The Guest Room (27 page)

Before leaving the hospital in Brooklyn, Richard had sent Spencer a text. He wrote that he had something for him and to meet him at Rapier, a restaurant a few blocks west of the Cravat. He suggested eleven-thirty. Spencer had texted back a smiley face. Richard assumed that meant he would be there.

And now it was eleven-forty-five, and there was no sign of the guy. Richard had taken a seat at the end of the bar—a redoubtable slab of burnished mahogany—that gave him a view of the entrance. He had ordered a beer, largely because of where he had just been and not because of what he was about to do. He couldn't recall the last time he had started drinking before noon. Just when he was about to text the fool once again, he saw him outside on the sidewalk, taking a last drag on his cigarette and then flicking the still-smoking butt to the ground. Then he was pushing his way through the glass doors and eyeing the tables. It took him a full ten seconds before he spotted Richard at the bar and smiled his way past the hostess.

“The bar, eh,” he said, taking the stool beside Richard. “Sometimes I like to eat at the bar, too. Feels kind of manly.”

“We're not eating,” Richard said simply, hoping to take Spencer's unendurable self-satisfaction down a peg.

“A liquid lunch? That's fortifying, too.” He got the bartender's attention with the singular ease of a drunk and ordered a vodka tonic. “Good to see you, Richard. Though you're looking pretty informal for an M and A stud. Black hoodie and jeans? This is…what? Your
Breaking Bad
chic? Or is this your hausfrau costume while you wait for Franklin McCoy to take you back?”

“Casual Friday.”

“I approve. And, I must say, I'm very glad you're going to be a friend and have my back on this one. Just when things seemed to be getting worse, it seems you've come to your senses and are going to make everything at least a wee bit better.”

“Oh, I think we both hit rock bottom this week. I don't think things could possibly get any worse for either of us.”

He rolled his eyes. “Oh, they could. They really could. Just wait till you see me testifying someday. But it beats jail. And, thanks to you, I will have paid my legal bills—at least some portion of them.”

“They're that bad?”

“So bad. And I am expecting it will take beaucoup bucks to dial down Chuck ‘Shithead' Alcott and ensure that the frail Mrs. Fisher makes a full recovery.”

“Nuisance suits.”

The bartender brought Spencer his drink, and Spencer tapped it against Richard's bottle before taking a generous swallow. “I know.”

“But,” Richard added, “that party really might have ruined the Fishers' marriage. Or scarred Chuck Alcott in some way. That's one more thing we have to live with.”

“Well, I didn't put a gun to Brandon's head and say go fuck the talent or else. And Chuck could have left whenever he wanted.”

“Maybe he didn't want to be a killjoy. Maybe he didn't want to pass judgment on Philip at his bachelor party.”

“That's why you took one of the girls upstairs and fucked her in the guest room?”

“I didn't fuck her, Spencer,” he said, lowering his voice and hoping that Spencer would follow his lead.

“Your loss, in that case.”

“I was drunk.”

“We all were.”

Richard considered adding that he only viewed being drunk as an explanation—not a defense. But there wasn't any point. So instead he let the thread go and said, “Anyway, given all the money pressures you're feeling—”

“I wish that was it. I am constantly looking over my shoulder and expecting to see some skinhead bruiser amped up on steroids. I look on the street and see black SUVs everywhere.”

“Can't help you there.”

“My lawyer says I am worried for naught.”

“There you go.”

“But still…”

“But still. So, it seems to me, my thirty thousand dollars will barely make a dent into what you may need.”

“Happy to make it thirty-five.”

“How do I know you won't?”

He smiled cryptically and took another sip of his drink. “You don't.”

“In the old days, I would pay you—you know, get down in the muck with you, really sink to your level of leech and—”

“Flattery will get you everywhere. If you want, I can simply send you my legal bills and whatever part of Mrs. Fisher's ‘treatment' I'm saddled with. Let you handle it.”

“I would sink to your level and hand you a check for thirty thousand dollars,” he went on. “And you, in turn, would hand me the negatives and the prints. But now? I have no guarantees. You could be storing the digital files anywhere. For all I know, they're already in the cloud with all your other filth.”

“Okay, you brought me a check today for thirty. I will, of course, take that off your hands. And someday soon, I may ask you for more. But if that day comes, I will give you my assurance that I have deleted the files everywhere and you have nothing at all to worry about. You will have my word as a scholar—and, I guess, a bit of a rake.”

Richard swallowed the last of his beer. “No, you're not a rake.”

“Well, I can try. Gives me something to aspire to.”

“You're just a grotesque little parasite. And kind of a loser,” he told him, standing. “And I've decided, Spencer, I'm not paying you a penny. Send the pictures to my wife. Share the video with my office. Do it right this second, for all I care.”

Spencer turned to face him, and for the first time Richard felt he had the creep's full attention. “You will regret that,” he said slowly.

“Nope. I won't.”

“Sleep on it. I can wait until tomorrow.”

“Oh, I feel okay about this decision. As a matter of fact, I feel pretty damn good about it. One more thing.”

Spencer glared at him, a slow seethe starting to fester. He waited.

“The tab? It's yours.” Then he turned away and left the restaurant, grinding the remnants of Spencer's cigarette into the sidewalk as he exited Rapier's glass door.

As Richard was heading north on the FDR Drive, his cell phone rang, and he saw on the dashboard screen that it was Dina Renzi. He was still agitated (though, yes, also rather pleased with himself) after standing up to Spencer Doherty. In addition, he knew, he was still rattled from the morgue. Now that he could only wait to see if or when Spencer dropped the hammer, his head was awash with the vaporous images of the dead. There was one bleeding out on his living room couch. Another in his front hallway. There was one who had been pretty nearly decapitated. And so he waited for the phone to stop ringing, and soon enough he heard the ping that told him he had a message in his voice mail. Only then did he press “listen” and wait for Dina's voice to fill his car speakers. He didn't believe there had been enough time for Spencer to send a video or photos to Franklin McCoy and for someone to watch it, digest it, and fashion a diatribe to launch upon his lawyer. But you never know. Maybe it was possible.

Nevertheless, he was pleasantly surprised when he heard Dina's voice sounding uncharacteristically chipper.

“Hi, Richard. I hope you're out and about and doing something fun. Call me back. I might have good news. I don't want to get your hopes up and over the moon, but it sounds like your friends at Franklin McCoy—and I am using
friends
with at least a small scoop of irony—want to meet next week. Hugh and I have gone back and forth since our meeting the other day. And the vibe I'm getting now is that they want to figure out a way to save face and maybe green-light your return to work. It's not a done deal, but I think we are, as we like to say, moving in a good direction. You may be back helping big sharks eat little sharks—That is what you do, right?—before you know it. So, call me back. Bye.”

He thought how he might be back in his office in a week or two, and how much he craved that. He considered briefly whether he had made a mistake ignoring his lawyer's advice and telling Spencer to go fuck himself, but he reminded himself that this decision was about trying to do the right thing. He would not allow himself to regret standing up to the cloacal ooze that purported to be his idiot younger brother's best friend.

He breathed in deeply through his mouth and tried to keep his attention squarely on the bumper and taillights of the shoddy-looking locksmith van directly ahead of him. He tried to be happy. But it was difficult when he surveyed his world this afternoon. He kept recalling the dead girl in the morgue, which made him think of Alexandra, who most likely was dead now, too.

No, happiness wasn't possible. He should lower that bar. Accept something less. And again the word
normalcy
came to him, as it had on this very road earlier in the day. He yearned for it. But he couldn't imagine what it would take for his life to return to…normal.

You won't always think rubber when you think Barbie.

It was something her older brother had said to Kristin earlier this week, the Tuesday evening when she and Melissa had finally returned home to Bronxville and they'd found the used condom atop the box of Barbies. She'd phoned her brother because she wasn't yet prepared to share this latest, lurid indignity with any of her female friends, but she had to tell someone. And her brother had listened, walked her in off the ledge, and told her before they hung up for the night that associations changed over time. Invariably they were diluted by experience. Someday, and it might take a year and it might take a decade, when she thought of her daughter's Barbies, she would think once more of the hours she had spent sharing the dolls with Melissa on the living room floor and making up stories. She would think tenderly of the games they would play. The worlds they'd create. She'd think of the clothes and the cars and the furniture. She'd think of the shoes.

Now, as she stood with Melissa and Claudia before a long, wide wall of the dolls in the FAO Schwarz on Fifth, she decided her brother was wrong. At least he might be wrong. Who could say what she would think about as she neared fifty? When she was a grandmother at, perhaps, sixty?

She and the girls had wandered here not because they had any interest these days in Barbies, but simply because they were exploring the entire store. They'd strolled here after the second museum. Something frivolous after all that self-improvement. They'd gone first to the Apple Store next door, descending beneath the colossal glass cube, but the world below was like a subway car at rush hour. No technological marvel was worth the effort it would take to press through the human crush. And while the toy store was less crowded, Kristin guessed that the fourth graders beside her had already outgrown 90 percent of the inventory.

She sighed, half listening as the girls made fun of some of the Collectible Barbies. At the moment, it was the
Twilight
Barbies that were giving them the giggles. The
Divergent
Barbies. Carlisle. Edward. Tris.

Whatever happened to naming all the men Ken? Whatever happened to Skipper?

Near the Barbies was a wall of Monster High dolls, a group even more anorexic than the Barbies. The Monster High kids had emaciated stick-figure bodies and balloon-like, goth white heads that were dramatically out of proportion with their arms and legs. They had fashion model eyelashes and pouty red lips, miniskirts and high heels. Names at once ghoulish and suggestive. Honey Swamp. Draculaura. Catty Noir.

Beside them was a line called Fairy Tale High. The classics get slutty. The Little Mermaid in fishnets. Cinderella in leggings and a croptop. Alice in Wonderland in a blue-and-white-striped micro-dress that barely covered her ass.

“Emiko has those leggings,” her daughter was saying, as she pointed at Cinderella.

“I love them,” said Claudia. “I want a pair. They're so hot.”

An expression came to her:
You're a doll.
Translation? You've done me a solid. Thank you.

She's a doll.
Translation? She's pretty. She's compliant.

A doll.
Synonyms? A babe. A chick. A sweetie.

Hours ago—museums ago—Richard had texted her that it was the girl he thought was named Sonja who he'd identified on the mortuary slab. The chemical blonde. She had not asked what next. What now. She had not asked whether this meant that the girl who had led him upstairs was still alive, or whether she was dead, too, and her body had simply not yet turned up. But it would. She had simply asked if he was okay. He'd texted he was.

Okay.
She had no idea what that word meant in the context of a morgue.

“I like her dress,” Melissa was saying. She was pointing at Alice in Wonderland. Slut Alice in Wonderland.

“I like that outfit,” said Claudia, motioning at the vest that barely hid Belle's breasts. Slut Belle's breasts.

In all fairness, Kristin knew that once upon a time her Barbies had been pretty slutty. She had often undressed her Barbies and Kens, and allowed the dolls to go to town on each other. Spreading the girls' legs as wide as she could. She'd been doing this while playing in the semidarkness underneath a robin's-egg-blue blanket that she had draped across her parents' dining room table.

Good Lord, it had only been two or three years ago that she and Richard had been laughing as the two of them polished off a bottle of wine at all the ways they had encouraged their daughter's Barbies to perform unspeakable acts, while Melissa's head was turned or she was searching for a particular Barbie gown in that Tucker Tote. It was how they kept their sanity, they had confessed to each other—yes, they both did it—as they sat on the floor with their girl and played with her dolls for hours.

All that had been changed by the condom. All that had been subsumed by the condom.

Here was the inescapable reality: ten years from now if she did not instantly make the synaptic leap to
rubber
when she thought Barbie, it would only be due to Alzheimer's. Early-onset Alzheimer's. Or, maybe, a traumatic brain injury. She looked around at the walls of the toy store, which were pink. She noted that the paisley swirls on the floor were pink. The lighting was a little pink. Sure, it was possible that a decade from now she might also think
pink
when she thought Barbie. She very likely might think
plastic
.