The Guest Room(26)

Twice his cell phone buzzed and both times it was Philip. He ignored the calls. He wasn’t prepared to talk to his brother and face again what had happened the night before. Twice more there were calls from reporters, neither of which he answered.

The only call he accepted was from a neighbor in Bronxville, a guy he played golf with but who had not been at the party. After all, the people there had been Philip’s friends, not his. Perhaps that was why Richard had accepted the call: it was someone who wasn’t yet privy to the debacle. He put everything but the flowers down on the sidewalk, and listened. His friend wanted to know why in the name of God there were video trucks from a couple of TV stations parked at the bottom of his driveway and—when he looked closely—a van from the state police. A mobile crime lab. Clearly something was horribly wrong, and he wanted to see what he could do.

“Everyone’s okay. At least everyone is in my family,” Richard told him. He was about to explain what had happened—offer a Reader’s Digest condensed version—when he heard his friend’s wife yelling something from the next room. It seemed a version of the story was already online: two people were killed at a bachelor party orgy in a swank Manhattan suburb.

“There was no orgy,” Richard said simply.

“But somebody was killed.”

“Yes. Two people.” He was relieved that in the theater across town his wife’s cell phone was off. Thank God. She might turn it on again at intermission, which he guessed would be around three-fifteen. And without a doubt there would be calls waiting for her on her voice mail. They would be from worried neighbors, and they would be from reporters. There might be calls from her brother in Boston and from other teachers at the high school. How had this gotten on the web so quickly? How was it already popping up on newspaper websites?

He realized that he would have to warn Kristin not to answer her phone. As he did, he recalled what he had told Dina Renzi: I believe our marriage will be fine. Suddenly he wasn’t so sure.





Alexandra


I guess my mother had lovers after my father died. She was young. She was human. I remember two different men who took her to the opera a couple of times, and there was another man who she went to a jazz club with on Friday nights when I was nine-and ten-year-old kid. Maybe even when I was eleven. My grandmother would babysit me. But when I asked my mother if this fellow was her boyfriend, she told me, no, he was just a friend.

One night when I was working at the cottage outside of Moscow, I opened the door to the office on the first floor. (I keep calling it a cottage, but it was once some bigwig party official’s dacha for sure—which is maybe why Muscovites liked to call it a cottage. Downplay class difference. Americans would probably call it a mansion.) I was looking for Inga, one of the women who helped train us, because I had a question. And she was in the lap of one of the bosses who ran us, a tall dude with a Stalin mustache named Mikhail. She still had her blouse on, but it was unbuttoned, and her skirt was up around her waist. She started to jump off his lap, but he held her there and smiled at me like this was no big deal. I said I’d come back later and backed away. I closed the door. I knew Inga would punish me for not knocking, and she did.

That night I woke up after a dream and stared up at the ceiling of my bedroom. I couldn’t remember the dream. But I remembered something else. After school one day I went to the brandy factory so I could show my mother a painting of tulips I had finished in art class. I was maybe seven years old, and so my grandmother brought me. She was talking to someone in the big reception area, and when I saw my mother was not at her desk, I opened the door to Vasily’s office. I didn’t think to knock. Did I see my mother try to jump off Vasily’s lap just the way Inga did—or did I dream that, too? I still don’t know. At least that’s what I try and tell myself.

But, of course, some days I do know. I do.

…

When I finally had the strength to climb off the bed after I had been raped my first night in Moscow, I went to the bureau with the TV where I had put down my cell phone. That was when I found it was gone. Of course. That was when I looked down and saw that my rollie suitcase was gone, too. At first I was surprised to see that my suitcase had been stolen. Why did they feel the need to take my clothes? Why did they want to take from me my ballet slippers and my toe shoes? Was that really necessary? I guess it was. After all, it was in their nature because they were pricks. A bird has to fly and a lion has to eat gazelle and a Russian mobster has to break what’s left of a girl’s heart by stealing those things that make her the happiest and feel most like life is worth living after she has been raped.

Over the next few months, I would meet girls who would tell me they got sucked into the life more slowly. Sometimes their pimp was first their boyfriend—at least they thought he was their boyfriend. This was case with those girls who started very young. Eleven, twelve, thirteen years old. Their boyfriends were dudes in their twenties and thirties. They told the girls they loved them, and the girls would do anything for them, even when their boyfriends would beat them. The girls always believed they had done something to deserve the beating.

Other girls thought their boyfriend was their “manager.” They were going to be a model, maybe. One girl told me that after a few weeks, her manager said that he needed her to do him and her career a gigantic favor and sleep with some guy who had very big clout. The guy was what her manager called a “game changer,” and it would just be that one time. So she did. The next thing she knew, she was down the rabbit hole. All she was doing was sleeping with guys who were “game changers.” She never modeled. Not even once.