The Guest Room(48)

Plates. As ashtrays.

He hated his brother’s friends. He hated Spencer in particular. He hadn’t heard from him since yesterday, but Richard knew if he didn’t call him soon, he would. He hadn’t told anyone yet about the threat except for his lawyer, and that conversation hadn’t been as helpful or as reassuring as Richard would have liked.

“You said that you and the girl didn’t have intercourse. Is that true?” Dina Renzi had asked him.

“Absolutely.”

“And no oral sex?”

“Correct.”

“So there’s nothing criminal on the video?”

“Well, certainly not sexual assault on a minor—if she even is a minor, which I doubt.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I’m telling you, she had to be eighteen.”

“Look, if you’re sure that’s the case, then maybe you should pay this jerk off. We don’t go to the police. Twenty-five G? Kind of a small price for the peace of mind. It would certainly help ensure marital harmony. And it would be one less reason for the press to write about you. Eventually, this story will go away, Richard—unless we keep feeding it with tasty little morsels like blackmail.”

“But what if he asks for more?”

“You say he’s a friend of your brother’s. As despicable as your brother sounds, I have to believe that he and his pals could shame him into letting this go.”

“After I’ve given him twenty-five thousand dollars…”

“I think the important things we have to accomplish here are to get you back to work and preserve your marriage. Then, just in case, we need to be prepared if those people claiming ‘emotional distress’ decide to come after you, too.”

“Might they?”

“I told you, I think it’s unlikely. It would be groundless. You didn’t bring the girls into your home or call the escort service. You said you didn’t even know for sure there would be a stripper.”

“Quite true.”

“Okay then. Maybe you should just view the twenty-five grand as a fine for your indiscretions and move on.”

It seemed that his initial reaction on the street—the video would devastate Kristin—was the correct one. Dina was female. It was pure fantasy to think that he could diffuse the threat by telling Spencer that Kristin already knew about Alexandra and he should fund his war chest elsewhere. Something about the way Dina had caved so quickly—help ensure marital harmony—made clear that the images on Spencer’s phone might be a last straw in ways that he couldn’t fathom as a male.

And, of course, there was always the reaction of Franklin McCoy to consider. If it got into the tabloids that a managing director was being blackmailed, he’d surely be finished.

Now he went to the guest room, where he had brought Alexandra, and breathed in the smell of the room. Unlike the TV and music room downstairs, the cat would have noticed nothing new here. It smelled fine—which meant it smelled not at all. He stared at the spot on the bedspread where Alexandra had sat. Where they had sat together. He wondered where her father was. Her mother. He tried to imagine how a nice kid like Alexandra wound up in a foreign country, sitting naked in a strange man’s house. He took a deep breath, wondering how long it would be before his memories of this nightmare turned to steam.

…

Much later, he would wander the first floor of his house, noctivagant as his cat. Then he would sit alone at the kitchen table, unable to sleep. Unwelcome in his own bed. He sat there drinking herbal tea, even though he hated herbal tea. He hated all tea. But he still hoped he might somehow get some sleep. Besides, drinking this tea was rather like wearing a hair shirt. He was punishing himself.

Upstairs, Melissa was sleeping in the master bedroom with Kristin. It was Kristin who had insisted. It was Kristin who had somehow kept it together when she surveyed the living room and the kitchen and the front hallway—when she, too, had watched in fascination as the cleaning crew had tried to wash away the stigmas of madness and degradation—and it was Kristin who had then brought Melissa up to her bedroom, the child still carrying her school backpack over her shoulder.

And that meant it was Kristin who had been with Melissa that afternoon when their daughter had found—there it was, right atop the plastic Tucker Tote filled with Barbie dolls, but somehow he had managed to miss it—what the child had mistaken at first for a jellyfish. A sick jellyfish. A dead jellyfish. Something she might have found washed ashore at the beach that summer.

It seemed that Spencer had taken Sonja to his daughter’s bedroom. That’s where he’d gone on the second floor. And when he was done with her—on his way back downstairs, perhaps just before pulling his iPhone from his pants pocket and peering through the camera lens into the guest room—he’d tossed his used condom onto a child’s plastic carton of Barbies.





Alexandra


How I changed. How much I changed. I could see I was the same girl in the mirror, even if now I looked like courtesan instead of regular girl going to dance class. But inside I was different. So different. It wasn’t just that I knew things about people. I knew things about me.

…

I said I was a better dancer than my friend Nayiri back in Yerevan, which probably makes you think I am a very ambitious person. Maybe once. And maybe Nayiri and I were competitive. But we were also friends. I would say we were as close as sisters, but I was an only child so I don’t know. Once I read an Armenian translation of Little Women, and those girls were very different from Nayiri and her two sisters. Nayiri and her sisters seemed to fight like wolves day after day. Nayiri was always angry with one or the other. They stole each other’s clothes and bangles, they argued over chores. So, I have no idea what having a sister is really like. But Nayiri and me? We never fought. We had played together as little girls, and then we danced together as we grew up. I would watch her in the studio mirror and she would watch me, so there was a little tension. She perfected her adagios before I did, but I got my toe shoes first. I could pirouette the length of the stage before she could, but she mastered her tours en l’air like boy: full rotations. Maybe she has mastered two rotations by now. It’s possible. It’s been a long time.