She wondered what the hell she had been thinking allowing her husband to have a bachelor party at their house. She tried to recall whose idea it was, and couldn’t. She just couldn’t.
“No,” Kristin answered carefully. “He’s in the same amount of trouble. There’s really nothing new here. It’s just…”
“It’s just what?”
Her brother, both because he was a therapist and because he was older, sometimes felt entitled to chide her for being averse to confrontation. Sometimes when the family was gathered for Thanksgiving or Christmas and she would mention how difficult the school principal was or how badly some parents were behaving, he would encourage her to stand up for herself. He would tell her to draw a line in the sand. Well, this time she had. She thought of her conversations with Richard since that first phone call in the small hours of the morning, and she certainly felt she had asked him the tough questions. She was furious and hurt and she felt betrayed.
“It’s just that people are already talking about what happened. I guess I didn’t expect that word would spread so fast,” she tried to explain to Melissa, and for the first time she saw herself the way other people might see her. She felt ashamed and (somehow) inadequate, which brought back all of the anger she had been feeling earlier that day in the guest bedroom at her mother’s. Was she not pretty enough for Richard? Not sexy enough? Not…erotic enough? Did her husband need more? Want more? Did he want something—someone—else?
She was, she realized, embarrassed. That was the word. She was…embarrassed. How could he be so cavalier with their lives? How could he go and risk ruining all they had built?
Suddenly she wasn’t sure she could bear to be around him after what he had done to their marriage. To their family. At least she couldn’t bear to be around him right now. Certainly not tonight.
Earlier today she had wanted stability for Melissa. That had been her goal. She wanted this nightmare behind them, and until it was she wanted to minimize the stress on her child. She and Richard had never fought in front of the girl, and she had hoped—expected, in fact—that they never would. But what sort of role model was she for her daughter if she seemed to condone this sort of behavior from her husband? If she didn’t, as her brother would have said, stand up for herself?
“The story is on TV?” her daughter was asking.
“Yes, it is.”
Melissa seemed to think about this for a second and nodded. Then she looked down at her own copy of the Playbill. Kristin realized that the girl was afraid to look at her.
“But it’ll be okay, sweetie,” she said, stroking the side of the child’s head, running her fingernails gently behind her ear. She could feel own her heart racing and took a breath. She had come to a decision: Richard would have to spend tonight at a hotel. Maybe tomorrow night, too. “It really will,” she added.
She didn’t try to smile when she spoke; that would have been impossible. She knew the fear she was feeling for the child was unreasonable, but she was unable to reassure herself when she thought about boys and men and the images they had of women in the digital age. Men were predators, and this little girl beside her—her child—was just too beautiful.
…
When Richard returned to his mother-in-law’s apartment, he presented her with the flowers he had bought, and then together they went to the kitchen to put them in a large vase. The girls weren’t back yet from the theater. It was awkward, but Richard took some comfort in his mother-in-law’s absolutely remarkable ability to steer clear of unpleasant subjects. She asked him about work. She had him show her the things he had bought for his family, the reasons why he had gone on the shopping spree conveniently forgotten. Or, more precisely, avoided. It was impossible to forget what had occurred last night.
Just as he was starting to put the gifts back in their boxes, Philip phoned yet again. This time Richard took the call, disappearing into the guest bedroom so they could speak in private. He didn’t apologize for not picking up earlier, but he began by explaining that he had been meeting with a lawyer and then had gone shopping for Kristin and Melissa. He added that the police had kicked him and his family out of his house.
“Well, thank God you’re not home,” his younger brother said. “Consider yourself lucky.”
“Why?”
“Your place is under siege.”
Though he was alone, Richard found himself nodding. He thought of the TV news trucks on the street at the edge of his driveway.
“My building has a doorman and I’m on the fourth floor, so they can’t get to me. But I’m also not going out. No fucking way. I will live on Chinese delivery and whatever the hell I have in my refrigerator. Still, I’m going to have to tip Sean big-time come Christmas,” Philip said, referring to the fellow who was on duty in the lobby that afternoon. His brother’s apartment was just off the East River promenade in Brooklyn Heights.
“How many reporters are downstairs?”
“According to Sean, five. At least it was five the last time he checked. Three men, two women. Some TV, some print.”
“How is Nicole?”
“No idea.”
“What do you mean, no idea?”
“She’s not talking to me. She’s holed up in her studio.”
“Well, there’s your answer. That’s how she’s doing.”
“I wouldn’t say she is overreacting exactly, but it would be nice if she saw our side.”
“Our side?”
“We could have been killed! My God, two people were murdered in cold blood in your house. How were we supposed to know the strippers were going to go postal? It was awful.”
“They weren’t strippers.”
“Fine. It wasn’t our fault that the entertainment went postal. It was still awful. And it was supposed to be just a regular old bachelor party. My bachelor party. A guy’s got a right to a bachelor party, doesn’t he?”
“Philip, it wasn’t a bachelor party. It was a…”
“It was a what?”
“It was a freaking disaster is what it was.”
“But it wasn’t my fault. It wasn’t your fault.”
“Philip, not trying to be judgmental here—”
“Then don’t.”
“Look, you fucked one of the girls.”
“You did, too.”
“I didn’t.”
“Fine, you took her upstairs and did whatever. None of my business. That’s not the point. It was my bachelor party. Grooms fuck strippers at their bachelor parties all the time. I’ve told you the shit that goes down at the hotel. I’m not proud of what I did, but if the girls hadn’t lost their minds, none of this would have been a problem. We would have had a good time with some jiggly little things and moved on. We wouldn’t have reporters camped out on our doorsteps right now. We wouldn’t have spent hours in a fucking police station last night. And my fiancée wouldn’t be so royally pissed off that who the hell knows if she’s actually going to marry me two weeks from today.”
Richard heard his mother-in-law turn on the radio in her bedroom. Classical music. She had turned the volume up high, either because her hearing was suspect or she wanted to give him privacy. He gently pushed the guest bedroom door closed with the toe of his shoe.
“Grooms don’t fuck strippers all the time,” he told Philip.
“A, they do. The next time you’re at a place like Thong, go upstairs with one of the girls to a private room. And B, it’s a fine line.”
“What is?”
“How much worse is it really to have a naked woman grinding her crotch against yours in a lap dance and—pardon my French—you whipping it out? Obviously, the latter is worse. I get it. But, seriously, how much worse is it really?”
“Listen to yourself. It’s a lot worse.”
“I’m not so sure,” his brother said, his tone petulant and defensive. “It’s all just foreplay. A couple Fridays ago when Spencer and I were there—”
“Where? Thong?”
“Yeah. We took a
couple of girls upstairs, got a little nasty, and when I got home, I was awesome with Nicole. A beast.”
“You made love to your fiancée after going to a strip club?”
“I showered!”
“That wasn’t my point.”
“And my point is simply that no one was hurt,” Philip insisted. But then, when he continued a second later, he had lowered his voice and sounded a little worried. “But this will blow over, right?”
“Are you asking me my opinion or trying to reassure yourself?”
“I mean, as a culture we have the attention span of five-year-olds. Don’t you think? Tomorrow we will be on to the next human disaster. And, maybe a disaster we should give a rat’s ass about.”
“Meaning two dead people in my house isn’t a disaster we should give a rat’s ass about?”
“You know what I mean: they were hookers who killed some mobster jerks. This isn’t, I don’t know, a bazillion starving children somewhere in Africa.”
Richard looked at his watch. The musical had probably ended half an hour ago. Kristin and Melissa would be back any minute. He tried to will his younger brother to ask him about them, but he knew it wasn’t likely. Philip just wasn’t hardwired that way.
“Yeah,” he said simply, allowing a sliver of sarcasm into his voice. “This isn’t a job for the Red Cross. I agree.”
“You talk to Mom and Dad?”
He knew he should call them. Should have called them. Any second now, one of their friends was going to tell them what they had just seen on TV, utterly thrilled to have something to discuss other than angioplasties or Coumadin or someone’s hip replacement surgery. His parents had retired three years ago to Fort Lauderdale, buying a house in one of those developments deep into what had once been the Everglades. There was a golf course that sometimes had alligators among the hazards. Everyone was between the age of sixty and embalmed. “No,” he answered. “I haven’t.”
“Me neither. I think it’s almost best to wait for them to call me and then I can say, ‘Mom, I didn’t want to worry you. It was scary, but I’m okay.’ You know, sound brave and stoic.”
“That’s you, Philip. Brave and stoic.”
“So what’s next? What did your lawyer say? Spencer’s wigging out. He’s worried he’s looking at some serious legal misery. He’s convinced this little clusterfuck is going to bury him in legal fees.”
“It very well might. The retainer request I agreed to this morning was impressive.”
“And given what you bring home, that says something.”
“I guess.”
“So what did you learn?”
“Well, those two girls have considerably more to worry about than I do. Or, I guess, than Spencer does. Or you do.”
“They killed people. That’s kind of obvious.”
“They might have been sex slaves.”
“Yeah, right.”
“I’m serious.”
“They were high-class escorts if they were anything,” his brother said. “Well paid. Gym memberships. Have a little Pink Wink in their medicine cabinets.”
“What in the name of God is Pink Wink?”
“Intimate bleach cream. Are you really that naive?”
“So it would seem. How do you know such things? Nicole?”
“I wish! I know because I’m a hotelier. We’re paid to know such things. It’s what we do.”
“Please. I can’t believe your hotelier bosses are going to be happy when they read about this.”
“They’ll be fine. It is what it is.”
“I don’t even know what that expression really means. I think it means nothing.”
“I’m telling you, they’ll be okay. But your bosses? That might be another story, right?”
“Sadly, yes. I think you’re right. Franklin McCoy will not be pleased.”
“Spencer might get a little grief from management for booking the girls,” Philip said. “Well, not for booking the girls—but for booking the girls from someplace sketchy. He didn’t use the service we usually use.”
“There’s such a thing as a service you usually use?”
“I love how innocent you are, my older brother,” Philip said, stressing the word older in a way that was both loving and condescending. “Yes, we do have our go-to girls for this sort of thing.”
“Okay, then: Why didn’t Spencer use them?”
“He was trying something new. Not completely new. He’d used the service that offers girls like Sonja and whatever-her-name-was—the one you did—once before, and it was awesome. The girls were wild—but wild in a yeah-I’ll-do-that sort of way. Not wild in a I’m-going-to-jump-on-your-back-and-cut-your-head-off sort of way. And he wanted something wild for me. For you. For us.”
“His heart was in the right place.”
“It really was. How was he to know they’d send over two batshit crazy strippers? How was he to know you’d wind up with a couple of dead guys in your living room and front hall?”
“I gotta go,” Richard said suddenly, surprising even himself. He’d dreaded talking to his younger brother, and the few minutes on the phone had been worse than he had expected. “Kris will be back any second.”
“Say hi for me.”
“I will,” Richard lied. “I will.”
…
Melissa sat on the plush carpet in her grandmother’s living room and matched up her new tights with her new skirts. Her grandmother sat in the yellow easy chair beside the fireplace and read a biography of Amelia Earhart. Cassandra, unused to this new environment, was gazing down at the world a little warily from the top of the back of the couch. Occasionally her grandmother would speak, sharing something about the aviator’s life that she had just read or commenting yet again on how unusual or clever the tights were, and Melissa had figured out the pattern: her grandmother spoke the second after they had heard her mother sobbing or her father raising his voice in desperation. Not anger; more like panic. Incredulity. Disbelief. Her parents were down the corridor and behind the closed door of the guest bedroom, but still the sound traveled. Melissa thought of the girls and boys she knew whose parents had gotten divorced. Sometimes the children had moved away; sometimes not. They lived in multiple homes, spending some nights with one parent and some nights with the other. Occasionally they fell behind in their schoolwork. The boys “acted out.” (That was the expression her teachers used; her own mother had used it on occasion, too.) The girls grew quiet.
She ate one of the chocolates her father had brought her and looked at the tights with the face cards. Kings and queens and jacks. A harlequin. She thought of fairy tales and wondered why there wasn’t a card with a princess. There should have been. It didn’t make sense. It was always the princesses that people cared about. She couldn’t name a single Disney prince, but instantly she could count on her fingers seven or eight of the princesses. She had met three of them at Disney World a couple of years ago, and now she rolled her eyes when she recalled how she had actually believed at the time that she was meeting Cinderella, Belle, and Snow White.
“This biographer thinks she and her copilot crash-landed on a reef and survived,” her grandmother was saying. “They were on this little island for weeks and could have been rescued. Can you imagine?”
She didn’t want her parents to get divorced. She wanted only to go home. In her mind she saw a picture from one of her thick books of fairy tales—a book that was so old it had once belonged to her grandmother’s mother—of an ominous house in the woods. The second-floor windows were eyes, the French front doors a mouth. In the story, the house was described as brooding. She would have called it hungry.
She told herself she would be brave, if only because she hadn’t a choice. But she was scared. She was, she realized, scared for the first time in her life.
A few minutes later her parents emerged from the bedroom. A few minutes after that, her father left for the night. He held her and promised that he would be back in the morning.
Alexa
ndra
So, I became Alexandra. I accepted a life of carrots and sticks. That is not a bad joke; that was just how it was.
For the first year and a half, I lived in the cottage two hours from Moscow by car, but in what direction I couldn’t tell you. There were five other girls who had been abducted, three from Volgograd (where Vasily had that second brandy factory) and two from the countryside—from the total middle of nowhere. Those two children made me look like know-it-all college professor. One had never owned a cell phone. One thought babies came from prayer because her male cousins and her uncle had been having sex with her for years and she had never gotten pregnant. So, in her head, a baby arrives when you ask God for one and pray very, very hard. Of course, this had been going on since she was eight. It’s hard to get pregnant when you’re eight. She was thirteen and was only now getting her period. She was, after a few days, very much like kid sister to me. At fifteen, I was the second oldest. Only Sonja was older—by one year. I would have my sweet-sixteen birthday party in that house. Inga gave me a silver bracelet, which was very pretty, and a dude from Rublyovka with ugly neck scruff pulled my hair while fucking me from behind.
What the six of us had in common was that we were beautiful and our parents were dead or had disappeared. Inga cared for us, as did another mistress or housemother we were told to call Catherine. They were going to teach each of us how to be—Catherine’s words—twenty-first-century paramour. That meant learning, basically, to do whatever some guy wants and is willing to pay for. But it also meant learning about makeup and hair and clothes and what to eat (and what not to eat). We ate lots of healthy fruits and vegetables, and we smoked lots of cigarettes. They watched our weight, and soon enough cigarettes were our rewards for staying away from the bird’s milk cake or the sugary pastila. We tried on different kinds of sexy underwear and were taught that the panty goes underneath the garter belt, even if that means it’s more difficult to go to the bathroom. We played Xbox games. We played Xbox games on a TV set for hours.