Chapter 4
four
RODRIGO
This apartment is so expensive, its mere existence should be offensive to anyone who’s not a multi-millionaire.
Alana pays for it, obviously. It is her taste, not mine— the glass-and-steel high-rise overlooking the Chicago skyline, the Italian espresso machine, the white linen sofa I’m not allowed to sit on with my work boots.
The view alone is the kind of thing people put on screensavers.
Lake Michigan stretches out beyond the floor-to-ceiling windows like it’s trying to impress someone.
I glance at my work boots, which sit unbothered by the front door.
I work in construction, and before I left Barcelona, I was helping to design buildings.
Alana says it’s the one thing about me she doesn’t like— she wishes I had a more glamorous career.
Perhaps one like hers, which involves murder and bloodshed.
I’ve never told her, but when I was a child, I wanted to be a painter.
But that’s something I’ve kept to myself.
Alana knows I paint as a hobby, but not that I once dreamed of making it a career.
That is information too fragile to be trusted in Alana’s hands.
Speaking of art: I’m sitting on a kitchen stool, watching Alana do the thing she calls “vision-boarding.”
She has covered an entire wall of the apartment in butcher paper.
The entire wall. It’s the wall directly across from the windows, the one that catches the afternoon light, and it is now a full installation piece.
There are printed photographs, magazine cutouts, paint swatches, ticket stubs, what I think is a grocery receipt, and at least six photographs of Alana herself: Alana at a dinner party, Alana on a yacht, Alana holding a very small dog that I have never met and hope I never will.
She’s dressed for the project in a coral-pink tracksuit that has never once been anywhere near a gym, her nails— long, squared, the color of a sports car— tapping against a glue stick as she assesses where to put a photo of Santorini.
“Do you think Santorini goes next to the Maldives, or like, more toward the Paris cluster?” she asks without turning around.
I have never been asked about a Paris cluster before. “The Maldives,” I say, because it sounds like the less consequential answer.
She tilts her head, considering. Then she nods (it’s decisive, and Napoleonic), and pastes Santorini firmly beside the Maldives.
The television is on behind me, set to some British period drama Alana found on Amazon Prime video streaming.
I haven’t been watching it, not really, but I’ve absorbed enough to know there’s a man at its center who does an enormous amount of staring into the middle distance.
It’s a look that suggests he has recently suffered a great tragedy and would like everyone in the room to acknowledge it— or, maybe, that he’s recently had a stroke.
“Oh my god.” Alana’s voice goes up half an octave. She spins around, glue stick in hand, pointing at the screen with one pink-manicured finger. “That’s Reggie.”
I look at the TV. The man in question is standing in what appears to be a very tasteful drawing room, jaw set, eyes full of manufactured sorrow.
“Reggie,” I repeat, wondering if I’m supposed to know him.
“Reginald Ashcroft.” She says as if it is obvious. “He’s a famous actor.”
“Never heard of him.”
“He’s also a friend of mine. Like, a real one. We’ve actually hung out. Oh! I should add him to the board.” She turns back to the wall, opens her laptop on the little step stool she’s using as a worktable, and begins searching for a photo of Reginald Ashcroft.
I look at the television again. Reginald Ashcroft has now clasped his hands behind his back and turned to gaze out a window. He does this with the full weight of someone who has decided that window-gazing is his life’s highest art.
“That man,” I say, gesturing at the screen. “Is your friend? You know him?”
“Of course I do,” she clucks. “We’ve been to some bars together. Made out a couple times. Like, don’t be jealous though because toxic masculinity is not a good look.”
“I don’t actually care—.” I start to say, but she cuts me off.
“Don’t be weird about it.” She doesn’t look up from the laptop. “I’m only telling you because I don’t want you to, like, be jealous or whatever. When I put him on the board.” A beat. “Which I'm going to do. Just as a friend, obviously.”
There’s a kind of silence that lives between what someone says and what they mean, and I have spent enough time around Alana to be fluent in it.
She is absolutely not telling me about Reginald Ashcroft to prevent my jealousy.
She is telling me about Reginald Ashcroft because she wants me to feel, in the most targeted way, the discomfort of knowing she has a beautiful, famous friend I cannot compete with, and then— crucially— she wants to watch me decide not to say anything about it.
She finds the photo. Prints it. The little wireless printer on the kitchen counter hums to life.
I watch Reginald Ashcroft on the television deliver a line I can’t quite hear— something with “honor” in it, probably, or “sacrifice”— and he does it with a fake sort of gravity that suggests he rehearsed it in the shower and was very proud of himself afterward.
Alana retrieves the printout, holds it at arm’s length, approving of something. Then she pastes Reginald Ashcroft to the vision board, directly beside one of the Alana-at-a-dinner-party photos, which makes them look, from across the room, as if they are at the same dinner party together.
“There,” she says, satisfied. She takes a step back, hands on her hips, surveying the full wall the way a general surveys a map.
I survey it with her. It’s an overwhelming document of a life— her future life, specifically, projected forward in the boldest, most unapologetic terms possible.
Everywhere she wants to go. Everything she wants to own.
Everyone she wants beside her. The photographs of herself outnumber everyone else, which seems, in some way, the most honest thing about it.
I am featured on the board as well, wearing a tuxedo.
Alana is pictured next to me in a wedding dress. Dios Mío. Horrifying.
On the television, Reginald Ashcroft stares out yet another window.
“He’s a good actor,” Alana says generously, like she is doing him a favor by acknowledging it.
I nod. I look at the wall. I look at the view of Chicago and the white sofa I’m not allowed to sit on.
The apartment is beautiful. The light is perfect at this hour, going gold where it hits the butcher paper, warming the photographs into something that looks, from a distance, like a life.
It should feel like something, being here.
The city laid out below as an offering, the skyline doing its level best. But somehow it feels less like a life and more like a waiting room I wandered into and cannot find the exit for.
But the espresso machine, I will say, makes an excellent cortado.
“I’m going to take a walk,” I say.
* * *
The hallway outside our apartment greets me with a blast of fresh air, none of it shared with Alana.
Marble floors, recessed lighting, a console table with fresh flowers that no one ordered— this building is like a hotel.
Perfect, but not personable. That’s why Alana likes it.
I stand next to the flowers and check the time on my phone.
It’s just past four in Chicago, which means it’s past eleven in Barcelona.
Late enough that my degenerate, criminal cousin— Benny— will be awake.
He picks up on the second ring.
“Primo!” His voice comes through the speaker, a warm collision.
I can hear the faint sound of what might be football commentary in the background and also might be an argument between neighbors— in Benny’s apartment these are difficult to distinguish.
“You called! I was thinking about you today. I saw a new action movie, there was a guy in it who?—”
“Benny.” I keep my voice low. The hallway has good acoustics, which is beautiful and also inconvenient. “I need to talk to you.”
For once in his life, Benny goes quiet. Benny is loud and ridiculous and has memorized the script of every action movie made between 1980 and 2005, and I love him more than almost anyone else on earth. He knows when I need his full attention.
“Ah,” he says.
“?Qué co?o me has metido?” I press the phone closer to my ear, lean against the wall, close my eyes.
What the hell did you get me into? I say it in Spanish because there’s no version of that sentence in English that carries the full weight of what I’m feeling right now. “Benny. She vision-boarded a wall.”
“A what?”
“The whole wall. She covered the entire wall of the apartment in paper and photographs. There's a photo of me in a tuxedo at the wedding she’s planning for us! And another of a famous British actor she claims is her friend.”
Silence. Then: “Which actor?”
“Benny, that is not— that is not the point.”
“No, no, I know, I just—” Benny pauses, then adds, “I didn’t know, cousin, when I introduced you that she was the actual La Diabla. I thought she merely worked for the woman, not that she was the woman herself. An unfortunate misunderstanding.”
“That’s an understatement,” I agree.
“Has she killed anyone lately?”
“She head-kicked a man in a warehouse. I’m not sure if he made it. But trust me— the vision board is worse.”
“?Sí! ?Es una gran noticia!” Benny exclaims helpfully. “She’s in a good mood then! She could have shot the warehouse man on the spot. Instead, she only kicked his face.”
“I have to break up with her,” I say, and then it’s out there, in the hallway, between the marble floor and the fresh flowers, and it feels both obvious and terrifying at once.
“Hold on, not so fast now,” Benny says, his voice trembling a little. “Let’s think this through…”