Short Hills

One night at the Hilton Short Hills in late May. Work trip. G flew out the same day, which turned a routine overnight in New Jersey into something better.

Short Hills is about 25 miles west of Manhattan in one of the wealthiest zip codes in the state. The town is defined by the Short Hills Mall, which is not a mall in the way most people use the word. It's anchored by Nordstrom and Bloomingdale's and the parking lot has more German engineering than a Stuttgart factory floor. The Hilton sits near the mall and is a standard suburban Hilton: conference facilities, decent rooms, a lobby bar that serves its purpose. Nobody goes to Short Hills for the hotel.

G and I had dinner at a steakhouse near the hotel whose name I'm drawing a blank on. It was inside a strip of restaurants on the main road and it was better than it looked from outside. The hostess seated us in a corner booth that was clearly designed for couples having affairs, which we are not, but the privacy was nice. We split a bone-in ribeye and a bottle of red and sat in a booth and caught up on the week. That's the thing about these work trips when G comes along: they turn a night that would have been room service and email into an actual evening. The ribeye was properly aged. The wine was something from Napa that we'd normally only order on a special occasion. It wasn't a special occasion. It was a Tuesday in New Jersey. Sometimes that's enough.

New Jersey gets a bad reputation that it doesn't fully deserve. The part of the state between the Turnpike and the shore is where the jokes come from. The western suburbs, the part that Short Hills belongs to, are green and quiet and wealthy in a way that doesn't announce itself. The houses have long driveways and old trees and lawns maintained by invisible people. We took a walk after dinner because the evening was warm and the neighborhood around the hotel is residential and leafy and quiet in a way that Miami never is. There's no street noise. No music from a neighbor's patio. Just crickets and the occasional car passing on a road that curves through trees. G said it felt like a movie about the suburbs, which it does. The air smelled like cut grass and something floral that neither of us could identify. We walked for about 30 minutes and didn't see a single other person on foot. In Miami, the sidewalk is a social space. In Short Hills, it's infrastructure that exists for joggers at 6 AM and nobody else.

The next morning we had breakfast at the hotel (standard Hilton buffet, decent eggs, good coffee, a waffle station that nobody was using and I used twice) and drove into the city for meetings. The drive from Short Hills to Midtown takes about 45 minutes without traffic, which means about 90 minutes in reality because there is always traffic on the approach to the Lincoln Tunnel. The tunnel itself is a marvel of engineering that you can't appreciate while sitting in it at 2 mph wondering if the car in front of you is ever going to move. G handled the driving because she's better at aggressive East Coast highway merging than I am, a skill she developed somewhere between London and Toronto and perfected in Miami. She changes lanes with a confidence that borders on violence. I've learned to look out the window and trust the process.

The meetings were in Midtown. We parked in a garage on 42nd Street that cost $55 for four hours, which is robbery but also Manhattan. New York in late May is the city at its best temperature. Low 70s, trees in full leaf, the parks green in a way that makes you forget it was grey and frozen three months ago. Between meetings I walked down to Bryant Park and sat on one of the green metal chairs with a coffee for 20 minutes, watching the lunch crowd filter in. There's a specific rhythm to a New York lunch break in good weather: people move faster on the streets but slower once they find a spot to sit. Everyone is simultaneously urgent and relaxed, which is a trick only New York pulls off.

I grabbed a slice from a pizza place on Lexington that I've been going to for years. It's not a famous pizza place. It doesn't have a line. It's just a good slice that's always been there and always tastes the same. There's value in that. The guy behind the counter recognizes me, or at least acts like he does, which in New York is the same thing.

G had a meeting of her own in Chelsea, so we split up for the afternoon. She texted me around 3 to say she was at Chelsea Market and had bought olive oil and some kind of spice blend from a vendor who talked her into it for fifteen minutes. G is immune to most sales tactics but she cannot resist someone who is passionate about a single product. If you know a lot about one thing and you're enthusiastic about it, she will buy whatever you're selling. The spice blend turned out to be excellent. We still use it.

We met back at the car around 4, navigated out of the garage (three-point turn, concrete pillar inches from the mirror, G directing from outside the car with hand signals like she was landing a plane), and headed to Newark. G flew one way, I flew another. That's the rhythm of a year where both people are working and traveling and the moments you get together are sometimes a dinner at a steakhouse in New Jersey on a Tuesday, and you take it.