Encountering Chance

The elevator doors opened. I stepped forward to exit into the hotel lobby. A handsome silver-haired gentleman who, together with his wife, had been sitting at the table next to mine and my husband’s in the hotel restaurant the night before was standing opposite me, poised to enter the elevator. “Billie?” And suddenly I knew his name, as I hadn’t the night before. “Ricky?”

More surprising was the rush of arousal I felt, at a level of intensity I hadn’t felt since I was a teenager engaging in lots of unconsummated lovemaking in the back seat of a car. In a movie, we would have jumped one another right there in the grand French Canadian hotel lobby. But no, this was real life, and my husband was standing at my side. We had just made love up in our room. I was deeply content. Where on earth had this sudden rush of sexual energy come from? And what was Ricky doing in this hotel just at the moment my husband and I had stolen away from our children for a romantic weekend in Montreal?

Despite my misgivings, Ricky and his wife, at the hotel for a convention, were soon seated on a semicircular lobby couch with my husband and me for cocktails and chat. Neither Ricky nor I could remember how we knew one another. But, in a surreal scene, with my husband on my left and Ricky on my right, Ricky began feeling for my knee. Could this be happening, right then, right there, with our spouses watching? Feeling faint and dizzy, I excused myself and left with my husband. Ricky and I were basically strangers who came from the same hometown and had merely known a few people and places in common. It was all very mysterious and titillating, but also embarrassing. Thankfully, no one else seemed to notice.

Back in New York, I resumed writing a novel I had entitled The Bra Strap Chronicles. It was a story about a traumatic coming-of-age not unlike the one I lived through in real life. In June of my 17th year, not long after my uncle, the founder of Secular Humanistic Judaism, had been outed by Time