Chapter 10 Lily #2
I tried to start on a new foot. “Hi,” I said. “Good morning.” Again, he didn’t even look at me. I understood. I would hate someone like me, too. He must have thought I was tremendously careless, someone who made messes and left them for other people to clean.
I wanted to look busy but wasn’t sure what else I could do.
The phone rang twice, both times people calling from their rooms to ask what time the buffet opened.
Deidre said that the casino had programmed them incorrectly and so the button that was supposed to connect callers to other places within the hotel was accidentally routed to the spa, and so most of the calls we got were actually meant for other facilities.
The company required a very specific greeting, which I garbled with my cottony, hungover tongue: “Thank you for calling the spa. This is Lily, how may I assist you?”
In front of me, Luis wiped down the brushed steel table in the magazine area, pausing to pick up an issue of Glamour and squint at the cover.
Maybe I needed to try a different tack. “Does this place always feel so creepy?” I asked him.
“It’s weird, right? It’s just so bright and empty and stark.
Like being inside a Josef Albers painting.
The one with the white squares.” No response.
But that was wrong, too. I just sounded like more of a snob, some spoiled white girl babbling on about abstract art.
I cleared my throat. “Look, I’m really sorry about this morning.
I’m Lily,” I said. “I just started.” Still, he wouldn’t turn around.
I gave up and simply watched him work the paper towel in small, slow circles.
I doodled on the edge of a spa menu as I waited for Carrie to come and tell me what to do next. Time was creeping by. 8:31. 8:35. 8:37. I turned my back to the desk and pulled my phone out of a gift certificate box, held it the way Emily had showed me the day before. No new texts, no missed calls.
“Hey!” a voice said behind me. I jumped, and my phone slipped from my grip, landed with a sickening crunch on the marble floor. “Jesus, it’s just me. I came through the back. I thought I’d get here early. I’m sure Carrie has been completely useless to you.”
Emily. Just Emily. When I picked up my phone, I saw that the screen was spiderwebbed with cracks. I cradled it in my palm like I would have a small, injured animal.
“Oh shit, I’m really sorry. That sucks.” She took the phone from my hand, grimaced, handed it back.
“There’s a guy over on the boardwalk who will fix it for twenty-five bucks.
I went to him last month. Right near the Taj Mahal.
Or what used to be the Taj Mahal, at least. Hey, are you okay?
No offense, but you look like you’ve been hit by a truck. ”
“Hangover.”
“Ah. You’ll learn not to go out before you open.”
“It’s been a shitty morning either way.” I told her about running into Brittany in the back hall.
“She’s a total twat. Ignore her. They’re like children. Just can’t listen to their bullshit. You’re the one with the power and don’t forget it. You can pack their books with appointments if you like them, or if they piss you off, then you can punish them for it.”
“What’s the deal with that older guy who comes in and cleans and like takes the recycling out? He refuses to talk to me.”
“You mean Luis?
I nodded. “I tried to talk to him like three times and he’s totally ignored me.”
“Well, he’s deaf. And mute. And he doesn’t use sign language, but he can read and write. Sometimes I think he pretends to understand less than he does—he’s smart enough to tune all of us out.”
“Oh—that explains it.” But I felt even worse than before. No wonder he didn’t like me, yammering on and on at him, oblivious.
“You’ll see. He’s really observant—he notices a lot about people. Once, when I couldn’t find Carrie, he could tell I was looking for her and he pretended to put a finger down his throat.”
“Wait, why?”
“Oh, you don’t know yet. Well, you would have found out soon enough anyway. She’s bulimic. She uses that bathroom right next to her office. It’s pretty disgusting.”
“So what has he noticed about you?” I couldn’t help myself. I was so curious about Emily, about what she was doing here. It seemed like my chance to ask more.
“Oh, probably that I’m a sinner, like my parents said when I left. Good as dead as far as they’re concerned.” She was smiling, but some of the mirth left her voice. “What about you? Your parents like your ex?” She gestured to my shattered phone.
“How did you know …”
“Come on. I could tell you were seriously pining when I came up to the desk. Let’s hear it. What’s the deal there?”
“He … well.” I fumbled for the right words.
God, how to describe what it had really been like?
The recording of Ramona and Matthew in bed.
The nude she painted of him, him looking smug, imperial, in an Eames rocking chair, every inch the enfant terrible.
The text messages I sent. Matthew, where are you? Matthew, what’s going on?
“He slept with someone else. She’s a painter,” I said.
“She was someone I was hoping to represent at the gallery where I worked. Matthew was—is—one of their clients. He’s a sculptor.
Quite well known, actually.” Something I had thought about a lot over the past few weeks was how Matthew had never wanted for anything—not attention, not money, not admiration, not fame.
How it made sense that he thought he could do what he did and that I might stay.
I thought of his mother, a tidy, brisk woman in her sleek, modern house nestled in the woods of New Canaan.
The summer place on the cliffs of Newport.
The father who flew in from London every few months, who hid his fondness for red meat and gin in bespoke Turnbull & Asser.
It had been a part of my initial attraction to Matthew—not necessarily the money, but the self-assurance it gave him.
The unassailable confidence touched his every movement, from the way he hailed a cab to the way he peeled an orange.
I remembered when I first started at the gallery, the clichés that were being bandied around about Matthew Whitehall, the twenty-nine-year-old wunderkind.
The rising star. I had been skeptical until I saw one of his newer pieces, a bronze of a couple embracing—there was an athletic quality about the way Matthew had rendered them, something nearly violent, that I found captivating.
The articulation of their tendons, the definition of their muscles, the sense of the energy coiled in their limbs, as though they might just as soon launch themselves at one another and collide.
I studied the piece until I felt something else—the rubber-band ping of attention directed toward me.
I looked to see Matthew across the room, his eyes on my face.
The knowing way the corners of his mouth turned up.
Now I couldn’t help but wonder if, from that moment, he’d seen me as a pawn.
I wanted to ask Emily more about herself.
Did she have a boyfriend? Girlfriend? Maybe that was how she ended up here, too, after her stint in L.A.
Maybe she was also retreating, also biding her time at the spa.
Though I wondered who wouldn’t be totally devoted to Emily, with her humor and her beauty and her strange, endearing combination of crassness and restraint.
“Ah. You’ll have to tell me more later. Deidre, incoming.
” Emily nodded her head in the direction of the front door.
I was relieved, for now, to have my attention jerked out of the past. I was still at the point where I could lose hours inventorying every detail for a clue about our end: the first date at the Cuban restaurant in Williamsburg, when Matthew took me home and used the belt of his bathrobe to tie my hands above my head, perhaps testing me for pliability.
My first lunch with Ramona, when she ordered a rare burger and I watched the bloody juice run over her hands as she ate.
Deidre gave Emily the rundown for the day, and I found myself looking past them both, through the glass and down the hall.
I hated that I was waiting for them, Clara and Des.
You are recovering from a broken heart. That meeting them had felt like the first thing that had really happened to me since I had been back.
I was watching so intently that it took me a minute to hear Deidre saying my name.
“Lily? Lily. Please tell me how your training is coming along.”
I GOT lost twice trying to remember Emily’s directions to the cafeteria: take a left at the first turn in the back hall, then a quick right, then take the freight elevator, then at the third floor make another left and a quick right after that.
The first time, I ended up in a dead-end hallway filled with linen carts heaped with damp towels.
The second time, I pushed through a door that led to a loading dock.
Three men in janitorial uniforms looked up from their cigarettes to eye me warily.
“Looking for a delivery, sweetheart?” one of them said. “I’d load you up all right.” I was too stunned and insulted to say anything back, so I simply turned away as the three of them laughed.
I found the freight elevator on the third try.
When the doors groaned closed, I leaned back against the far wall and shut my eyes.
I willed the elevator to get stuck, so that I could stay like that for hours, alone and quiet, no one asking me for anything at all.
But all too soon, the doors opened again.