The Guest Room(63)
When she was dressed, she sat on the bed to put on her shoes. She had grabbed a pair of modest heels today from her closet. She wondered if this was how the girl had sat before her husband last Friday night on another bed in another room just down the hall. She saw the girl vividly in her mind. Her insouciance. Her mouth, half open with carefully feigned desire. Her youth. She closed her eyes, wishing her imagination were impervious to pain.
…
Nicole stirred the berries and granola in her yogurt parfait. She was nauseous, sick with loss and despair, but she felt that she had to order something. Across the booth (thank God he had gotten a booth, she had thought when she first arrived, and thank God he had arrived before her), Philip was wolfing his western omelet as if he hadn’t eaten in days. She feared he had missed all the signals she had offered since she had gotten to the restaurant. He had stood and embraced her, apologizing with uncharacteristic zeal, and she had not lifted her arms to hug him back. He had tried to peer into her eyes in a way he almost never did—with an earnestness that suggested he was not simply hearing whatever she had to say, he was listening—and she had looked down at the toes of her boots. He had offered to take her jacket and hold it for her while she had slid into her side of the booth, and she had replied that she would be more comfortable keeping it on. She glanced down at the engagement ring since she knew this was the last time she was ever going to see it.
“It was a nightmare,” Philip was saying now. “You can’t imagine how awful it was to see that crazy bitch stabbing the Russian dude. I will never be able to scrub that image from my eyes. Never. We thought she was going to try and kill one of us next.”
She wasn’t completely surprised that he was trying to elicit her sympathy. And, the truth was, she knew that it must have been terrifying.
“And then we heard the gunshots, and that’s when we thought we were all going to get killed. I mean, Chuck Alcott fell to the floor, just sobbing—sobbing!—like a baby. And I know I ducked.”
“You ducked.”
He sipped his coffee and nodded as he swallowed. “Maybe more than ducked. You know, it was a reflex. I knelt behind the couch.”
She assumed that knelt was a euphemism. Knelt suggested a gradual descent and some premeditation. She was pretty sure that even duck was a euphemism: it was likely that he had thrown himself to the floor as if someone had tossed a hand grenade into the room.
“I mean, guns and knives at what was supposed to be a harmless bachelor party?” he added. “That’s nuts!”
She agreed that it must have been horrifying for him to have witnessed the murder of the two bodyguards, but there was never anything harmless about this bachelor party. And so she told him precisely that.
“Look, I know it got a little out of control,” he said. “We all drank too much. But you know how sorry I am, right? I wouldn’t have told you if I wasn’t sorry and knew I could assure you that I would never, ever do something like that again.”
“You only told me because you got caught,” she countered.
He held his fork as if it were a pointer and glanced at the tines. There was a bit of yellow egg there. “But I know we can get past this. I know I can.”
She wanted to say, Well, that’s big of you. But she still hoped she could remain above sarcasm. She wanted only candor in this final breakfast. “I can’t,” she said instead.
“And what does that mean?”
“It means…it means a lot of things. It’s not just about trust, and how that’s gone. I kept hoping you’d grow up or expecting you’d grow up or believing you’d grow up. And that’s crazy on my part. Because you won’t. I used to love that little boy in you. But now that little boy is just a horny teenager who wants his women to be skanky girls gone wild. Beautiful things with eating disorders.”
“Not you. You know how much I respect you.”
“And yet you stare at other women on the street. You really think I don’t notice?”
“I’m a guy. It’s how I’m hardwired. If it bothers you, I’ll stop. I usually only do it when some woman is dressed, I don’t know, provocatively.”
“If it bothers me? Really? It never crossed your mind that I might not want you ogling some other girl’s ass?”
“I’m not perfect, I know that. I’m not my brother, I’m not—”
“I’m not sure that your brother is much better.”
“You would be in the minority thinking that.”
She dropped her spoon onto the white plate with the parfait glass, embarrassed by how much noise it made. “Damn it, Philip, this is not about your sibling issues!”
“I’m sorry.”
She could feel people in the restaurant watching them. She could sense Philip’s fear that she was about to make a scene. She hadn’t wanted to make a scene; she certainly hadn’t planned that she would. But at this point? It didn’t matter. What mattered was that if anything good had come from that appalling debauch at his brother’s, it was this: she had (and the ghoulish irony of the expression was not lost on her) dodged a bullet.
“How dare you say, ‘I can get past it,’ as if that means you’re such a big person or you’re better than me? How dare you! It really doesn’t matter if you can get past it. I can’t,” she said, and she was crying, her voice a little lost in her sniffles, but she didn’t care. She didn’t care at all. She stood and lifted her purse over her shoulder and held out her left hand. Then, with her right, she pulled the engagement ring off her finger and—as he was standing, reaching out to her, imploring her to stop, to think, to not throw away all that they had—she tossed it onto the table. It bounced onto the floor, and Philip fell to his hands and knees—dove, as a matter of fact—after it. As far as she knew, he never followed her out the door or tried to catch her, because she never looked back.