The Guest Room(52)
And then Richard heard him hang up.
…
The next morning, Wednesday, Richard sank deep into the leather couch in the TV room and tried to make sense of the unexpected numbness that came with aloneness. The way it had stunned him into a somnambulant torpor. Outside on the street a TV news van had parked for about fifteen minutes, filmed the house, and moved on. They probably had him peering from behind the curtains. He wondered when they’d go away once and for all.
He flipped the channels aimlessly among the talk shows, soap operas, and reruns of ancient sitcoms that seemed to dominate daytime TV, uninterested in a digital buffet even hundreds of channels long, and tried to imagine what Kristin and Melissa were doing or thinking that moment at the school. He was having far more success entering the mind of his wife: yesterday she had looked at the bloodstains and detritus and told him that their house had been scarred. She had seen the used condom and said their marriage had been violated. Last night he had slept downstairs on a futon on the living room floor—there was no way he was going to sleep on the living room couch, now a prop from a splatter film—because it was clear that his wife couldn’t abide him beside her after all. She couldn’t abide him on the same floor.
Or, more accurately, last night he had tried to sleep. Mostly he had dozed fitfully on the futon, wondering if he would have been better off at a hotel. Kristin said that before she had walked in the front door, she had convinced herself that the party wasn’t as bad as her visions. Now? Now she knew it was worse. The condom in her daughter’s bedroom had destroyed the fragile equilibrium she had recovered. She was, she had said, her voice muted by despair, unsure now whether they could even stay in the house. In the neighborhood. She dreaded having to return to her classroom.
“But you’ve been back two days. The worst is over,” he had said, believing his argument was eminently reasonable. “It’s not like your students will know about the condom.”
“But I will,” she had countered. “Besides…”
“Go on.”
“They all know how sordid last Friday night was. Everyone does.”
He nodded. She was, he feared, in fact underestimating how sordid everyone presumed the party was. And how squalid. He knew what was in the newspapers and on the web. He knew the sorts of photos and video that existed on Spencer’s cell phone. But he sure as hell wasn’t going to correct her.
His daughter’s frame of mind was less clear to him, in part because she wasn’t asking him questions about what specifically had occurred—which, when he was honest with himself, he was actually rather thankful for—and in part because he wasn’t sure how much she understood about sex. She hadn’t known that it was a used condom when she had started to reach for it, curious. Thank God, Kristin had been with her. He wasn’t there, but in his mind he saw Kristin diving like a cornerback to grab a loose football off the ground. She had scooped it up before their daughter could touch it. It was a testimony to the reflexive courage of a mother—the maternal selflessness—that Kristin had grabbed the damn thing with bare hands as if it were a mere pretzel that had fallen to the floor, rather than the preternaturally disgusting biohazard that it was.
Still, he knew his daughter was scared. He suspected that she was afraid for her parents’ marriage, and he had a sense she was unnerved that he wasn’t going in to work. It was like he was in time-out—which he guessed he was.
About two hours ago, he had phoned Hugh Kirn, that doctrinaire pedant of a lawyer at Franklin McCoy, but either Kirn was truly on another call—as his secretary had said—or he was avoiding him. Still, the lawyer hadn’t yet called him back. And so half an hour ago he had phoned Dina Renzi. She’d said she would give Kirn a ring and check in. She would remind Kirn once more how unlikely it was that Richard would be subjected to criminal charges, and how already the public spectacle was dissipating: the stories in the tabloids and on the web were all about Monday’s arrests, and filled more with legalese than prurience. Even a tale as juicy as this one—investment bankers and hookers, dead Russian mobsters in a refined Westchester suburb, a manhunt for a pair of female killers—had a pretty short shelf life in the digital age. And as for Spencer’s increased demand? She had said two things, neither of which made him feel any better. Pay it. And remember these weren’t naked pictures of Jennifer Lawrence someone had hacked from her iCloud account. He wasn’t Brad Pitt. They really weren’t worth a whole hell of a lot.
He reminded her of all he still could lose, and she had reminded him that this is what happens when you take naked girls upstairs to the guest room.
And now he was waiting for Dina or Kirn to call him back.
Absentmindedly he fingered the Band-Aid on his neck; for the first time in years, he had cut himself shaving, and it was a doozy. Thank God you couldn’t kill yourself with a Gillette Fusion razor.
He scrolled through the contacts on his iPhone. He wasn’t sure what he expected to find, but he was hoping there was a name there he could talk to. Just call and say hello. He had noticed that none of his golf buddies had phoned him since that one call on Saturday afternoon, and that was well before the scope of the violence and bacchanal were clear. Of course, those guys might be more accurately described as golf acquaintances: a group of men, all five to ten years older than he was, whom he saw on occasional Saturdays. They talked about work and they talked about their families, but he was pretty sure he had never spent any time with any of them away from the country club. Away from the golf course. Their wives recognized each other when their paths crossed at supermarkets and restaurants, but Kristin had never taught any of their children.