At the Hilton Millennium Hotel next to the twin towers of the World Trade Center, I attended a small business conference....
The Networld Conference and Exhibition of 1986 was smaller then than it is now. I worked for a Dallas manufacturer exhibiting that year for the second time, but with the thought that if traffic was slow again we would not come back.
Sure enough, the first day was slow--painfully boringly slow. My sales colleague who was assigned to work the exhibit with me took off after only a couple of hours. I stood and talked to the few prospects that wandered by until my feet hurt. Wanting to look "Eastern" I had left my comfortable mule skin boots at home and wore lace-up wingtips that were like torture devices. Our team of marketing experts had not thought to provide our booth with a chair or two.
Across the broad isle was a larger exhibit of electronic networking products from a big east coast company. Most of their salesmen were young slicked down MBA types. They had two saleswomen. One was an ice queen, an untouchable booth babe acting very professional. The other was a rather homely older woman, probably in her late forties. She was a little older than I was then, but she looked even older.
She dressed kind of dowdy wearing low-heeled practical shoes and a JC Penney dark red tailored suit with a silky ruffled blouse. Her brown hair was cut very close. She was short and quite thin, but the way she dressed and her hair cut made her seem even smaller. To complete the dowdy look, she wore thick glasses in extremely large frames. Made her eyes look huge. However, she had a friendly smile—and she was in a booth with chairs!
Wandering across the isle, I engaged her with some small talk about the show and the lack of customers. She invited me to sit, and I was happy to accept. We sat and talked until the show crawled to an end.
After closing up our exhibit, I headed for the big doors exiting the exhibit area. As I was getting on the escalator to the hotel lobby, the little woman stepped on behind me, tugged my jacket, and asked if I had dinner plans.
I explained that I had left the evening open in the expectation of having dinner with a prospect, but the few I spoke with that day had other plans. So, no, I had no plans. She was pleasant enough, but not exciting in any sense of the word: Nothing to look at and not much of an intellect, but dining alone was not very attractive either.
I suggested eating in the hotel. Everyone I knew would be going out on the town—you know, New York, New York! Not that I would be embarrassed to be seen with her—no, it was exactly because I would be embarrassed to be seen with her. Definitely a low prestige dinner companion, but undemanding.
An uninspiring hotel meal followed by a glass of sweet wine was enough for me, and I started wriggling-out to go to my room to catch the second half of Monday Night Football. She asked me to go to the hotel bar with her instead where I could watch the game while she had another drink and a smoke.
The game was between two inept teams I cared nothing about. I smoked one of her cigarettes and ordered a single malt...and then another.
You've heard this part before: about half way through the second drink, she started looking better. Her tailored suit was not exactly revealing, but I could see her slender and nicely shaped legs. The top two buttons of her blouse somehow had been opened without my immediate notice. She put her glasses in her purse, and I saw that her normally shaped eyes were a pretty blue.
By this time she had told me her entire life's story. But I had only listened to part of it, and I was not really listening to her when she started telling about her divorce. I hate to hear people talk about their divorce. I was trying to think of something to say that would politely get me out of there, when she started telling me about her sexual relationship with her attorney.
I had always suspected that women and their lawyers became intimate in the reckoning of power and lust that ends a marriage, but I had never heard anyone actually admit it. I was intrigued.
She told me that when she last visited him to sign the final papers that concluded the dreams of her youth, leaving her husband broke and homeless, she crawled across his office on her hands and knees, sucked his dick while he sat in his big leather chair, and then let him fuck her as she bent over his desk looking down at her settlement. I looked at her intensely and noticed that she was beginning to look a little like Jean Seaberg.
A lot of questions came to mind, and I asked them. She answered in plain English. The alcohol may have loosened her inhibitions somewhat, but I suspected that I was just experiencing her natural state—rather lusty. I could see, once more, what fools men are when it comes to sex. This rather plain little woman could manipulate more powerful men to her will by the skillful deployment of nothing more than her availability.
Suddenly she said that she was ready to turn in, bid me good night, paid the bar bill and was gone. I stared at the TV for a few minutes then moved heavily toward the elevators.
When I got to my room, my head was throbbing so I searched through my shaving kit for an aspirin. There are never aspirin in my kit, but I looked anyway. The phone rang. It was Jean Seaberg's look-alike.
She said that she had opened the curtains to her room and was surprised to see that she had a spectacular view of the World Trade Center Towers just across the way. She asked if I would like to see it. I glanced out my window, which looked at somedark office building or other.
"Sure," I said. "Do you have an aspirin?"
"Have a headache? Come to 2429. Twenty-fourth floor," she said. "I will have something for you."
A lot happens in the scenery between the 5th and the 24th floors. When she opened her door to my muffled knock, I could see beyond her wide opened curtains the sparking lights of lower Manhattan and beyond to the New Jersey shore. The view was made more brilliant by the dimness of her room.
She was still in her suit skirt, but her shoes were off and her jacket tossed across one of the room's two chairs. She looked composed deeply set in the small hotel sofa with her bare feet resting on the other chair. I sat in the only place left, next to her. Her silhouette was dark against the lights of the tower of offices not far away. My senses were filled with the dark bouquet of tobacco, bourbon, and perfume—and perhaps a subliminal aroma that made my neck and shoulders grow thick with anticipation.
"Look over there," she said.
I looked. "At what?"
