The Guest, page 12
Alex had the sick sense that she was a ghost. Wandering the land of the living. But that was dumb, a dumb thought. It was just when the day was hot like this, hot and gray, anxiety moved closer to the surface.
She was wearing her swimsuit bottoms under her clothes and changed into her top in the bathroom stall. When she emerged, there was a mother at the sink struggling to pull a soaking wet swim diaper down a baby’s chubby legs. The mother grimaced at Alex.
“Sorry,” the woman said, and scooted away from the sink.
“No worries.” Alex smiled at the woman. Smiled at the baby.
She was trying to be good, she realized. As if it would matter whether or not she smiled at a harried mother. Like it would somehow help things along with Simon, a cosmic reparation. Would Nicholas say something to George? Or Simon? But how would Nicholas explain allowing Alex to stay, letting Alex loose in his employer’s house: maybe he wouldn’t say anything.
Alex needed to sit in one place and try to think of what to do. She found a patch of unclaimed sand and lay with her head resting against her bag. She still had the book from George’s house and held it overhead to block the glare.
She read the same paragraph three times. She slapped at a gnat on her stomach, turned the page. The daughter had just tried to commit suicide the night before her mother’s second marriage. The daughter had gotten too much love, was the gist of the memoir, so much love that it had crippled her and now she had to correct it by getting even more. It made Alex uncomfortable, someone demanding love so overtly, showing all her cards. As if it were that easy, as if love were something you deserved and didn’t have to scramble to earn.
Useful, anyway, to have something to read, some obvious, visible task that legitimized her, meant her presence somewhere wasn’t so strange. She abandoned the book when her phone turned on, for a brief moment, then sparked to life long enough that she caught a glimpse of the home screen before it shut off. Better than nothing. She had assumed there might be an outlet by the bathroom. There wasn’t.
A place to plug in her phone: that was a task, an aim, eminently reasonable, and it was okay, she decided, to not think beyond that, not yet.
* * *
—
To the left of the main beach, more beach, more crowds. To the right, an open expanse. Alex went right. A ways down, there was a brick building with a brick terrace edging onto the sand and bright blue umbrellas set up in tidy lines. As she got closer, she saw a private lifeguard, dressed differently from the public one, who surveyed a square of ocean marked off with buoys. Odd to see brick at the beach, this squat brick building with its wide terrace. It didn’t look right, too cultivated and old-fashioned for this landscape.
This must be the club. A place she had never been, only heard about. The beach club was for the worst people, Simon said, a place where all their noxious allegiances to race and class could be laundered by nostalgia. They turned away most applicants. It occurred to her, remembering Simon’s disdain, that probably he had applied and been rejected.
Alex hung off to the side. After a while, she could tell which people walking past would veer up the steps and into the club and which people would not.
The club looked sparse, almost military, but no matter. It didn’t make a difference what was behind a rope, really, it just mattered that there was a rope. The people on the terrace needed the people walking past, just as the people walking past needed the people on the terrace.
The only drama came when an outsider stopped to rest in the shade of an umbrella and sat down on one of the beach chairs. The woman glanced around, face open as a dinner plate, trying to understand where exactly she had found herself. Not a minute passed before a man in a polo shirt came over and bent down to say something to the woman—Alex watched this happen, watched the error being corrected. Like the couple at Helen’s party, ejected from the sphere where they didn’t belong, only this woman was apologetic, eager to participate in her own removal. The man, Alex figured, was some more subtle version of a bouncer, sifting through the social information on offer and deciding who was an interloper and who was not.
The crowd on the terrace sat around tables with drinks in their fists, cast in shadow from the blue umbrellas. Lots of older men, skin burnt to the same rust color as their overly baggy swim trunks. The women in collared blouses, untucked, with neat chino shorts. The social groups were separated by gender. Except for the polarized sunglasses, it could have been a scene from sixty years ago, the men gathered in primal council, nursing their brown alcohol, the women and children at separate tables, eating chicken tenders with saltwater hands.
Alex could just go up to one of the men. Approach a table with only a few men hunched over their watery cocktails, a manageable audience. Easy enough. You waved your fingers, you spoke in a voice just a tick too quiet—they got flustered, trying to follow what was happening. Any glitch in the usual order of things, the expected social script, made people anxious, off balance. Even a glancing touch at their elbow, the barest squeeze of an arm, could short-circuit any wariness. Suddenly they were newly suggestible, eager to find steady footing in whatever story you offered.
And men did not, it turned out, mind being approached by a young woman—not usually, anyway. They did not immediately assume that her motives might be murky, their vanity allowing for the possibility that she had been drawn over by the sheer force of their personhood. But not really sensible to try that here. The air was too domestic, dripping with the proximity of family and other blunt moral concepts. It had a chilling effect: the wives nearby, the children.
Alex just needed to be seen with anyone who had already been approved, and that would be indication enough that she belonged.
The nannies might be the right move: women in rash guards and cheap sunglasses, kneeling in the sand with toy shovels to help children dig holes. Their bodies were practical, bodies that didn’t bear the evidence of an excess of time and money. The children wore classic boater stripes and salmon-colored trunks. The nannies wore blindingly bright shirts from some restaurant in St. Martin or Mustique, carried plastic sacks from Citarella that held bags of soggy baby carrots they’d mete out to their charges.
The children were in their own realm, tripping along the shoreline, only circling back to the nannies to submit to another application of sunscreen. Children were too much like Alex. Tolerated but not needed, not powerful.
* * *
—
A young girl was toting sand in a bucket, her face grim, occupied with her task. She walked by close enough for Alex to touch: Alex reached out for a brief graze of the girl’s shoulder.
Before Alex could say anything, the girl’s eyes widened in alarm. She hurried back to a towel where a woman was lying. A mother, Alex saw, not a nanny, and that wouldn’t work. Alex waited for the girl to say something to her mother, to point out Alex, but the girl just dumped the contents of her bucket and busied herself patting the sand smooth.
Another kid broke away from a group, a group obviously under the purview of a nanny: a woman in long pants and a wide cloth hat, shaking sand off a flotilla of towels. The boy flung himself into the shallow waves. Then ran in dizzy circles on the sand before passing out dramatically on his back. How old was he, six? Hard to gauge children’s ages.
He seemed to sense Alex was watching him. The boy sat up and glanced in her direction. She smiled and gestured for him to come over. She waved again, more urgently, and he crab-walked most of the way toward her before getting to his feet. When he arrived, he didn’t speak. Just panted, his bare chest heaving.
“Hi,” Alex said, “hi. Are you having fun?”
She smiled, gently, as if they were sharing a joke.
“I don’t know you,” he said.
“Sure you do. I’m Alex.”
He squinted. Looked over his shoulder.
Alex followed his glance—back to the nanny in the hat, two little girls shrieking and plucking at her pants, and Alex waved at the nanny, so the boy could see her doing it, even though the nanny didn’t.
“So guess what,” Alex said.
The boy crossed his arms.
“You want to do something fun?” she said.
He appeared willing to let her try to impress him.
“Should we go up there and get something? I bet there’s dessert up there, huh?”
“Sugar doesn’t grow your bones.”
“Nope,” Alex said. “It doesn’t.”
The boy was visibly bored.
“Well, okay. I’m Alex. Where are your parents?”
He pointed generally in a far-off direction.
“Home?” Alex said.
He nodded. So that was good.
“I bet there’s a pool up there?”
Another nod.
“Okay,” she said, “you can show me the pool.”
The nanny was actually looking over at them, now, from down the beach, and Alex watched her eyes alight on the boy and then on Alex, and Alex waved again, more confidently, mouthing nonsense, but appearing, she hoped, that she was conveying some message. She pointed to the boy, and then to the club. Ruffled the boy’s hair—he softened automatically, and somehow the gesture, as she was doing it, felt genuine.
The nanny was coming over. Not ideal but okay. Okay.
“You’re in trouble,” the nanny said. But she was talking to the boy. “No more swimming without sunscreen,” the nanny said. “Come here.”
The boy tilted his face up, eyes closed. The nanny applied a layer of sunscreen from a tube, wiping the excess between her palms. She was brisk but calm, the exchange lacking any drama.
“You having fun, Calvin? You being good?” The nanny turned to Alex. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I should have been watching him.”
Did she think Alex thought she had somehow shirked her duties? Alex smiled hard.
“Oh, not at all, we’re fine.”
“Want to come play?” the nanny said to the boy. “Let your friend relax?”
The boy shrugged. “We’re going to the pool.”
The nanny looked to Alex again.
“If that’s okay with you,” Alex said. “Obviously. I’m Alex, I’m a friend of the family.”
The nanny considered the boy.
“I haven’t seen Calvin in a while,” Alex went on. She smiled. “He’s gotten so big. Haven’t you?”
Alex held her hand out to the boy. She waited: this could go either way. But the boy grabbed her hand. A squeeze. Once, twice.
This seemed to soothe the nanny, though she still hesitated. Alex kept smiling. The nanny glanced back at her other charges, whose play fighting looked on the brink of turning into an actual fight, one kid letting out a piercing screech that made her wince. She turned to Alex. “All right,” she said, after a second. “I’ll be up in a bit. You behave yourself, Calvin.”
“We will,” Alex answered for both of them, a pleasant singsong.
* * *
—
They walked past the man guarding the perimeter, Alex not even glancing in his direction, and up they went, up the wide steps and under the many umbrellas and onto the open terrace of the club. She had not even needed the boy.
He gazed off into the distance. “I can have ice cream, I’m allowed.”
Alex had planned on cutting the boy loose, but he seemed pliant, happy enough, interested in what might happen next. It allowed for a different quality of day to present itself. At least she could get him ice cream.
* * *
—
A man hovered in the open window of the snack bar, heat emanating in visible waves from the grill behind him. He was sweating, a fly circling near his forehead. Even the fly was moving slowly.
“Ice cream,” the boy announced. “Vanilla.”
“Good choice,” Alex said. “Vanilla ice cream.”
The man nodded. He was uninterested in the specifics of Alex and the boy, though his expression was arranged in a smile.
Behind Alex was the pool, smaller than she’d imagined, lane dividers floating on its surface. A woman in a navy one-piece waded back and forth with a small boy, her thin hair pushed into a baseball hat. A teenager sat with his feet in the water, a hamburger half-eaten on a plate. He didn’t look up when a girl in uniform, probably his age, bent to pick it up and place it on her tray.
“How much?” Alex said, starting to open her bag.
“We don’t take cash,” the man said, like this was obvious. “Number?”
“Sorry? I’m visiting,” she said, “I don’t know the rules.”
“The last name?” he said. “For the chit.”
She looked at the boy, lost in his ice cream, a significant amount already down his chin.
“Last name, Calvin?” Alex nudged him.
“Spencer,” the boy finally said.
“Spencer.” Alex smiled sweetly.
The man did not care. He flipped through papers on a clipboard. He made a note. “Okay. One ice cream. Number 223.”
“Do I need to sign anything?”
“Nope.”
“Actually,” Alex said, “I’ll have an ice cream, too. And a cheeseburger. And a beer.”
* * *
—
The man had pointed out the dining room where Alex could find a power outlet. The room was mostly empty at this hour, the buffet closed. Lunch was over, the tables waiting for cleanup: soiled plates on trays, stained napkins in polyester weave. Her cheeseburger was fine. The ice cream wasn’t good. It tasted like the waxy container it had been scooped from. Still, Alex finished hers while the boy swirled his tongue around his own ice cream with unbroken focus.
Alex took a swig of beer from the plastic cup. Only the occasional staff passed in and out of the dining room. Women in their fifties with sun spots, a white-haired man in belted khakis, a teenager with a lush beard of acne.
She turned her phone on. There might be a brief stretch of usefulness, enough that she could read her text messages. Maybe Simon had texted. But she knew Simon—he wouldn’t make the first move. It was on Alex to shift things forward.
If there was more from Dom—and of course there would be more—she’d just keep ignoring him. She’d deal with Dom after she fixed things with Simon. At the party. The party that was still days away. If she considered how many days, the panic started to rise up. Better to just try and figure out what this afternoon would look like. What Alex would do tonight. Keep the sphere limited.
The boy was still working on his ice cream. When he saw Alex watching him, he paused.
“Are you a good grown-up?” he said. Was she? He didn’t seem too concerned either way.
“I’m not even a grown-up.” She put her phone down. “How’s the ice cream?”
He shrugged. Some had melted down his hand and dried so his skin looked strange and artificial.
“I have to pee,” he announced.
A ding from her phone. Alex had new texts, she could tell, but they weren’t loading fast enough to read before the phone shut itself off.
“You go to the bathroom,” she said, “and I’ll be right here.”
Though, it occurred to her, this was a good place for them to part ways. The boy could head back to his nanny. She could apply herself to the phone problem. To the wasting-of-another-day problem.
“Come with me?” The boy was rubbing his crotch with one hand, the other hand holding aloft the last of the ice cream. “Please?”
* * *
—
The women’s bathroom was well stocked: a bottle of mouthwash on the counter, tampons, a jar of Q-tips. Alex knocked back a paper cup of mouthwash and spit into the sink. Her tongue buzzed with menthol. The stalls were empty but someone had left a tote bag under the sink. Alex toed open the bag. She glimpsed a striped sweatshirt, three tubes of the same colorless chapstick.
The boy was already finished. He paused expectantly by the sink. “Shouldn’t I wash my hands?”
“Sure.” Alex was nudging the tote bag. Trying to sense whether there was a wallet inside. Something heavy, anyway. She squatted to feel around the bottom of the bag. A money clip: an ID, a credit card, a Christmas-themed gift card to Saks, a selection of folded fifties and twenties that looked almost ironed. A chunky silver barrette.
The credit card would be good, Alex thought, as long as she didn’t need a PIN or a zip code, but how long before the owner noticed the charges? Alex wanted to take the whole money clip, but restraint was a good thing. Always. Hadn’t the other girls taught her that? To never take enough that you couldn’t call the guy again, never fleece him so badly that he cut off the relationship entirely. People, it turned out, were mostly fine with being victimized in small doses. In fact, they seemed to expect a certain amount of deception, allowed for a tolerable margin of manipulation in their relationships.
“I wanna swim,” the boy said. “I could race you.”
She had already taken two fifties and the silver barrette, dropped them in her own pocket, but before she could decide whether or not to grab the credit card, the door started to open. Alex straightened. Kicked the bag back where she’d found it. By the time the woman entered, Alex was washing her hands in the sink, drying them with a paper towel with assiduous care.
The woman: blond, blue-eyed, her teeth white but not exactly straight. A rugby shirt worn with blousy cotton capris.
Her eyes went directly to the tote bag. “Thank god.”
As she bent to pick it up, Alex hustled the boy along. But there was no need to rush—it didn’t even seem to occur to the woman to check that the contacts of her bag were intact. The bubble of safety was utterly assumed. The woman smiled at Alex in the mirror. Alex smiled back.
