JUST ONCE MORE

The Gotham Hotel—55th Street at Fifth—kept its walls graffiti free and its windows clean. On that midweek Manhattan morning in 1975, the city leaned into spring like a boxer looking for his rhythm. I had flown in early from Los Angeles—nonstop to JFK, on a new United Mainliner 747, the red-eye—wearing a rumpled linen jacket and a journalist’s appetite for moments I hadn’t yet earned.

Brunette bobbed Sam Lang stepped off the early train from Boston’s South Station, just after ten. I was already there, waiting at Grand Central. She moved like a secret slipping through the cracks of morning traffic—model-thin, sweet smile, chin tilted with quiet purpose. And in that instant, I swear, my Ingrid Bergman stepped off the carriage.

We didn’t rush toward each other. Met with an embrace. Tender not overdone.. No cinematic swell. We saved our kiss, the weight of it, for the Gotham.

Back in LA, five years earlier, she’d worked for a PR firm run by a friend of mine. We’d orbited each other professionally, politely, until one bourbon-soaked night rewrote the terms. We never spoke about that night, not really. That’s how you preserve a perfect song—you don’t play it too often.

This time, there were no lies to protect. Her boyfriend was long gone, and I was nobody’s secret. I flagged a cab, we rode in silence, her hand resting just close enough to mine to keep the past alive. At the Gotham, she kicked off her shoes like she owned the place, walked to the window, pulled open the curtain, undressed and stretched out bare on the wide sill pretending the sunlight would last forever. Midtown blushed beneath her.

“You always knew how to pick a view,” she said.

We made love like we were rewriting a final draft—slow, with purpose, but a little scared of the ending.

By noon, we were tangled in sheets and coffee and the kind of laughter that doesn’t age. Later, we stepped out into the city like it belonged to us. Somewhere between Bemelmans Bar and P.J. Clarke’s, we wandered into Elaine’s. It was mid-afternoon and the place was hollowed out, empty of its nighttime legends. Elaine herself sat alone at a table by the wall, smoking, reading the inflight magazine story we’d run about her bar. She looked up. I walked over, introduced myself, handed her my business card—the one with all ten magazines from our inflight publishing group printed down the side like a list of alibis.

She smiled, genuinely. Sat us at a table by the window and bought us a round.

The woman manager doubling as a waiter grinned, “One of you must be famous or you have dirt on Elaine?”

“Why’s that?”

“This is table #1. Cocktail hour. I’ve pocketed a $500 tip to be seated there.”

As we left, Sam took my arm and held it—her face lifted toward mine. Our eyes became cameras, snapping portraits of two people lost in time, trying to keep it. We managed to find our way to the subway. Does the number one still roll?

We traded stories for the rest of the day, made up memories just to keep the old ones company. And by midnight, we stood on the platform at Grand Central again. The same station, the same track number. She hugged me like a book closing on a happy story.

“I’m glad we found each other,” she whispered.

“I’m glad we remembered,” I replied.

The years did what they do—she finished her master’s at Boston College, ended up teaching business writing in Arizona. I moved on, too—more bylines, more cities, until we both found our other great loves and we married them and divorced them. No stamps were spent on invitations or explanations.

We still call each other around the holidays. Once every forever, two older voices crossing time zones to talk about the one time we got it exactly right. We don’t explain it. We just laugh, because we still remember—her silhouette in the Gotham’s window, the clink of glasses at Elaine’s, the ghost photographer that played paparazzi, who took those pictures for our mind’s eyes.