25. Cass
CASS
For a single, suspended moment, the four of us—that would be Susan, me, Matvei, and the ice machine, for those keeping score at him—exist together in a delicate balance. Like a little ecosystem in The Ice Room.
There’s the predator—Matvei, obviously.
There’s the prey—me, of course; that goes without saying.
The ice machine—innocent in all this, emotionless, merely the habitat we’ve adopted.
And now, a new invasive species has joined the party. Susan Oglethorpe.
The question we’re all wondering: What will she do next?
I’m paralyzed with fear. Matvei is also still, though I don’t think emotion of any kind has ever immobilized him. Susan has yet to make her move.
Then she blinks. Once. Twice. Slowly. Dangerously.
Her eyes do a quick sweep of the incriminating evidence, from Matvei’s hand still half-buried in places it absolutely shouldn’t be, to my cheek smushed against the steel face of the ice machine, the cashmere robe slumped half-off my shoulder, the abandoned ice bucket on the floor.
I open my mouth with zero idea of what’s about to come out of it. Hi, Susan! Funny seeing you here! This isn’t what it looks like!
But even she isn’t that dim. Head in the Too Rich to Care Clouds or not, there is just no way that she can’t put two and two together.
Besides, I can’t even come up with a shameless lie like that right now.
My brain is shorting out like a fridge on the fritz.
A frantic, sparking buzz. Any second now, I’m going to melt down.
In the end, it doesn’t matter. Susan doesn’t give me the chance to panic.
She pivots on one Ferragamo heel, light as a ballerina, and strides right back out.
What now? Do I curse? Do I cry? Do I bury myself in the ice machine until I enter cryo sleep like Walt Disney?
“Hm.” Matvei is busy withdrawing his hand and reassembling my clothing for me. The robe gets pushed back up my shoulder, the knot adjusted, the lapels tugged closed. “That was interesting.”
“ Interesting? ” I hiss, spinning around. “ Interesting?! That’s the word you’re going with?!”
“What word would you prefer?”
“Catastrophic! Apocalyptic! The end of my entire fucking life as I know it!”
“She didn’t say anything.”
“That’s worse! Matvei, that is so much worse .
Susan Oglethorpe is a WASP. Do you know what a WASP does when she sees something?
She files it away into a little manila folder labeled Future Ammunition and pulls it out at the most diabolical possible moment.
Susan is friends with every wife of every partner at Raymond’s firm!
By next week, the only thing anyone on the Upper East Side is going to be talking about is Cassandra Snyder’s hand-job buffet at The Crispin Hotel. ”
He cups my face. His palms are warm, even now. “ Dikarka, you have to breathe. If you don’t, you’ll pass out. Not that I mind giving you mouth-to-mouth, but I think you’d agree that the timing is less than ideal.”
I breathe. Well, it’s more of a snotty, teary sniffle, but oxygen goes in and carbon dioxide goes out, so we’ll say that counts.
“Good girl,” he says quietly. Then, in a thoroughly unbothered tone: “She won’t say anything.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I do.” His thumb skims my cheekbone. “She has too much to lose. Bill makes her sign a new post-nuptial agreement every five years. She is not going to set foot near a single rumor that could even theoretically be redirected to cast a bad light on her own marriage.”
I stare at him. “How do you know that?”
“I’m a lawyer, dikarka . I know everyone’s prenup.”
I close my eyes. “Does it make me a bad person if that comforts me?”
“I don’t judge. Take comfort where you can get it.”
He bends, retrieves my poor, abandoned ice bucket from the floor, and presses it back into my hand. Then he once more tugs the robe closed around me and reties the belt, double-knotting it like a kindergarten teacher sending a kid out into the snow.
The whole thing takes maybe ten seconds. By the end of it, you would not be able to tell, looking at me, that I’d just been pinned to a vending machine moments ago by my Russian baby daddy.
Well. Aside from the part where I look like I’ve seen the face of God.
“Come on,” he says, and ushers me out of The Ice Room with his hand at the small of my back like nothing from the last ten minutes ever happened.
The hallway is mercifully Susan-free. The piano music is still tinkling from somewhere unseen and the sconces continue to drone softly, throwing pools of amber light onto the green-and-gold pheasant wallpaper. We walk side by side, my slippers shushing on the carpet, his bare feet utterly silent.
“You should put on some shoes,” I whisper. “You never know how often these rugs get shampooed.”
“I assure you that I’ve stepped in far worse,” he says grimly. “Besides, I’m almost at my room.”
“Which one is yours?”
He glances down at me, the corner of his mouth twitching in the way that means he’s enjoying himself at my expense. “Why do you ask, Mrs. Snyder? Are you propositioning me?”
My cheeks burn. “I’m asking a perfectly reasonable question to which I am owed a perfectly reasonable answer.”
“Alright.”
He stops walking.
I do, too. I look up to realize that we’re standing in front of the Honeymoon Suite. The sneering ram glares at us, frozen forever in tarnished brass.
Then, slowly, he extends one long index finger and points.
To the left.
To the door directly next to mine. The one with the wolf knocker. Sleek, with its fangs bared.
“You have to be kidding me,” I whisper. “You are next door to me ?!”
He nods.
“You’re— Matvei, how ?! They had a whole list of room assignments. Pre-planned and everything. You can’t just?—”
“There was a partner in his late sixties who had been bumped to the Wolf Suite on account of the Honeymoon upgrade for your husband. A brief conversation with the front desk revealed that he would in fact be quite delighted to have the Badger Room instead of the wolf decor, particularly when accompanied by a complimentary bottle of the hotel’s finest cabernet, which I was happy to underwrite. I wanted to keep you close to me.”
I gape at him. “Sometimes, I find it hard to believe you’re real.”
In response, he reaches down to grab my hand and pull it up to rest flat on his chest, right over his beating heart. “Does this feel imaginary to you, dikarka?”
He waits for me to answer. He’s so good at that, at just standing in the middle of a moment without rushing it.
I’ve never met a man who could be still the way Matvei is still. Raymond can’t be still for two seconds together. Raymond is a foot tap, a phone check, a watch glance, a recurring throat clear.
Matvei is a cathedral.
Matvei is a mountain.
Matvei is the pause between two notes of a song.
I look up at him in the buzzy amber light, in his thin black tank, his bare feet, his ink half-hidden, and I think: In eight months, you’re going to be someone’s father.
I don’t say that, though. I tuck it under my tongue with all the other things I’m holding for later. “No,” I say instead. “You feel very, very real.”
He nods and releases my wrist, which falls limply to my side. I can’t bear to look at him anymore. Like he said, it hurts too much sometimes.
So I softly open my door and slip inside. I deny myself the pleasure of looking back at him, because if I did, I kinda sorta think I wouldn’t be able to resist dragging him in here and seeing just how detailed those tattoos are.
Especially the ones that dip beneath the waistband of his pajamas.
But when my door is shut behind me, I pause and wait. I’m listening for?—
Yes, there it is.
The soft sound of his door opening. The soft sound of it closing. The faint creak of old floorboards as he moves around in his room, the room that, as I’ve now learned, shares a wall with mine.
I set the ice bucket down on the bar cart. I don’t even pour myself a glass of water. The whole reason I left the room has evaporated into meaninglessness.
The bed is made. The fire has died down to coals.
Raymond’s bag still sits at the foot of the luggage rack, untouched since he stormed off to play squash a thousand years ago.
Raymond himself is still off doing whatever he’s doing, which I suspect involves thinly veiled threats and deals that should not see the light of day.
For once, I’m grateful for it.
I undress, drop the robe at the foot of the bed, and crawl under the duvet. Then I do what I’ve done for so many nights of my long and loveless marriage: I take stock.
Item one: I am, by all available evidence, quite possibly going to die of an unfinished orgasm. This ache has gone past inconvenient and into actively medical. My thighs are still trembling, an unbearable little hum that won’t quit no matter how I shift my legs.
Item two: Susan Oglethorpe witnessed said almost-gasm. Her name has become a metronome in my skull, ticking off each new awful possibility. Matvei said she won’t say anything and I want, very desperately, to believe him.
But, counterpoint: She is Susan fucking Oglethorpe.
Item three, and the worst of all: roughly eighteen inches of plaster away from me, on the other side of this wall, a man is brushing his teeth, or pulling back his sheets, or padding around on those godforsaken bare feet, and I want him so badly my molars hurt.
I roll over and press my face into the pillow.
This, I think, is going to be a very long night.
That’s my second-to-last thought. My very last one, just before sleep claims me, comes as I reach out a sleepy hand and press it against the wall.
I have no proof of this, and it’s probably a silly thought anyway, but I like to think Matvei is doing the same thing on his side.
With my other hand, I touch my belly, linking this improbable family together again.
You see that, little one? I think to the bean in my belly, fingers spreading on the plaster. We’re not alone tonight.
I fall asleep like that, with my hand on the wall.