The Guest, page 10
“Nothing?”
“It turned on for a second, it seemed like. Then nothing. There’s a place in town that might be able to fix it,” he said. “I can take you there on the way to Simon’s. You about ready to head back?”
Alex smiled at him, then down at her hands.
“George isn’t back for a few days,” Alex said, “right?”
“Saturday,” Nicholas said. “First thing.”
“Do you mind,” Alex said, “I mean would it be just totally horrible if I just hung out here for a while longer? I’m such a baby,” she said. “I hate that house when it’s empty. I get so scared, it’s kind of pathetic.”
Nicholas was obviously taken aback, but was good at not appearing surprised. Surely he had dealt with worse.
“I mean, yeah.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “I’ve got a few more things to do.”
“But I wouldn’t be in your way, right?” Alex said. “If I just hang here and read or something? And you can kick me out whenever you need to, really.”
She made herself look down, counting out a few seconds before she looked back at him. She held his eye.
“I’m really sorry to ask,” she said, “I’m so embarrassed.”
There it was, the flicker of responsiveness, the barely perceptible glance at her breasts.
“Of course. Let me just text Mr. H and let him know, but I’m sure it will be absolutely fine.”
Alex touched his arm.
“Nicholas,” she said, “listen, do you mind just not telling George I’m here? I don’t want Simon to know.” She let her mouth tremble slightly, then bit her bottom lip. “To be honest, we’re kind of fighting,” she said, “and I know he’d be furious I was at his friend’s house. Bothering you. He can get really mean.”
She said this in an almost whisper, a reluctant confession, and Nicholas’s brow furrowed as he took in this information. She rubbed her bare arms and smiled at him, a brave smile.
“I’m really sorry,” she said. “I hope that doesn’t put you in a weird position.”
“No,” he said, “no.” He exhaled. “I mean, I’m sure it’s fine if you want to hang for a while. Right? No harm in that.”
“Thank you,” she said, going up on her toes to hug him. She could smell the faint tang of her underarms, but hopefully he couldn’t. He kept a businesslike distance as he patted her shoulder.
“Of course,” he said. “Happy to help.”
* * *
—
Alex sat in the shade with her legs in the hot tub. The sunlight warped the surface of the pool. She was reading a memoir she’d found on the living room shelf, an old hardback whose butter-yellow pages were brittle enough that she could pierce them easily with a fingernail.
Somewhere on the property, she heard someone operating a leaf blower, then the sound of a lawnmower. Occasionally a man in long sleeves and a baseball hat walked past the pool carrying a garbage can filled with weeds. When she nodded and waved, he just looked at the ground. So much effort and noise required to cultivate this landscape, a landscape meant to invoke peace and quiet. The appearance of calm demanded an endless campaign of violent intervention.
“Do you want a towel?” Nicholas said, passing by on his way to the garage. “Sunscreen?”
“Please don’t worry about me,” she said, “I don’t want to put you out at all.”
He showed her how to use a key hidden by the gate to open a small bar area: pool toys hanging on the wall, a small sink and refrigerator. She should feel free, Nicholas said, to take anything she needed.
All this abundance was its own intoxicant. She changed into her pink two-piece that still smelled of chlorine. She drank a Corona and three mini bottles of water from the refrigerator, then spent ten zoned-out minutes covering her body with sunscreen from an amber tube, sunscreen that smelled woodsy and expensive. She felt vaguely turned on, her skin sliding around under her hands, newly aware of her swimsuit pressing her crotch. She put the sunscreen in her bag. A party favor, useful for later. Like her new sunglasses: she’d found a pair in a bowl on the living room table when she’d gone inside to pee, big tortoiseshells whose green lenses sharpened the world into shockingly precise detail.
Four days until Labor Day. It seemed like a long time. Enough that she didn’t worry too much about what exactly might happen between now and then.
Her skin glistened in the sun, her hands were slick from the sunscreen, and when she dipped her legs in the hot tub, she saw a veil of oil start to spread, a rainbow radiating from her skin—she was dirtying the water, sand sparkling on the steps, but so what? Someone would just clean everything again.
“Sit with me,” Alex called, the next time Nicholas passed. “Please?”
She was a little drunk, even off one beer. She swallowed a burp. She pushed the sunglasses up on her forehead.
“How is it?” Nicholas said. “Want me to turn on the jets?”
Hard to gauge whether he was annoyed or not, having to deal with the needs of this person who did not employ him.
“Come sit with me,” Alex said, “please.” She patted the warm stone beside her. “I’m lonely.”
“I’ve still got to do a few things.” Nicholas cocked his head.
* * *
—
Alex had fallen asleep. For a second, waking up, she was disoriented. Then it clicked back into focus. The line of lounge chairs along the pool, the yellow swoop of a sculpture in the lawn nearby. Though the air smelled like cut grass, the landscape truck was gone, and the day, another day, was almost over.
She inspected her cleavage, pressing on the skin to see if it turned white. But no, she had somehow avoided getting sunburnt. That was lucky. Wasn’t she a lucky girl? Just the ghost of the fish in her mouth, the grainy aftertaste of the beer, another bottle half empty on the table beside her. When she picked it up, the beer was warm.
The book was splayed open on the ground—she had read almost twenty pages, but couldn’t quite recall what the book was about. A memoir by a woman whose mother had loved her too much. Whose brothers had loved her even more. A problem of emotional excess, psychological gout.
When she got to her feet, all the blood rushed to her head. She walked into the pool with one hand lifting her hair above her shoulders to keep it dry. The pool was heated to an amniotic degree, the water silky and smelling of minerals. She let her hair fall. She held her breath, ducked under. An easy lap. She surfaced at the far end. There, back at the other end, where she had just been, was Nicholas, his white button-up glowy in the dusk. His hand was up in a wave. She swam back toward him and stepped out of the pool, squeezing the water from her hair.
“Feels nice?” Nicholas said.
“Perfect.”
She grinned at him, grabbing a towel from the lounge chair. She wrapped it around herself, holding it just under her bikini top so it pushed up her breasts. She wiped her nose with her forearm.
“Saltwater pool,” she said, “right?”
“Yep.”
“Do you go in ever?”
“In this pool?” He made a face. “No.”
“Even when they’re not here?”
He shrugged. “Maybe once or twice.”
Admitting even this small transgression seemed like a step forward, though Alex suspected it was a lie. She rubbed each leg briskly with the towel, then started to braid her wet hair over one shoulder. “Can I see your place?”
“It’s not that big,” he said.
Was he embarrassed? Or just impatient. No, she decided, he was curious.
“But, yeah,” Nicholas said, “you can see it if you really want.”
“I do,” Alex said, “I really want.”
* * *
—
The staff apartment was a box with gray tile floors, though at least the air-conditioning was strong, the rooms almost too cold to be comfortable. Most of the furniture was white and plastic. There was an older television mounted to the wall, a black leather couch. A few Surfer magazines on the coffee table. Everything was very neat.
“You live here all year?” Alex said.
“Just when Mr. H is out here. Otherwise, we’re in the city.”
We, he said, as if he and his employers were a unit.
She sat on the couch—she’d changed into cutoffs, though she was still in her bikini top and an oxford shirt she left unbuttoned. When you were quiet long enough, let the silence really settle, people usually felt too uncomfortable to gather their thoughts. To form those thoughts into a question, like, for example, why was Alex still here?
“Do you want a drink or something?” Nicholas said.
She brightened. “What do you have?”
“I can make literally anything you want. I went to bartending school.”
“Really?”
“Oh yeah,” he said. “I’m a scholar. Bartending school and three semesters at the Actors Studio. So what’s your drink?”
“Dealer’s choice.”
He decided to make a tequila drink that needed fresh herbs: he took her out to show her the garden. It was under the purview of a master gardener, he said. There were tomatoes among the humid prickly vines, a patch of basil that made the air smell thick and grassy. She saw squash, in the shade of their big leaves, and Nicholas bent down as if to pick one, though he did not, his hand only resting on its ridged skin.
There was a beehive in the back. “There’s chickens, too,” he said, “do you wanna see?”
This offer, she assumed, appealed to people from cities.
* * *
—
Nicholas wanted to make a different drink, next, something that had a float of dark rum on top and required him to psychotically jackhammer a cocktail shaker over his head. He poured the drink into the glasses from a dramatic height. Soon enough they had each had two.
How did the coke appear?
From somewhere in the immaculate staff apartment, coke Nicholas parceled out in bumps, silty white piles that they snorted off the key to the garage. It wasn’t very good, an immediate speedy drip in Alex’s throat, but, more importantly, there seemed to be a tremendous quantity. Some spilled down her front when she brought the key toward her nose, but she didn’t care—not at that moment. They could get more, if they wanted it. Wasn’t that true? Even though her heart was racing, she was calm, imagining a pearled line of possibility stretching on without end. She could always get what she needed. Wasn’t she taking care of herself? Hadn’t she managed to avoid going back to the city, hadn’t she kept things moving forward out here?
It was probably late. The sky was totally black. She’d taken a quick shower in Nicholas’s bathroom. Her hair was still wet, but at least it was clean, slippery. The air conditioner made a constant industrial whoosh that eventually became white noise. She plugged her phone into the wall, and that alone felt like an improvement, a deposit on the future promise of connection. When the screen turned on, she did not click on Dom’s name (twenty unread texts), but saw two texts from a number she didn’t recognize: a dolphin emoji, a text that said what are u up to tonite? It took a moment to realize it must be the boy from the beach. Jack. The boy with braces. Her phone died before she could write back. She didn’t know if she even wanted to: it was hard to conjure up more than his blond curls, the boy pointing to the big, far-off house. What book had he been reading? Siddhartha. Right.
Nicholas tried to play music from his phone before finally giving up.
“The Wi-Fi in here is really bad,” he said. “Basically nonexistent.”
He knelt on the rug, floating a CD on delicate fingertips into a chunky old stereo.
“A CD player,” Alex said. “Why the fuck do you have a CD player?”
“A classic,” he said. “Do you know this song?”
Nicholas didn’t seem to mind when Alex didn’t respond.
He crawled over and arranged a few lines on the cover of Surfer magazine. They knelt on either side of the coffee table, not quite looking at each other, in the way people doing drugs often did not quite look at each other.
“You first?” he said.
A little bit dizzy afterwards, she leaned her head back against the couch. Even after showering, she still smelled like that expensive sunscreen.
How late had it gotten? She was fuzzy on the details of their conversation, how exactly they had landed on this latest topic: Nicholas had, apparently, many years ago, almost been cast in a big studio movie. It was not the lead—but, he said, even so. He made it sound as if he had been promised the role. A life-changing role.
“It’s just,” Nicholas was saying, “I would have been good. For real.”
“I’m sure,” Alex said. “I’m sure you would have been great.”
“It was so fucking close,” Nicholas said. “It was down to me and, like, two other guys. Two other guys!”
“You would have been amazing,” Alex said. Was her voice too loud? “So fucking great,” she said. “One hundred percent.” As she said it, it seemed true. She felt genuine affection for Nicholas. He deserved good things.
They had finished their drinks, their glasses empty except for a few twisted leaves of mint—she should try to have some water. They both should have water; Nicholas’s cheeks gone a bit red. She had the thought, again—that she should get up and drink water. She didn’t move. Now Nicholas was talking about George. She supposed she had asked.
“He’s been good to me,” Nicholas said. “He’s a good guy.”
Alex must have made a face, Nicholas’s voice gone suddenly strident. “I’m serious!” he said. “He’s great.”
She stared up at the ceiling, her heart pounding hard enough that she could feel it. It wasn’t unpleasant. She put her hand on her chest. “If you say so.”
“A lot of people aren’t. But he’s tidy, clean, and he’s got a good heart, so you know, that’s pretty good. Considering. He’s not mean.”
“How’d he get all his money? How much does he have, anyway?”
Nicholas neatened the lines on the table, bent to do another quick one. He snorted hard, then sat up. “I really,” he said, “don’t know.”
“Fifty? A hundred? More?”
He shrugged.
“Fuck.” Alex slumped lower on the couch.
“Family money. Now he has a foundation.”
“I don’t get it.”
“I dunno. He likes art. What have you got in there anyway?” He toed her bag with his shoe.
“Nothing,” Alex said, “just clothes.” She pulled her bag in front of her.
It was funny to her, suddenly, this bag she’d been dragging around, this bag full of all her possessions. She lifted out a pink sweater. “Feel this, it’s so soft.”
“Clothes? Why do you have a bag of clothes? Weird,” he murmured, peacefully, “so weird.”
Nicholas lay his head on his folded arms.
They both were a little giggly, a little sweaty.
“What about this?” Alex held out the small onyx rock from Helen’s house. It was cold in her palm. “Do you like it?”
Nicholas opened one eye to study the rock, then sat up to hold it.
“So heavy,” he said. “I like how heavy it is.”
She took it back, wrapped it in the sweater. She shoved the bundle further down her bag.
“What is it?” Nicholas said. “Is it fancy?”
She didn’t answer, but that didn’t seem to bother him. Nothing seemed like it could bother either of them, a calm lull settling over the room.
“How’d you meet Simon?” Nicholas said, after another stretch of silence.
“At a party. We knew the same people.”
Did he believe her? Nicholas seemed about to say something.
“What?” Alex said.
“I don’t know,” he said. “You like him? He’s so much older. You’re what, twenty-five?”
“Twenty-two.”
“Yeah. A baby! Don’t you want to be with someone your own age?”
Alex shrugged. “I love him,” she said, watching Nicholas’s face.
* * *
—
Alex wanted dessert, which is how they had ended up in the main house, Alex following behind Nicholas as he disarmed the security system. She couldn’t stop laughing.
“Shh,” he said, but he was laughing, too—this was like a parody of a heist movie, his finger to his lips, his exaggerated, cartoonish insistence on quiet. Who would ever be able to hear them? They could yell if they wanted to, Alex screaming at the top of her lungs, and nothing would happen.
Even in the half-light, Nicholas’s features were legibly handsome. He would have been a good actor, she decided. The living room lights were off—she held on to Nicholas’s shirt as he led the way through the darkness toward the kitchen. She was barefoot. She didn’t remember when or where she had taken off her shoes.
“Fuck,” she said, recoiling—something warm and alive brushed against her leg.
“It’s the cat,” Nicholas said. “Chill, Maria,” he cooed, “just fucking chill. I should actually feed her.” He flicked on the kitchen lights.
“There’s gelato in there,” he said, nodding at the freezer. He squatted down to the cat, its eyes almost wholly obscured by fur. “You hungry, Maria? You starving?”
Alex opened the freezer door—there was a bottle of vodka, four pints of pale green gelato, and ten boxes of unopened perfume.
“What’s all this?” She studied the back of one of the cellophane-wrapped boxes.
“It’s Greta’s,” Nicholas said. “The wife.” He was filling a tiny silver bowl with water while the cat wound itself around his ankles. “She’s worried they would discontinue it.”
“Right.” Alex took out a pint of gelato. “Don’t you hate them? I mean, you can tell me. I don’t care. I don’t even know them.”
