The Insatiables

by Brittany Terwilliger

  “I love it,” I said.

  “Max said that Gus wishes we’d gone to Barcelona instead.”

  “Why?”

  She looked around and lowered her voice as if the golf course might be bugged. “Apparently Gus and Clive take two of their Italian clients there every year to go to this high-end brothel they all like. They buy the whole place out for a weekend and set it up like a game of hide-and-seek. Max said they divide the prostitutes into teams, half good and half evil. Then they hide a Rolex somewhere in the brothel and whichever guy finds it first gets to keep it. The guys wear tuxedos and carry laser guns, and the “evil” prostitutes kidnap them and the “good” ones help them escape. So it’s like laser tag but with lots of sex and tying people up.”

  “Wow.” I kicked a pebble as I walked.

  “Yeah. Boys.”

  “So you’re a runner, huh?” I asked, changing the subject. “I should be doing the same thing.” It was complete BS; I hated running.

  “Oh, you should come with me some time,” she said eagerly.

  Crap. “Sure, that’d be great,” I said.

  “I’m not a long-distance jogger, just a few miles normally,” Lauren said. “But it looks like it’s mostly uphill here, so, good for the glutes.”

  Great, I thought. Now I would have to start avoiding her.

  “Okay, well, tell Gus I’ll be there in a few minutes,” she said and took off again. I flashed a quick wave, and she smiled, knowing we weren’t friends but pretending we were.

  I stopped to assess where I was, not entirely sure I was walking in the right direction. The place Gus had described in his email appeared to be just over the next hill.

  My phone buzzed in my pocket, and I checked it. An email from Rousseau. I smiled giddily.

  “How is the place?” it said.

  “Beautiful,” I typed and hit send.

  “When are you going to invite me to visit?” he wrote back.

  It was a thrilling and unexpected question. I stopped walking and sat down on the grass by a tree. Rousseau writing to me again—that was surprise enough. Rousseau suggesting we actually meet—that was someone else’s life. I didn’t know how to respond. What did he want? Did he actually care about me? Or was I just a diversion? Was I overthinking? I wanted to give him what he wanted. I also wanted not to ruin this, whatever it was, either by smothering or by neglect. I wondered about his marriage. Did she know he was writing to me, that he’d kissed me? They were European; maybe they were more open-minded than Americans about things like that. Or maybe they loved each other so uniquely and so completely that he could never love anyone else, and I was nothing to him. Maybe this was all nothing. I fell back on our San Francisco repartee.

  “Never,” I wrote. “Biot doesn’t allow Rousseaus. I checked.”

  “Ha,” he replied. “Five bucks says Gus invites me down before the end of the month.”

  I stood and started walking again. “You must be special.”

  “I am.”

  “Aren’t you supposed to be working?” I wrote.

  “I’m at work right now, I’ll have you know. Desperately struggling to stay awake at a very boring meeting.”

  “What would they do if you just got up and walked out?”

  “Give me dirty looks,” he replied.

  “Do it.”

  “You are a bad influence.” I could feel his smile coming through the digital screen. It gave me butterflies.

  I put the phone back in my pocket, hiked the steep hill at the edge of the third hole and, slightly out of breath, walked past the clubhouse. The afternoon sun washed the pink bricks of the sidewalk so brightly they looked white. I passed through a metal gate leading to a small courtyard, boozy with honeysuckle. It was cool in the shade. Inside the door there was a stack of paintings leaning against the wall. From the sounds of the voices echoing off the tile floor, Max was already there.

  “. . . not here to do that,” I heard him say in a raised voice.

  “You don’t need to do anything,” I heard Gus reply. “You just need to know how to motivate people to do good work for you. Didn’t you ever read Huck Finn?”

  I knocked on the edge of the doorway where I stood, to let them know I was there.

  “Who is it?” Gus shouted.

  I announced myself. Gus emerged in the hallway singing welcomes, motioned for me to follow him inside, and then meandered into his white and stainless steel kitchen. It was a strange feeling being inside Gus’s house—too intimate—even if it was a rental. Gus wasn’t quite a real person to me, and I wasn’t sure I wanted him to be. Also, it was hard to look at him now and not picture him in a bow tie chasing hookers with a laser gun.

  “What are all these?” I asked, pointing to the stacks next to the door.

  He set a bottle of chardonnay on the kitchen counter. “Paintings I shipped from the States.”

  I wondered if they were expensive, and then mentally answered my own question.

  Gus opened the bottle and side-eyed me. “I couldn’t leave them in Ohio; somebody might steal them. I know those thugs Tim Cook and Jeff Bezos have my house under surveillance. I’ll be damned if they’re going to get within thirty feet of these babies.”

  I looked around the kitchen. “Can I do anything to help you?”

  He poured three glasses of wine and put them on a tray.

  “Sure,” he said. “You can carry this into the other room. Thanks.”

  I followed Gus into his cavernous living room and immediately noticed the cappuccino machine—the shiny black Jura from outside his office—sitting on a sideboard. Of course he wouldn’t leave that behind to be abused in his absence. I set the tray down on the table and handed Max a glass of wine. Max looked at me as if I’d ruined something by showing up, but I was too busy looking around to care much. Gus’s place was nicer than any of ours, full of art and exotic plants and relics from Gus’s extensive travels. A menagerie of Veblen goods I hadn’t even known existed. One wall of the living room was entirely made of glass in order to showcase the pristine Ducati parked in the all-white adjoining garage. There was what appeared to be an alligator-hide bar, stacked with bottles of liquor, the kind that, I learned, was bottled after being poured over women’s bare breasts. He even had a remote-controlled toilet in the guest bath, complete with foot heater.

  “Not a bad life, eh?” Max said. He looked voracious, as if he might open his mouth and suck the paint off the walls.

  “Was this already here before he moved in?” I asked, motioning to the glass wall.

  “I had some adjustments made before I got here,” Gus said. “Nothing extreme.” His eyes met mine for a second and a ghost of a smile twitched on his mouth, as that of a person trying to appear nonchalant while searching my face for envy.

  More knocks at the door announced the arrival of Darren and Lauren, along with a fresh gust of honeysuckle air. Darren dropped The Backpack gingerly to the floor and took a seat at Gus’s glass dining room table next to Lauren, who had changed from her running clothes into a burgundy wrap dress. Max and I picked up our glasses and joined them there.

  “Did you have a nice run?” Max said.

  Lauren’s lips fluttered into a small smile when he looked at her. “Yeah, it helps with the jet lag.”

  I poured Lauren and Darren each a glass of wine while Gus opened another bottle. He set it on the table, then crossed the room, picked up a thin-handled coffee cup and made himself a cappuccino from the shiny, black machine. He didn’t offer the rest of us one and we didn’t ask. I wondered, though, why it was that Gus was so liberal with the wine, and yet so stingy with the cappuccinos.

  “Okay, guys,” Gus said, taking his seat at the head of the table. “Thanks for coming out. This shouldn’t take too long, but I want to at least establish everyone’s roles so we can get started. Just a reminder that all
of you will be eligible to advance if you do well here. I’ll decide after the launch whether you’ll stay at your current level or move up. So do a good job, and your future at Findlay will be bright.”

  I looked at the eyes around the table. If there were ever five more ravenous people in a room together they would have eaten each other.

  “This is April,” Gus said. “The launch is in January. So we have nine months. The home office sent us these launch plans, one for each of you.” He nodded to Darren, who immediately pulled a stack of binders out of The Backpack and passed them around. We flipped through pages of basic charts (“a product launch has three phases: strategy, development, and execution”), a calendar of vague and obvious benchmarks we were expected to hit (“launch to customers on January 15”), and some product data so technical that none of us could decipher it. Thanks a lot, home office geniuses. It appeared we were going to be inventing this wheel from scratch. All we really knew was that we had this product, the Tantalus, and that it needed to be introduced to our sales force and customers in a big and memorable way that simultaneously educated and attracted. Tasks like generating timelines and producing sales pitches and drafting training plans still existed in the ambiguous realm of “somebody else does it.”

  “So, where was I?” Gus said. “Yes, yes, roles and responsibilities. Max will be the Executive Marketing Manager. Darren and Halley are support staff. And Lauren, you’ll be in charge of training the sales team.”

  Lauren asked, “What’s my title?”

  “I don’t know,” Gus replied. “We haven’t gotten that far. Max, what do you think?”

  “Hmm . . .” Max said, “Director of Sales Training?”

  Gus shook his head. “Clive will freak out if anyone has the phrase ‘Director of Sales’ in their title.”

  Max leaned back, linked his hands behind his head, and looked at the ceiling. “Okay, how about Sales Training Director?”

  “That doesn’t make sense,” Lauren said. “In everyone else’s title the ‘Director’ part comes before the thing they’re directing. It sounds weird for mine to come at the end; people will wonder if there’s something wrong with me.”

  Max rolled his eyes. “How about Director of Training for Sales?”

  Darren gulped his wine and poured himself another glass.

  “I don’t like the ‘for’ in there,” Lauren said.

  “Let’s just call you ‘Director of Training,’” Gus said. “Will that work?”

  Lauren thought about this for a moment, clearly displeased, but eventually relented. “Fine,” she said, lips pursed.

  That was all we accomplished that day.

  16

  The next day, my new car was delivered. I gathered my keys and my bag and locked up on my way out, pinching a fingerful of lavender from the pot by the door. The warm camel-colored interior of the Passat smelled like new leather. I rolled down the windows and wound through the narrow country roads, past roadside fruit stands and red-awninged boulangeries and billboard ads for French mobile phone companies with big white bubble letters. I negotiated the scary roundabout in front of a store called Le Clerc, tiny cars flying at full speed through the tiny exit and into the parking lot like they were on rails. I got honked at, yelled at, gestured and stared at for my slow driving and my fear of picking the wrong lane.

  I didn’t have a Euro coin to rent a shopping cart, so I pulled a blue plastic wheelie basket around the store, gathering cheeses and baguettes, fruit and chestnuts, and working to block out the smell of freshly bleached dead lake and bait shop emanating from the poisson section. At the checkout, the cashier chucked the items down the conveyor belt at me, not a grocery bag in sight. And as it dawned on me—watching other patrons unfurl rumpled plastic sacks and pack their own groceries—that unlimited free grocery sacks and pimple-faced high schoolers standing at the end of the chute packing those sacks for me (and, at certain stores, even carrying them to my car!) were a privilege that I’d always taken for granted, the checkout girl lifted my clear plastic bag of apricots and spoke to me in words I did not understand.

  “Blah blah blah blah blah.”

  “Vous parlez Anglais?” This was practically the only French phrase I knew.

  “Non,” she replied. I took that as a “no.”

  I was a deer in the headlights with no idea what to do next. The clock ticked.

  “Blah blah,” the girl said.

  There were a few awkward seconds in which we both stared each other down. She held the bag up in the air and dropped it down onto her other palm in demonstration, but I was as confounded as ever.

  “BLAH BLAH!” the girl said, progressively louder, as if my problem was simply bad hearing. I stared. So did other people, actually, considering that this person was now shouting at me.

  The girl kept performing the same bag-dropping motion over and over again, and my face burned with embarrassment. I felt the acute loneliness that comes with knowing you are the only person in the world in this exact situation at this exact moment.

  Eventually a guy standing behind me in line said, “You need to weigh them,” as if speaking to a small child.

  D’oh. I hadn’t even noticed the weigh and label stations.

  I wanted to tell the checkout girl never mind, I could go without the fruit, just keep it. I was holding up a long line of disgruntled French people. But I didn’t know how to say that. Or even mime it. I stood for a second longer. The checkout girl shoved the bags of produce into my hands, smiled patiently, and waved at me to go, go now, to weigh this stuff and come back when I was done.

  “It’s okay?” I asked. “All these people are waiting . . .” I trailed off as she waved me away. I looked back at the other customers, who clearly thought I was tres stupide.

  I ran back to the produce section, dropped the bags individually onto the scale, pressed the corresponding picture button, affixed the paper label sticker to the side of each bag, and ran headlong back to the checkout where the line of customers and the checkout girl were still waiting.

  Groceries tossed, unbagged, back into the wheelie basket, I handed the girl my American credit card. And then it was declined. Mortification complete.

  The bank had frozen my account for suspected fraudulent activity, because no Dayton girl would be using her credit card at a grocery store in France. I had no other way of paying for my stuff. I lifted my arms in resignation and apologized to the cashier, who blinked at me in disbelief, then I abandoned my groceries and left, wishing I had a mask to hide my face. This was not the European romance I’d imagined. This was an episode of Looney Tunes and I was Pepé Le Pew and France was the cat who thought I smelled bad. My childish dreams of this place—the cafés, the purple fields of lavender, riding through the countryside on a vintage bicycle with a basketful of fresh baguettes—died right then and there. I would have gone back to Dayton immediately, back to Celeste and Phil Collins and Level 1, if I could’ve.

  “So far, living with Lauren and Gus and Max is like being marooned on Gilligan’s Island with a bunch of Mrs. Howells. I’ve only been here for a couple weeks, and all day long I’m getting emails from them. ‘Halley, my dishwasher isn’t working.’ ‘Halley, find me a restaurant for dinner tonight.’ And, my personal favorite, ‘Halley, there’s a cat outside my apartment that won’t go away,’” I wrote.

  “What do they want you to do about it?” Rousseau wrote back.

  “I don’t know,” I replied. “I’ve been forwarding all their emails to the property manager.”

  “Stop being so competent, darling, and maybe they’ll leave you alone.”

  “Yeah, good plan. That’ll show them.”

  I put my phone on the side of the bed to finish drying my hair, then picked it back up again to read his last message. Stop being so competent, darling . . . There were so many things I wanted to say to him. So many questions I wanted to ask
. It was all still so new, but the existence of him, always there on my phone, keeping me company, believing I was significant, was the only thing preventing me from going to pieces right now. When Rousseau and I conversed, for those moments I got to bask in the sunshine of my best self. I looked forward to his messages with a glad sparkle that contained all my previously held affection for Phil Collins, my complex attachment to Celeste, my need for the stability that I’d never noticed Dayton and my family provided. But I was playing a dangerous game; I knew I was. How long would it take for Gus or Anthony to find out about this? And what could I possibly ever mean to him?

  I stepped into a black and gray-striped maxi dress and swiped some mascara over my eyelashes. Then I picked up the phone again and began to type.

  “Do you talk to everyone the way you talk to me?”

  “What do you mean?” he replied.

  It wasn’t the response I expected, and I squirmed.

  “Just that if Gus found out I was talking to you like this, I’d probably be in trouble,” I wrote.

  “Well I’m not going to tell him, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

  “I’m not worried,” I typed, then reconsidered. Eventually I would have to say it, so I might as well say it now. “I guess I am worried. It’s not just the work thing. I’ve never been friends like this with a man who is married before.” It must have sounded so provincial, but at least it was true.

  “Oh, are you upset about that?”

  “Aren’t you?”

  “No,” he wrote. “I hope that doesn’t sound bad. I don’t know, it seems like I’ve known you all my life or something.”

  I got that same shimmery feeling I’d had sitting next to him in San Francisco, as if he’d reached through the screen and brushed my neck with his fingers.

  “And the answer is no,” he wrote, “I don’t talk to everyone the way I talk to you. Frankly, I don’t talk much to anyone at all. Just you.”

  When I realized what he was saying I almost lost my mind with joy. So this was something then.