“A big bed…” he said.
“It’s a nice bed.”
“And so you’re just staying with him till you catch your flight?”
“I actually got a hotel this morning. I needed some space of my own, even for a day. I haven’t had my own place in, I don’t know, since being home last summer, maybe. Which: nothing like the Valley in summer, but still…”
Will flexed his eyebrows. She hadn’t said anything about the Valley before.
“I had some leftover cash. I got this place this morning—and after hauling my stuff up to the room, I just lay there on the covers in the quiet. It was paradise. Even if it was just for an hour.”
“I traveled in Europe the summer before college. We went hostel to hostel, four or eight or sixteen people to a room. Me and my buddies from high school. They left before I did at the end of the trip, so I was alone for a few days when I’d totally run out of steam. I hadn’t asked my parents for money the whole time, but I wrote them from an internet café and splurged on a hotel in Amsterdam those last few days. I basically didn’t leave the room for forty-eight hours. It wasn’t even nice, but I was finally alone. Air-conditioning. A bathroom that wasn’t way down the hall. It felt like staying at the Ritz compared to what we’d gotten used to for ten weeks. Point is: I get what you mean.”
“I never meant to end up at Jack’s, you know? I just really couldn’t go back to Gram’s.”
“No more swinger parties.”
“There was that. But there was also, he just…when I went back there to get my stuff that morning after the club, there was a whole scene. He said I hadn’t had his permission to be out all night. He didn’t like me skipping out on the party and coming back in the morning. He was treating me like I’d been hired to spend the night with him. Like I was his girlfriend. It was awful.”
“What did he say?”
“I don’t know, it was all very intense. He yelled, he threw some books around.”
“Jesus.”
“I grabbed my bags and he stood by the front door and tried to block me from leaving. Curtis the Cook had to intervene. He popped up in the loft and asked if everything was all right, and Gram sort of straightened up, shocked—he must’ve thought we were alone. And so I squeezed past him and out the door into the courtyard. I waved goodbye to Curtis over my shoulder and he had this horrified look on his face. Like, What kind of monster have I been living with?”
“God, I’m sorry. That sounds awful.”
“I knew what was going on,” she said. “I just didn’t think it’d come to that. I knew he was an asshole. I knew he was possessive. But he paid a lot for practically nothing. I never let him touch me, okay? That time I took my shirt off, he tried, and I made a big deal out of it, and he seemed genuinely sorry and ashamed. I thought he’d be able to handle his shit. Which is fucking naive of me.”
“How did you even meet him initially?”
“I was writing a paper in the fall about Picasso. The class spent time with the collections in Paris, but the professors encouraged us to come down to use the research library at the museum here, too. I was all set up at a hostel, and then someone at the museum told me about the Sunday dinner, and so I went to check it out, whatever, and then he offered me a bed and blah blah.”
“Blah blah foot model blah blah.”
“That’s how it usually goes, right? It seemed fine enough at first. I can look out for myself. It was money and it was easy work and it was free trips down and it was no big deal. I love visiting here. Obviously. I just never thought of it as crossing a line, even when it probably did. It was never…I was never made to feel like I was yesterday. But as I was rolling my bag across the courtyard after the whole blowup, he yells after me—with all those open windows, he says it in Spanish for people to hear—You ungrateful little whore. I hadn’t thought of it that way before, silly as that sounds.”
“I mean, you shouldn’t have. You were modeling for money and a room—so what?”
“But then, later that day, there I was in this deluxe apartment with this guy I’ve just met, propped up on the bed, putting out for my room and board again. I don’t know, it just begs the question…”
“I don’t think that’s how it really works. I don’t think that’s how people classify someone hooking up with a person they’re into.”
“He was just so nonchalant about it,” she said, reliving it in her mind, clearly. “Just another one of many for the basketball star.…Not ungrateful, but not exactly surprised by his great good fortune.” She smiled. “He’s been there before, he knows what he’s doing.”
“Ah, of course,” Will said, wincing a little. “Lucky you.…Lucky Whitney…”
He was drunk. He didn’t know why he said it or what he meant.
“So you are worried about her with him…”
“No, not that. I just meant Whitney and this…”
“Whitney and what?” She leaned forward on her stool.
The slipup had boxed him in. They’d been sealed here by the ashcloud, scooted inside by the rain. His shirt was sticking to his skin still. His hair was matted down flat on his forehead. He was trapped in this comfortable corner of the bar with this beautiful young woman with whom he was conversing more easily than in their previous encounters. She was sharing secrets, and maybe so should he. His beer glass was empty again and his head felt light, light all over, this morning’s whiskey melting again
