The Guest Room

by Chris Bohjalian

  At the time, that was how I thought.

  Anyway, Vasily did not have my mother killed. It was only lung cancer that made it so she couldn’t breathe and was always in agony.

  But Vasily certainly swooped in when she died.

  And then I was fucked—and that is an American pun, of course, but it was also my life.

  …

  Why did that older girl think Vasily had had my mother murdered? She overheard Vasily talking to a bodyguard about us when he was visiting Moscow. My mother had seen through his story that he wanted to make me superb dancer. Really he just wanted to make me superb prostitute—which he did.

  Of course, I am not sure that my mother would have wanted me even to become a ballerina. She was clingy with me—not just protective, but needy. Many people noticed. They would tell me that it was because of the earthquake, followed by her husband’s death. She wanted me safe in Yerevan with her, not going away to dance in Russia or Europe or America. I would attend university near our apartment and become a doctor. A pediatrician. I would help Armenia. That was the plan. At least that was her plan. Her mother was a nurse, so why should her daughter not become a doctor?

  My grandmother disagreed. She had no objections to me becoming a dancer. I think she had decided that being a doctor (or nurse) was overrated. As Americans say, she was “all in” at the idea of me becoming a ballerina. I tried to bob between the two of them, but one wave or the other would knock me down and give me snootful. My mother would tell me I was a good writer. She had a friend who said that maybe I could become a poet if I wanted to be an artist so bad. Maybe I could become a doctor and a poet. When you’re twelve years old, the future seems to have no limits.

  But this was all just talk for me. I would tape my toes and I would rub my feet and I would stretch and toss my shoes—especially my toe shoes, which made me so proud—into my dance bag, and off I would go to studio. Some days, I would practically skip down the sidewalk. That was how happy dance made me when I was a girl.

  …

  Yerevan had plenty of orphanages, but I didn’t need one after my mother died. After all, I was already living with my grandmother. All that was different was that suddenly I had a whole bedroom to myself. I was no longer sharing one with my mother. And now I was as sad as my grandmother had been for weeks. When you’re a teenager, it’s hard to believe your mother really is dying. I guess the teenage brain doesn’t get it that the chemotherapy is going to fail or the radiation is only postponing things. The teenage brain doesn’t accept what’s coming. I only saw the little steps forward, not the bigger steps back. My mother was never in remission. The doctors never said she was cancer-free. And yet I viewed her hospital stays and the ways she got sicker only as phases. I saw setbacks, sure. But I believed in the end she would get better. She had to, yes? How could a girl lose her father when she was toddler and her mother when she was teenager? I would join my grandmother in church when my mother was hospitalized, and the reverent fathers were very kind. Looking back, they probably thought my teenage quiet was my understanding of how sick my mother was. It was actually the opposite: total teenage denial.

  During the last two weeks of my mother’s life, I would sit beside her hospital bed and try and hold her hand. By then I was holding all bones. I would go there for few minutes right after school and before dance, and then I would go again right after dance. It was amazing how quickly she deteriorated those last days. We could still talk when she went into hospital for the last time, even if her sentences were short and often racked by a hacking cough. But by the end, I would just hold her hand. We didn’t speak. When she slipped first into morphine cloud—when she finally stopped coughing and her body was no longer spasming in agony—and then into death, I was so stunned.

  In the days that followed the burial, Grandmother and I were lonely, even though we had each other. But she had lost a child and I had lost a parent. My grandmother had obviously seen lots of people die, but it’s different when it’s your daughter. It’s different when you have to witness your granddaughter watching her own mother die.

  We were both very quiet those days. There really was very little to say.

  …

  Those weeks, we also had Vasily. Or, at least, we had Vasily’s people. He would show up at our apartment or at hospital—always foreshadowed by his cologne—and he would hug us. He would tell us very funny stories and laugh at his own jokes like crazy person. And his laugh was so big, so contagious, that sometimes we would laugh, too.

  At least a little.

  Chapter Three

  Richard stood in his driveway, his arms folded across his chest, and gazed at the police cars and the mobile crime scene van. The sun wouldn’t rise for another hour and he was cold. He hadn’t bothered to get a jacket when they had all left for the police station a while back. His younger brother was on his way back to Brooklyn by now; all of the guests were straggling home.

  He couldn’t bring himself to go inside. Not yet. He needed a moment. But he was curious as to what awaited him, and so he went to a window, crunching the pine nuggets beneath his shoes and pushing aside branches from the dwarf hydrangea. From there he peered into the living room. He presumed the corpses were long gone, and, indeed, he didn’t see the bodyguard who had been killed there. His blood, however, was everywhere. The couch, upholstered with a beige brocade patterned with dark blue shadows of flowers, looked as if it had been sitting on a slaughterhouse kill floor. In the sepulchral, hungover darkness of his mind, Richard saw a cow on a stalled conveyor belt bleeding out above it and wondered briefly where he had ever seen such a thing. Then he remembered. PBS. A documentary. He recalled the thug at the moment of his death and why so much of the blood had wound up on the couch: the man, a Russian with an almost comically bad Boris Badenov accent, had been leaning over its back, reaching for something that had fallen onto one of the cushions. A cigarette lighter, Richard thought—the first of two glimmering flashes, one silver and the other steel. They’d been getting ready to leave, Richard presumed, the four of them. The bodyguards and the girls. He’d just brought…Alexandra…downstairs. And then the blond one—so tiny, so very, very small, her weight gossamer when she had been straddling him on the couch, pressing her breasts into his face, her nipples erect—had appeared out of nowhere, a raptor, throwing herself onto the Russian’s back and plunging a knife deep into the right side of his neck. The fellow had reared up like a horse and tried throwing her off of him, but already he was gagging, his eyes wide. Richard had watched (they all had watched, studies in suburban male impotence) as his blood had sprayed like the paint on one of those pinwheel paint machines for little kids at community carnivals, soaking primarily the couch but also splattering the spines of the novels on the white built-in bookshelves on the nearby wall and—when the bodyguard lashed out one last time before collapsing onto the rug—the Hudson River School landscape by a minor but still immensely talented painter from the nineteenth century. A wannabe Bierstadt. The girl had reached into the dead man’s jacket, grabbing his wallet, his pistol from his holster—dear God, Richard recalled thinking, the guy was actually wearing a holster with a gun—and the wads of twenties and fifties and (yes) hundreds she and her partner had earned. Then she looked at the rest of the men briefly (in hindsight, Richard couldn’t decide whether that glance was dismissive or regretful) and rushed into the front hallway. Her arms were tattooed with the pimp’s blood. There was some on her neck and her cheek. It was like she was a five-year-old who had been finger-painting. A moment later, all of the men at the party, stupefied by the way the hooker had gone banshee, some afraid that they would be next, had heard the gunshots—two pops, a few seconds between them, the noises not deafening but still horrifying because it was the middle of the night and because everyone knew what the sounds were. What they meant. It was then that Richard saw the girl (like her partner, so petite) with the black hair, a gun in one hand and a key ring in the other. He had no idea if it was the same gun the bl
onde had taken from the dude she had just stabbed, or a second weapon. She, too, surveyed the room before climbing back into her clothes—some of them, anyway, because through the window Richard could see the white blouse in which she’d arrived, draped on one of the living room chairs—and disappearing with the blonde into the night. None of the men thought to stop them. Richard guessed that all of them were, like him, utterly dazed. And, without question, terrified. It was only when they heard the car’s engine roar to life in the driveway that any of them stopped cowering. Because, in fact, they had been cowering. They had.

  It was his brother, Philip, who spoke first, murmuring, “What the fuck. Seriously, what the fuck just happened?”

  But he knew. They all did.

  Had it only been forty minutes earlier that Philip had been leaning over that very couch, leering as the girls were on their knees, making out with each other on those very cushions? The girls were both wearing sports jackets they had commandeered from the guys—one, Richard thought, was his brother’s—and at the time he had found this only annoying. Not erotic. It wasn’t merely that he imagined the poor guys were now going to have jackets that would reek of eau de stripper when they went home; it was that he couldn’t see as much of the girls as he wanted. Their bodies. Their hips, their breasts, that part of a woman’s collarbone he found so erotically interesting.

  Soon, of course, he would see all of that—at least he would see all that he desired of the one with the black hair. She said her name was Alexandra, but obviously she had made that up. At least that was what he assumed. Philip’s pal at the hotel, Spencer Doherty, had paid for Philip to fuck one and the party’s host and best man, Richard, to fuck the other. (At the party, Spencer had asked the other guests to pony up a hundred or two hundred each to help cover the cost, and most of the men had agreed.) But for a price, the rest of the guests could have a little private time with either of the girls. Or both. Boris Badenov had made that clear. So had the dancers. But private time wasn’t an issue for Philip. The groom was so drunk by then that he hadn’t even bothered to adjourn to one of his older brother’s bedrooms upstairs: he’d taken the blonde on the living room floor while everyone around him had egged him on. Richard had listened as he had led the other girl upstairs to the guest room. (He sure as hell wasn’t about to bring her to his and Kristin’s bedroom or Melissa’s bedroom or even the room with the home theater and their records and two very comfortable couches.) He’d started talking to her on the stairs, if only to drown out the sounds of the men as they raucously cheered his brother, and the woman as she cried out like a porn star.

  “Where are you from?” he’d asked her, and she had leaned her head on his shoulder as if they were lovers on a date, and talked about Armenia and Russia, and how in another life she could show him the most beautiful sculptures and parks in Yerevan and Moscow.

  “There is a Botero cat at the base of the Cascades in Yerevan,” she had said.

  “A Botero,” he’d asked, “is that a kind of cat? A breed like a Siamese or an Abyssinian?”

  She looked up and smiled. “No, silly. Botero is a sculptor. He’s from Colombia. It’s a plump—plump like big pillow—black cat. A very big sculpture. But the cat has a king’s face. Royal.”

  “Regal?”

  “I guess.”

  “And the Cascades are a waterfall in the city?”

  “Cascades are steps in the city. Levels. And there are sculptures on every level,” she explained, as she started to unbutton his shirt. He let her. He stretched out his arms to allow her to pull off the sleeves. “I like a man’s chest,” she said. She kissed his sternum.

  “How many levels?”

  She looked up at him. “The Cascades?”

  He nodded.

  “It’s been so long. I wish I knew. I wish I could remember. Seven? Maybe eight?”

  “You grew up near them?” He thought she sounded wistful.

  “Close, yes. Parts of the city are so beautiful. The opera house? Nothing like it. At least for me.” She undid his belt and pulled down his zipper. He let her do this, too. He had never been with a woman this hypnotically sexy; he knew he never would be again. He tried to memorize every detail of her smile and her breasts and even her fingers, as his underwear and his pants slid down to his ankles and he stepped out of them. She started to kneel to pull off his socks, but he stopped her and stepped out of them, too, so—like her—he was naked.

  “How long have you lived here?” he asked. “In America?”

  “Shhhhhh,” she whispered, and her dark eyes seemed to sparkle. “Shhhhhh.” She stepped backward toward the bed, pulling him with her by holding both of his hands.

  …

  In the end, they hadn’t had sex in the guest room. For a long moment he had stood above her as she sat on the bed, her feet—so small, the arches petite and erotically incurvate, he remembered, the nail polish on her toes an unexpectedly childlike pink—dangling a few inches off the floor. He’d gazed down when he felt her hand reach out to him. He saw the nail polish on her fingers matched the color on her toes.

  But instead he ran his own hands along the skin of her thighs and felt the goose bumps. Her skin was smooth and tight, but all he could sense was the reality that the poor thing was cold. And instantly he had taken a step back.

  As drunk as he was, there was still some small part of his temporal lobe that recalled he was married. That recalled he was a father.

  As drunk as he was, he realized that this had all gone too far. Too ridiculously far. What in the name of God was he doing about to fuck a stripper—no, she wasn’t a stripper; she was a prostitute, a call girl, an escort, a whore—at a bachelor party? This was crazy.

  Moreover this slight young thing on the bed had to be a whole lot closer to his daughter’s age than to his. She was remarkably beautiful and she was his for the moment if he wanted her, but she was somewhere between eighteen (please, he thought to himself, please, please be at least eighteen) and maybe twenty-two or twenty-three. Maybe. But probably not.

  The realization made him shudder with self-loathing.

  “No,” he said simply, the syllable as much a small cry as it was an actual word. “No.”

  The girl leaned forward on the bed and he thought she understood. She didn’t. Instead, she looked up with a smile—gloriously feigned wantonness—and raised an eyebrow knowingly. She leaned toward him, opening her mouth. Gently he pushed her away, two fingers on each of her temples. “Thank you,” he said, the words awkward and obvious and pathetic, “but no.” Already he feared that he had forever forfeited much of the self-esteem that came with the titles of husband and father. Were not those lap dances downstairs—those mind-blowing, frictive, erotically aerobic balletics—sufficiently incriminating? Of course they were. And this? Worse. Obviously worse. He was heaving inside with regret, regret at what he had already done and regret at what he was giving up. “I’m married.”

  She shrugged. “I figured.”

  “No. I meant…” and his voice trailed off. After a moment he began again: “I didn’t know this was going in…in this direction,” he said simply.

  She seemed to think about what he had said, and he wondered if she didn’t speak enough English to understand the meaning of this direction. But before he had even started to elaborate, she asked, “Would you like to just talk?” She patted the mattress beside her, encouraging him to sit down.

  “Maybe downstairs we can talk,” he mumbled. “I mean…we should return to the party.”

  “You’re a sweet man,” she said, and weak-kneed he gave in and sat down beside her. He wrapped his arm around her, hoping to warm her. And there they did talk. He asked about her family and was saddened by the reality that she had none. He told her that his wife was a schoolteacher, and how the two of them loved to watch their daughter dance. How two years ago their daughter had been obsessed with Brownie badges. With Barbies, which already she had outgrown.

  “Oh, I loved Barbies, too.”


  “Even in Armenia?”

  “Even in Armenia. I had lots of them.”

  “Really? How?”

  “It’s long story how I got them. How I got so many.”

  “Tell me.”

  But she hadn’t, because it was clear the party downstairs was growing especially feral, and he feared he had better return. They both felt the alarm from the internal clocks they’d set when they had started upstairs going off. She hopped off the bed first, leaned into him, her hands on his thighs, and kissed him on the cheek. “Your wife is lucky girl.”

  He saw the goose bumps had returned to her thighs. “Can I get you a blanket? You could wear it like a shawl, maybe. You’re still cold.”

  “Not really. I’m fine.”

  And then she watched him get dressed, serene and unashamed by her own nakedness. She talked about what a lovely (she used that very word) man he was, and how kind he seemed. She said she liked the tone of his voice and his stories. She said she liked his smile. When he was done, she rose on her toes as if she were a ballerina and kissed him on the lips, though it was oddly chaste and Richard imagined it was the way a woman might kiss a former lover when she was saying good-bye for the last time. It was perfect in its own way, and Richard thought to himself with optative sadness that this was why men fell in love with strippers and escorts: it wasn’t the licentiousness, the dissembling, their craven willingness to do whatever you wanted. It was the way they would, out of the blue, surprise you with the psychic ability to know what you needed. He reached into the back pocket of his pants for his wallet, uncharacteristically bloated with bills, and pulled out the fifties and hundreds he had withdrawn from the bank that day for…for whatever…and gave her all that was left. Nine hundred dollars, he thought. She thanked him and joked that she really had no place to put it.