Regardless, we downgraded to three stars and clicked try again. After several minutes of searching ... searching ..., our hotel was revealed: the Hilton in Times Square. Sexy? Not even remotely.
"Where are you from?" the friendly man at the front desk asked me when we checked in a few days later. "Uh, uh ... Massachusetts," I decided. But when I handed him my driver's license, he looked confused.
"You used to live in New York?" he asked.
"Yes," I said quickly, "but now I'm here for work." I looked around the noisy lobby. Over the years, my husband and I have splurged on some nice Manhattan hotels for special occasions like anniversaries. They had beautiful people hanging off barstools in the lounge areas, rooms with down comforters, and marble-tiled bathrooms stocked with aromatherapy lotions.
This Hilton was not one of these places.
At the lobby bar, glum businessmen in ill-fitting suits nursed Budweisers, clusters of noisy tourists huddled around maps and yapped on cell phones, and the faint smell of cigarettes clung to tattered couches. I tried to get beyond the aesthetics and remind myself why I was here: Because I needed sex. Because sex was good. Because I missed my husband's body. Because I had an Exersaucer in my bedroom, rubber duckies in my bathtub, and Piglet in my DVD player. We walked wordlessly to the elevators.
I wish I could report that the second we entered our antiseptic hotel room, we stripped off our clothes and performed unspeakable acts on each other. In reality, the first thing I did was unpack my breast pump and express a few ounces. When I finished pumping and climbed into the double bed next to my already-naked husband, he said, "We have to make sure we actually have sex. And not just sleep."
We did have sex—satisfying, athletic sex. But that's not what is most memorable about our afternoon. What I remember is the silence. The endless hum of hotel white noise, and the stillness of being 39 floors above the city and miles away, physically and psychologically, from our children. Way more than sneaking around and having sex, our anonymity was the daring thing about our tryst. We were irresponsible enough to be unavailable to our family and our coworkers for a few hours. We had opted out of parenthood and staked a claim on our sanity and our right to be adults. It was the boldest thing we could have done. Short of having children.
