Super Host

by Kate Russo

  She’s led him on, she thinks. She never should’ve done those shots. They were meant to tell him she’s game, but she doesn’t want to play anymore.

  “Paulie.” She can barely spit it out.

  When he pushes her against the outer wall of the pub, the back of her head scrapes against the bricks. His tongue fills her mouth, spreading cigarette tar and stale beer all over the inside of her cheeks. His hands are on her hips and he squeezes, pushing his erection into her pelvis. His body is like an anvil against her full bladder.

  “You came back for me tonight,” he whispers, looking her square in the eyes, challenging her to refute it.

  It’s true, she did. He’s not at all what she hoped, but somehow exactly what she feared. She tries to push him away, but it only makes him more persistent. He reaches his hand under her cardigan, grabbing her breast and squeezing it so hard she wonders if he’s trying to pull it off, maybe put it in his pocket with her hair elastic.

  “Jesus. Fuck,” she mutters, trying to wriggle out from between him and the wall, but he grabs her arms and locks them up over her head. “Please, Paulie.”

  “You’re so polite,” he says, his smile cocky.

  He keeps her arms pinned to the wall with one hand and uses the other to unzip his trousers, putting the full weight of his body against her. He’s pressing her wrists against the wall so hard that she loses all feeling in her fingers. The bricks continue to scrape her scalp, yanking out hairs every time she tries to move her head. She’s pretty sure it’s bleeding, because it feels warm, like piss in a pool.

  Earlier, she’d been able to calm him by putting a hand on his chest. She’d like to do that now, but with both hands pinned above her head she can’t. She tilts her head to the side, trying to make eye contact, but he’s not interested in looking at her anymore. When she stops trying to shift, everything is still. She’s aware of voices, but they’re faint, distant, somewhere on the other side of the fog bank. There’s nothing to see but the beads of sweat forming on Paulie’s forehead.

  “Paulie, no.” It comes out as a whimper. A plea that doesn’t register with him at all. He’s working on her zipper now. She can feel his penis pulsing in the groove between her hip and her pelvis. Her bladder throbs under the pressure of his hand on her jeans. Lack of oxygen is making her woozy. His bald head is turning into TV static right in front of her. She knows she should probably scream, but she’s not sure she can. As a girl, she’d wondered if there would come a moment in her life that really, truly warranted a scream at the top of her lungs. Is this that moment? Are you allowed to scream after you’ve let the guy buy you a drink? She opens her mouth, but nothing comes out.

  “Stop fighting,” he says in a stern whisper.

  She feels like she’s going to faint. He has her propped up, but her head slumps. “I need to sit down.” When she hears herself, she sounds distant, as though the words were uttered by someone else.

  “Fuck that. No you don’t.” He steps back to pull down her high-waisted jeans. The release of pressure is just enough to make her knees wobble.

  “I think I am going to fai—”

  Her body drops under Paulie, her head bumping along the bricks as she slides down the wall. He catches her by the fly of her jeans and holds her up, then her bladder gives way. Urine streams down her thighs, causing Paulie to step back in horror. “Fuckin’ cunt,” he says, as if explaining the circumstance to himself. The ground beneath her is cold, her urine warm. She closes her eyes. It’s possible she loses consciousness for a second because when she opens them again she sees Paulie, or rather his shoes, rounding the corner, and she is alone. When she tries to get to her feet, they slide out from under her immediately.

  Just sit here and breathe for a second, she tells herself, pulling her legs up to her chest and putting her head between them. She can smell her own piss, but she’s too woozy to care. If anything, it smells comforting. She touches the back of her head and feels the patch of blood that’s already congealing in the cold. She wishes he hadn’t taken her elastic band. It’s a stupid thing to wish at a time like this; she should be happy to be alive. She should be happy he didn’t penetrate her. But she really just wants her fucking elastic back so she can pull back her hair and try to walk away from this situation feeling somewhat normal. Is this what her mother means when she says that some girls are just asking for it?

  She can hear voices, like patchy radio, in the distance. “Someone’s had too much to drink!” Followed by laughter. Figures emerge and then disappear again in the dense fog. She leans back against the wall. The air in front of her is thick as whole milk. It could be the ocean out there for all she knows. In fact, she swears she can hear waves. Her head slumps to the side. She closes her eyes and thinks about what her night might’ve been like if she’d gone to Blackfriars Station like she knew she should have. How she might have knocked on Bennett’s door for that cup of tea. Maybe she would have told him about how she wanted to be a food photographer and about the Hasselblad camera she’s coveted for so long. Or maybe she wouldn’t have said anything. Maybe she would have just sat there quietly and watched him contemplate his fabric samples, running his fingers lovingly over the textured threads. Tomorrow, she’ll have to tell him that she’s going home early.

  “Is she alright?”

  Alicia can hear a woman’s voice, but it sounds far away, like she herself is on land and the woman is in the waves. When she opens her eyes, a group of women is approaching her. She tries to lift her head, but it feels like a wrecking ball. She closes her eyes again.

  “Shit.” One pair of feet is rushing closer. “I know her!”

  She feels a hand on her arm and flinches, confused, thinking Paulie might be back. “Alicia?”

  There’s a blurry, large figure in a tight black turtleneck standing over her.

  The woman sits down next to her and puts her arm around Alicia, drawing her into her big bosom. “It’s me, Kiera,” she says softly.

  Alicia lifts her head and looks up at Kiera, bleary-eyed.

  “Can you tell me what happened?” Kiera asks, cupping Alicia’s face in her hand.

  “I shouldn’t have come here,” Alicia mumbles, almost inaudible.

  “Here? To this pub?” Kiera tries to decipher what she means.

  Shaking her head, Alicia looks away: the pub, Borough Market, Camden Town, Chiswick, London. Take your pick, she doesn’t belong in any of them.

  “I got your message,” Kiera says, tucking Alicia’s hair behind her ear.

  Kiera’s friends are now squatting all around her. One is rubbing her knee. Another wants to know if she should call 999.

  Alicia wraps her arm around Kiera’s waist.

  Kiera looks down at her undone, soaked jeans and grips her tight. “It’s not your fault,” she whispers as Alicia starts to whimper. “Do you understand, Alicia?”

  She nods, yes, and she wants to believe her. Feeling out to sea, Kiera is her mast. Alicia curls deeper into her friend, clinging for dear life, while the waves rage.

  More Vibe

  You can live in an enormous four-bedroom house with a chef’s kitchen, dedicated laundry room, super king-size beds, a flat-screen TV, closets full of shit you haven’t looked at in years, endless fluffy towels, and a bathroom with a rainfall showerhead and heated towel racks or . . . Or you can live in a glorified shed with a hard futon, a calcified kettle, a wardrobe you share with a mouse, and a shower—roughly the size of an upright coffin—with a rusty tap. Either way, you’re alive. And that’s preferable to death, Bennett’s pretty sure.

  Looking out the window of his tiny garden studio, across the short green grass of his lawn (it stays impossibly green, even in winter), and past the stone patio, he stares into the window of his large yellow-brick house. The futon, where he’s currently perched, abuts one of two large windows of the studio, perfect for spying on guests. Today, it’s th
e Eastons, a British guy and his American wife, who checked in a few days ago. They’re booked in for a month, the longest any guests have ever stayed. The pair of them are walking around like they own the place, he thinks, bitterly. They’re artists. “Me, too,” Bennett told them at check-in, pointing to his studio across the garden. That didn’t elicit a response from either of them, not even an American “No kidding.” Mrs. Easton just looked across to the studio, her face scrunched up like she smelled something rotten. Though he assured them he would be no bother, her expression suggested that, yes, he would. “Don’t worry,” he’d said, “I’ll leave you in peace.” It wasn’t a total lie. He hasn’t interrupted them at all; it’s just he can’t stop watching them. After all, he hasn’t got a TV to entertain him.

  In the beginning it was important for the studio to feel like a home. For the first few days, he went to the trouble of pulling down the futon every evening and reassembling it as a couch in the morning. He even went so far as to cover it with a fitted sheet at night, though it was a bugger to fold up the next day. He kept the duvet and the pillows in a tiny linen closet next to the loo, pulling them out at bedtime and stuffing them back in each morning. Before long, all that became a nuisance. The frame of the futon was a problem, too. It creaked and often got stuck halfway between bed and couch. Each morning, he’d have to pull the whole thing out from the wall and then give it a good, hard shove into the couch position. Difficult to accomplish because the shove usually just pushed the futon, in bed form, back up against the wall. The key was to push it more upward and then back, but this involved getting on his knees for the correct leverage. Bennett is fifty-five, a fact he didn’t want to be reminded of every single time he bent down to push the futon back into a couch. With that in mind, the futon now remains permanently upright. When he wakes up, he tosses the duvet and pillows down to the foot, where they stay until it’s time to sleep again. And it’s at the top of this futon where, every morning, he rests his chin and stares straight out into the kitchen window of his large former home.

  The Eastons wake up late, which works well for Bennett because so does he. The winter sun doesn’t stream bright into his studio until eight so he’s rarely up before then. This morning, they are doing what they’ve done every morning so far—eating granola at the kitchen island, staring at their phones without saying a word to each other. Bennett’s getting to know the routine. First, Mr. Easton comes downstairs in his pajamas. He grabs the granola from the shelf and pulls down one bowl from the cupboard. He fills it with granola and milk and then puts the box back on the shelf and the milk back in the fridge. Five minutes later his wife comes downstairs, fully dressed, her hair always tied back in a bun. She pulls down the granola from the shelf and a bowl from the cupboard. Filling the bowl with granola, she then eats it dry, which Bennett finds repulsive. They don’t converse the whole time they are eating, just scroll through their phones. They never show each other articles or photos. In fact, they don’t exchange a single glance until the moment Mr. Easton picks up his bowl and drinks the leftover milk, at which time his wife turns to him and gives him a look that could curdle a dairy farm.

  Bennett can see all of this because he has excellent vision. Strange that he couldn’t see his divorce coming from a mile away (probably because things that close up start to get a little blurry), but he can read the bottom line of letters at the optometrist’s office, unaided. He believes this gift of good vision is one of the assets that makes him a good artist. In particular, he loves to stand back from whatever painting he’s working on and take in all its tiny, intricate details, of which there are many. Currently, he’s working on a four-by-five-foot painting of a yellow fabric he pulled out from the bottom of a heap of floral-patterned fabrics he has in the studio. He’s collected thousands of fabrics over the years, as evidenced by the floor-to-ceiling stacks that populate the side wall on the opposite end of the studio. He’s been painting so-called “portraits” of these fabrics for about a decade now. His “loyal subjects,” as he likes to refer to them—mostly to himself, because there’s no one else around. The fabric wall is organized by pattern and then by color. There’s one floor-to-ceiling stack of floral fabrics arranged chromatically, starting from oranges to reds to purples to blues to greens and then yellows at the bottom. Similar stacks exist for gingham, geometric, and striped fabrics. He likes to mix and match within his paintings, overlapping different patterns and palettes.

  Given that yellow is his least favorite color, this floral fabric was an odd choice. He can’t even remember where he bought it. It stuck out to him a couple weeks back, after his renter, Alicia, left the house one morning in a yellow cardigan that caught his eye. He’d lingered on her jumper—not quite mustard, not quite butter, more like Colman’s blended with Lurpak Spreadable and a squeeze of lemon. He had to mix it. That afternoon, he did exactly that, mixed the color from memory. Not with actual mustard and butter, but with paint—cadmium yellow, extra deep, mixed with a little brilliant yellow, pale, Naples yellow, brown ochre, and lastly some cadmium lemon. Diluting the paint mixture with turpentine, he brushed a thin wash over his canvas, staining it with what he’d come to think of as “Alicia Yellow.” Once he’d done that, this particular yellow floral fabric right at the bottom of the stack leapt out at him, demanding its moment. He had thought to himself that if he bumped into Alicia the next day he’d show her the canvas. Maybe he’d even ask her to stand next to it with the cardigan on to see how close he’d gotten the match. He never did get the chance to ask her.

  Though shy from the beginning, the Alicia he saw the next day was a different woman from the one who’d worn the cardigan, the one he couldn’t get out of his mind since she’d checked in. She was completely distraught that morning, said something had come up and she needed to go home early. It was none of his business, so he didn’t pry—probably family or boyfriend stuff, not stuff you share with your middle-aged AirBed host. She didn’t ask for a refund, but he gave her one anyway. He’s not sure why other than he hoped it would make her smile, which in that moment seemed more important than money. She did smile at the refund, kind of—not the happy or relieved kind, but the obligated kind. With that, he decided not to show her the painting, sensing that she’d certainly feel obligated to smile again. Yesterday was the deadline for the two-week window she had to leave him a review on the AirBed website, but she never did. He checked the website every morning, every time he made a cup of tea, and again when he broke from painting for lunch and dinner. He’s not surprised she didn’t leave a review, though it would have been nice to hear from her, to hear she’s okay. He wrote her a five-star guest review: Alicia was an excellent guest, kind and considerate. Would happily have her back anytime. It was the restrained version of what he was thinking, I wish she’d come back so I could give her a cuddle. Anyway, hard to imagine feeling that way about the Eastons.

  Today, Mrs. Easton doesn’t look at her husband when he slurps the milk from his granola bowl. Instead, she takes her spoon and lightly bangs herself on the forehead with it. Bennett barks a quick laugh at her frustration. He doesn’t laugh out loud much anymore. He can’t get used to the sound of his own voice, which seems much louder and also foreign when he’s the only one around to hear it. Besides, what’s the point of registering to himself that something is funny? He already knows.

  Mr. Easton gets up, puts his bowl in the sink, and heads back upstairs. Bennett is quick to lie back down on the futon at this moment. After three days of watching their routine, he’s learned that this is exactly when Mrs. Easton will put down her phone and stare straight out the kitchen window into the garden at his studio.

  He rolls off the futon and onto the floor, landing on his feet and hands, then crawls a couple feet to the bathroom door, where he pulls himself up by the handle, groaning as he does so.

  His paint-splattered jeans and tunic are hanging from a hook in the bathroom. Very rarely does he wear anything else these days. He has a fe
w plastic containers that hold his other shirts and jeans, but they remain closed much of the time. The container with underwear and socks sits on top of the others for easy access, though possibly not easy enough. Today, he puts on his paint clothes before realizing he hasn’t changed out of the underwear he slept in. He thinks for a moment about whether or not he can be bothered to take off the jeans and change his briefs. It’s not the first time he’s had this particular existential crisis. Who is going to know, but him, if he keeps on the old ones? He doesn’t want to ask himself, “What’s the point?” That’s a dangerous question . . . but, really: What is the point? Again he thinks of Alicia, all set to face the world that day in her yellow cardigan. If she could do it . . . He takes off his jeans and pants, dropping the dirty ones in a tiny waste bin that acts as a hamper, and pulls out a fresh pair of black boxer briefs from the plastic tub. Putting them on, he lets the elastic waistband slap into place with pride. The underwear is brand-new. He went to Marks and Spencer last weekend to buy a dozen more pairs. With his washer and dryer in the main house, he had to stock up on socks and pants to get him through the Eastons’ month-long stay.

  His morning bathroom ritual is quick. He doesn’t shower every day anymore. Showers in the narrow and claustrophobic cubicle are far from the luxurious ones he used to take in the house. The master bedroom shower has two rainfall showerheads and enough room to conduct an orchestra. If he stood upright in this stall, the showerhead would be at his neck. It had been Eliza’s idea to install the studio shower in the first place. She despised the smell of the turpentine and oil paints, so she encouraged him to shower after a day of painting before coming back to the main house. Bennett can’t smell any of it anymore. After nearly forty years of painting, he’s gone nose-blind. Most mornings, he throws on his paint clothes, brushes his teeth, and splashes water on his face. He does the latter quickly, no need to labor over all the grooves that time has carved into his skin or the scar under his left eye from the night, forty years ago, when his father, half-cut, threw a ceramic bowl at his face. Eliza used to buy him this expensive face moisturizer, but he has no idea where she got it from. He could google it, but he’s never bothered. Unlike clean underwear, it’s no longer necessary.