The Guest Room(82)

Richard swallowed the last of his beer. “No, you’re not a rake.”

“Well, I can try. Gives me something to aspire to.”

“You’re just a grotesque little parasite. And kind of a loser,” he told him, standing. “And I’ve decided, Spencer, I’m not paying you a penny. Send the pictures to my wife. Share the video with my office. Do it right this second, for all I care.”

Spencer turned to face him, and for the first time Richard felt he had the creep’s full attention. “You will regret that,” he said slowly.

“Nope. I won’t.”

“Sleep on it. I can wait until tomorrow.”

“Oh, I feel okay about this decision. As a matter of fact, I feel pretty damn good about it. One more thing.”

Spencer glared at him, a slow seethe starting to fester. He waited.

“The tab? It’s yours.” Then he turned away and left the restaurant, grinding the remnants of Spencer’s cigarette into the sidewalk as he exited Rapier’s glass door.

…

As Richard was heading north on the FDR Drive, his cell phone rang, and he saw on the dashboard screen that it was Dina Renzi. He was still agitated (though, yes, also rather pleased with himself) after standing up to Spencer Doherty. In addition, he knew, he was still rattled from the morgue. Now that he could only wait to see if or when Spencer dropped the hammer, his head was awash with the vaporous images of the dead. There was one bleeding out on his living room couch. Another in his front hallway. There was one who had been pretty nearly decapitated. And so he waited for the phone to stop ringing, and soon enough he heard the ping that told him he had a message in his voice mail. Only then did he press “listen” and wait for Dina’s voice to fill his car speakers. He didn’t believe there had been enough time for Spencer to send a video or photos to Franklin McCoy and for someone to watch it, digest it, and fashion a diatribe to launch upon his lawyer. But you never know. Maybe it was possible.

Nevertheless, he was pleasantly surprised when he heard Dina’s voice sounding uncharacteristically chipper.

“Hi, Richard. I hope you’re out and about and doing something fun. Call me back. I might have good news. I don’t want to get your hopes up and over the moon, but it sounds like your friends at Franklin McCoy—and I am using friends with at least a small scoop of irony—want to meet next week. Hugh and I have gone back and forth since our meeting the other day. And the vibe I’m getting now is that they want to figure out a way to save face and maybe green-light your return to work. It’s not a done deal, but I think we are, as we like to say, moving in a good direction. You may be back helping big sharks eat little sharks—That is what you do, right?—before you know it. So, call me back. Bye.”

He thought how he might be back in his office in a week or two, and how much he craved that. He considered briefly whether he had made a mistake ignoring his lawyer’s advice and telling Spencer to go f*ck himself, but he reminded himself that this decision was about trying to do the right thing. He would not allow himself to regret standing up to the cloacal ooze that purported to be his idiot younger brother’s best friend.

He breathed in deeply through his mouth and tried to keep his attention squarely on the bumper and taillights of the shoddy-looking locksmith van directly ahead of him. He tried to be happy. But it was difficult when he surveyed his world this afternoon. He kept recalling the dead girl in the morgue, which made him think of Alexandra, who most likely was dead now, too.

No, happiness wasn’t possible. He should lower that bar. Accept something less. And again the word normalcy came to him, as it had on this very road earlier in the day. He yearned for it. But he couldn’t imagine what it would take for his life to return to…normal.

…

You won’t always think rubber when you think Barbie.

It was something her older brother had said to Kristin earlier this week, the Tuesday evening when she and Melissa had finally returned home to Bronxville and they’d found the used condom atop the box of Barbies. She’d phoned her brother because she wasn’t yet prepared to share this latest, lurid indignity with any of her female friends, but she had to tell someone. And her brother had listened, walked her in off the ledge, and told her before they hung up for the night that associations changed over time. Invariably they were diluted by experience. Someday, and it might take a year and it might take a decade, when she thought of her daughter’s Barbies, she would think once more of the hours she had spent sharing the dolls with Melissa on the living room floor and making up stories. She would think tenderly of the games they would play. The worlds they’d create. She’d think of the clothes and the cars and the furniture. She’d think of the shoes.

Now, as she stood with Melissa and Claudia before a long, wide wall of the dolls in the FAO Schwarz on Fifth, she decided her brother was wrong. At least he might be wrong. Who could say what she would think about as she neared fifty? When she was a grandmother at, perhaps, sixty?

She and the girls had wandered here not because they had any interest these days in Barbies, but simply because they were exploring the entire store. They’d strolled here after the second museum. Something frivolous after all that self-improvement. They’d gone first to the Apple Store next door, descending beneath the colossal glass cube, but the world below was like a subway car at rush hour. No technological marvel was worth the effort it would take to press through the human crush. And while the toy store was less crowded, Kristin guessed that the fourth graders beside her had already outgrown 90 percent of the inventory.