Linen Closet Tryst

I signed up for the couples cooking class alone, which tells you most of what you need to know about me. Amina, forty-two, paralegal, single, the kind of woman who reads the cancellation policy before she books anything. The class was at one of those posh Edinburgh hotels that smells like money and lavender, the kind where the towels cost more than my electric bill, and the brochure promised "a week of connection for two." I paid for two seats and brought my imagination as my plus one.

The cooking itself was fine. We made a beef wellington that the chef kept calling "rustic," which is what chefs say when they mean a stranger's wellington collapsed. My table partner for the knife skills segment was a lovely widow named Edith, seventy-one, who could julienne a carrot better than anyone in the room and told me so herself, twice. We got along. But the whole point of me being there, the embarrassing honest point, was that I wanted to meet someone. Not through an app. Not through a friend's husband's coworker. Just, in person, over pastry cream, the way people used to.

I usually leave this out until the third or fourth date, and it has ended the last two relationships I bothered to have. I like a certain kind of arrangement in the bedroom. Nothing complicated, nothing that would scare a reasonable dog. I like to be in charge. I enjoy a man who is happy to be told what to do, and I like saying it out loud. My ex, a fellow paralegal named Joel who billed his hours with surgical precision, lasted nine months before the flinch. Not a big flinch. A small one, the kind you can miss if you're not watching. I was watching. He never came back from it, and neither, really, did we.

So there I was, between sessions on the Saturday afternoon, needing a restroom and following a sign that lied to me. The corridor past the banquet offices dead-ended at a door marked STAFF ONLY, and like an idiot with a keycard from the class packet that turned out to open half the hotel, I went through it. The linen room on the other side was bright and orderly, shelves of folded sheets stacked like cakes, towels in ranked white ranks, and up on the highest shelf a puppet with a missing arm propped against the wall, which I noticed because who wouldn't notice that. I never found the restroom. I did find a laundry basket of unclaimed lost-and-found items staged there for sorting, including a little black dress in a size that flattered me, and I am only human. I put it on. I was twirling, actually twirling, checking myself in the mirrored door of a supply cabinet, when the door behind me opened.

The man who came in was forty-something, tall in a conference-lanyard sort of way, wearing the hotel's auditor badge and an expression of pure auditor focus that evaporated the second he saw me. We did the whole frozen tableau thing. Him in the doorway, hand still on the handle. Me in a borrowed dress with my heels in one hand and my dignity in the other. He was, I noticed before anything else, cute in a tired-librarian way, and he was, I noticed second, holding a clipboard like it was a shield.

"I am so sorry," he said. "I'm doing a door audit. This door should have locked behind you."

"It should have what?"

"Locked. Self-closing, mag lock, the works. It didn't. That's a finding. I write these up." He said it apologetically, like the door's failure was somehow his personal embarrassment. "You're a guest?"

"Class. Couples cooking. Attending alone, which is exactly as fun as it sounds." I gestured at the dress. "Before you write me up too, this is from the basket. The lost-and-found one. I was going to put it back."

He looked at the dress, and then his face did something interesting. It went from professional to puzzled to a kind of strangled recognition, the look of a man seeing his own handwriting on someone else's check. "That's not from the basket," he said slowly.

"It's absolutely from the basket."

"It's from a dry-cleaning bag. I left a dry-cleaning bag with the front desk in March and they sent it to lost property and it never came back." He said this with the flat certainty of a man who has audited a claim and found it valid. "Black lace. There's a tiny repair on the left strap where the stitching went. I did the repair myself."

Now, I had noticed the stitching. It was good stitching, small and even, the work of someone patient. I looked at him. He looked at the dress on me. And then I laughed, because the alternative was a silence nobody could survive. He laughed too, that relieved bark of a man who has just confessed a felony and been handed a biscuit instead of a sentence.

"You're telling me," I said, "that I am standing in a linen room in your underwear."

"Technically the hotel's linen room. Ethically, yes."

I should back up and tell you who he was, because I didn't know yet either. Chandler, forty-four, security auditor for the hotel chain itself, in town to test whether their doors locked and their staff followed protocol, which mostly meant he spent three days opening doors he shouldn't be able to and feeling smug about it. And here is the part he told me ten minutes later, standing among the towels, which is not where most men tell you their secrets, but then Chandler is not most men. He crossdresses. Had since he was twenty-one and a friend at university dared him into her skirt for a theme night and something in him went, oh, there you are. Twenty-three years of it, mostly private, entirely unshared, because the last woman he'd worked up the courage to mention it to had gone quiet in a way he recognized from the inside of funerals.

"I don't wear it to work, obviously," he said. "It's at home. It's a whole thing, shelves and everything, very organized, which will surprise no one who has watched me hold a clipboard for five minutes."

"Twenty-three years," I said, "and you've never told anyone you're dating?"

"Anyone I was dating. My sister knows, she's fine about it, she helps me shop, which is mortifying and wonderful. But partners, no. The one conversation I attempted went so badly I decided the shelf would stay home." He shrugged in the way men do when the shrug is doing a lot of structural work.

I want to be fair to the universe here, because I do not believe in fate but I do believe in comedy, and the universe had arranged for me to be wearing this man's panties in a linen room while he explained his shelf system. I told him about the flinch. About Joel, about the men who said they were open-minded right up until the word came out of my mouth and then developed sudden interests in their phones. He listened the way auditors listen, actually taking it in, no flinch anywhere on his face.

"So we're both," he said, and waved the clipboard in a small circle, "difficult to retail."

"That's an awful way to put it."

"I know. I've been writing findings all day. Everything sounds like a report." He looked at the puppet on the high shelf, possibly to give his face something else to do. "That's from the renovation. They found it in a wall cavity, apparently. Nineteen twenties stage puppet, one arm gone. Facilities were going to bin it and I asked for it instead."

"You collect them? Puppets?"

"Marionettes. Vintage ones. I restore them. There's a little community, mostly men my age who should know better. I have a small one on my keychain, armless, obviously, as a warning to myself about hoarding." He showed me. He really had one, a grinning wooden fellow the size of a thumb, one arm gone at the shoulder. "This is a Czech piece from the fifties. I found the match for his missing arm in Prague two years ago and I've never gotten around to fitting it. I keep