The Guest Room (20 page)

“I mean, it's not like Richard had an affair,” Kerri-Ann was saying to Kristin now. They were sitting in the back corner of the coffee shop just off Pondfield Road after school, speaking softly so no one could hear them. Kristin hoped Melissa was having a good time at the ice-cream parlor before dance. In a perfect world, the combination of her friends and Jesse and ice cream and ballet would take her mind off the nightmare at home. “It's not like he confessed he had a lover he was meeting lunchtimes at his brother's hotel.”

“I used to like that hotel. I sort of hate it now. It's creepy.”

“I've met Philip. I think he's creepy.”

“He is, I know. Sometimes Richard and I try to delude ourselves into believing that he's just immature.”

“You're being kind. He might be in his early thirties—”

“Actually, he's thirty-five.”

“Thirty-five? Incredible. I have boys in my classes—you have boys in your classes—who are more mature. The guy's thirty-five years old and no doubt subscribes to
Maxim
. But he's not unique. How creepy are men? I once heard a comedian do an entire set on guys masturbating in cars. He asked how many women in the audience had seen guys doing that, and I swear three-quarters of the women in the club raised their hands.”

“God…”

“It's hard to believe that he and Richard are brothers. They are just so different.”

“I thought so. I like to think so. But I just can't get over the idea that Richard went upstairs with some escort and stripped. And that's just what he told me. How do I know he didn't have sex with her? How do I know he's not having lunchtime quickies at Philip's hotel? I just feel so violated and betrayed and…like I'm not enough.”

Kerri-Ann smiled at someone behind Kristin's shoulder and waggled her immaculately plucked sickle-moon eyebrows. And so Kristin turned around. There she saw two handsome boys who she recognized were seniors. The students waved at Kerri-Ann; the taller of the pair raised one eyebrow back at the French teacher and grinned in a fashion that he probably hoped was seductive. In reality, it looked only mischievous.

“You're plenty,” Kerri-Ann was saying when Kristin turned back to her. “Have you ever been to a strip club?”

“Why? So I could compare myself to some slinky twenty-two-year-old and see I'm plenty?”

She shook her head. “They're kind of depressing.”

“How many have you been to? This is a side of you I didn't know existed.”

“I guess I've been three times in my life. Once with some girlfriends from college because we were curious and twice with guys who thought it would be kind of hot.”

“And it wasn't?”

She shook her head. “Not for me. You have guys paying women—no, guys paying girls—to show them their junk. That's kind of demeaning for everyone involved, don't you think? And, of course, the girls are so not into the guys and the guys sense it. How could they not? Plus there's this weird undercurrent of self-loathing: the guys know they're losers for paying, and the girls know they're slutty—and not in a good way—for peeling. I don't buy any of that female empowerment bullshit.”

“Slutty…in a good way?”

“Oh, I've given boyfriends amazing lap dances. In my home. Or his. But it's because we're into each other. It's because it's fun.”

“You know, I expected there to be a stripper at the bachelor party. I really didn't care. I didn't mind. I kind of figured every guy there would have seen a naked woman. Richard was doing his brother a solid and hosting a party. It wasn't supposed to be a big deal.”

“What's really the source of your pain?” Kerri-Ann asked. “Is it the hurt or the humiliation? I mean, they're two different things.”

“I don't want to intellectualize this. It all makes me sad inside. Besides, it's all linked.”

“If Richard were in the newspapers because of some illegal insider trading thing, would you feel this much hurt? Or would you just feel humiliation?”

“That's an impossible question to answer. And, just so we're clear, I feel terrible for him, too. I know he brought this upon himself, but I also know he's devastated—and a little scared. Who knows what this could do to his career? So, that's a part of the mix, too.”

Kerri-Ann tore off a small piece of the scone she was nibbling. “What if the girls hadn't murdered the guys who had brought them—those Russians? What if there had been no news story, but somehow you found out that the men had been fucking the talent? Would you still feel so much humiliation?”

“Again, I'll never know. But that talent? They may have been prisoners. They may have been minors. Sometimes I think I'm so angry at Richard because it's hard to get pissed off at some poor girl who's doing all this because there are guys with guns making her.”

“I'm not a marriage counselor,” Kerri-Ann said. “Don't even play one on TV. But this is the sort of stuff I'd try to understand. I mean, if I were you.”

“I can't compartmentalize it. It's still too soon.”

“Are you thinking of leaving him?”

She steadied her gaze at her friend. “No.”

“But the thought crossed your mind, I can tell.”

The thought had crossed her mind, but she had not really expected ever to verbalize it. She knew this was among Melissa's biggest worries: her parents were going to get a divorce. But the thing was, she loved Richard. Good Lord, she was furious with him—but she also felt bad for him. Sure, she was embarrassed, but so was he. He was actually disgraced.

“How could it not?” she told Kerri-Ann. “I'm really pissed at him.” Her eye caught the chalkboard specials on the wall behind a cappuccino machine, and she was struck by the way someone's penmanship had made all of the lowercase
i
's look phallic. “Of course, I wouldn't be surprised if Philip's fiancée breaks off the engagement. Cancels the wedding.”

“Isn't it soon?”

“It's supposed to be a week from Saturday.”

“But right now it's still on.”

“Yes. But if I were Nicole—that's his fiancée—I'd break it off.”

“Yeah,” Kerri-Ann said. “I would, too.”

“And yet if you were me, you wouldn't leave Richard?”

“You two have a life together. You've got a daughter. But this Nicole? She still has time to get out.”

“That suggests the only reason I'm not getting out is inertia and Melissa.”

“I didn't mean that. I meant you know Richard. Whatever happened, it was a mistake.”

“We think.”

“And it only happened because it was a batshit crazy bachelor party and he was drunk.”

“Again, we think.”

“Yes. I guess,” Kerri-Ann admitted. “You think…”

Kristin took a sip of her coffee, cold now, and then sighed. When she looked back at Kerri-Ann, the other teacher was already smiling and waving at yet another group of boys.

Nicole considered all of the ways she could inform Philip that she was breaking off the wedding. They ranged from going to his apartment in Brooklyn Heights and telling him face-to-face, to sending him a text. A text would manage to be both cowardly and cruel, and it would invariably prove epic: it would, knowing Philip, almost certainly go viral. And why shouldn't it? She imagined the words on the screen of her phone:

After what you did on Friday, I just can't marry you. I'm sorry.

Or it could be a long text that crossed some
t
's and dotted some
i
's.

After what you did on Friday, I just can't marry you. I'm sorry. I don't trust you and I don't see a future where I can trust you. I've called the caterer and the church and the people who were bringing the tents to my parents' house. I'll send you a check for what you paid toward the deposit. I'll give you back the ring. I don't want it. Please don't call me. I'll call you when I'm ready.

But even a text that long still conveyed only a tiny fraction of what she wanted to say—which suggested the need for an e-mail. Besides, he would call her, even if she asked him not to. Of course, he would call her after an e-mail, as well. He would call her if she mailed him a handwritten letter, enclosing the ring in the envelope. Philip was nothing if not persistent. It was, perhaps, why she had first fallen in love with him. He was funny; he was playful; he was—at least at the beginning—attentive.

All of which suggested she would have to see him in person, because he was going to have to try for the last word. But she feared that if she went to his apartment, that last word might lead to her backing down. Alone in his living room or bedroom, he would convince her to change her mind. And she did not want to change her mind. It wasn't only that she didn't trust him; she no longer believed that she loved him.

So instead she wrote him a text that said she wanted to have breakfast with him Thursday morning at a place on Montague Street they both liked, and tweaked it over and over on her phone. If she did see him on Thursday morning, it would be the first time in a week—since before he had had sex with that prostitute.

Can you have breakfast with me tomorrow at 7:30 at Evergreen? We need to talk. Please don't call me. But text me if you can and I will be there.

After reading her final draft a third time, she pressed “send.” She realized that she felt horrible for the girls who had been brought to the party and she felt terrible for the families of the dead men; but, yes, she also felt something very close to despair about the way she had fallen out of love with Philip. She couldn't build a life together with him that began on the bodies of two dead men and the fact he had fucked a prostitute. She just…couldn't.

She took the engagement ring he had given her off her finger, but then put it back on. She decided that she wanted to take it off in front of him in the restaurant. The ring was a symbol: maybe—just maybe—it would hurt him as much as he had hurt her if she removed the ring from her finger before his very eyes.

Melissa was not exactly scared of the Internet, but she knew that there was a world beyond the sites she visited often—sites for school, sites for music and movies, sites about Brownie badges and fashion and hair—that was not meant for a nine-year-old girl. In some cases, it was just a keystroke away. One letter off. An accidental dash.

Not quite a year ago, one morning when her dad was upstairs getting dressed and her mom was packing her lunch for school, she had been using the computer in the family room to visit the Girl Scouts website because she had a question about a Brownie badge. She had typed in one of the words incorrectly and wound up on a site so disturbing that she had yelled for her parents reflexively. Even before they had dropped what they were doing and rushed into the family room, she had closed the screen. What she had seen (or, now, what she thought she had seen), was monstrous and grotesque. She felt…ashamed. Her parents had found the site in the computer's history and deleted it, and told her that she had done nothing wrong. They said she had done exactly the right thing telling them about it. Then they had lectured her (yet again) about the need to be careful on the Internet, and reiterated the house rules, which they admitted she had indeed been obeying when she had inadvertently strayed onto that site.

Now, while her mom was making dinner and her dad was out, she decided to move beyond the site with the funky tights for girls. She took a deep breath and typed in her father's name in the search bar. Her mom had said he would be home for dinner, and Melissa honestly wasn't sure how she felt about that. Her anger toward him had been smoldering for a couple of days. She was irritated with him for making Mom sad—for causing such tension in the house—and she was embarrassed by the attention she was receiving. Even her dance teacher had given her a huge, wholly unexpected hug that afternoon. Moreover, was it possible that her father had done the sorts of gross things at the party that she had seen on the website she had accidentally stumbled upon almost a year ago now?

She read stories about her father on four different sites before she had had enough. She had never heard the expression “sex slave” before, but she had an idea what it meant. She looked up the word
orgy
and was appalled. Again, there were pictures. But she scrutinized as well the sections of the news stories that focused on the dead Russians, because the reporters always quoted detectives who stressed that there were many more men like that pair out there—and that their Russians friends were probably furious and dangerous.

“Sweetheart?”

At the sound of her mother's voice she instantly minimized the screen.

“What?”

“What are you doing?”

“I was trying to find something for school.”

“About?”

“Turtles,” she lied.

“Okay. Would you like mashed potatoes or baked potatoes?”

“Mashed.”

Her mother nodded and retreated. Before the bachelor party, Melissa knew, her mother would have asked her why in the world she was looking up turtles. She would have come to the computer and sat down beside her to see what she had found. She would have asked why her teacher—a woman her mother called by her first name because, of course, they were peers on the faculty—was having them study turtles. Was it a unit on reptiles? Was someone bringing a turtle to school? Were they going to get turtles for the classroom? Now, however, her mother was so distracted that she didn't ask a single question. Not a one.

After Melissa clicked again on the story about the violence in her home, she deleted it. She deleted all the sites she had visited from the computer's history. Then she googled turtles. For the life of her, she had no idea why the first thing she had thought of was a turtle.