The Guest Room

by Chris Bohjalian

  “Resisted her. You make it sound like it was all the girls’ fault. It wasn’t, you know. I feel bad for them.”

  “On some level, I do, too. On some level, I even feel a little bad for Richard. It won’t be pretty when he goes in to the office on Monday morning.” She gazed out the window at the overcast skies. “So, what are you going to do?” she asked Nicole.

  “About?”

  “About the wedding.”

  There was a long silence on the other end of the line. “I don’t know,” she said finally. “I just don’t know if I can marry him anymore.”

  …

  While Kristin and Melissa were at the matinee that afternoon, Richard went clothes shopping for the whole family. He had to believe that the police would allow them back into their home by Monday, but that still meant they would need additional clothing. He guessed he could sponge off his suit and press it, but he still needed jeans for tomorrow and shirts for the next two days. He needed a necktie. Kristin said that she and Melissa were fine through Sunday, but they would both need clothing for the start of the week. For school.

  Just in case, he bought clothes for Tuesday, too. He spent two hours in Bloomingdale’s, shopping as if it were Christmas Eve and he had nothing to place under the tree. He ignored price tags. He bought skirts and dresses and designer jeans and underwear. Then he went around the corner to a special boutique where he bought his daughter two pairs of the strangest tights they had in stock: one pair was nothing but the royalty from a deck of medieval playing cards; the other was covered with doodles of stars and planets and the sorts of spaceships you would see in silent films from the first decades of the twentieth century. He bought them chocolates. He bought his mother-in-law flowers. He bought with the desperate hope that somehow he could buy their forgiveness.

  Twice his cell phone buzzed and both times it was Philip. He ignored the calls. He wasn’t prepared to talk to his brother and face again what had happened the night before. Twice more there were calls from reporters, neither of which he answered.

  The only call he accepted was from a neighbor in Bronxville, a guy he played golf with but who had not been at the party. After all, the people there had been Philip’s friends, not his. Perhaps that was why Richard had accepted the call: it was someone who wasn’t yet privy to the debacle. He put everything but the flowers down on the sidewalk, and listened. His friend wanted to know why in the name of God there were video trucks from a couple of TV stations parked at the bottom of his driveway and—when he looked closely—a van from the state police. A mobile crime lab. Clearly something was horribly wrong, and he wanted to see what he could do.

  “Everyone’s okay. At least everyone is in my family,” Richard told him. He was about to explain what had happened—offer a Reader’s Digest condensed version—when he heard his friend’s wife yelling something from the next room. It seemed a version of the story was already online: two people were killed at a bachelor party orgy in a swank Manhattan suburb.

  “There was no orgy,” Richard said simply.

  “But somebody was killed.”

  “Yes. Two people.” He was relieved that in the theater across town his wife’s cell phone was off. Thank God. She might turn it on again at intermission, which he guessed would be around three-fifteen. And without a doubt there would be calls waiting for her on her voice mail. They would be from worried neighbors, and they would be from reporters. There might be calls from her brother in Boston and from other teachers at the high school. How had this gotten on the web so quickly? How was it already popping up on newspaper websites?

  He realized that he would have to warn Kristin not to answer her phone. As he did, he recalled what he had told Dina Renzi: I believe our marriage will be fine. Suddenly he wasn’t so sure.

  Alexandra

  I guess my mother had lovers after my father died. She was young. She was human. I remember two different men who took her to the opera a couple of times, and there was another man who she went to a jazz club with on Friday nights when I was nine- and ten-year-old kid. Maybe even when I was eleven. My grandmother would babysit me. But when I asked my mother if this fellow was her boyfriend, she told me, no, he was just a friend.

  One night when I was working at the cottage outside of Moscow, I opened the door to the office on the first floor. (I keep calling it a cottage, but it was once some bigwig party official’s dacha for sure—which is maybe why Muscovites liked to call it a cottage. Downplay class difference. Americans would probably call it a mansion.) I was looking for Inga, one of the women who helped train us, because I had a question. And she was in the lap of one of the bosses who ran us, a tall dude with a Stalin mustache named Mikhail. She still had her blouse on, but it was unbuttoned, and her skirt was up around her waist. She started to jump off his lap, but he held her there and smiled at me like this was no big deal. I said I’d come back later and backed away. I closed the door. I knew Inga would punish me for not knocking, and she did.

  That night I woke up after a dream and stared up at the ceiling of my bedroom. I couldn’t remember the dream. But I remembered something else. After school one day I went to the brandy factory so I could show my mother a painting of tulips I had finished in art class. I was maybe seven years old, and so my grandmother brought me. She was talking to someone in the big reception area, and when I saw my mother was not at her desk, I opened the door to Vasily’s office. I didn’t think to knock. Did I see my mother try to jump off Vasily’s lap just the way Inga did—or did I dream that, too? I still don’t know. At least that’s what I try and tell myself.

  But, of course, some days I do know. I do.

  …

  When I finally had the strength to climb off the bed after I had been raped my first night in Moscow, I went to the bureau with the TV where I had put down my cell phone. That was when I found it was gone. Of course. That was when I looked down and saw that my rollie suitcase was gone, too. At first I was surprised to see that my suitcase had been stolen. Why did they feel the need to take my clothes? Why did they want to take from me my ballet slippers and my toe shoes? Was that really necessary? I guess it was. After all, it was in their nature because they were pricks. A bird has to fly and a lion has to eat gazelle and a Russian mobster has to break what’s left of a girl’s heart by stealing those things that make her the happiest and feel most like life is worth living after she has been raped.

  Over the next few months, I would meet girls who would tell me they got sucked into the life more slowly. Sometimes their pimp was first their boyfriend—at least they thought he was their boyfriend. This was case with those girls who started very young. Eleven, twelve, thirteen years old. Their boyfriends were dudes in their twenties and thirties. They told the girls they loved them, and the girls would do anything for them, even when their boyfriends would beat them. The girls always believed they had done something to deserve the beating.

  Other girls thought their boyfriend was their “manager.” They were going to be a model, maybe. One girl told me that after a few weeks, her manager said that he needed her to do him and her career a gigantic favor and sleep with some guy who had very big clout. The guy was what her manager called a “game changer,” and it would just be that one time. So she did. The next thing she knew, she was down the rabbit hole. All she was doing was sleeping with guys who were “game changers.” She never modeled. Not even once.

  And so while I did go to Moscow with them when they asked, they did not suck me in slowly. Nope. They made sure I knew right away what I was in for—and what would happen if I did not cooperate.

  …

  When I discovered that my phone and my rollie had disappeared, I opened the hotel room door. I nearly screamed because there was a tall guy in the hallway watching it—watching my room. He was just sitting there in the plush chair that was near the elevator, looking at different things on his phone. (Knowing what I know now, he was looking at soccer scores or porn, and probably porn.) When he saw me, he just smile
d and motioned me back inside with his fingertips like I was little bug in front of his face. He was bald, too, just like Andrei. To this day, I will never understand why Russian mobsters feel the need to shave themselves so they look like cue-ball-head babies. No girl really likes that look. It’s big mystery to me.

  It would be hours before they would send up Inga, so I went back inside my room and that’s when I saw the blood on the sheet. I didn’t remember Andrei pulling the bedspread down. Then it dawned on me: I was still bleeding. Not a lot, but a little. It was pooling in my underwear and dribbling down my leg like raindrops on a windowpane. And suddenly I just went crazy like wild animal. I was pounding on the walls with my fists. Then I was slapping the back of the door with the palms of my hands, and I didn’t stop even when my skin felt like it was burning. I’m not sure what I expected. Did I think the corridor thug would set me free? Or did I think he would order me to stop? Did I care? The point was, I was trapped. I was a prisoner. In the end, he didn’t set me free or yell at me. He just ignored me. I pounded on the walls and the door until I was so tired I just slid to the floor. I looked at the velvet drapes in front of the window. I was on the ninth floor, but maybe there was a fire escape. There wasn’t.

  I crawled my way to the bed and fell back onto the mattress, where I cried till I was hyperventilating. I was exhausted. It was like evening a few years earlier when I was babysitting an infant on another floor in my apartment building in Yerevan. I just couldn’t stop this poor little girl—she was just over a year old—from crying. I held her, I rocked her, I sang to her. I tried to burp her. I changed her diaper—and changed it again. And then she started to hiccup. Not once, not twice. Not for a couple of minutes. For hours. She didn’t stop hiccupping and crying till her mother returned. I was convinced she was going to hiccup herself to death. I would have brought her to my mother or my grandmother, but neither was home. And that night in a Moscow hotel room, abducted and humiliated and alone, I was like that.

  And I was so tired now. I was so tired.

  Eventually I remembered the bloody sheet. I was lying on it. I was lying in my own blood—and then I felt not only violated, I felt ashamed. As angry as I was and as scared as I was, there was still that part of me that wanted to be a good girl. That needed a grown-up’s approval. That feared making a bad first impression. I was in a hotel nicer than any hotel I had ever been in before. (In truth, I had never really been to a hotel before. I had been to motels and cabin courts on Lake Sevan, but never anything as luxurious as this.) It seemed to me that I could not allow the maid to see the sheet. I couldn’t bear what she would think. I rolled the sheet into the tiniest ball I could and I placed it inside that plastic trash bag. Then I put the plastic trash bag under the bed—at least for now. I told myself that later I would find a way to throw it out.

  When I curled up on the bed after that, all I could think of was my mother and my grandmother. I had finally stopped hiccupping, but I was still whimpering. I was crying because my mother was dead and I was crying because my grandmother was far away and I was crying because I had been raped. I was crying because I was terrified. You have no idea what terror is like until you are a teenage girl in bloody panties trapped in a hotel room. It didn’t matter that it was an elegant Moscow hotel with a little refrigerator in the room and wineglasses and an ice bucket. It didn’t matter that maybe the other rooms on the other floors were filled with oligarchs and tourists.

  But what, looking back, seems weirdest to me is this: I remember feeling guilty. I understood this was not my fault: What girl would not want to be ballerina? What girl would not have trusted her dead mother’s boss and, with her grandmother’s blessing, left with his assistant on an airplane? But all reason was gone with that bloody sheet. All reason was gone when, a few seconds later, I pulled off my panties and put them in the bag with that sheet.

  …

  The woman said her name was Inga and she was from Latvia, but I had a feeling she was lying. She went on and on about my name, and how I needed a new one. Anahit would not do. Not European enough. Not glamorous enough. Not seductive enough. She wanted me to become—not kidding—Alexandra. In the last twenty-four hours, I had been fucked for the first time and then filmed with some bastard bodyguard’s penis deep in my mouth, and now this strange woman is talking to me about why my new name should sound like imperial Russian tsarina. I was in shock. I remember sitting on the bedspread of the bed where the night before I had been raped, and then turning away from this pretend Inga and wrapping my arms around my ribs. I was cold, even though the hotel room thermostat was set high for hotel sex. She kept talking to me in a very sweet, very calm voice—I guess she was the good cop to Andrei’s bad cop—about how things would get better, and how this was a glamorous life I had been given, and the sooner I accepted that the better off we’d all be. Her Armenian was very good, but she had an accent I did not recognize. It might have been Polish, but I was just guessing. I had met many tourists in Yerevan, but none from Poland.

  “Alexandra is rather like Anahit,” she was saying. “That’s why I proposed it.”

  I could have told her that Anahit was the name for a beautiful Armenian goddess not some poor woman who was shot with her family by the Bolsheviks. But I was done speaking that day, because every time I opened mouth, all that came out was either a trapped cat hiss or a sad little cry. She tried to rub my neck and my shoulders through my shirt, but I slapped her hands. It was a reflex.

  Finally Inga said that she was going to leave me alone. But she gave me a foil disk with little pills on it and said, “Oh, by the way: if you don’t start taking the pill, they will kill your grandmother. It’s really simple. And they’ll know if you aren’t taking the pill, because you’ll get pregnant.” Then she smiled like kind aunt. When she closed the hotel room door behind her, I heard her say something to the guard, but I couldn’t make out the words.

  The next day I was a little more communicative. Not much, but a little. And Inga figured out how well I spoke English. She was surprised that no one had told her, and a little miffed. But she was also pleased with the discovery, even though I spoke English better than she did.

  Still, it would be a few more days before I would understand something about me that you probably figured out a long time ago: I was a valuable piece of property and they were investing impressive dram in me. I might be just object, but I was fifteen, I spoke English, and I was hot. I had the potential to make them very serious scratch.

  Chapter Five

  In the dark of the theater, losing herself in a musical about a group of beached whales and the people who try to save them—it vacillated between charming and operatically sad—Kristin was almost able to forget the nightmare that had occurred in her living room (in her whole house, in truth, but at the moment she kept returning to the living room) the night before. There were times during the first act when she sat acutely still, her hands atop the yellow and white Playbill in her lap, her daughter beside her, when she was able to convince herself that all would be well in the end. She felt her body relax into the red velvet cushion of the seat; she immersed herself in the world of the pickup-truck-sized puppets of whales and the plaintive singing of the desperate marine biologists.

  But that hope disappeared the moment the lights came up and she switched on her phone at intermission. There were the feverish voice-mail messages. The ineludible texts. The frenzied questions from neighbors and other schoolteachers about the news stories, some of which she decided she would have to scan before returning anyone’s calls. There was a message from her brother. She could feel Melissa watching her as she scrolled through the first article, reading the quotes from the police officers and detectives and—dear God—some gregarious friend of her brother-in-law’s named Chuck Alcott who apparently was lacking both in reticence and verbal restraint. “I don’t know who was more out of control, the two hookers or the guys at the party,” he was quoted as saying. He said that at least half the bankers, advertising
executives, IT managers, and hoteliers (there was that word again) at the party had had sex with the girls. He said the stabbing of the fellow who had brought the prostitutes was the most horrific thing he would ever see in his life. He added that he had not witnessed the shooting of the second Russian—none of the men had—but it was the other girl who had gotten the gun and pulled the trigger. This Chuck Alcott insisted that he was one of the revelers who had not had sex with the prostitutes.

  Her husband, she noted, was described as a wealthy investment banker; their house was called elegant and well appointed; their daughter was not mentioned at all. Thank heavens.

  But the part of the story that struck her most was the paragraph about the hookers. Although the headline suggested that the girls had unleashed unspeakable violence in her home, the article—despite the Chuck Alcott quotes—portrayed them as victims. As Richard had said, it may have been their captors they killed, not their bodyguards. The girls may have been sex slaves. They may have been minors. No doubt, the reporter concluded, the pair was trying harder to stay ahead of Russian gangsters than they were the police.

  “Is Daddy in more trouble?” Melissa asked her. All around them people were stretching and sharing how moved they were by the first act. Her little girl’s eyes were the most remarkable blue, even in the muted light of the theater. Her eyelashes already were lustrous and long. She was a lovely child and Kristin was scared for her. For her future. She thought of the gentlemen’s clubs—now there was a ridiculous euphemism—they had passed in Times Square on the way to the theater and decided that, at the moment, she hated men. All of them. They turned girls into whores. Sex slaves. And not just in dark alleyways in Bangkok. Right here. There may have been two in her home.