Super Host

by Kate Russo

  Lastly, she pulls out the citrine, her favorite of the three big stones her mother gave her. “This will help you realize and fulfill your dreams,” Viv stated, with great confidence. It’s this rock that Kirstie holds out the most hope for. She sets it on the opposite end of the windowsill from the amethyst, facing Bennett’s studio in the backyard. Since leaving Salcombe, she purposely hasn’t thought much about her future. She hoped that freedom would inspire her. Instead, it’s only filled her with fear. What happened to the big dreams she had when she was younger? Actually, they were better than dreams. They were plans—to design and open her own hotel. It seems strange to her now, how close and certain those plans had felt. So certain, in fact, that it never occurred to her that marriage and children could derail them. She doesn’t know what to hope for now. It’s hard to imagine wanting anything beyond a life without fear and judgment. If she could have that, the rest is just details.

  She unpacks her clothes slowly and methodically, careful to make sure the activity eats up a decent chunk of the afternoon. She finds she likes the feeling of the fabric in her hands; the whole process feels deliciously necessary. She never got to do such necessary things in Salcombe. They had a maid for all of that. Maybe she could get a job at one of the high street fashion stores, folding shirts and designing displays? She raises an eyebrow at the citrine crystal in the window. It stares back as if to say, That’s your dream? Folding clothes at fucking Topshop? Try again. It’s not like she needs the money. Albert kept the Salcombe house in the divorce, but she got most of the cash in their bank account, plus half of the continuing residuals from Criminal Coast. No small thing, since the damn show plays on a loop on ITV3 all day and night. Anything she does now, she can do purely for the love of it. It’s just, what does she love?

  She loved hotels and hospitality when she was younger. That was her first job straight out of school, cleaning rooms at a local seaside hotel. It was only supposed to be a temporary gig, but then she worked her way up to the front desk and even manager. She was good at it and it’s always been hard for her not to fall in love with things she’s good at. Back in those days, she used to study old issues of glossy magazines—ones she knicked from the lobby of the hotel where she was working—and cut out pictures that would inspire the design of her own hotel. She’d paste the cutouts in a red scrapbook called My Hotel, along with copious notes about how she’d use the designs and what she’d change. She’d considered calling it My Dream Hotel but decided this place wasn’t going to be a dream—it would be a reality.

  When she met Albert, she’d been managing the front desk at a waterfront Torquay hotel for two years. She knew everything there was to know about both the hotel and the town. In her opinion, there was no better feeling in the world than knowing how to do something really well. (She misses that feeling every day.) That year she applied to the University of Plymouth for the hospitality program. Her plan was to open her own boutique hotel in some small Devon village. A destination hotel with ten beautifully appointed rooms and a restaurant rated the best in Devon. These days, there are lots of such places, but back in the mid-eighties, her idea was an entirely fresh concept. She tells herself not to be bitter about that. She made her choice. It was the wrong one. Move on.

  Albert, a guest at the Torquay hotel, had been in town for a wedding. Kirstie checked him in on a Friday afternoon. She didn’t recognize him, but she thought he looked like Boris Becker, her favorite tennis player. A porter would later explain who he was.

  He wanted to know where the wedding would be taking place, so she pointed through a large bay window into the hotel’s beautifully manicured garden, where a tent had been set up. “Why come all the way to the seaside to get married in a garden?” he mused.

  He had a point, she thought. She wouldn’t learn until much later that Albert always had a point.

  “A wedding on the beach would be better. Sand in your toes . . .”

  She smiled, enamored by the idea. “Lots of lovely secluded coves around here.”

  When she handed him the room key, he winked at her. “They should have let you plan it.”

  Kirstie tucked her blond hair behind her ear. She’d had it cut and blow-dried to look just like Chrissy Evert, her other favorite tennis player.

  “I don’t suppose you’d like to have a drink later?” he enquired, feigning insecurity. “When you’re done here. I’d like to hear more about these coves.”

  “I’m off at five,” she answered, like this kind of thing happened all the time.

  He jingled the key in front of her. “Perfect. You know my room number.”

  She went up to his room at five, bringing with her a handful of foldout maps and a pen to mark where all the secluded coves were. She was pretty sure that he intended to make a pass at her—she wasn’t an idiot—but it was important to keep up pretenses. After all, she wasn’t a prostitute. When she knocked on the door, he called, “Door’s open,” and there he was on the balcony—their first balcony—looking at the seafront, a pitcher of gin and tonic on a clear plastic table.

  She showed him the maps, folding them out onto her lap, so that he had to lean over her in order to see. He held one corner, she another, while she circled spots of interest. She told him all about her life, what it was like to grow up in the so-called “English Riviera,” all about her job and her plans to attend hospitality school and open up her own hotel. He listened to all of it and asked questions. He smiled a lot, leaning on the arm of his chair, his head propped up in his hand. He refilled her glass from the pitcher of gin and tonic, but never his own.

  “How old are you? Do you mind my asking?”

  “Twenty-three,” she said. “And I don’t mind. Ask me again in ten years and I’ll say the same thing.”

  He smiled at her wit, which she could tell he found sexy, at the time. “For such a young woman, you have big aspirations.”

  She shrugged. “It’s just an idea . . .”

  Except it wasn’t. It was a well-researched proposal. Comments like that haunt her, now. At the time, she didn’t notice how quickly she downplayed her life’s ambition just because she was drinking gin and tonics with a handsome and successful man.

  The next day he called the front desk and extended his stay another five days. Every evening after work, she went up to his room. On the second evening they kissed and on the third she went to bed with him. She hadn’t wanted to miss out on what might well be her only chance to have sex with someone from telly, someone who also happened to look like Boris, the dreamiest man alive. Once he had her in bed and her hotel uniform—a tight black skirt and white blouse, complete with name tag—on the floor, he asked, “Are you a virgin?” She replied, “No!”—as if to say, Are you nuts?—and, for a moment, she thought he looked disappointed. On her day off, they hopped in his MG convertible and she showed him all around South Devon. They went to Salcombe for the first time and he remarked that it was more civilized than Torquay, the kind of place where he could see himself settling down. By the end of the five days, she’d pretty much forgotten about her plan to open the hotel. She hadn’t opened her scrapbook once. There was still plenty of time, in her mind, and a new idea was forming: my dream husband.

  She’d like to slap that girl now.

  * * *

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  After she ended up at her mother’s in Totnes that night, Kirstie called each of her children. “You’re probably going to see some photos in the press,” she told them. It was important they hear about what happened from her first, she explained calmly. Michael, an aspiring actor, though he mostly does voice-over work, said “You went to the police? Oh, Mum . . . couldn’t you have at least talked to me first?”

  “What would that have done, Michael?”

  “I could have told you not to. This is going to be everywhere.”

  “I’m sorry, darling. I know this is hard.” Her heart sank, reali
zing for the first time that her kids would be caught in the media circus.

  “So, what now? You can’t go back there, not after you reported him to the cops.”

  “No. I’m going to file for divorce.”

  “I’m sure he didn’t mean it, Mum. He’s just got a wretched temper.”

  “He meant it, darling. I’m sorry.”

  Matthew had been more difficult to get ahold of. He was in some nightclub in Plymouth, when on Kirstie’s fifth attempt, he finally answered his mobile. A once semiprofessional cricketer, he’d torn his ACL leaping over a fence at Dartmouth Naval Academy on a drunken dare. Now he’s a full-time bum.

  “’Bout time,” he said, when she told him she was divorcing his father. “You two have never been happy together.”

  Well, that wasn’t quite true, but probably not since Matthew was born, and Matthew was the kind of kid who believed, vehemently, that nothing at all existed before he did, least of all, other people’s feelings.

  Then there was Martha. She’d saved the conversation with her daughter for last because she knew it would be the most difficult, not because her daughter would be hurt, but because she wouldn’t. A dentist outside Leeds, she spends her days whitening the teeth of the Yorkshire elite. Martha has insinuated, more than once, that she believes her mother has “wasted” her life, which hurts Kirstie deeply, in part because she agrees. Still, she suspects that she and her daughter have a lot more in common than Martha admits, like the time her daughter hinted that she liked Theresa May, calling her “brave in the face of a hostile nation.”

  “Nonsense,” Albert scolded (just like he scolded Kirstie), “that wretched witch cares more about her shoe collection than she does the British people.” Albert believed the working-class man was the most important asset to any civilization. He’d used his fame to stump for Labour candidates all over the country—well, male candidates, anyway. “Women don’t use reason,” he always explained. “They always want something.” As if male politicians never want anything.

  “That’s such a stereotype, Dad,” Martha had shouted back.

  Kirstie remembered smiling at this, opening the refrigerator and putting her head inside where no one could see it. When she was young, she’d liked Margaret Thatcher. She remembers seeing the Iron Lady on her parents’ TV screen and imagining that she, too, could one day be prime minister. When she looked at Thatcher, dressed in her red woven skirt and matching jacket with gold buttons, she saw a woman who could render a roomful of men silent. They hung on her every word.

  “What did you do, Mum?” Martha wanted to know, after Kirstie told her the balcony story.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You must have done something to make him angry. Why do you always egg him on?”

  This was one of her daughter’s frequent misconceptions, that Kirstie did things, on purpose, to make Albert’s temper worse. Like some kind of weird sex game, Martha is convinced her mother gets off on it.

  “I didn’t do anything, Martha.”

  “You’ve always wanted to leave him, don’t make him out to be a criminal in the process. He wouldn’t kill you, Mum. He just wouldn’t.”

  She let the line go silent. He would have killed her. The problem with Albert was that he thought he could kill her and then bring her back to life. As if he’s been writing her into the script of his life all this time. As if he could hit Delete and then start her story again.

  “Right.” She let the phone go silent for a moment. “I like Theresa May, too, you know,” she said, feeling the tears well up. “I voted for her.” Then she hung up.

  * * *

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  She sends all the kids a group text saying she’s arrived in London and misses them. Come down anytime, she says, even though she knows she’ll eventually have to beg.

  * * *

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  Morning bursts into the bedroom through the skylight by six. Light bounces off the crystals, refracting and casting light purple and yellow tones all over Bennett’s white designed room. Kirstie rolls over and looks at the citrine on the windowsill, the keeper of her hopes and dreams. According to Viv, she’ll look over at the crystal one morning and her future will become clear. Not this morning, though, not yet. It’s hard to be patient with a rock. She rolls herself out of bed, keen not to stew in her own thoughts or analyze that strange dream she had last night, where she was standing on stage in front of an audience of old men wearing Thatcher’s red wool jacket with the gold buttons and nothing else.

  Opening the middle drawer to her dresser, she looks down at the clothes she folded so neatly yesterday, before pulling out a pair of black yoga pants and a hot pink elastic top. Dressed, she rolls out her yoga mat onto the floor by the window. Facing the garden, she starts stretching. She reaches above her head and to the side, letting her hips pull her waist in the opposite direction. She holds herself in this position for thirty seconds before switching to the other side. She and her mother did yoga together, while she was staying in Totnes. At eighty-four, Vivienne can’t do the really difficult poses, so it’s been a while since Kirstie has tried anything as challenging as a Crane Pose or her favorite, a Firefly Pose. She worked on her core strength for months in order to achieve this pose for the first time. She spent hours a day at the yoga studio in Salcombe with Thorbjørn, her blond-haired instructor, twenty years her junior. Everyone in town thought she was fucking the Dane, but it wasn’t like that at all, though she did confide in him. He was the only person in Salcombe she’d told about Albert’s temper, that she was worried that one day her husband might try to hurt her and she wanted to be ready. She might need her balance and core strength to save herself, she told him, and that turned out to be true. That night on the balcony, she felt her abs lock into place, a wall of defiance. She might be “dumb as a rock,” but try snapping a rock in half.

  She gets down on the floor in a squatting position, thinking that maybe when she gets better at doing the difficult poses again, she’ll start doing her yoga in the garden. Maybe she’ll ask Bennett to take a photo of her in Firefly Pose so she can send it to Thorbjørn and let him know she’s still working hard. She had to say goodbye to him abruptly after the photos were published. Viv got a call from a friend that morning, who told her, all excited, that “Your daughter is on the cover of all the papers!” It was difficult to go back to Salcombe after that. The town was suspicious. Had the photos been doctored? they wondered. Surely, not Cliff Caswell, national treasure. Not Albert Cartwright, upstanding community member and card-carrying liberal? Not possible, they wrote in the opinion section of the local paper. Sure, maybe he slept around a little; after all, boys will be boys. But she probably slept around, too, have you seen her? they whispered. They were convinced that Albert Cartwright would never hit a woman. It’s true. Albert had never hit her. He just berated her and tightened his grip around her neck until she couldn’t breathe. But no hitting. Why, everyone wanted to know, would she have stayed with him if he was so horrible? Only a moron would stick around if she truly feared for her life. Try being told you’re stupid and useless for twenty years and see if you don’t end up believing it yourself. That’s what she wanted to tell them.

  She squats on the floor, like a frog getting ready to leap, then shifts her center of gravity so that her hands are carrying most of her weight. Her knees hug her shoulders and she tightens her abdominal muscles, rock-solid, preparing to stretch her legs up to the ceiling. She gulps, letting out a groan as her legs extend, and her hands bear all the weight. She’s just about to straighten her arms, pushing her whole body about a foot above the mat, when she tips over backward, landing on her bum. “Aw, fuck,” she yells, rolling onto her side and rubbing her elbow, which she’s pretty sure bent back in the wrong direction. She stands up, so she can shake out her arms and roll out her neck. From the window, she studies Bennett’s studio, wondering if he slep
t there last night, or went to his girlfriend’s. As if she’s willed him into being, he opens the door of the studio in a navy blue T-shirt and pair of grey sweatpants. His eyes are pulled up to the master bedroom by the brightness of her hot pink top in the window and she waves down to him, smiling. He waves back with the same goofy grin he greeted her with yesterday, then exits his gate and begins to run. Her smile remains, even after he’s gone.

  * * *

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  An hour later, she’s sitting on the patio sofa, dressed in khaki capri slacks and a black top that wraps around her waist, tying in a bow at her side. She likes to think “the wrap” is her signature style, classy yet seductive, just like Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge—her favorite royal.

  With a cup of tea and her iPad, she’s on a property website looking at flats when Bennett reaches the gate, panting. She looks up, smiling. He’s grasping the fence for support while he tries to catch his breath; he isn’t aware that she’s there, watching. When he finally comes through the gate, he’s drenched in sweat. He shakes his whole body, like a dog after a swim, hoping to fling off some of the sweat.

  “Morning, Bennett!” she shouts, her smile even broader now.

  “Morning!” he says, startled, trying to mask his surprise with enthusiasm. He pulls the earbuds from his ears and the faint sound of rap fills the garden. She wasn’t expecting that. “How was your first night?” he asks, fishing around in his pockets for the right device. First he pulls out his phone, then finds the iPod and hits Pause. “Sorry.”