The Guest Room

by Chris Bohjalian

  “Oh, I think we both hit rock bottom this week. I don’t think things could possibly get any worse for either of us.”

  He rolled his eyes. “Oh, they could. They really could. Just wait till you see me testifying someday. But it beats jail. And, thanks to you, I will have paid my legal bills—at least some portion of them.”

  “They’re that bad?”

  “So bad. And I am expecting it will take beaucoup bucks to dial down Chuck ‘Shithead’ Alcott and ensure that the frail Mrs. Fisher makes a full recovery.”

  “Nuisance suits.”

  The bartender brought Spencer his drink, and Spencer tapped it against Richard’s bottle before taking a generous swallow. “I know.”

  “But,” Richard added, “that party really might have ruined the Fishers’ marriage. Or scarred Chuck Alcott in some way. That’s one more thing we have to live with.”

  “Well, I didn’t put a gun to Brandon’s head and say go fuck the talent or else. And Chuck could have left whenever he wanted.”

  “Maybe he didn’t want to be a killjoy. Maybe he didn’t want to pass judgment on Philip at his bachelor party.”

  “That’s why you took one of the girls upstairs and fucked her in the guest room?”

  “I didn’t fuck her, Spencer,” he said, lowering his voice and hoping that Spencer would follow his lead.

  “Your loss, in that case.”

  “I was drunk.”

  “We all were.”

  Richard considered adding that he only viewed being drunk as an explanation—not a defense. But there wasn’t any point. So instead he let the thread go and said, “Anyway, given all the money pressures you’re feeling—”

  “I wish that was it. I am constantly looking over my shoulder and expecting to see some skinhead bruiser amped up on steroids. I look on the street and see black SUVs everywhere.”

  “Can’t help you there.”

  “My lawyer says I am worried for naught.”

  “There you go.”

  “But still…”

  “But still. So, it seems to me, my thirty thousand dollars will barely make a dent into what you may need.”

  “Happy to make it thirty-five.”

  “How do I know you won’t?”

  He smiled cryptically and took another sip of his drink. “You don’t.”

  “In the old days, I would pay you—you know, get down in the muck with you, really sink to your level of leech and—”

  “Flattery will get you everywhere. If you want, I can simply send you my legal bills and whatever part of Mrs. Fisher’s ‘treatment’ I’m saddled with. Let you handle it.”

  “I would sink to your level and hand you a check for thirty thousand dollars,” he went on. “And you, in turn, would hand me the negatives and the prints. But now? I have no guarantees. You could be storing the digital files anywhere. For all I know, they’re already in the cloud with all your other filth.”

  “Okay, you brought me a check today for thirty. I will, of course, take that off your hands. And someday soon, I may ask you for more. But if that day comes, I will give you my assurance that I have deleted the files everywhere and you have nothing at all to worry about. You will have my word as a scholar—and, I guess, a bit of a rake.”

  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 fuck 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 an
d 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.

  She sighed, half listening as the girls made fun of some of the Collectible Barbies. At the moment, it was the Twilight Barbies that were giving them the giggles. The Divergent Barbies. Carlisle. Edward. Tris.

  Whatever happened to naming all the men Ken? Whatever happened to Skipper?

  Near the Barbies was a wall of Monster High dolls, a group even more anorexic than the Barbies. The Monster High kids had emaciated stick-figure bodies and balloon-like, goth white heads that were dramatically out of proportion with their arms and legs. They had fashion model eyelashes and pouty red lips, miniskirts and high heels. Names at once ghoulish and suggestive. Honey Swamp. Draculaura. Catty Noir.

  Beside them was a line called Fairy Tale High. The classics get slutty. The Little Mermaid in fishnets. Cinderella in leggings and a croptop. Alice in Wonderland in a blue-and-white-striped micro-dress that barely covered her ass.

  “Emiko has those leggings,” her daughter was saying, as she pointed at Cinderella.

  “I love them,” said Claudia. “I want a pair. They’re so hot.”

  An expression came to her: You’re a doll. Translation? You’ve done me a solid. Thank you.

  She’s a doll. Translation? She’s pretty. She’s compliant.

  A doll. Synonyms? A babe. A chick. A sweetie.

  Hours ago—museums ago—Richard had texted her that it was the girl he thought was named Sonja who he’d identified on the mortuary slab. The chemical blonde. She had not asked what next. What now. She had not asked whether this meant that the girl who had led him upstairs was still alive, or whether she was dead, too, and her body had simply not yet turned up. But it would. She had simply asked if he was okay. He’d texted he was.

  Okay. She had no idea what that word meant in the context of a morgue.

  “I like her dress,” Melissa was saying. She was pointing at Alice in Wonderland. Slut Alice in Wonderland.

  “I like that outfit,” said Claudia, motioning at the vest that barely hid Belle’s breasts. Slut Belle’s breasts.

  In all fairness, Kristin knew that once upon a time her Barbies had been pretty slutty. She had often undressed her Barbies and Kens, and allowed the dolls to go to town on each other. Spreading the girls’ legs as wide as she could. She’d been doing this while playing in the semidarkness underneath a robin’s-egg-blue blanket that she had draped across her parents’ dining room table.

  Good Lord, it had only been two or three years ago that she and Richard had been laughing as the two of them polished off a bottle of wine at all the ways they had encouraged their daughter’s Barbies to perform unspeakable acts, while Melissa’s head was turned or she was searching for a particular Barbie gown in that Tucker Tote. It was how they kept their sanity, they had confessed to each other—yes, they both did it—as they sat on the floor with their girl and played with her dolls for hours.

  All that had been changed by the condom. All that had been subsumed by the condom.

  Here was the inescapable reality: ten years from now if she did not instantly make the synaptic leap to rubber when she thought Barbie, it would only be due to Alzheimer’s. Early-onset Alzheimer’s. Or, maybe, a traumatic brain injury. She looked around at the walls of the toy store, which were pink. She noted that the paisley swirls on the floor were pink. The lighting was a little pink. Sure, it was possible that a decade from now she might also think pink when she thought Barbie. She very likely might think plastic.

  But first and forever? She was always going to think rubber.

  She looked at her watch. They should probably continue on their way to Grand Central. They had to catch a train home.

  …

  Richard knew this was neither a vision nor a dream, and his first reaction was flight. He should continue right past his driveway. Instead of braking, he should hit the gas pedal and drive up the thin street off Pondfield Road. Drive around the block. Just take a moment and try and figure out what the hell the girl was thinking. But he didn’t. His brother might do that, but he wouldn’t. Instead he glided up his gently sloping driveway and came to a stop just before the garage doors.

  The girl was sitting on the front stoop of his house, her chin resting on the knuckles of one hand, a cigarette dangling from the other. She was wearing a knit cap with the Giants’ logo—his team, a sign or a coincidence he couldn’t have said—and sunglasses, but he knew instantly it was her. He could see enough of her face. Her lips. Her posture. He recognized the leather jacket.

  But he would have known it was her regardless of what she was wearing. It wouldn’t have taken a sixth sense. It took only a glimpse.

  She didn’t move when he shut off the car engine and pulled the key from the ignition, but he could tell that she was watching him. He was watching her. She was wearing a miniskirt and boots, and he had one of those thoughts that was comically inappropriate in his mind, and caused his lips to quiver upward ever so slightly: What would the neighbors think? Hot girl in a miniskirt and boots, smoking a cigarette on my steps?

  Well, never mind what they thought. They couldn’t possibly think less of him. He couldn’t possibly think less of himself.

  Mostly, he realized, he was smiling because Alexandra was alive. That detective was wrong, all wrong. Thank God. (Had he murmured those two splendid words aloud in his seat? He thought he had.) Her decomposing body wasn’t about to wash ashore somewhere in Brooklyn or on Staten Island, or bump for hours against the stanchion of a Navy Yard dock before someone called 911 or fished it from the water. Nope. She had wound up…here. In Westchester. And she was, quite clearly, breathing. Not decapitated. Not drowned. He was so relieved that he was shivering ever so slightly when he climbed from the car. She didn’t stand until he had crossed the driveway and marched all the way up the slate walkway and front steps. When she finally did rise, she held her cigarette away from the two of them and bowed her head against his chest. He felt the wool cap against his neck and the earpiece to her sunglasses against his collarbone. He felt her whole body lean into him.

  “I bet you did not expect to find courtesan back here,” she murmured.

  Awkwardly he rubbed her shoulder blades. He felt simultaneously that it was morally wrong to touch her, and morally imperative that he did.

  “No,” he agreed, “I didn’t. I…”

  She waited.

  “I was afraid something had happened to you.”

  “You thought I might be dead.”

  “As a matter of fact, yes.”

  He felt the rise and fall of her chest as she breathed. “Nope. Still here.”

  “I’m very glad. I was afraid for you.” He wondered if she knew her partner was dead. Sonja. He considered telling her where he had been earlier that day, but then thought better of that idea. In time. Maybe.

  “I couldn’t think of anyplace else to go,” she murmured.

  “Well, I might have started with the police,” he said, a suggestion born more of paternalism, he hoped, than self-preservation.

  Abruptly she pushed him away with her free hand and took a step back. “No. I am not going to jail.”

  He wished he could see her eyes behind the sunglasses. Was this an admission that she had shot the Russia
n in the front hallway?

  “They showed me the Rikers Island. They told me about prisons in America,” she went on, her voice a little louder now, a little more frantic. “I know what goes on there. I know what really goes on there.”

  “Whoa,” he told her, putting his hands up, palms open. He wasn’t sure who they were, but presumed it was whoever had brought her to America and then, most likely, butchered her friend. “Let’s go inside. Let’s talk, okay? I want to know who you are. Who you really are. I want to know what you need—what I can do.”

  “You won’t call police guys?”

  He shook his head. “I can’t promise that I never will. But I won’t right this minute.”

  “Look…”

  “Go on.”

  “I’ve come because Sonja might have left something here by accident. Something important. I need it.”

  “I’m sure it’s long gone. The police were here for a couple of days. Anything Sonja left is in a police evidence locker somewhere. I mean it. They scoured the downstairs.”

  “It was upstairs.”

  He thought about this. He recalled what his wife had found in their daughter’s bedroom. “They were less thorough there,” he admitted. “What is it?”

  “A phone number. It was hidden in”—and she seemed to grow almost shy when she continued—“a condom wrapper. Sonja went upstairs with a man.”

  “I know.” He gazed for a long moment at the street and the houses around them “Okay, let’s go inside. We’ll look. We’ll talk there.”

  “You worry about people next door?” she asked.

  “Alexandra—and it is, Alexandra, right?”

  She gave him a strange half nod that he couldn’t quite decipher.

  “Well, Alexandra, the people next door are the least of my problems—and, I would wager, the least of yours.”

  …

  But the condom wrapper and the slip of paper weren’t there. They weren’t anywhere in the bedding, and they weren’t behind the mattress. Together Richard and Alexandra actually moved the bed, and they searched amid the clothing and books and video game discs that had wound up over time beneath the box spring. And Richard was relieved. He knew if he found the number he was going to give it to the police; he certainly wasn’t going to allow this girl to try and make a run for it with an illegal passport and fake credit cards.