He needed a moment to recover, but Jonathan had seen him and waved him over. The introduction. Exclamations. We’ve met before! You have? Yes, years ago on a plane. How amazing! Holly was excited and very friendly, but Peter felt nothing but despair, for she gave no indication that she had spent every waking moment since their parting thinking about him. She was wearing a rather low-cut silk blouse and extremely narrow black pants with a faint chalk stripe. She looked fantastic.
Peter and Holly told Jonathan their story. They had bonded over Thomas Mann, of all things! Then their narrative petered out.
“Well, so,” Jonathan asked, “you never saw each other after that?”
Peter took Jonathan’s question to be a challenge. Of course, any halfway competent male who flew across the continent sitting next to a young woman like Holly would have managed to get her phone number. Peter felt compelled to stake his own claim to Holly, to show Jonathan that he had not failed in this respect, and to make sure Holly knew what had happened, whether she cared or not. True, in achieving these aims, he would make himself look idiotic, but that was not too high a price to pay.
“Actually,” he said, “we were going to see each other again. Holly wrote her number on a piece of paper, and we were going to have dinner.” To identify the piece of paper would be to give Jonathan too intimate a detail, Peter thought. “But … uh … well …” He paused, turning red. “Well, I actually lost the piece of paper.”
“You lost it!” said Holly. She put her hand on Peter’s arm. “You lost it! I always assumed that you just blew me off!”
“Oh no!” Peter said. In his solipsism, it had never occurred to him that Holly might have been hurt. “I lost the number. I know, it was a fairly idiotic thing to do. I was at my hotel, and it was gone. I looked everywhere,” Peter said, “but somehow or other, the thing just disappeared.”
“How kind of too bad,” Holly said. Her tone and expression reflected a touch of spontaneous warmth toward him that had thus far been lacking.
“I sure thought so!” said Peter.
“I bet you did!” said Jonathan.
They all laughed a little.
Jonathan had been observing the others closely. Now he smiled at both with affection. “What a close call for me!” he said. “If it had been different, then, well, who knows what might have happened? And maybe we would all be sitting here together, but it would all be … different.” His tone was mild, sweet, humorous, even a wee bit vulnerable. “I’m pretty lucky that Peter chose that moment to be fairly idiotic. It might be hard to believe, Holly, but that was actually out of character for him.”
Holly laughed and squeezed Jonathan’s hand. No spoilsport, Peter laughed too. He and Holly exchanged a glance, and then some other guests approached, and the party’s momentum swept them all away. For the rest of the night, Peter sought out Holly, trying to have a private moment with her, but for some reason this opportunity was always denied him.
One evening shortly after Peter had met Holly again, he received some further information about her attitude toward the Lost Phone Number. Holly was out and Peter was having a drink in Jonathan’s apartment before going to dinner. Waiting for a call from some other friends, Peter watched a hockey game and Jonathan corrected a proof.
“Hey,” Jonathan said, without looking up from the page, “did you know that Holly really got a crush on you that time when you sat next to each other on the plane?”
Trying to remain as cool as possible, Peter took a sip of his beer and continued to watch the Devils’ power play. “Really?” he said.
“Yeah,” said Jonathan. He scrawled a couple of words in the margin and continued to work as he talked. “Yeah. We were talking about it, and that’s what she told me. So naturally it got me concerned and I said, ‘So what about now?’ She laughed. She said, ‘You’re jealous over somebody I sat next to on a plane years ago? Are you crazy?’ I guess it did sound pretty silly. Oh hell!” Jonathan drummed his pencil on the paper and then made an erasure. “Anyway, she told me not to worry. ‘You know how those things go,’ she said, ‘you meet somebody someplace with some kind of forced intimacy and you think there’s been some magic, and then two days later you’ve forgotten all about them.’ It’s interesting. That’s really true, don’t you think?” He whispered aloud a few words of his text and made a change. “Well, also she said that, you know, you’re such a nice guy that she bet you felt bad about not calling, but actually it was a relief that you didn’t. She had gotten so wrapped up in the baby, you can imagine, and there was the whole scene with her father and her sister, and then her mother coming. She didn’t know what she would have done if you had.” He crossed out a couple of words. “So anyway, phew. I wouldn’t want to have had to shoot you.” He teethed on his pencil, reclined in his chair, and held the proof up, frowning at it.
This account had the unmistakable ring of truth, although Peter wished desperately that he could convince himself Jonathan was making it all up. But why would he bother? He had Holly. Also, Peter couldn’t remember a time when Jonathan had lied to him. Indeed, Jonathan had his own code of honor and rarely outright lied to any of his friends, not even to the women he was involved with; it was almost a principle, and it was part of the game, to juggle them without resorting to sheer mendacity.
She laughed. Really nothing Jonathan had said had surprised Peter. Still, he felt heartsick. The Devils’ pusillanimous line had barely managed to get off a shot before the two sides evened up. Peter drank again from his beer and continued staring at the TV “Oh, yeah,” he said, “we had a lot of fun talking on that flight. Holly’s great.”
Peter saw very little of Jonathan and Holly over the following several weeks. She was getting a master’s degree in Classics at the university where Jonathan had his fellowship, and he virtually moved in with her as she finished. When they came to the city, Jonathan did not include Peter in their activities. Uncharacteristically, Jonathan rarely came to the city by himself, and he seemed to be devoting all his attention (within reason) to Holly alone. This time, it seemed to be serious. Holly had a thesis topic she was quite excited about (Horace, “authority”), but did she really want to be an academic? Jonathan was urging her to move to New York, and when Holly learned about a last-minute opening at an excellent girls’ school she applied and was hired. After a summer of travel, she and Jonathan established themselves in his apartment. Having seen Holly so rarely, Peter had not had much chance to return to the subject of their first meeting, and as time passed it felt more and more as if it would be awkward and strange to bring it up.
The thing between Jonathan and Holly was serious. After living together for a while, they were married. Peter and Holly had become quite good friends, but they never discussed their first meeting again. Peter had watched and waited—foolishly, he knew—and then he’d given up.
Peter had eaten his appetizer without taking any notice of it; he could not have told anyone what it was. Holly was saying something to him, but he hadn’t answered.
“Peter?”
“Oh sorry. What was it you said?”
“You seem to be a million miles away. Thinking about the big day?” Holly said this with the smile of a female friend who is indulgent of a man’s dread of his own wedding.
“Oh, no, actually. But I should be. There’s a crisis about the cheese.”
“Oh God!” Holly cried. “How horrible! I suppose Charlotte and her mother are treating it like the Algerian civil war.”
“Basically, yeah. Torture, assassination, the whole bit.”
“I guess I was lucky. My mother sat back and sort of vaguely watched everything happen. ‘That sounds lovely, dear’ was all she ever said. The only problem was that she easily could have forgotten the date and set off that day to buy a butterfly collection, or something else she had suddenly decided was a necessity.”
“She