by Daniel Riley
Her hotel wasn’t far, just a few more blocks, and it was a good thing, because the rain was starting to come down again. It would be warmer there, at least. The AC in the bar had practically given him the flu. He could use the bathroom in the lobby before checking in with Whitney, if he could even remember her number. As they approached the front steps to the hotel, Will took in the building. It was considerably grander than he’d imagined, and on a plainly luxurious stretch of Diagonal. Maybe she’d gotten a deal off one of the night-of apps. Maybe the foot modeling paid more than he’d imagined. A bellhop appeared in a suit. Will watched Jenna move past him from behind. He remembered the summer Whitney wore jeans over a leotard. Maybe Jenna was just a younger, more thinly drawn version of the woman Whitney had been, the woman he’d long loved.
He dashed to the bathroom in the lobby without fully taking it in, and looked at the inscrutable screen of his phone again. No texts, as far as he could tell. He’d have to call Whitney from the lobby to figure out where they might meet up again. He had the keys to the apartment, after all, so she couldn’t get inside without him.
He found Jenna in a plush leather chair near the elevator bank. The lobby was decorated with the sort of dark velvets and fresh-cut flowers one might find in the country estate of a monarch.
“I’m gonna make some coffee,” she said. “I’m gonna change my clothes.”
“Got it,” he said. “I’ll just wait down here to see—”
“Don’t be silly,” she said. “You just fell in a gutter.”
“I’m fine, really.”
She looked at him sweetly, pitifully: “You’re not doing anything wrong, you know? Nothing’s gonna happen that you’re gonna have to lie about later.”
He hadn’t been suggesting that. He hadn’t presumed anything.
“Okay,” he said, carefully. “I could probably wash these scrapes out better, you’re right.”
As they passed the front desk, the concierge beckoned for her at a casual volume: “Ms. Silverstein, your father asked that you return his call at your earliest convenience.”
Jenna nodded and waved thanks.
Will waited for the elevator doors to shut to ask, frozen up as he was by the ever-revealing luxury: “Who’s Ms. Silverstein?”
“Moi,” she said.
“Leonard. Jenna. Ms. Saisquoi. Ms. Silverstein.”
“That about covers it.”
The doors dinged open and she led him down the hallway and they were inside quickly.
The room was small and dark but hung with the same velvets as the lobby, voluminously appointed around a single king bed and a mahogany table. There was a leather luggage perch at the end of the bed, where the oversize suitcase that had lasted her all year rested. She’d barely unpacked anything. This room was clearly as she’d described: a place to escape to, a place all her own to breathe. But this was of a different order than what he’d expected. The price was all Will could think of.
When the door latched shut, he felt suddenly nauseated. He’d had too much to drink and his head was heavy. His ankle and wrist were throbbing—maybe he’d sprained something. He felt the sand filling up his skull and he felt a shock of alarm in his stomach. There was nothing good that could come of this. And yet: he was in control here, all he had to do was the right thing.
She ran the water in the bathroom to warm up her hands. She handed him a small laundry bag to wrap his phone in. Then she started fiddling with the coffee maker—an old American drip-coffee model with grounds and everything. He sat on the edge of the bed. She took the pot into the bathroom and filled it with water and dumped it down the back of the coffee maker.
“Well, that’s a nice perk,” he said, trying to bait her into acknowledging the hotel and the room.
“Every morning for, like, ten years, I watched my mom work one of these,” she said. “Six a.m. with her at the diner before school. Black pot, regular; orange pot, decaf. I usually can’t drink this stuff ’cause of it.”
Will sat on the edge of the bed, narrowing his eyes. She’d said her mother was a businesswoman who worked in Asian markets. It reminded him of the thing she’d said about the Valley, about hot summers in the Valley. The quicksand of facts.
“Where was the diner?” he said, tentatively.
She was operating mindlessly. She had to have been drunk, too. She was speaking without thinking.
“Uh…on Magnolia. Magnolia and, like, Lankershim, I think.”
North Hollywood. The Valley. Not Santa Monica. Not Rustic Canyon.
He made a sound of unsurprised understanding. Maybe they’d moved from one place to the other at some point. Maybe this was a stepmom.
The coffee maker was burbling and she turned, snapping out of the routine, and told him she was gonna hop in the shower.
The water started, he heard her clothes hit the floor. The door wasn’t closed all the way, but he didn’t try to sneak a peek through the crack. It all felt like a setup for something. Concentrating on not looking, he looked, but he couldn’t see anything, anyway. He stood and walked toward the coffee maker to check on its progress, and couldn’t see anything through the crack from over there, either.
He could have pressed her on the discrepancies—either the old story was a lie or the new story was a lie, or none of it was true. He didn’t know her. The only thing that was certain was that it was all some ruse. And at this point he didn’t even want to catch her out. He didn’t want to trap her in the corner. What would be the point, anyway? He hated confrontations that exposed people, that wrong-footed them. How had he become a lawyer? He so very much needed a new job.
The water was running. Jenna was humming something. He sat back down on the edge of the bed and pulled out his busted phone. It was still alive. He touched the cracked screen tentatively, as though it were a pan handle straight off a stovetop. The shower knobs screeched off. He could hear the showerhead dripping, the slide of the curtain on the rod, the infamous feet padding out of the tub, one and then another. He could hear a brush running through hair. He could hear a brush untangling knots. He could hear a towel drying skin, and then he heard the door open and was confronted by the bright white lights running the rails of the bathroom mirror.
Jenna was burrito-wrapped in a towel. Her hair was wet and wavier than he’d seen it, and it fell over her shoulders and down her back.
“Help yourself,” she said, squaring up to him, her feet wider than her shoulders, hanging there like a provocation.
“What?” Will said.
“Help yourself to the coffee,” she said, smiling. “Did you pour yourself any yet?”
“No, not yet,” he said, swallowing. “But thank you.”
He stood up and grabbed two porcelain mugs, and she poured expertly, thoughtlessly, like a diner waitress.
“Any gross cream?”
“No thanks,” he said.
He was still wearing his shoes and so towered over her. They were sharing the tightest quarters of a small hotel room. The “kitchen.” Will thought of the many rooms of his and Whitney’s studio.
He sipped his coffee and it was hot and terrible.
“Don’t forget to call your dad or whatever,” he said.
“I’m sure it’s just about my flight,” she said, moving back into the bathroom. “He’s been helping to get me on a flight. Earliest available is tomorrow morning. I’ll call him in a little bit.”
“Just like that, the skies clear up and everyone’s outta here, huh?”
He wondered if she could hear him from the bathroom. She’d vanished from sight again, but the shampoo cloud enveloping her had found its way into every corner of the room. She reemerged, sipping her coffee and smiling at him, the electric blues peering over the rim of her mug, pools in the smooth, liquid face, a creamy pink without makeup.
He felt the full length of his cock straining against his jeans. She sipped again and didn’t drop her eyes.
He turned back to the edge of the bed and sat, crossing his
legs, concealing himself.
“Are you sure you don’t want to just call your dad now to get it over with?”
She smiled again and sipped.
“I wonder how much longer it’s gonna be for us,” he said. “Clearing Zone 6—Jesus.”
“I haven’t told you yet the real reason I’m so eager to get out of here, have I?” she said, walking back to the coffeepot for a warm-up. “You know my roommates in Paris—I mentioned them? Something insane happened, and I still don’t totally know what the truth is. But she’s dead and I think he killed her.”
Will felt at once like he wasn’t living his real life. His mind went somewhere fantastical, as it had during the concert. He was drunk or high and his body hurt and he couldn’t tell for sure if he had maybe fallen asleep already. All he could say as his heart beat faster was: “What?”
“Yeah, I’d moved out and everything, and then I saw it on the news while I was waiting at the train station, and it just freaked me the fuck out. I just don’t want any part of that, you know? I don’t want to be caught up with the police up there. It’s this whole thing now that’s unraveling. I keep reading about it online, and they think he killed her.”
“Your roommates? Literally your roommates.”
“Wild, right?”
“You seem not as freaked out by this as I would be.”
She shrugged. “I mean, I’ve known for several days now. I just don’t want to have to go back there and be questioned, you know? The French police. The German police, too, probably. They were both from Cologne. They’d met there and come to—”
“Wait, I saw something on the news about this! Yesterday afternoon, I totally forgot. This guy was a suspect for the murder of his girlfriend? In Paris. Those were your roommates?”
“You saw it on TV? So you saw what a big deal it is, then, right? You get why I need to get the fuck out of here.”
“But…but maybe you can help the police, right? Maybe you can help them with—”
“I just want to leave. I need to leave. I’ve been here too long. I can’t get caught up in a thing where I’m here for another month while they try to figure this thing out, and interview me about what I know, and then I become a suspect, and blah blah blah. I didn’t even know them that well. It was their place for the year, and I rented a room for the spring term when I got out of university housing, and that was it.”
“But you’re not worried about, I don’t know, seeming like you’re uncooperative or whatever? When they do look for you, and you’re back in L.A. or New York not talking to them? I mean, I bet they’re looking for you right now, don’t you think?”
“Well, maybe that’s why I got rid of my cell phone, then.”
She widened her eyes, as though testing to see if he was following the plot.
“It just might be helpful if you, you know—” he said.
“Well, maybe I don’t want to be around for when they figure things out. Maybe I was the one who killed her, and that’s why I wanted to get out of Dodge.”
The look on his face wasn’t something he was in control of anymore, which is why he was surprised to hear her laugh at the sight of it. He felt his features come into focus—the slack mouth, the wrinkled forehead, the eyes with their chill behind them.
“Relax! Will! Jesus! You must really fucking think the world of me,” she said, laughing. “I didn’t kill her—my God! But…I did fuck her boyfriend the night before I left. So I’m feeling, you know, I’m feeling a modicum of guilt…”
He eliminated the look of shock on his face, deliberately trying to draw it down to neutral. The drapes were closed. It was so dark out anyway with the rain and the ashcloud.
She started laughing again. “I’m kid-ding! It was a joke. C’mon! All of this is a joke. You’re such a stiff. There wasn’t a fucking murder. There wasn’t anything. And certainly nothing I’m involved with. You’re ridiculous!”
But Will knew the news report. He’d seen it, plain as anything yesterday, before he’d fallen asleep. Or had he dreamed it? He’d been drunk and beat then, too, and had been drifting off. He couldn’t remember anything after it. He’d seen the report about the murder in Paris, the apartment building, the two young Germans. But he couldn’t tell what was real or not anymore. She’d scrambled the baseline of fact. Then again, what was he doing thinking a baseline of fact existed at all? He didn’t know a thing about her. And he’d known less than nothing until two days ago. It had been just forty-eight hours. He couldn’t believe it. He knew nothing about her except what he’d seen and heard in her presence, and she was doing her best to make him question the certainty of even that shared reality.
She was still smiling and then she was rolling her eyes, like he’d taken the joke way too seriously again. The cold blood coursing through his body had choked off any arousal, and now he was sitting in damp clothes, working too hard to make sense of what was true. She might’ve killed someone, or she might’ve seen the news and made the whole thing up. Who knew if she’d even had roommates in Paris? Who knew for certain if she’d even studied abroad there? Or if she’d gone to NYU at all? Or if she was twenty-two or from Los Angeles or named Ms. Leonard or Ms. Silverstein—or lived a single detail of the life she’d described to him at Gram’s party?
This woman was the body before him, but that was the only thing he could say for sure.
It was at that point that she walked slowly toward him. It didn’t take all that many steps to cross the room. The steam had moved from the bathroom into the bedroom, the steam and the scent of the shampoo. She was ten feet away, facing squarely toward him as before. She had an idea written on her face and he understood it clearly. He didn’t move. She ran her tongue over her teeth, beneath her lips. He sat on the edge of the bed and she stood in the center of the room. Neither of them said anything. She kept her mouth shut and her tongue moving. He heard himself breathing through his nose. He heard himself swallow. She cocked her head to the side and then dropped her eyes to the floor, and her whole body slackened, like the audition was over.
“You have remarkable restraint,” she said, and chuckled, and then turned toward the bathroom, dropping her towel as she went, so that it was the whole of the back of her—wet blonde, firm butt, park-blackened pads of her feet—that Will watched slip into what was left of the steam.
Endurkoman
For thirteen days they’d waited out the volcano, slept on floors in nearby villages, cooked in strange kitchens with pots and pans that were in all the wrong places, with ovens that ran too hot and too cold. They’d read the papers. They’d seen the photographs in the foreign magazines. They’d consumed radio broadcasts and television programs and internet websites with updates. They’d prayed for their neighbors, they’d prayed for their cows, they’d prayed for resilience of spirit. They’d tuned in each night for the assessment by the volcanologists at the Department of Civil Protection and Emergency Management. All while they waited patiently for the all-clear to return to the valley. When it finally came, it came via robocall from the President herself.
Much of what was left in the valley was stone and ash. Entire plots were slurried black and still smoldering. Some homes stood untouched, soot on the windowpanes and side paneling, but interiors preserved in a panorama of aquamarine light. Gardens, even, were blooming casually, complacently, from autumn-buried bulbs. For most, though, it was an end of things. Entire material lives ceased to exist, worldly possessions swallowed by liquid flame. But as far as anyone could count, no neighbors had been killed. And, in that way, nothing had truly been lost at all.
They’d known it had been coming. They’d known it had been near time. They’d fled before the worst of it, lifted out as though by valkyries, and were set down in their purgatories up the coast and down the coast and inland. But then the President lowered the threat of further activity to green. The eruptions were through and they had survived. So the angels set them right back down where they’d been before, where their grandparents had lived
and their grandparents before them, and they puzzled through how to move forward. How to lay new foundations in the ashes.
Wednesday
“Where the fuck have you been?” he said.
“Where the fuck have you been?” she said.
He was at the apartment when she buzzed up, six-thirty in the morning, bright light through the windows, a broken ashcloud at last.
“I’ve been here all night,” he said.
“Bullshit,” she said. “I was here at six and eight last night. Buzzing up. Beating down the door. Waiting around in the street. Calling over and over. Nothing. Just that same straight-to-voicemail over and over.”
“My phone broke,” he said.
“Your phone broke,” she said.
“Screen’s shattered and it’s been dead since last night. But I was home by eight. If you were really here, I must’ve just missed you. I even tried you from a pay phone around then. Three or four times. It was your phone that was dead. And your mailbox is full, as always. How can you possibly be putting this on me? I thought something terrible had happened. I didn’t fucking sleep.”
“I was at his apartment,” she said. “After you weren’t here, twice, we walked all the way back and I went to sleep. I don’t know what you want from me. You weren’t here.”
“I don’t know what you want me to say, either. I’m certainly not the one at fault here.”
“I know you were with her. I know you were at her hotel,” she said. “Your phone’s allegedly broken, but what about hers?”
“You were there when she said it: she threw her fucking phone in the Seine!”
“Riiiiight. Right right right. How could I forget? And so no way to be in touch until you got to a pay phone. No other solution.”
“You don’t have the high road here,” he said. “I’m sorry. You’re giving me shit for being at her hotel. You’re hitting me for not figuring this out sooner. I waited till the rain stopped and then I walked straight back here. You’re the one in his apartment. You’re the one who could’ve walked right back over again, who doesn’t pick up when I call because you’re passed out in his big fucking bed.”