A part of me thought this was almost funny: Crystal was old enough to fuck American johns but too young to wear a wire. But obviously nothing was really funny to me that night.
“So Yulian—”
“He beat Crystal until she confessed,” she said. “And then…well, you know what they did after that.”
“And you?”
“Police guy never came to me. I hadn’t been asked. But Crystal had told me too much, and Pavel had a feeling I hadn’t snitched on her. I said I didn’t know anything, but he didn’t believe me. He said I could no longer be trusted.” She reached out to me and held my arms in her hands. “Look, I don’t know for sure they were going to kill you. But I overheard what they were saying about me tonight. It was when they were in kitchen. And if they killed me, how could they not kill you? How?”
This was almost too much news to absorb, and I am smart enough girl that I can absorb a lot. When she felt me shivering the tiniest bit, she rubbed my arms like it was January in Moscow. Then she even gave me a small smile and said, “These blocks have strip clubs.” She let go of me and pointed first at one near where we had bought the knit hats, and then down a street where she said there was another. “And there was also one by the Empire State Building, yes?”
“Yes, uh-huh.”
“Don’t worry, Alexandra, we’ll make some quick money at those places before we leave.”
“Leave for where?” I asked.
She tucked a lock of her platinum hair under her cap so you couldn’t see a single strand. Then she adjusted my cap so you couldn’t see any of my hair either.
“Well, we can’t go home,” she said. “Not to Volgograd and not to Yerevan.”
“Too much Vasily,” I agreed. Besides, she had no one left in Volgograd and I had no one left in Yerevan. All we had waiting for us in those places was shame.
“That’s right.”
“So?”
“So, we are going to Los Angeles. Land of the Bachelor. Land of the Kardashians. We are going to disappear into the most glamorous place on earth.”
Chapter Ten
All of the men at Philip Chapman’s bachelor party had described the two girls to the police, but they had agreed there were no photographs. Not a single one. Spencer Doherty swore that he hadn’t taken any pictures. (Did he protest too much? Days later Richard would wonder.)
It wasn’t simply that the men had found Pavel and Kirill utterly terrifying—though they did; as drunk as the men were, they were confident that the Russians with their shaved heads really would (worst case) break their fingers or (best case) break their phones if they tried capturing even a single image of either girl or five or ten seconds of video. No, the men kept their phones in their blazers or pants because none wanted to risk banishment from the party; none wanted to risk missing a moment of the girls’ performances; none wanted to jeopardize their chance to be taken by the talent to one of the other rooms in Philip’s brother-in-law’s house. (After reveler Martin Scofield returned to the living room and the blonde had retreated to the bathroom to—yet again—clean up, he told the men in detail how she had finished him off. She was insane, he’d said, she was ravenous; he’d never felt anything like it. After that? The men viewed the suburban living room—the whole house, really—as their own private seraglio. Each fully expected that he, too, would experience a moment of ineffable carnality with one of the girls, an episode that in memory would outlast the innumerable, inexorable indignities of old age, and offer a fodder for tumescence infinitely more powerful than even the bluest of pills.) And so the police sketch artists did what they could, creating one girl with platinum hair and one whose mane was jet black. They did what they could to bring the girls’ eyes to life, and capture the fullness of their lips. They tried to add the demure pitch to the nose of the girl who may (or may not) have been named Alexandra, and the slight upturn to the nose of the one who may (or may not) have been called Sonja. But the pictures were, in the end, relatively blunt objects; certainly they failed to convey the way each of the girls moved, a winsome fluidity that was lissome and licentious at once.
“Did they have any birthmarks or moles? Any tattoos?”
No, the men agreed—and this was one of the only things about which they were all in complete agreement—they did not. Their skin was flawless. Unsullied by either imperfection or ink.
…
Thursday morning when Richard woke up, he found a text from Spencer waiting for him on his phone.
So, how are you doing, buddy? Want to talk? I’m thinking of you and your family and your future at that bank of yours.
There was not a word in it that would look incriminating in a court of law, or appear even mildly threatening. But Richard understood perfectly well the subtext beneath the text.
…
It was degrading. Kristin knew what she was doing was degrading. But her nerves were frayed and her equilibrium was in shambles. Her self-esteem was in shambles. She knew this was a bad idea—no, this was a terrible idea—but she was incapable of stopping herself. She emerged from the master bathroom shower Thursday morning, toweled herself off, and then stood stark naked before the full-length mirror in the adjacent bedroom. Her and Richard’s bedroom. She studied her body with pitiless, hardhearted eyes, finding only the ways it had been diminished by age, methodically ratcheting up the self-hatred. She was forty, and while she knew that forty was not old, it also was not twenty. She believed she was still pretty…but was she now only pretty for forty? (She heard the cultural ageism in that question, and chastised herself. But she also knew that she couldn’t transcend aesthetic preconceptions any more than her breasts could transcend gravity.) She stared for a long moment at her nipples, objectifying and then loathing them. She had a hint of rib, but did she need a hint more? She examined the crease of her lips, the slope of her nose. She ran her fingers over her cheekbones. She cringed when she saw that she needed a bikini wax—and cringed that she even got them in the first place. It wasn’t the pain. It was the whole idea that she was raising her daughter in a world where pubic hair was a problem.
She needed to spend more time at the gym. She needed a different lipstick. She needed…
She needed, she told herself, to get dressed. And so she did, but the damage to her psyche had been done.
She had read articles over the years about a man’s supposed biologic craving for young women: it was all about primeval procreation, in theory, the need to plant seed in fertile soil. Maybe. But the idea of Richard desiring a woman perhaps less than half his age—half their age—was at once appalling and infuriating. She thought of a line from Nabokov: “Because you took advantage of my disadvantage.” Lolita. In this case, however, Kristin felt that she was at the disadvantage—not the young thing. The truth was, she feared, all men were Humbert Humbert. Maybe they weren’t pedophiles lusting after twelve-year-olds, but didn’t Lolita look old for her age? Older, anyway? Sure, there were MILFs in porn, but Kristin had a feeling that considerably more men wanted their porn stars to be students at Duke University than moms from the bleachers at a middle-school soccer game. She—a forty-year-old female history teacher—may not yet have morphed into Shelley Winters, but it was getting harder and harder to compete with the real-life Lolitas of the world.
Yet men’s tastes in pornography weren’t really the issue, were they? It was one thing for a middle-aged man to access his inner ninth grader and lust after a porn star on his tablet or TV screen; it was quite another to bring a prostitute (or, far sadder, a sex slave) upstairs in this very house. Some lines were more blurred than others—at the word blurred, her mind conjured an appalling music video from a few years back—but the line between lusting after a porn star and fucking an escort was clear. Berlin Wall clear.
When she was dressed, she sat on the bed to put on her shoes. She had grabbed a pair of modest heels today from her closet. She wondered if this was how the girl had sat before her husband last Friday night on another bed in another room just
down the hall. She saw the girl vividly in her mind. Her insouciance. Her mouth, half open with carefully feigned desire. Her youth. She closed her eyes, wishing her imagination were impervious to pain.
…
Nicole stirred the berries and granola in her yogurt parfait. She was nauseous, sick with loss and despair, but she felt that she had to order something. Across the booth (thank God he had gotten a booth, she had thought when she first arrived, and thank God he had arrived before her), Philip was wolfing his western omelet as if he hadn’t eaten in days. She feared he had missed all the signals she had offered since she had gotten to the restaurant. He had stood and embraced her, apologizing with uncharacteristic zeal, and she had not lifted her arms to hug him back. He had tried to peer into her eyes in a way he almost never did—with an earnestness that suggested he was not simply hearing whatever she had to say, he was listening—and she had looked down at the toes of her boots. He had offered to take her jacket and hold it for her while she had slid into her side of the booth, and she had replied that she would be more comfortable keeping it on. She glanced down at the engagement ring since she knew this was the last time she was ever going to see it.
“It was a nightmare,” Philip was saying now. “You can’t imagine how awful it was to see that crazy bitch stabbing the Russian dude. I will never be able to scrub that image from my eyes. Never. We thought she was going to try and kill one of us next.”
She wasn’t completely surprised that he was trying to elicit her sympathy. And, the truth was, she knew that it must have been terrifying.
“And then we heard the gunshots, and that’s when we thought we were all going to get killed. I mean, Chuck Alcott fell to the floor, just sobbing—sobbing!—like a baby. And I know I ducked.”
“You ducked.”
He sipped his coffee and nodded as he swallowed. “Maybe more than ducked. You know, it was a reflex. I knelt behind the couch.”
She assumed that knelt was a euphemism. Knelt suggested a gradual descent and some premeditation. She was pretty sure that even duck was a euphemism: it was likely that he had thrown himself to the floor as if someone had tossed a hand grenade into the room.
“I mean, guns and knives at what was supposed to be a harmless bachelor party?” he added. “That’s nuts!”
She agreed that it must have been horrifying for him to have witnessed the murder of the two bodyguards, but there was never anything harmless about this bachelor party. And so she told him precisely that.
“Look, I know it got a little out of control,” he said. “We all drank too much. But you know how sorry I am, right? I wouldn’t have told you if I wasn’t sorry and knew I could assure you that I would never, ever do something like that again.”
“You only told me because you got caught,” she countered.
He held his fork as if it were a pointer and glanced at the tines. There was a bit of yellow egg there. “But I know we can get past this. I know I can.”
She wanted to say, Well, that’s big of you. But she still hoped she could remain above sarcasm. She wanted only candor in this final breakfast. “I can’t,” she said instead.
“And what does that mean?”
“It means…it means a lot of things. It’s not just about trust, and how that’s gone. I kept hoping you’d grow up or expecting you’d grow up or believing you’d grow up. And that’s crazy on my part. Because you won’t. I used to love that little boy in you. But now that little boy is just a horny teenager who wants his women to be skanky girls gone wild. Beautiful things with eating disorders.”
“Not you. You know how much I respect you.”
“And yet you stare at other women on the street. You really think I don’t notice?”
“I’m a guy. It’s how I’m hardwired. If it bothers you, I’ll stop. I usually only do it when some woman is dressed, I don’t know, provocatively.”
“If it bothers me? Really? It never crossed your mind that I might not want you ogling some other girl’s ass?”
“I’m not perfect, I know that. I’m not my brother, I’m not—”
“I’m not sure that your brother is much better.”
“You would be in the minority thinking that.”
She dropped her spoon onto the white plate with the parfait glass, embarrassed by how much noise it made. “Damn it, Philip, this is not about your sibling issues!”
“I’m sorry.”
She could feel people in the restaurant watching them. She could sense Philip’s fear that she was about to make a scene. She hadn’t wanted to make a scene; she certainly hadn’t planned that she would. But at this point? It didn’t matter. What mattered was that if anything good had come from that appalling debauch at his brother’s, it was this: she had (and the ghoulish irony of the expression was not lost on her) dodged a bullet.
“How dare you say, ‘I can get past it,’ as if that means you’re such a big person or you’re better than me? How dare you! It really doesn’t matter if you can get past it. I can’t,” she said, and she was crying, her voice a little lost in her sniffles, but she didn’t care. She didn’t care at all. She stood and lifted her purse over her shoulder and held out her left hand. Then, with her right, she pulled the engagement ring off her finger and—as he was standing, reaching out to her, imploring her to stop, to think, to not throw away all that they had—she tossed it onto the table. It bounced onto the floor, and Philip fell to his hands and knees—dove, as a matter of fact—after it. As far as she knew, he never followed her out the door or tried to catch her, because she never looked back.
…
Later that morning, Richard reassured his younger brother that Nicole might change her mind in a few weeks or a few months. But he didn’t believe it. He only said she might because he felt he had to say something, and he couldn’t quite read the tone of his brother’s voice on the phone. But the wedding clearly was off. That part of the conversation was brief and, it seemed, almost rote. It was as if Philip had grown accustomed to the news, bad as it was, and in hours had jumped four stages to acceptance. In truth, Richard wasn’t surprised that Nicole was leaving him before they could even get to the altar; Kristin, he surmised, would have done exactly the same thing. Any woman with even a teaspoon of self-respect would. Nevertheless, he felt bad for his brother. It seemed the collateral damage from Friday night was only getting worse for everyone.
“Are you weirded out that all those Russian dudes made bail?” Philip asked him suddenly.
“They didn’t all make bail,” he answered carefully.
“Okay, most. I find it amazing that one was the guy who Spencer used to talk to on the telephone when he was lining up the girls.”
“You do hang with an impressive crowd,” he said. He still hadn’t decided whether to tell Philip what his despicable friend was doing and enlist his help. He guessed this was because he suspected, in the end, he was going to pay the guy off. Maybe after he had written the check or transferred the money he would rat Spencer out. Inform Philip that his friend was a dirtbag. But he kept coming back to the reality that there was no guarantee Spencer wouldn’t keep coming back for more, which was one of the reasons why he hadn’t called his portfolio manager and moved around some money already.
“The guy was just a voice on the line,” Philip was saying. “They never met.”
“Next time, Philip? Tell him to just use Craigslist, okay?”
“Yeah, that’s a deal,” his brother agreed, though Richard would have preferred that Philip had said there wouldn’t be a next time. Then: “Spencer is fucking terrified. He just can’t believe those guys are back on the street.”
“He probably should be terrified.”
“He even got me a little wigged out. But, like, what would the Russians want with us, right?”
“I guess.”
“You guess?”
“I guess.”
“You’re supposed to do better than that, my older brother. You’re supposed to reassure me.”
“Am I?”
“It’s part of the Older Brother Contract.”
“Good to know.”
“And I gather his legal quicksand is just getting worse.”
At this, Richard felt himself perking up. “Oh?”
“Brandon Fisher’s lawyer called his lawyer again yesterday afternoon. Brandon’s wife checked herself into some clinic.”
“Oh, please.”
“I know. But between the Russians and the lawyers, Spencer is not a happy camper.”
“Well, I’m not either.”
“Would you do me a favor?”
He braced himself. “What?”
“Mom and Dad are kind of bummed about the wedding. They really like Nicole. I’m sure they’ll call you later today or tonight.”
“And?”
“Tell them I really am okay. Reassure them.”
“Yeah, no problem. I can do that.” He took a little pride, unseemly as it was, in the reality that as far as he had fallen, he remained—at least in the eyes of his brother and their parents—on a higher moral ground than Philip. This was, of course, a low bar. But still…
“What’s next?” Philip asked.
“For me? I don’t know. See what the Rorschach on the living room walls and the couch makes me think of this morning.”
“The couch is still there?”
“A rubbish company is picking it up, but they can’t come until Saturday.”
“Have they seen it?”
“No.”
“Well, won’t they be surprised when they do. Me? I’d just drag it outside and burn it.”
“The couch is the least of my problems,” he said, and his brother murmured something not wholly intelligible in assent.
After hanging up, Richard saw a news van driving slowly past the house. He fantasized giving the camera crew the finger if they pulled into his driveway. He sighed: it was almost Halloween. He wondered if they’d get any trick-or-treaters this year, or whether he was such a pariah that no self-respecting parents would allow their children anywhere near the Chapman front door.