5. You Know What They Say About Glass Houses #2
Whatever was in the blender was a sickly shade of brown, but that was basically my experience with smoothies under most conditions.
“Oh, um—sure, thank you. Looks great.” Emmanuelle beamed with approval.
“I didn’t realize you had an event tonight,” I added, taking in the sheer volume of booze that had been stocked behind the bar—dozens of handles and what seemed to be crates of Italian glassware—though it was clear she couldn’t hear me.
The blender whirred with purpose, the almighty buzz-god grinding away at palm-sized whiskey cubes.
Once I stood level with this portion of the house, the atmosphere made it clear this was a place designed for a certain kind of mingling.
There were sunken leather sofas, an indoor firepit, all of it wrapped around the massive pool.
There were smaller pool houses, too, little cabanas, a micro-village of fashionably enclosed palapas.
Everything about the space said lounge, an invitation to plumb the depths of something, sin most likely.
That was my grandmother’s influence, the fact that everything seemed to me like I was descending the Inferno, one circle deeper with every flight of unimaginably priced terrazzo stairs.
This level was gluttony, I reasoned. Maybe lust.
The blender cut out then and my ears rang with the silence. “What?” said Emmanuelle, and began coughing. “Sorry,” she said with a vague gesture around, “all that dust from the renovation—”
I motioned to indicate that I was young and thriving, unconcerned with dust. I didn’t pick up on any, but the paint smell was noxious, even down here. “Are you having a party?” I repeated, gesturing to the bottles and glasses behind the bar. She cleared her throat, then flapped a hand.
“Oh, well, when the cat’s away.” Recovered now from her little coughing fit, Emmanuelle beamed at me, gleaming bronze with what was probably very good self-tanner.
She was wearing a sheer teal caftan, beneath which was a bathing suit, a white one-piece with a slash through the center.
On her feet were gold sandals, the heels toweringly precarious.
I’d only met her once before, but something about her face seemed slimmer, her cheekbones a little more pronounced.
“You look beautiful,” I said. Which was true.
“Oh, this?” She motioned to herself with an air of dismissal, though I knew she was pleased. “All the right potions, my dear. Body is a temple. Here, try this,” she said, nudging the fresh sludge at me that she’d poured into a large, bulbous wine glass.
“Oh, great. Thanks.” This, I realized. This was the smell that emanated from Emmanuelle. “What’s in it?”
“Oh, fruits and veggies, of course. Chlorella, spirulina, hemp … all organic, lots of antioxidants. A few things specifically for beauty, of course. Preventative!” She wagged a finger at me. “Collagen, sea moss gel, hyaluronic acid—”
“Yum,” I said, my stomach turning. Some things were better not to hear. I took a sip, registering that it tasted fundamentally no different from a strawberry banana smoothie. “Mm,” I said. It left a strange numbness on my tongue, but was otherwise banal.
I never got more than that single sip. Emmanuelle, meanwhile, had somehow drained all of hers while I’d been delicately sampling.
“Right, now we can have some fun. Here,” she added, thrusting a baby monitor in my direction as she covered what was obviously a burp.
The monitor tumbled from her hand as I leapt to catch it, forced to set my glass hastily on the bar.
I winced a little at the ring it left on the raw wooden bar top.
“Excuse me—my goodness! Hodel’s already been with his pills,” Emmanuelle added without pause, fanning herself, “so he’s out cold.
Try this,” she added, a second thrust, this time with another drink she must have already prepared, which I was incapable of not fumbling.
Some of it sloshed onto my jacket, which would be a nuisance to clean.
I was sweating, the leather already half adhered to my arm.
I smelled tequila, lemonade, pineapple juice, maybe grenadine.
“Is this … a baby? Am I watching a baby?” My brain was working slowly as I regarded the safety monitor in my hands.
I hadn’t yet processed the concept of pills.
The smoothie had left my tongue feeling heavy, which sometimes happened when I had anything with coconut.
(Weda, I heard Nessa say in my ear, bitch.)
Emmanuelle snorted. “Julian is hardly a baby.”
I looked down at the screen of the monitor, which had gone black. I hit a button I thought would wake it up again, then tried to adjust the brightness. “Oh, um. Well, I kind of thought this was just an interview—”
“Darling! I trust you. What do you think, sweet enough?” She took the drink back from my hand, sniffing it theatrically. “I’ll make another. Don’t worry, it’s agave.”
I hadn’t tasted the drink, though I was fairly confident it would have been excruciating.
Emmanuelle’s tastes clearly ran sugary, to the point where I questioned the state of her tongue.
Or would have, if not for other concerns.
“Emmanuelle—” I frowned at the screen of the monitor. “What am I supposed to be looking at?”
Her eyes had left mine; had left, as far as I could tell, the radius of my existence. She was busying herself with a variety of bottles, and then looked up at something behind me, something willfully not where I happened to be.
“Oh my god, Atticus, finally!” Emmanuelle waved up at someone who had just begun departing the stairs from the main house—maybe the upper house, I reasoned, looking up at it. Difficult to tell what counted as main. The part of the house with the front door, anyway.
The man on the stairs—Atticus—was, from what I could tell at a distance, middle-aged, with some visible hair loss, and profusely sweating.
He was flanked by two additional men, who took the stairs one step behind him, one very tanned Asian, one possibly half Black, with light eyes.
They were both distinctly lithe and femme, clearly too young for the man who was Emmanuelle’s guest, as they were almost certainly my age or even younger.
“Come,” Emmanuelle cooed to him, sashaying around the bar to drape an arm around my shoulders, “meet my protégée—”
I was still looking at the screen of the baby monitor in my hand. With the brightness all the way up, all I could distinguish was a bedframe with a bare mattress, a sheet. There was nothing on the mattress.
“Ah, so you’re the one Emmanuelle’s been chirping on about.
” The man named Atticus was hardly taller than I was; both his accompanying dates were taller, already swiveling their hips as elsewhere, over the sounds of crickets, Lana continued her breadth of melancholic Americana. “You’re an actress, then?”
“Yes, on my good days.” The performance of who I was in public situations came on like a reflex, even though I still felt a niggling sense of panic, a wrongness when it came to the task I had apparently been assigned.
I already understood that there was a kind of front-facing aspect of my new job as well as a back-end workaround.
I was there to be Emmanuelle’s pet, but in at least some capacity, I was also supposed to be looking after someone.
Whoever Julian was—and I was becoming very concerned about him being an extremely ill-cared-for child—I was at least partially tasked with keeping him alive.
And just because Emmanuelle didn’t care now didn’t mean she wouldn’t blame me for something in the future.
She seemed mercurial. She favored me now, but I sensed that I wouldn’t want to see what lived on the other side of her good graces.
“Emmanuelle,” I attempted, following her as she swanned her way to the pool, caftan fluttering on one of the periodic gusts of wind.
She either didn’t hear me or didn’t want to.
Atticus’s arrival had been like the opening of the floodgates, a trickle of guests that became a steady stream.
There were easily a dozen people in the courtyard now, belonging to a mix of archetypes.
Some were the usual men with that Teddy-like quality, the existence of money that manifested in “quiet luxury” or whatever it was that read to me like an indiscriminate sameness.
Some were more flamboyant, like Atticus, clearly friends of Emmanuelle and each other, accompanied by dates who already reeked of alcohol.
The women looked like influencers, all done up in a similar style to Emmanuelle—sheer dresses, jackets that were purely ornamental, falling off their shoulders or tied with bare functionality around their waists.
“Emmanuelle, can I just speak to you for a moment—”
“Anya darling.” Emmanuelle whirled on me. “Don’t you understand I’m working?”
“I—” I broke off, startled by her sudden fury, which was tightly confined to her eyes and mouth.
There was a flash of something, a dark and ominous rage, that forced me half a step back.
I was right not to assume that her favor was static.
“Yes. I’m sorry.” In these situations it was best to be quick and to the point.
“It’s just that you’ve asked me to keep an eye on Julian, and I can see you’ve got …
quite a lot of guests, so if you could just give me some information about him, like any allergies or emergency contacts—” I pulled out my phone, ad-libbing something akin to responsibility, but her expression warped, going suddenly twisted.