understanding why she had responded to her name.

The receptionist stood behind the counter holding up a credit card.

"You left this."

Clara looked down.

Her wallet was open in her hand.

"Right."

She crossed back, took the card, thanked her again. The receptionist smiled politely, already looking toward the next guest.

When Clara turned, the man was watching her. No surprise. No confusion. His expression changed by almost nothing. Then he looked away.

The elevator doors closed before she reached them.

* * * *

Room 614 had one queen bed, a narrow desk, and a window overlooking roofs darkened by rain.

Clara left the lights off.

She put her bag on the luggage rack and stood at the window without removing her coat. Traffic moved below in wet ribbons. Bicycles slipped between cars. Somewhere farther down the street a siren approached, became briefly enormous, then faded toward the station.

Her phone showed three missed messages from Daniel.

Landed?

Hotel okay?

Then, eight minutes later:

I assume Copenhagen has claimed you. Tell the Danes I want you back by Thursday.

Clara read the messages twice.

She typed:

Landed. Hotel is fine. Dinner thing starts at 7. Will call later.

She watched the little indicator appear almost immediately.

Daniel was typing.

She locked the phone before the reply came.

On the desk sat the usual hotel arrangement: two bottles of water, glasses turned upside down on paper circles, a small card describing the hotel's commitment to sustainability. Clara removed her coat, folded it across the back of the chair, then went into the bathroom and looked at herself.

Forty-two. Not old. That wasn't what bothered her.

There were faint lines at the corners of her eyes she had started noticing in photographs before mirrors. A thread of silver near her left temple that Daniel claimed to like and she suspected he genuinely did. Her face had narrowed slightly over the years. Or perhaps the softness had simply moved elsewhere.

She touched the skin beneath one eye.

Nineteen. She could still see that girl if she knew where to look. Not in the mirror. Never there.

In gestures. The way she sometimes tucked her hair behind her ear when uncomfortable. The way she still checked the price before ordering wine even when somebody else was paying. The stupid little hesitation before entering a room where she knew no one.

At nineteen she'd worn a red cardigan that night.

Cheap wool. Three black buttons. She had borrowed it from Elise because somebody had spilled beer down the front of her blouse at the pre-party.

She had forgotten that.

Clara lowered her hand. She remembered the cardigan clearly now. And him.

Not everything. Memory wasn't film, no matter how much people pretended otherwise. She remembered pieces with impossible precision and entire hours not at all.

His hand against the bar. A pale scar across one knuckle. The way he'd asked what she was studying and listened to the answer.

No. That wasn't quite right. He hadn't listened. He had repeated pieces of it back to her. There was a difference she hadn't understood yet.

You study architecture. You hate your statistics professor. You're thinking about transferring. Your father wanted you to go into medicine. Each repetition had felt like attention. Now it sounded like an inventory.

Clara turned on the bathroom tap, and let the cold water run across her fingers.

She had gone home with him. Not that night. Three nights later. She remembered wanting to correct that detail, although there was nobody in the room accusing her of anything.

Three nights later. She had chosen to go. That mattered to nineteen-year-old Clara, and apparently to forty-two-year-old Clara too.

Nothing terrible had happened. That was another thing she found herself insisting upon. He had not hurt her. He had not threatened her. He had not forced her to do anything. He had simply become somebody else once the door closed.

Not cruel. Cruelty would have required interest. Finished. Yes, that was the word. As though whatever had been happening between them had concluded the moment he knew she would stay.

By morning he'd barely spoken. She remembered sitting at the edge of his bed pulling on one boot while he stood at the window smoking. He had been naked from the waist up, his reflection ghosted across the glass.

She had wanted him to turn around. Not because she wanted to stay, but because she wanted confirmation that the person from the bar had existed.

He never did.

For months afterward she'd been ashamed of how much that hurt. Years later it became funny. Then tedious. Eventually it became nothing.

That was how old wounds were supposed to behave.

The phone vibrated against the desk in the other room.

Clara shut off the water.

Daniel had replied.

Good. Love you. Don't let them make you network after 10. You become socialist after two glasses of wine and start interrogating CEOs.

Despite herself, she smiled.

Capitalists fear me.

Three dots appeared.

I fear you. Different thing.

She put the phone down. For a few seconds the room returned to normal. A conference. A hotel. A man who resembled somebody she'd known a long time ago.

Genetics could be unkind that way. Faces repeated. Strangers looked like dead relatives. Children grew into grandparents they'd never met. There were only so many arrangements available for eyes, cheekbones, mouths.

She knew this.

Clara sat on the edge of the bed and removed her shoes. The man downstairs had been perhaps thirty. The man she remembered had been perhaps twenty-nine. Twenty-eight?

Older than her, certainly. At nineteen, six or seven years had seemed substantial.

She tried to remember his name.

Michael.

No.

Matthew.

Something ordinary. She could remember the scar on his hand but not his name. That seemed unfair.

She lay back across the bed without intending to. The ceiling above her was smooth white plaster with a sprinkler head positioned slightly off center.

There had been a photograph.

The thought arrived complete. Clara sat up. Elise had taken it. Not of him. Of all of them.

A birthday. Whose birthday?

Nina's. Twenty-first.

No, that couldn't be right. Clara had been nineteen.

Elise's birthday, maybe.

There had been six people at the table. Clara on the end. Somebody making rabbit ears behind somebody else's head because apparently human civilization had once tolerated such things.

And him. He'd arrived later, and someone had taken a photograph outside.

Clara picked up her phone and opened her contacts. She found Elise beneath a surname Clara still thought of as temporary despite the fact that Elise had been married for fourteen years.

She hesitated.

They hadn't spoken in nearly six months. Not because anything had happened. Adult friendships simply developed deserts between them and expected everyone to understand.

Clara pressed call.

It rang four times.

"Jesus Christ."

Clara smiled despite the knot beginning somewhere beneath her ribs.

"Nice to hear your voice too."

"Clara?"

"Unless you've got another Jesus Christ calling from Denmark."

There was movement on Elise's end. A door closing. Children's voices receding.

"I thought you were a school parent. Why are you calling?"

"Do you still have your photographs from university?"

Silence. Not alarmed silence. Elise was apparently deciding whether the question was stupid enough to require clarification.

"What?"

"The actual photographs. Before everything was digital."

"I have boxes of things somewhere."

"Do you remember that guy I dated? First year."

"You dated several guys first year."

"The older one."

"Oh."

Clara waited.

Elise made a small sound somewhere between amusement and disgust. "That one."

"You remember him?"

"I remember you crying in my room while insisting you weren't crying."

"I wasn't crying."

"You were literally holding toilet paper against your face."

"We were out of tissues."

"Because you had been crying."

Clara smiled, but the smile didn't last.

"Do you remember his name?"

Another pause.

"Julian."

Clara closed her eyes. Yes. Julian. The name moved through something old and untouched.

"Julian what?"

"I have no idea."

"Did you ever meet him?"

"Once. Maybe twice."

"What did you think of him?"

"Clara."

"What?"

"Why are you asking me about some asshole from twenty years ago?"

"Twenty-three."

"That correction somehow makes this less reassuring."

Clara looked toward the rain-dark window.

"I saw someone downstairs."

Elise didn't answer immediately. Clara could hear a television in the distance.

"Someone who looked like him?"

"Yes."

"Okay."

"Exactly like him."

This time the silence was different. Not belief, but rather accommodation. The careful pause people gave friends when deciding how seriously to take something.

"Clara, people look like other people."

"I know."

"And you're sure you're remembering what he looked like accurately?"

Clara rubbed her thumb across the edge of the phone.

"No."

There it was. The sensible answer. The adult answer.

Memory was unreliable. She knew that better than most people. Every reunion contained proof. People misremembered who had kissed whom, which apartment they'd lived in, who had first told the story that eventually belonged to everyone.

Maybe Julian had had lighter hair. Maybe his nose had been broader. Maybe the man downstairs had only possessed the right arrangement of gestures and Clara's mind had filled in the rest.

Elise sighed.

"Do you have somewhere to be?"

"Conference dinner."

"Then go downstairs, drink free wine, complain about your industry, and stop excavating men who weren't worth remembering the first time."

"That's almost profound."

"I've matured."

A child shouted something unintelligible. Elise covered the phone and answered in a voice that instantly belonged to somebody's mother.

Then she came back. "I'll look for the photographs this weekend."

Clara sat very still.

"You don't have to."

"I know. Now I want to."

"Okay."

"If I find one, I'll send it."

"Thanks."

"And Clara?"

"Yeah?"

"If it really is him, ask what moisturizer he uses."

Clara laughed. That helped.

They said goodbye, and the room became quiet again.

On the bed beside Clara, the phone screen went black. For several minutes she sat there listening to rain touch the glass. Then she dressed for dinner.

* * * *

At seven fifteen, Julian was still in the lobby. The young woman was gone. He sat alone now, one ankle resting across the opposite knee, looking at his phone.

Clara stopped beside the elevator. There was no reason to walk toward him. So she did. Not quickly. Not dramatically. She crossed the lobby with the measured pace of someone who had mistaken a stranger for an acquaintance and was preparing to be embarrassed about it.

He looked up when she was six feet away.

Clara stopped.

Up close, the resemblance became worse. The same small scar across the knuckle of his right hand.

For a moment neither of them spoke.

Then his expression softened into polite curiosity. "Can I help you?"

His voice was wrong. Or perhaps memory had lost that too. Clara felt something inside her loosen. Of course. Of course it wasn't him.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I thought you were someone else."

He smiled. Not broadly, but just enough.

"It happens."

Clara nodded and turned away.

She had taken three steps when he spoke again.

"Red suited you better."

She stopped. People moved through the lobby around her. Suitcases rolled across concrete. Someone laughed near the bar. The elevator chimed.

Clara turned slowly.

Julian was looking at his phone again. As though he hadn't said anything at all.