“Hi, I’m Lily,” I said.
“Hey,” she said. I extended my hand. She gave me a limp little handshake and turned back to her computer.
“Um, is there anything in particular I should get started on?”
She laughed. I smiled, more out of nerves than anything else, and she noticed. “Sorry, not you.” She laughed again and kept typing. “Just go make sure all the computers are on and unlock the door. I’ll be up in a few minutes to help.”
As I passed the dispensary, I could hear Brittany complaining about me to another technician. “And then this moron slams into me, practically breaks my tailbone, and it all goes splat, everywhere …”
“I don’t know where they’re getting these receptionists,” the other woman said. “These girls just fuck everything up. You should see my books for the next two weeks. Disastrous.”
I wanted to scream, I went to Vassar! I’ve sold art to buyers in sixteen countries! But I knew the inevitable question would be: How did you screw all that up?
I stepped behind the desk and had the feeling that I had been left to man a ship, steering the prow into a day I knew nothing about, with instruments I didn’t understand how to use. The day before I had been so relieved to know I would have a few hours free from Deidre, her all-seeing gaze, but now I missed having directions, having rules. What if a guest came? What if someone had a question? What did I say if the phone rang? All that, and I was still feeling weak and disoriented from my hangover. I wished I could step out of my body for a few hours. I’d had that feeling often lately. I couldn’t stand being in my own skin.
As I waited for Carrie to come train me, I watched a woman wearing what looked like a safari guide outfit—bucket hat, khaki shorts, hiking boots, khaki vest with lots of pockets—make her way through the Swim Club. She climbed into the bank of plants that ran along the edge of the dome and starting snipping leaves and branches, other times misting a plant with a spray bottle, cupping a leaf tenderly in her hand. I was so engaged watching her that I didn’t see the woman approaching the spa until she had her hand on the door.
As she entered, I said, “Good morning,” sounding girlish, a little shrill.
The woman was petite, smaller than me, with thin blonde hair that was nearly translucent. “I have a wax appointment,” she said.
“Sure, the last name, please?”
“Greer. First name is Ellen.”
She was booked for an 8 a.m. I checked her in the way Emily had showed me, slowly moving through the series of clicks and keys, trying to pass off my hesitation as intentional—the measured, calm way someone who worked in a spa should move, should speak. “Yes, Mrs. Greer, we have you with Brittany today for your Brazilian bikini wax. Follow me, please.” The spa offered four types of waxes. According to Deidre, one finger-width in from the crease of your thighs was a touch-up. Two fingers in was a standard bikini wax. Three fingers in was a Brazilian, and they were doing something new now, she said, called an hourglass, which was two fingers down from the top of the bikini area. It helped elongate your stomach and make you look slimmer. I led Ellen Greer to the locker room and tried not to think of Deidre holding up six fingers side by side. I couldn’t imagine starting my day by paying almost $100 to have a stranger rip off all my pubic hair. It was the kind of thing I would have loved to talk to Ramona about—how violent beauty could be, how misogynistic, how cruel. Mrs. Greer was petite, muscles toned with expensive barre and pilates classes, fat edited away by five-day cleanses, green juice, kale. A woman who was constantly negotiating with her body, thinking of it as something to be punished or tamed.
While Mrs. Greer was in for her service, the man who had cleaned up the mud—Luis—came back to the front desk.
I tried to start on a new foot. “Hi,” I said. “Good morning.” Again, he didn’t even look at me. I understood. I would hate someone like me, too. He must have thought I was tremendously careless, someone who made messes and left them for other people to clean.
I wanted to look busy but wasn’t sure what else I could do. The phone rang twice, both times people calling from their rooms to ask what time the buffet opened. Deidre said that the casino had programmed them incorrectly and so the button that was supposed to connect callers to other places within the hotel was accidentally routed to the spa, and so most of the calls we got were actually meant for other facilities. The company required a very specific greeting, which I garbled with my cottony, hungover tongue: “Thank you for calling the spa. This is Lily, how may I assist you?”
In front of me, Luis wiped down the brushed steel table in the magazine area, pausing to pick up an issue of Glamour and squint at the cover.
Maybe I needed to try a different tack. “Does this place always feel so creepy?” I asked him. “It’s weird, right? It’s just so bright and empty and stark. Like being inside a Josef Albers painting. The one with the white squares.” No response. But that was wrong, too. I just sounded like more of a snob, some spoiled white girl babbling on about abstract art. I cleared my throat. “Look, I’m really sorry about this morning. I’m Lily,” I said. “I just started.” Still, he wouldn’t turn around. I gave up and simply watched him work the paper towel in small, slow circles.
I doodled on the edge of a spa menu as I waited for Carrie to come and tell me what to do next. Time was creeping by. 8:31. 8:35. 8:37. I turned my back to the desk and pulled my phone out of a gift certificate box, held it the way Emily had showed me the day before. No new texts, no missed calls.
“Hey!” a voice said behind me. I jumped, and my phone slipped from my grip, landed with a sickening crunch on the marble floor. “Jesus, it’s just me. I came through the back. I thought I’d get here early. I’m sure Carrie has been completely useless to you.”
Emily. Just Emily. When I picked up my phone, I saw that the screen was spiderwebbed with cracks. I cradled it in my palm like I would have a small, injured animal.
“Oh shit, I’m really sorry. That sucks.” She took the phone from my hand, grimaced, handed it back. “There’s a guy over on the boardwalk who will fix it for twenty-five bucks. I went to him last month. Right near the Taj Mahal. Or what used to be the Taj Mahal, at least. Hey, are you okay? No offense, but you look like you’ve been hit by a truck.”
“Hangover.”
“Ah. You’ll learn not to go out before you open.”
“It’s been a shitty morning either way.” I told her about running into Brittany in the back hall.
“She’s a total twat. Ignore her. They’re like children. Just can’t listen to their bullshit. You’re the one with the power and don’t forget it. You can pack their books with appointments if you like them, or if they piss you off, then you can punish them for it.”
“What’s the deal with that older guy who comes in and cleans and like takes the recycling out? He refuses to talk to me.”
“You mean Luis?
I nodded. “I tried to talk to him like three times and he’s totally ignored me.”
“Well, he’s deaf. And mute. And he doesn’t use sign language, but he can read and write. Sometimes I think he pretends to understand less than he does—he’s smart enough to tune all of us out.”
“Oh—that explains it.” But I felt even worse than before. No wonder he didn’t like me, yammering on and on at him, oblivious.
“You’ll see. He’s really observant—he notices a lot about people. Once, when I couldn’t find Carrie, he could tell I was looking for her and he pretended to put a finger down his throat.”
“Wait, why?”
“Oh, you don’t know yet. Well, you would have found out soon enough anyway. She’s bulimic. She uses that bathroom right next to her office. It’s pretty disgusting.”
“So what has he noticed about you?” I couldn’t help myself. I was so curious about Emily, about what she was doing here. It seemed like my chance to ask more.
“Oh, probably that I’m a sinner, like my parents said when I left. Good as dead as far as they’
re concerned.” She was smiling, but some of the mirth left her voice. “What about you? Your parents like your ex?” She gestured to my shattered phone.
“How did you know …”
“Come on. I could tell you were seriously pining when I came up to the desk. Let’s hear it. What’s the deal there?”
“He … well.” I fumbled for the right words. God, how to describe what it had really been like? The recording of Ramona and Matthew in bed. The nude she painted of him, him looking smug, imperial, in an Eames rocking chair, every inch the enfant terrible. The text messages I sent. Matthew, where are you? Matthew, what’s going on?
“He slept with someone else. She’s a painter,” I said. “She was someone I was hoping to represent at the gallery where I worked. Matthew was—is—one of their clients. He’s a sculptor. Quite well known, actually.” Something I had thought about a lot over the past few weeks was how Matthew had never wanted for anything—not attention, not money, not admiration, not fame. How it made sense that he thought he could do what he did and that I might stay. I thought of his mother, a tidy, brisk woman in her sleek, modern house nestled in the woods of New Canaan. The summer place on the cliffs of Newport. The father who flew in from London every few months, who hid his fondness for red meat and gin in bespoke Turnbull & Asser. It had been a part of my initial attraction to Matthew—not necessarily the money, but the self-assurance it gave him. The unassailable confidence touched his every movement, from the way he hailed a cab to the way he peeled an orange.
I remembered when I first started at the gallery, the clichés that were being bandied around about Matthew Whitehall, the twenty-nine-year-old wunderkind. The rising star. I had been skeptical until I saw one of his newer pieces, a bronze of a couple embracing—there was an athletic quality about the way Matthew had rendered them, something nearly violent, that I found captivating. The articulation of their tendons, the definition of their muscles, the sense of the energy coiled in their limbs, as though they might just as soon launch themselves at one another and collide. I studied the piece until I felt something else—the rubber-band ping of attention directed toward me. I looked to see Matthew across the room, his eyes on my face. The knowing way the corners of his mouth turned up. Now I couldn’t help but wonder if, from that moment, he’d seen me as a pawn.
I wanted to ask Emily more about herself. Did she have a boyfriend? Girlfriend? Maybe that was how she ended up here, too, after her stint in L.A. Maybe she was also retreating, also biding her time at the spa. Though I wondered who wouldn’t be totally devoted to Emily, with her humor and her beauty and her strange, endearing combination of crassness and restraint.
“Ah. You’ll have to tell me more later. Deidre, incoming.” Emily nodded her head in the direction of the front door. I was relieved, for now, to have my attention jerked out of the past. I was still at the point where I could lose hours inventorying every detail for a clue about our end: the first date at the Cuban restaurant in Williamsburg, when Matthew took me home and used the belt of his bathrobe to tie my hands above my head, perhaps testing me for pliability. My first lunch with Ramona, when she ordered a rare burger and I watched the bloody juice run over her hands as she ate.
Deidre gave Emily the rundown for the day, and I found myself looking past them both, through the glass and down the hall. I hated that I was waiting for them, Clara and Des. You are recovering from a broken heart. That meeting them had felt like the first thing that had really happened to me since I had been back. I was watching so intently that it took me a minute to hear Deidre saying my name.
“Lily? Lily. Please tell me how your training is coming along.”
* * *
I GOT lost twice trying to remember Emily’s directions to the cafeteria: take a left at the first turn in the back hall, then a quick right, then take the freight elevator, then at the third floor make another left and a quick right after that. The first time, I ended up in a dead-end hallway filled with linen carts heaped with damp towels. The second time, I pushed through a door that led to a loading dock. Three men in janitorial uniforms looked up from their cigarettes to eye me warily.
“Looking for a delivery, sweetheart?” one of them said. “I’d load you up all right.” I was too stunned and insulted to say anything back, so I simply turned away as the three of them laughed.
I found the freight elevator on the third try. When the doors groaned closed, I leaned back against the far wall and shut my eyes. I willed the elevator to get stuck, so that I could stay like that for hours, alone and quiet, no one asking me for anything at all. But all too soon, the doors opened again.
The caf smelled depressing, even from a distance. All of the hot food had an overcooked, stewed quality. I let a grim-faced woman splatter a scoop of mashed potatoes onto my tray and helped myself to a pile of iceberg lettuce, brown at the edges, and a mealy tomato slice, then topped it off with a heap of croutons. I slid into a booth with a plastic-covered bench that squeaked every time I moved. I knew I should eat: my stomach had gotten better and I was starving, yet all of the food on my plate seemed like the most depressing version of itself.
As I poked at my lunch I thought about how, after my dad’s funeral, the casino had sent a catered meal to my mother’s house, but the timing was off and by then anyone who had been staying with us—my grandparents from Ohio, my aunt and uncle from Arizona—had already gone. Huge silver chafing dishes full of roast beef, pasta in a vodka cream sauce, shrimp fra diavolo, scalloped potatoes, Caesar salad, chocolate mousse, two kinds of cheesecake, and a greasy paper sack of garlic bread for just the two of us. We ate in the living room, so we didn’t have to sit at the table with his empty chair, the rich sauces roiling in our guts.
I studied the rest of the room. Everyone grouped together, according to their jobs. The servers who worked at the steak house. The craps dealers, the blackjack dealers, the poker dealers. The cocktail waitresses, the front desk associates. The pit bosses, the junket reps, the security guys, the fussy cluster of secretaries who brought their own silverware from home. The only other person I saw from the spa was Luis, who brought his tray outside and scattered bits of bread for the birds. He must have clacked the tray down on the table loudly, because the three women smoking under the nearby awning started and gave him the eye, but he didn’t seem to notice. Or maybe he did it on purpose. Maybe he liked the vibration of the impact in his fingers. Maybe it made him feel heard.
I felt a pang as I watched him, a reflexive desire to store away stories and facts to tell Matthew, to pocket and package everything I saw and present it to him later. I wanted to tell him about Luis, to talk about what it would be like to navigate the world in so much silence. Matthew loved stuff like that: stories of extremes. I wondered what it felt like with no noise to crowd his thoughts.
When I came back from lunch, I worked on memorizing the spa menu and its descriptions of services. We were trained to upsell whenever possible, but of course the company never called it that. Enhancing relaxation meant add-ons to services: an extra exfoliant, a foot scrub. Pampering yourself at home meant buying products. I had to hand it to the copywriters. They made everything sound like a gift, even when the guest was the one footing the bill.
“What’s the difference between the Swedish Massage and the Premium Massage?” I asked Emily.
“Nothing but the price, I’m afraid.”
“Well, then what do you say when people ask you?”
“I tell them that the Premium includes acupressure and reflexology.”
“What are those?”
“Hell if I know. Most people will want to look like they know what you’re talking about, like they do this all the time, so hardly anyone ever asks. People are always afraid of looking stupid. I suggest using that to your advantage as much as possible. Shame motivates almost every interaction.”
“Okay, Freud,” I teased, but I already felt like she might be right.
“Think about it. How many times do you do something,
or don’t do something, because you’re afraid you’re going to be embarrassed?”
“All the time.”
“You and everyone else. If we’re not being fat-shamed, slut-shamed, mommy-shamed, we’re worried about being seen as deficient for not knowing a random term for a scalp massage or a foot rub. It’s bullshit, but it’s true.”
“Emily, can I ask you a question? Why the hell do you work here?” I hoped she understood what I meant. She was clearly brilliant. I knew I only wanted to be here as long as it took to save up enough to get back to the city—three, four months. After all, I was just pretending. But what did Emily want? What mantra got her through her days?
She rolled her head in a circle, stretching her neck. As she did, a gold cross on a chain came untucked from the neckline of her shirt, and she reached for it without looking and tucked it back in. “Great question. I didn’t go to college. So this, believe it or not, is the best I can do around here. There are hardly any jobs to begin with, now that everything on the other side of town is shutting down. Plus, it helps me keep up my acting skills. I have to pretend that the people who come here don’t make me want to rip my fucking head off. Present company excluded.”
“I’m flattered,” I said.
“You’ll see what I mean.”
“Lily?” Deidre called. Her voice echoed from the hair salon. “Please come into my office.”
“Time for you to get another lesson in Ass-Kissing 101.”
“I think that’ll make my hangover come back.”
“She can make you feel the misery of every hangover you’ve ever felt, all at once.”
As I walked back to Deidre’s office, I pictured Emily on a stage or a film set. The way her face could shift from one mood to the next, the way she was conscious of how she moved through space, her gestures precise, her posture perfect, the way she so easily pretended to click through the books when someone asked her to schedule an appointment, so that they’d feel lucky and grateful when she managed to book them a space, like they’d received a special favor—all the while I was watching the empty slots scroll by and had to turn my face away so that I didn’t give anything up. Was she like that with everyone? What secrets did she hide with her blunt humor, that quick wit? I wondered what aspects of her life, her personality, she wasn’t letting me see.
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