The Guest Room(34)

“Yes.”

“Maybe you do. But this is, in some ways, a lot better than the life I was leading.”

I knew Elena’s history. She was the third of the three girls from Volgograd. While she was there, she was living with her stepfather, who worked in the large brandy factory. She had been brought to the cottage two days before me. Her mother was dead, and her father had run off years ago; her stepfather recently had been laid off. Suddenly his boss offers to buy his stepdaughter to help him make ends meet. Only an idiot would think this was a coincidence. They knew what Elena looked like. They knew her value. And, of course, they knew her stepfather. He was despicable. He’d been a very big jerk to her, even before he sold her like cow at the market.

“I can do this,” she went on. “And if we do our jobs, they take really good care of us. And everyone has to work, yes? Everyone has to do something.”

Two years later when I was working in Moscow—more like courtesan now—I spent two nights as arm candy for a very fat but very nice economist from Saint Petersburg. He would use the expression “Stockholm syndrome.” He used it on our second night together, when we were having a little pillow talk. I would often tell men stories. Capture-bonding, he said. I knew just what he meant. I thought of Elena and that day in the sun back at the mansion.

Of course, not all our life would be Stockholm syndrome.

Look what happened when I got older and they brought me to America. Land of the free and the home of the brave? Nope. Not in my case. For girls like me, it was nothing more than the home of the disgusting. Perverts and sad men. There were confusing exceptions, such as guys like Richard Chapman. Guys like that could haunt you. But you get the point. And nothing was free—just like in Russia.

…

Sonja and Crystal had faith in hatred. They were good at it. They believed the world is filled with evil and people are devils, and you can only fight evil and devils with hatred.

Me? I was never good at hatred. I felt it. I knew it. But it did not live inside me the way it did inside them. Maybe things would have turned out better if it did. If I had been better at hatred.





Chapter Six


Before falling asleep at the hotel on Saturday night, Richard flipped through the photos on his iPhone. He wanted to see pictures of Kristin and Melissa. He hoped they might calm him. But among the hundreds of images were some scans of shots from his own childhood, and after looking at a dozen photos of his wife and his daughter, he paused on one of Philip and him. There he was at seventeen and Philip at twelve, the two of them in T-shirts on a beach on Grand Cayman. They were on a family vacation. He couldn’t believe how long their hair was. He couldn’t believe his seventh-grade brother was wearing a T-shirt that said “How to pick up chicks.” Granted, the image was of a stick-figure human picking up baby chickens. But still. What were his parents thinking? Sometimes Richard liked to blame his brother’s idiosyncrasies on the friends he had made at college—a bunch of hazing-and party-obsessed frat boys who lived for beer pong and porn—but perhaps it was genetic. Maybe Philip had been born a jerk. But Richard didn’t view their father as especially sexist. He was a management consultant. Their mother was a librarian. And despite the fact that their father made scads more money than their mother, Richard viewed their parents’ marriage as a partnership. It was rather like his own marriage with Kristin. He earned the lion’s share of their joint income, but every decision they made was a joint one.

He remembered taking Philip and two of his frat brother friends to dinner one night between Christmas and New Year’s when Philip was a junior in college. Richard had his MBA by then and had been working at Franklin McCoy for six months. He brought Philip and his pals to a steak restaurant in the gentrifying meat packing district, but the place was a throwback: heavyset waiters with walrus mustaches who frowned at you dismissively if you ordered any salad other than the iceberg wedge. When it was time to consider dessert, the three younger guys thanked him and bolted. They said they had fake IDs and planned to go to a strip club. Richard knew they thought less of him—they viewed him as a little less manly—because he didn’t go with them. But the reality was that he was dating a schoolteacher with hazel eyes and lustrous amber hair that fell to her shoulders. A young woman with a laugh that he loved, and who liked indie rock as much as he did. He didn’t see the point of a strip club. Besides, he was planning to work that night. The fact was, back then he worked every night he wasn’t with Kristin.

He put down his phone and gazed out the window at Times Square. His room was on the eighteenth floor. He decided he would give almost anything to go back in time. Two days. That was all he wanted. Even a day and a half. Down there somewhere were strips clubs, which instantly made him think of Alexandra. Of strippers and escorts and sex slaves. He recalled the girl’s eyes when she kissed him. It was going to be years, he feared, before he would find a way to forgive himself.

He wondered who among the thousands of people out there right now was going to screw up tonight as badly as he had twenty-four hours ago.

…

The next morning was the first time that Richard and Kristin Chapman had been in the newspapers since their wedding announcement had appeared in the Times. Richard read the articles just before sunrise, having slept little the night before. The bed at the Millennium was fine; so were the pillows and the heater’s strangely mellifluous white noise. He tossed and turned because he feared the quiet of the room and the emptiness of the bed were harbingers. He vacillated between anger and despair, a ping-pong ball lobbed back and forth in gentle, transparent arcs. One moment he felt victimized; none of this, especially those dead Russians, was his fault. The next? He would see himself naked and erect at the edge of the guest room bed, a hauntingly beautiful young woman reaching out her hands to him. Her mouth. And he would be overwhelmed with regret. Sure, he had drawn back. But he should never have been in that position in the first place.