"We're on vacation, remember?" Stephen said. "Live a little!" He piled into the back seat of the Lincoln behind her and told the driver the name of the hotel where they were staying.
"That's it?" Linda asked. "He doesn't need to know the address or anything?"
"These New York cab and limo drivers know the city like the back of their hand. Gosh you really are funny sometimes. You don't get out much, do you?"
"Apparently not." The ride from the airport into mid-town Manhattan should have been offered as a thrill ride at King's Island, Linda decided. The driver shifted from lane to lane, narrowly missing other cars and busses, driving with his pedal to the metal, causing the engine to whine and moan at several points. Every square inch outside their window had been covered with concrete or asphalt, with ribbons of overpasses criss-crossing over them. They passed through a man-made tunnel with lights on the wall before emerging onto a strait of land and factories with belching smokestacks.
The highway curved around to an elevated plane leading to a bridge spanning a slate gray river. The huge buildings of Manhattan awaited them on the other side. "Almost there," Stephen commented.
Soon the limo darted in and out of city traffic that crawled along, past storefronts and glass atriums with sidewalks bulging with herds of people. "I'm lost," Linda murmured.
Stephen laughed. "How can you be lost? You're with me."
"It's so big!"
The driver stopped at a curb in front of the high-rise hotel where they would be staying. "It's not the Waldorf, the Westin, or the Four Seasons but it's pretty damned close," Stephen said, as he paid the driver and helped Linda out onto the sidewalk, into the cacophony of blended traffic sounds, engines, horns honking, crowds of people talking, and a pneumatic jackhammer louder than any of it.
As they entered the hotel lobby, Linda shuddered to think of how the more expensive and opulent hotels of New York would be. The hotel Stephen had chosen featured Grecian plaster archways and a lobby with a high ceiling that curved above them, and front desks with granite countertops, with clerks in jackets and ties. Bellmen in the classic short maroon jackets and cylindrical caps pushed golden carts with covered suits dangling from them. A well-dressed woman passing by them carried an exotic, cream and gray Himalayan cat.
"I feel like I'm in a movie," Linda remarked.
Linda and Stephen rode in a mirrored elevator to their rooms on the ninth floor. The plane ride and the wind by the curb at the airport had tousled her hair. She gazed at herself in to mirror and pushed a few locks of her hair back into place. "Women always obsess so much about their hair," Stephen said.