MONDAY
1.
If you had been on this morning’s flight from Sacramento to Los Angeles, you’d have seen a pair of newlyweds on the commencement of their honeymoon. You would have overheard how proudly he said My Wife all through the short flight. Her voice muffled and timid, speaking into his shoulder, My Husband. After disembarking, oblivious to the heat and absurd humidity, they hovered at the arrival gate, then in front of the Terminal 6 Starbucks, where flies swirled in sluggish arcs. They’re at the luggage carousel now, standing hand in hand. Her pretty sundress wrinkled from sitting. They are good-looking, you think to yourself. The full bloom of their youth like a flash-bang to your senses. But then a black Town Car pulls up just outside the sliding exit doors and they’re whisked off.
Slowly, slowly, the newlyweds are shuttled along a jammed freeway, heading away from the busy beaches, where the sea is warm and the sand scorches bare feet. They won’t get to see the Indigenous folks peddling mango and pineapple spears, or the sheriff’s department patrolling them from atop their ATVs. Just as the surfers, out in the water, won’t ever know the dappled pattern of sunlight along Wilshire Boulevard at this hour.
They’re passing the university now, its students squabbling over politics and fair-trade coffee beans; its faculty checking their bank accounts, trying to figure out the math, How much do I make an hour? Meanwhile the Sav-on turned Rite Aid turned Walgreens is empty once more. Dust on a FOR LEASE sign is a very particular kind of sadness.
The ficus trees have become more numerous. Their gigantic, bulbous heads sprouting up and out across the street. Deeper and deeper the Town Car travels into Beverly Hills, into these landscaped expansive grounds, verdant and shaded and very green. This is where the sleek animals live. Everything expensive and pristine, the houses not like anything the couple has ever seen. Different from the mobile homes, the one- or two-bedroom apartments, the suburban neighborhoods—and there, springing up from this dense tropical jungle, is a stucco Mediterranean palace. Green-and-white candy-striped awnings fluttering in the hot dry wind, façade as pink and angry as a sunburn. This is the Town Car’s destination, the Pink Hotel.
“Our reservation is under Mr. and Mrs. Collins,” the husband tells the front desk.
The wife frowns. Her thumb slips into her mouth, the nail inserted between two pearly incisors. She repeats this new last name in her mind, over and over, but its meaning slips away. She chews harder, aware of Keith beside her, chatting up the hotel front desk manager, the assistant manager, whoever else might be nearby. His new panama hat tilted to the side for affected casualness, mustache trimmed to a neat little edge, his hand searching for hers. They are Mr. and Mrs. Collins.
The past twenty-four hours have been a series of rapid transitions for this newly minted Wife. She has not had time to adjust. Grains of rice are wedged into the dark corners of her purse from when the civil servant said, You may kiss the bride, and all their friends from the restaurant showered them with the bleached white grain. Then, like every proper wedding, even the small ones, there was champagne and cocktails and dinner and dancing. A Bloody Mary at the airport before their flight did nothing to ease this morning’s headache.
Neither had the car ride from the airport. The Town Car’s air-conditioning was no match for the heat outside. Little wife’s legs are moist and tender from when they stuck to the leather seat. And the driver’s buzzing voice, how Keith kept him talking in his persistent amiable way, runs on a loop in her head.
No one wants to take the bus or train when it’s this hot.
Waves of heat wafting off the asphalt, the concrete, the other cars and trucks and eighteen-wheelers. Commuters at a standstill. So many knuckles gripping so many steering wheels as Santa Ana winds beat against their car windows. Dust devils spinning across construction sites, flapping workmen’s shirts like flags, threatening makeshift tents beneath the freeway overpasses with collapse. All the while Keith was nodding along, asking, How crowded are the beaches?
The locals want their turf back, their driver told them. You hear them say it under their breath, they say it to anyone who doesn’t look like they belong.
Keith’s hand on hers became so sweaty, she pretended to need something from her purse. Lipstick, wallet, pens—ah, yes. Her phone. She snapped a selfie. Husband and Wife in the backseat of a Lincoln Town Car.
The narrative of their wedding photographed well. The ceremony had been short, but the old courthouse had given it understated elegance. Our young couple promising each other that one day, when they had real money, they’d do it all over again. Have a huge party, with flower arrangements and party favors and a live band. Maybe a destination wedding, some other place that swam in their minds in vibrant colors like India or Hawaii or Thailand. Something to prove that marrying young had not been a mistake. They’d been together five years and had just moved in together, their first apartment without roommates. She was about to start a sommelier certification course, and Keith was moving up the ranks at his uncle’s Michelin-starred restaurant. Forge an empire, they’d written into their vows. Because they were at the precipice, the beginning of their lives. Marriage as the next step in a life well planned.
There’d been no one to give her away, no one from Keith’s family present to bless the union. A quick ceremony and then on to the next thing. Yet in front of the civil servant, entombed by the thick mahogany walls of the courthouse, beneath murals of California’s forefathers panning for gold, missionaries looking to God, Native Americans harvesting corn and wheat, they became serious. Even solemn. Their friends from the restaurant, who had arrived laughing and jubilant, quieted down. Hands were folded in laps. Legs crossed and uncrossed and crossed again. Keith took a sprig of lavender from his almost-wife’s bouquet and fastened it to his lapel. Someone rearranged her blouse so that it looked more appropriately prim. They pinned back her bobbed hair. Lipstick was reapplied. Her step became heavy, so did her gaze and the thumping in her chest. A new and unexpected transformation was taking place that she had not prepared for. No longer Kit Simpkins, she was to be Kit Collins.
Kit Collins. Kit Collins. Kit Collins.
The name ricochets off the walls of her mind. She cannot get its rhythm, has not been able to shake its alien feeling or understand why she bristles at its pronunciation. Who is this Kit Collins?
I now pronounce you man and wife.
The kiss that followed was fine. Somewhere in the courthouse an alarm went off. Somebody had exited through a wrong door. High and whirring, the sound reverberated through each of Kit’s limbs. They were playing their roles, she told herself. Keith, the proud groom. Kit, the blushing wife. Rice raining down around them. Had she blushed?
On to the reception they went. His uncle’s restaurant done up with votives, with tiny lights in all the oak trees and sycamores, crisp white wines chilling in silver buckets. They danced and danced, ties on the men’s heads, the women barefoot and tilting. Kit’s cheeks ached from smiling. Finally, Keith (not a good dancer) wildly swung his arm and the bottle of sauvignon blanc in his hand thumped his best man in the nose. Friends turned into employees once more, Keith directing them to clean up the blood, Kit softening his tone. He just needs to get to bed.
Back at their new apartment, the weight of the night embarrassed them. Made them like shy children. Keith joked about consummation. They were overwhelmed and exhausted. That they did not have sex on their wedding night seemed a bad omen. Kit stayed awake, a feeling of failure sweeping over her. The thrust of it surprising. She spent the night unpacking their wedding gifts. Spreading them out so it seemed like there were more. The fine bone china from her aunt laid out on the kitchen table. Something to aspire to, the note read. There were only two place settings. Her aunt had not been able to make it to the wedding. Regretfully must decline. Which was expected, they’d not seen each other in many years. Her uncle didn’t even bother signing the card. It would have been nice if something of her mother’s had been sent. Something borrowed, something blue.
Why did you take everything out of their boxes? Keith mumbled, harried, tripping over a blender her stepfather had given them. He, too, had been unable to make it to the nuptials. Busy with the twins, his email had said. A photo of his new wrinkly babies attached, both in powder-blue onesies.
Then it was a rush to finish packing for their flight from Sacramento to Los Angeles, Keith worrying about making a good impression.
This trip could change everything, he had said, rearranging his curls once more. And Kit wanted to ask, Hasn’t everything changed already?
* * *
They’re smiling at her now. The front desk employees. She must take her thumb out of her mouth and say hello. Their faces bright and merry from greeting the handsome young newlyweds. Sweat has collected at the back of her neck. Keith is busy signing paperwork. His signature slanted but solid.
The lobby of the Pink Hotel is a stark contrast from the boiling heat outside. Her bare arms are chilled from its sudden cool air.
“Welcome, Mrs. Collins.”
She opens up her face so they are pleased. “Thank you,” she says with a smile.
Around them a ballet of perfectly groomed bellhops, their costumes royal green, buttons polished gold, collects and disappears with their luggage. One of them hands her a bottle of water, emblazoned with the hotel’s crest. Something to keep her from biting her nails. She twists off the top and catches a whiff of their apartment. Its new-paint smell has stubbornly clung to her summer dress.
“Congratulations,” they tell Keith, and she knows what they mean. That slight clenched feeling returns to her jaw.
“It’s such a beautiful hotel,” she says.
Husband grins at wife. He’s proud to have her beside him. She is an eager and breathless twenty-three-year-old girl. Cheeks rosy from the heat, brown hair tousled from the wind.
“And we get to spend a week here!” He sweeps his hat off, then, not sure what to do with it, puts it on again. “How lucky are we?”
He’s giddy from having walked the red carpet at the hotel’s entrance, which he’d seen in countless movies and photographs. The doormen smiling and welcoming. The heat outside forgotten as a cool blast of air was expelled from somewhere deep inside. A shiver had traveled over him. The same kind of anticipation as on their wedding day. As if standing at the mouth of a cave. How deep is it? How far does it go? The boy in him doesn’t know. He must jump in to find out, becoming a man in the process.
The hotel’s perfume struck him first. Made his blood hum. Everywhere massive flower arrangements loomed—birds-of-paradise, fuchsia anthuriums, monsteras, and elephant ears the size of an artist’s canvas. Every type of lily. It was exquisite, the mixing of tropical and floral. The sweeping carpet softening their footsteps, the curved walls unfurling them into the grand foyer like a petal on a breeze, depositing them beneath an elaborate Venetian glass chandelier. That humming heightened. He had to press his hands together to keep them from shaking.
Luxury with a capital L. A bit naughty. Like the glossy photos of the Condé Nast Traveler or Town & Country magazines he kept under his bed, hidden from his elderly parents, who had expected him to follow them into academia. Into denim and tweed, perhaps cotton twill for the new generation, but certainly not hospitality. How could he explain his visceral reaction to velvet and silk? To them transformation was about science. The sun turning nuclear energy into heat and light, human bodies converting food into energy. Metamorphosis was reserved for caterpillars and tadpoles. Not for boys with polyester sheets who pine for Egyptian cotton.
* * *
Their room is ready. Upgraded to a suite at Mr. Beaumont’s insistence.
“He didn’t have to do that,” Keith says, but he would have been disappointed otherwise. He looks beyond the front desk manager for Mr. Beaumont. The reason for the much-fussed-over hair, the painstakingly trimmed mustache. He still has his business card in his wallet, from when Mr. Beaumont said, I could use a man like you.
“Is he here?”
The front desk manager holds up his hand, his supple suit jacket falling away to reveal French cuffs.
“Let me check.”
Keith watches him disappear into the back office, barely stifling a sigh.
Beside him, Kit is fidgeting. Her thumb in her mouth again. He takes her hand, rubbing his fingers over her cold ones to soothe her awkwardness.
“Can’t we just go to the room?”
“Hang on for five minutes longer, I just want to thank Mr. Beaumont. Let him know I’m—that we’re here.” He squeezes her hand, the phalanx bones more yielding than the slim gold wedding band on her ring finger.
They’d met the Beaumonts two months earlier, when Mr. Beaumont and his wife, Ilka, were in San Francisco for the Western Hospitality Expo. It was the usual swarming of exhibits and cooking demos and seminars, bar tabs of brown liquors and wedge salads—Ilka Beaumont bored out of her mind, when out of the din of male voices droning on about industry trends and operational excellence, she overheard the wife of an executive raving about a small restaurant that had recently received a Michelin star. It’s in the boonies.
And it’s true, if you were driving Highway 128 at night you’d almost pass the quaint roadside hotel where Keith is general manager and Kit works part-time as a waitress. Except the restaurant has put lights in the trees, making you take a second look. Note the hand-painted sign, the unmistakable scent of a spa. Somewhere a creek trickles. Elk cross the road in herds. What’s this, have you discovered something new? The patio is bustling with soft chatter, the patter of knives and forks and plates and spoons. Tapestries on the walls, touches of gold here and there to contrast the exposed beams and distressed wood. Different from the grid cities and hill cities and borough cities with their fine dining or food trucks or whatever. This is authentic. The Pink Hotel needs new and different to stay relevant, so Mr. Beaumont called the general manager to his table, asking, How fresh is the venison?
They’d brought Louie, their much-fussed-over bichon frise, and while Mr. Beaumont and Keith talked the little dog escaped from his mistress’s lap, disappearing into the dark. Kit raced after him, eventually finding him in the parking lot. The Beaumonts insisted on treating them to a drink, which turned into two and then three. A bottle of burgundy was uncorked. Kit’s cheeks turned a charming shade of pink. Her large eyes softened, her small, pouting mouth blossomed into something sensuous and ripe. They stayed until after closing, the older couple basking in the glow of the younger one, the younger couple seduced by the attention. Their espressos cooling in front of them, the tiny curled lemon peels untouched on the saucer.
Where are you lovebirds going for your honeymoon? the Beaumonts asked. They pooh-poohed Napa. The grapes haven’t been the same since the fires, they said. Come to LA, they said. Mr. Beaumont offered them a substantial discount. Occupancy took a dive in the early autumn, plus this year, half of the 205 rooms would be undergoing renovation. Nearly a dozen of the twenty-three bungalows were getting what Ilka Beaumont called a face-lift. We all need them after a time, she sighed, and caressed Kit’s rosy cheeks. Oh, to be twenty-three again.
* * *
Mr. Beaumont is not available.
“Meetings all afternoon,” the front desk manager apologizes as he hands Keith a key card for Suite 220.
A baggage porter escorts them through the hotel, pointing out the different ballrooms, the exit to the extensive gardens, the curving staircase that goes down to the mezzanine, where there are shops and a spa and the exit to the pool; Keith’s head swiveling left and right.
“The Beatles once snuck in after midnight,” the porter is telling him, his stiff band collar pressing into his brown neck. He grins at Kit, who is concentrating on the silk pink carpet under her ballet flats, her sinuses tight beneath the tender bones of her skull.
“They swam until dawn.”
She meets his eyes and manages a look of eagerness.
They pass the Polo Lounge, where someone is playing jazz piano for the lunch service. Plates and glasses and bubbling laughter round out the scene. Keith crooks his neck to get a better glimpse of the room—how ornate and elegant it looks with its oak accents and mirrored walls and green upholstered booths. There are more potted plants, their waxy leaves dark green in the low light. He read somewhere that the Rat Pack only ever sat at booth 3, Steve McQueen had once been a regular at the bar—that Elizabeth Taylor preferred table 8, Marilyn Monroe always booth 6. A litany of celebrities swim in his head like stars in the sky.
The hostess smiles as they pass by.
“The Collinses,” the porter mouths, and she runs out to say hello. Mr. Beaumont has made dinner reservations for them. Eight o’clock.
“Wonderful, wonderful,” Keith repeats because he does not know what else to say. Again he sweeps his hat from his head and then puts it back on. He glances at Kit. She has had the same crooked smile since arriving. For a moment he worries she might not be up for dinner and drinks with the Beaumonts and what he imagines is a vast celebrity cohort. What if she doesn’t fit in? But then the porter stands aside so Kit can step into the elevator, and Keith catches him looking at her ass and he’s reassured of his choice of bride. Together they can do this. They are a striking couple.
“Sir,” the porter says, remembering himself.
Their room is on the third floor with views of the gardens from the balcony. The grounds are so dense with tropical plants and exotic flowers that it looks as if they’re staying in the heart of a jungle—but then the palms, a little ways off, their shaggy heads golden against the blistering sky, hint that this is Los Angeles still. If they’d been given a room facing Sunset Boulevard they’d have seen heat waves coming off the asphalt; heard the blaring horns from the slow-moving traffic; been able to watch the bus stop swell with nannies and maids and housekeepers, arriving on the ten o’clock bus that had inched them from a main hub that they’d taken a train to get to—sometimes two or more—from other jobs or maybe home, which is always where the weather is twice as hot, more concrete than green.
But that’s outside the Pink Hotel. Inside, Kit has flopped across the massive California king, relieved to no longer be in the lobby with everyone staring. The room is quiet except for the faint hum of the air-conditioning.
“I only tipped that porter five dollars,” Keith says, sitting beside his wife. “Do you think that was enough? I don’t want it to get back to Mr. Beaumont that I’m cheap.”
He pushes the pillows away so he can see her face. She’s rolled over and is staring at the delicate curved molding on the ceiling, brow furrowed. Her sandals slip from her feet, silently plopping onto the carpet.
“This place is something else,” she finally says. “It’s nothing like the Old Boonville Hotel. Did you see the people in the Polo Lounge? Their clothes, their jewelry—and that was the lunchtime crowd.”
He stretches out beside her. “Don’t tell me Mrs. Collins is intimidated.”
She tucks her head in the hollow between his shoulder and pectoral. “It’s just—what are we going to do all day?”
“Anything we want.”
He reaches for her hair, brushing it with his fingers. Is now when Man and Wife consummate their marriage? It would make sense. They’re alone in an opulent suite. The light slanted and gold, Kit’s thigh warm against his hip. The word union swirls around his head. Bless this union.
He kisses the top of her head, and jumps up.
“Are you hungry? I still can’t believe they didn’t give us a snack on the flight. Not even coffee and a biscuit.”
Room service is busy the first time he rings but he reaches them on a second try. He orders a turkey club and a bottle of champagne, then, because he can’t shake the feeling of being judged, he asks about their famous soufflé and adds two to the order. Let them think he hasn’t already added up the total in his mind and mentally gasped. He’ll just have to increase his credit card limit. No big deal.
“Have you seen this bathroom?” Kit calls to him. It’s tiled and marbled, everything pink and green. They can both fit in the shower. Everything is branded, all the products in the shower and by the tub. They riffle the minibar, which is filled with freshly pressed juices with names like Will You Berry Me? and Green with Envy. Everything monogrammed. They take selfies in front of the banana-leaf wallpaper. Unpack their clothes and put away their shoes. Kit slips one of the downy robes over her short sundress and turns the air-conditioning even lower.
“How decadent is this? Outside it’s roasting and in here I’m wearing a robe as thick as animal hide.” She parades around the room, relaxed now that it’s just the two of them. Twice she teases him with kisses until he dashes toward her.
Around the bed, in and out of the walk-in closet, nearly tripping over their luggage. Finally he tackles her on the tufted chaise sofa. The sun coming through the window has turned everything silver. The palms, the banana and fiddle-leaf plants, the birds-of-paradise and bougainvillea. He kisses her laughing mouth, the hot, damp parts of her neck, the little mole on her collarbone. This he can do, this rediscovering of the familiar. But just as his hand slips beneath her dress, there’s the chime of a doorbell, followed by a curt knock.
“Be right there,” Keith huffs. He waits for Kit to retie the robe but she disappears into the bathroom instead.
A blond boy wheels in a table heaped with domed silver plates. He presents each item, the turkey club with french fries and tiny bottle of ketchup; the pumpkin soufflés in their porcelain ramekins. The chef has sent up a tray of chocolate-dipped fruit—strawberries and cherries and dried orange slices. Congratulations written in an elaborate hand across the plate in white chocolate.
“Would you like me to open the champagne, Mr. Collins?” He’s holding the bottle of brut as if it were a newborn babe. Yes. Yes, Mr. Collins would.
Pop!
The heavy cut-crystal flutes are filled to the brim.
Keith makes sure to sign his name with flourish. He admires his smooth large hand. The gold band on his ring finger glints at him.
Kit has come out of the bathroom in her summer dress, the robe having been discarded. She runs her fingers over the French-pleated pink cloth napkins, the buffed and shining silverware tucked within them. In the center of the table is a single calla lily, also pink.
“Congratulations,” the grinning blond boy is saying as he hands her a flute of champagne. “Cheers to a wonderful honeymoon.” His bushy brows rising and falling.
The bubbles loosen the stiffness in her neck, the tightness behind her eyes. She touches the calla lily’s petals and thinks how pliable they are.
“If you need anything,” the blond boy is saying to Keith as he backs out of the room. “Congratulations again.”
The door clicks shut behind him.
“Where were we?” Keith asks, clinking his flute to hers. They gulp down their bubbly. The mountains, which had been dusty and yellow since their arrival, are clearly defined now. Parrots cry out as they cross the sky.
She munches on the french fries while he attacks the turkey club, which has some kind of aioli that impresses him deeply. He picks up the receipt, remembering how Mr. Beaumont had not even glanced at the restaurant bill when it came. Just held his card in the air. Ilka Beaumont glittering in her jewelry beside him. Keith had never seen anything like it. He was like a sultan, he had told Kit later, when they were in bed together in their apartment. How do you get to that level? How do I get there? He had wanted her to understand, promising her a diamond ring by their first anniversary.
He’s studying his signature on the room service receipt. He’d thought marriage might change it somehow. But it looks exactly the same—except, no. There’s maybe a firmer indentation, a slight bend to the K that was not there before. More of a shift, then, like a fracture in the earth’s crust, creating new landmasses, entire continents. This is metamorphosis, Husband thinks, cracking the decorative wafer on the soufflé and digging into its molten center.
2.
Kit can’t decide which bathing suit to wear. She’s brought three. Keith has already gone down, eager to see if Mr. Beaumont is out of his meeting, I should really thank him for the room upgrade. With the distorted light the suite becomes extended. It’s just Kit and the air-conditioning whirring. Lavish furniture does not count as company. Shadows from the jacaranda tree outside cross the plush carpet. The morning has been surreal and dreamlike. Walking past the Polo Lounge with its women like polished stones, smooth and ebony, delicate and shining. In spite of the low light, or the curved booths meant to shield them from prying eyes, some heat at their centers making them spark and light up the room. The effect of animals thriving in their natural habitat. Piano music all the way to the elevator. And then their room—their suite. A television in the bathroom mirror. The porter showed her how to turn it on. If Miss would like to take a bath and watch her favorite shows. The heated marble floors—the champagne, delicious and cold, Botox for the brain.
She chooses a rust-colored one-piece, cut low.
The bathroom mirror is still steamed over from her shower, which she had hoped would wake her up. Tousled hair will have to do. No time for makeup. Keith is waiting—her husband is waiting. Mrs. Collins.
“Enough of that,” she says aloud to the empty room. A shiver traveling under her robe, down the length of her spine, the tiny blond hairs on her thighs rising.
She switches off the air-conditioning. Outside those green parrots screech in the coral trees. The wind whips the candy-striped awnings against the building. She stands there for a moment feeling the heat coming through the floor-to-ceiling window. The bathing suit warming over her flat stomach, the stripe of heat across her thighs. What will happen to them? She sometimes asks Keith as they lie in bed waiting for sleep. What will happen? The future as a blank spot—no, a dark cavernous endless thing. And Keith is the only thing keeping her from tumbling in. Perhaps marriage isn’t a trick, only a necessary anchoring. No dark hole can get her now. A ring on her finger, feet firmly planted on this silk rug.
Voices in the hallway penetrate her thoughts. She adjusts her bathing suit and turns to leave. In the corner of the sitting area is the table that the blond laughing boy from room service had wheeled in. Those bushy brows wagging when he saw her peeking out from the bathroom.
Those dirty plates piled high, silver domes upside down. It’s ruining the effect of the suite. With its ketchup-stained tablecloth and unfolded napkins, smudged with bits of grease and chocolate from their fingers. Silverware dirtied and dull. She moves it into the hall.
In the lobby everyone is well-dressed. Cell phones raised in front of faces, shopping bags dangling from jewelry-clad wrists. It was a mistake to wear the hotel robe downstairs. But this is how the women who stay at the Old Boonville Hotel do it. They show up from the city with their husbands, who haul their duffel bags and roll bags from their car while they handle the business of checking in. Always prudent, a little annoyed, going over the deposit—How long will it take for the amount to go back onto my credit card?—making sure their spa services and restaurant reservations and childcare or pet care are booked correctly. Could you send ice to the room now? They think of everything, and then emerge from their room in the hotel’s waffle robes. Spend their long weekends going from treatment to treatment in the spa. Husbands too. Although they sometimes duck into the hotel restaurant for a drink or hamburger, a quick glance at whatever game is on. Take the shot, take the shot—damn! Always a little self-conscious, tying and retying their robe. Which is what Kit is doing now.
It’s a different hostess at the Polo Lounge than earlier. This one less polite. Lips pursed, she points Kit toward the pool, eager to shoo her away.
Down a carpeted, curving staircase—why hadn’t she gotten a manicure before the wedding? It would have kept her from biting her nails, and the polished banister deserves a manicured hand gliding along it.
Past the Fountain Room, where Ilka Beaumont has celery juice and granola every Sunday morning.
While Louie feasts on a T-bone as large as my ulna, she told Kit during their dinner, her arm stretched across the table to illustrate her point. David Yurman bangles clanging together and catching the light. Who’s a spoiled brat? she teased the little dog asleep on her lap. You are, yes, you are.
There are only old men in business suits in the Fountain Room now, each with a mug of coffee. They look up as Kit passes, their eyes following her as she continues down the long hall, silent but for the gentle slapping of her flip-flops. She stops to look at the memorabilia from films and photo shoots that have taken place here. A photo of Faye Dunaway lounging by the pool; Cary Grant being fitted for a suit. Katharine Hepburn on the tennis court; Rita Hayworth in a pantsuit. The gift shop is filled with trinkets monogrammed with the hotel’s insignia. She touches these things, turning over their price tags and then hastily putting them back. There’s a Cartier store, and she pauses to watch a couple browse. The woman presses a brooch to her breast. An emerald frog with rubies for eyes.
“Mrs. Collins,” Keith says, wrapping his arms around her waist. His hands over hers so that she stops fidgeting with the robe belt. “Are you looking for the pool?”
He smooths her damp hair around her face, the ends almost touching beneath her chin.
Mr. Beaumont had been happy to see him, shaking his hand vigorously. He was exactly how Keith remembered. Tall and slim, lines on his face from smiling, fair hair receding in an everyman kind of way. It was the suit that transformed him. Immaculate, expensive. The material catching the Venetian chandelier light and shimmering. Keith! Welcome, welcome. I was just talking to management about you. Direct eye contact, introductions to hotel clerks, bellhops, concierge—anyone within arm’s reach. It was a relief, a reiteration of what Keith had felt at that dinner two months ago. Mr. Beaumont liked him. A job offer seemed more and more likely. He hadn’t wanted to tell Kit until he was sure. But Mr. Beaumont’s smile was as broad as a drawn bow, insisting on personally giving him and Kit a tour of the hotel tomorrow. Telling him he’d comped a poolside cabana for the afternoon.
Ask for Coco in the café, she’ll see to everything.
You didn’t have to do that.
Nonsense, it’s your honeymoon. It was my pleasure.
Their brief conversation buoyed Keith. His step across the lobby was light and confident, the other employees looking at him, some guests too. He’d practically floated down the curved stairs toward Kit, his beautiful young wife who was window-shopping—emeralds and sapphires, he realized as he got closer, a feeling of pride swelling within him.
“Oh, thank god you wore your robe too.”
“What?”
“You left when I was in the shower, so I wasn’t sure. Everyone’s been looking at me.”
“We’re on our honeymoon,” he says, kissing her. “Let them stare.”
They cross into another hall. Kit looking around, taking in the mirrored light and pink-carpeted halls, the ribbon of banana-leaf wallpaper. Her eyes as wide as a doll’s and just as brilliant. The women at the spa desk smile as they pass. Orchids framing them, their delicate blooms quivering beneath the air-conditioning.
“This place is so fancy,” Kit says, knotting the belt tighter.
“You’ll get used to it,” he says, holding open the door.
The heat hits Kit like a weight. “I forgot how hot it is.”
“See?” He smiles at her. “You’ve acclimated already.”
The path meanders through a small garden, past a sitting area, rattan sofas with plush pink pillows shaded by palms and giant wild banana. Hummingbirds darting from flowering shrub to creeping vine, dragonflies droning in the tea roses.
Sweat has pooled between Kit’s small breasts. She feels it drip down toward her navel. If only she’d packed a notebook. She could get up early, before anyone else was awake, and spend the morning in this perfect little garden. Reclining across the sofas, trying to capture the carefully pruned roses, how white their petals are against the pink cinder-block wall. Or the fig beetles, iridescent and as large as silver dollars, how they bump into hornets near the bougainvillea. She’d study the wind in the tops of the palms and write: They bend like very tall reeds. The beginning of a poem, maybe. The heat is as thick as cream, scoop it up with a spoon.
Her limbs have become heavy and slow. The ache to sit and scribble is so strong that she doesn’t flinch when a hornet comes too close. Keith has to swat it away.
“I’m not used to the humidity,” she breathes.
“Mr. Beaumont said the gardens create their own microclimate.” His voice sounding far away. “It’s so dry everywhere else, in the city you’d get a nosebleed.”
She squeezes his hand. “But here we have our own tropical paradise. Maybe I’ll write a little.”
“I’m going to keep you too busy,” he says, tickling her sides so that she laughs and he can kiss her exposed neck.
They leave the little garden and descend a steep staircase to the pool and Cabana Cafe. Their senses awakening at the symphony of splashing and laughter, of piped-in music and cocktail shakers. The outdoor café is bustling with daiquiris and sparkling rosé. Ceiling fans swirling in slow arcs. Women in gauzy cover-ups. Waitresses in short tennis skirts and matching polos. Businessmen relaxing in angled alcoves. Kit watches as one of them drizzles maple syrup across his pancakes, sucking a bit that’s gotten on his pinkie. She almost misses the last step. Keith gives her hand a squeeze.
“Mr. Beaumont said I should ask for Coco,” he tells the pretty brunette at the hostess stand.
Coco tilts her head to get a good look at this Keith Collins, a little farther so she can see Kit, who is standing behind him. For a moment Keith is sure that she’s looking at him the way all female new hires look at him. Posing so that he can admire their lips or eyes or whichever part of their face they think is their best asset. The beginning of a workplace flirtation. Except something flashes, very briefly, over her features, and although her lips remain soft, her name rolling out of her mouth with warmth, a glimmer remains in her dark eyes and Keith can’t shake the feeling that Courtney Flores is laughing at him. “Call me Coco,” she says.
She escorts them to one of the eleven cabanas, which are all in a row, constructed to look like Renaissance tents pitched beside an oasis. Their curtains swept and pinned suggestively to the side. Wall sconces above pink and cream couches, a circular daybed in the intimate corner. Brut rosé chilling in an ice bucket.
“This is where West Side Story was written,” Coco is telling Kit.
Keith lets them chat. He’s too busy admiring the back wall of the cabana, painted to look as if it weren’t a wall at all. He could be on a villa balcony, a jungle of wild banana just on the other side, like the plumage of a giant exotic bird. The sound of splashing makes him turn back toward the pool, where a redhead in a turquoise string bikini has surfaced. Her pale arms glide through the water until she reaches the ladder. Delicate biceps and forearms flexing as she pulls herself up. The water cascades down those slender shoulders, waist, hips, thighs; water pooling on the hot concrete beneath her painted toes. A man rolls her into a towel, kissing the hollow cleft of her collarbone.
“Oh, the wedding was small.”
He hears his wife. Coco is watching him with her dark eyes. He clears his throat and pretends to be interested in their cabana’s flat-screen TV, flipping through the channels.
“Only a handful of coworkers and friends came.”
“It was intimate,” Keith says, abandoning the TV for an apple from the fruit bowl. He can feel those dark eyes on him still. He looks up, meeting her gaze. She’s gathered her mass of hair over one shoulder. The curve of her neck, how she stretches it so that he can see the muscles tense in her throat. Frowning, he puts the apple back.
“I’d much prefer an intimate wedding to some of the things I’ve seen here,” she says to Kit.
The brut rosé is popped and two flutes are filled.
“Like what?” Kit sips, feeling those light, tingling bubbles rush to her head. That heavy feeling in her limbs has shifted to liquid once more. Humidity forgotten. She settles into the sofa, pillows fluffing up around her.
“A groom once parachuted into his own nuptials.”
“No!” Kit guffaws. “What else?”
“One wedding party drank five thousand bottles of Mouton-Rothschild.”
“Is that expensive?”
“One-point-five-million-dollars expensive.”
Kit’s eyes are huge. She looks at her flute.
Coco laughs, topping up Kit’s glass. “This is Scharffenberger, only eighty dollars a bottle. Don’t worry, it comes with your cabana.”
Kit glances across the pool, to where a stunning redhead is lying on a recliner. Her diamond ring could take out an eye. Husband stretching in his tight swim trunks beside her. They’re so exposed, much too out in the open. She would hate that. Much better to have the privacy of a cabana. But then the redhead’s sunglasses flash in her direction, the husband saying something in her ear to make her laugh—and the couple sitting on the edge of the pool, they’re staring from behind their tropical drinks, legs splashing in the water. On the far end of the pool, where a group has pulled together recliners as if building a fortified wall, straws between their teeth, acrylic nails flashing like claws—everyone is watching her and Keith. The new arrivals. Even the parents, who should be watching their children in the water, look over.
Keith is asking Coco about the hotel’s clientele.
“I run a hotel-restaurant up north,” he’s saying, and goes on describing the business of management. The polite smile on Coco’s face is familiar. Kit has seen it often. It’s the same as when Keith compares vintages to the female wine reps, or suggests a new dessert to the pastry chef. The practiced smile of a tired woman trying to get along with her day. Grin and bear it, Kit’s mother used to say. Like this, and she’d demonstrate. That frantic energy that made her mother such a dynamic presence in Kit’s childhood would disappear. She seemed a calm, rational human being. Eyes a little blank, smiling without showing her teeth.
“The owners wanted art nouveau but I knew French country chic was the way to go.”
That I pricks Kit. She sits up.
“I’ll let you two enjoy the cabana,” Coco says. “I’m sure you get enough of talking shop at home.” She smiles at Kit, who is biting her nail.
“Oh, we don’t mind. Kit is used to it.”
“I’ll come back with some snacks.”
From the hostess stand Coco observes them. They’re entirely out of their element and anyone watching can see it—and here, at the hotel, everybody is always watching. It reminds her of those nature specials. Gators in the water, lions on the land, and here comes a dainty gazelle looking for a drink. Coco doesn’t realize she’s staring until Ethan pokes her side.
“Who’re you gawking at?” He’s pushing an empty room service cart. “Oh, the new Mr. and Mrs. Collins. I talked to Bertie, he took them to their suite, and you know what? A fiver. That’s what he was tipped. And he said the whole time the husband kept clearing his throat like he was about to make a speech. Made a show of signing the paperwork at the front desk. I had to see them for myself, so I brought up their lunch. The wife hums to herself, and you could not wipe the grin off his face. Poor country mice.”
“Mr. Beaumont thinks Keith Collins might make an excellent protégé.”
Ethan clicks his tongue. “Your pillow talk with the boss is so disappointing.”
“Shut up,” she says, slapping his arm with one of the lunch menus. “Besides, she seems sweet. I feel bad for them. Who gets married that young? Does she even look old enough?”
The Collinses are cuddled up now, drinking their free wine. Kit’s foot tapping to a beat they can’t hear, looking at something on her phone they can’t see. They’re giggling together, these young newlyweds. They watch as Kit reaches up to Keith’s face, her fingers slipping into his curls, pulling his mouth to hers.
“Old enough.” Ethan’s brows rise higher.
A siren slices through the chatter, making everyone tense. The parents in the pool, the group on the recliners chewing the ends of their straws. An ambulance is stuck at the intersection in front of the hotel. It shrieks from the other side of the wall. Blares its horn at the cars blocking the street. One of the pool attendants drops a champagne bottle and it shatters on the hot concrete. Coco grips the menus in her hand tighter, blinking away grit that has blown into her eyes.
But then the bartender is making piña coladas, the blenders turned to high so that’s all anyone can hear. When they’re switched off there is only the piped-in music, the nearby fountain, laughter coming from the café, occasional noise from the hotel construction site. A little girl jumps from the side of the pool into the deep end. Her parents applaud.
“God, I’m on edge.”
Ethan pats Coco’s arm.
The pool attendant who dropped the champagne bottle has joined them. “This summer is fucking endless,” he says. Coco helps double-bag the shards of broken glass.
“It’s the heat,” Ethan sighs.
“And the wind. It makes everyone crazy.”
“I’ve never seen it this bad. Like a pressure cooker.”
“I swear to god June was a decade long—but also somehow a blip? I don’t know.”
Several waiters and pool attendants have convened at the hostess stand. The casual banter of downtime. It’s fire season, says one of them. When is it not? says another. Did I tell you a fight broke out in my gym last night?
Personal lives are discussed in broad strokes—How’d that audition go? Did you close on the condo? Breakups and make-ups and shock over how fast kids grow. I swear you were just celebrating his first birthday. But all conversations lead back to the Pink Hotel, to its customers and guests. They trade stories like war correspondents. Jesus Christ, how much was the bill, can you imagine?
“We’re stressed out,” Coco joins in, as she arranges truffle french fries beside two coconuts on a tray. “Every single one of us.” She’d been only half listening to her coworkers, too preoccupied with watching Kit and Keith Collins. Already the hotel was beginning to have its effect. The husband adapting quicker than the wife. He was first into the pool, making a show of diving in. There’d barely been a splash. When he surfaced he tossed his head like a woman, wet curls flying back. Then teased his wife in a louder-than-necessary voice until finally she disrobed and waded, fidgeting and flushed, into the shallow end of the pool. They’d been swimming ever since. Rolling and splashing like seals in the sea. Now they’re climbing out, toweling each other off. Breathless and elated and in need of a drink.
“Kit and Keith Collins,” Ethan is telling the others. “Can you imagine? Probably the type to name their children all K-names, Katie and Kristopher and little Keith Junior.”
Coco laughs. “You’re terrible.”
“He has a sweaty handshake. So clammy.”
“Watch yourself, darling.” She lifts the tray onto her shoulder. “That sweaty grip might end up your boss.”
She crosses the pool area with the casual grace of someone who has done this thousands of times.
Kit Collins is indeed humming to herself. She’s lying across the daybed, kicking her legs like a kid in a soda shop.
“Our specialty,” Coco says, handing an excited Kit a coconut. “We mix two kinds of rum with the coconut water and crushed ice.”
“Mmmm, it’s delicious.”
“Drink it slowly,” Keith warns. “Rum isn’t always your friend.”
Kit wrinkles her nose at him. “Rum is my very best friend, thank you very much.”
She likes it when it’s like this between them—as if there were no restaurant with its Michelin-starred chef, no arguments about her needing to get her certification, no questioning of their future together. Just Kit and this person who, when he looks at her, smiles with his mouth and eyes. In these brief moments she feels confident in knowing Keith, in understanding the world and her place in it.
When Coco had first left them alone in the cabana there’d been a moment of awkward silence. Again Kit thought, What will happen? They clinked their glasses together and sipped their wine because that seemed to be the thing to do. So was lying across each other, looking out at the pool. From some hidden speaker French music pulsed. Kit’s toes began to tap along, Keith stroking her collarbone. They imagined aperitifs in Parisian cafés. Of cobblestone streets and grand museums in the rain—balconies with views of the Eiffel Tower. That led to other musings. London, where they could see Big Ben, wander the gardens of Hyde Park. Or the Orient Express—Kit pulled it up on her phone. Verona and Venice joined the conversation. They had their whole life ahead of them. What an intoxicating thought. Glossy photos of art deco train cabins, of stewards in white gloves, of elegant stemware and delicate sterling silver sugar tongs. Women in gowns, men in tuxedos. It’s fun to let yourself pretend. Maybe the Pink Hotel is just the beginning and she’ll never have another cold shower or weevils in the flour.
Our newlyweds laughed louder, grew accustomed to being watched. Who are they? Everyone’s eyes seemed to ask. Who could they be? Throw a dart in the dark because they could be anyone, and they might be on their way to becoming whoever they wanted.
Keith is talking to Coco about the truffle french fries.
“These taste like real shaved truffle, wow.”
Kit smiles at her. “What would you do if you were staying here?”
“Exactly what you’re doing.”
“Here, sit down,” Keith says, throwing their damp towels from one of the sofas.
Ethan pops his head in, Keith invites him to join them.
“We have this whole cabana for just the two of us. Kit—” He clears his throat and tries again. “My wife and I have been trying to decide what to do while we’re here. What would you do?”
Ethan grins. “Well, I’d come down after dark and use one of the cabana phones to call room service, make them bring a bottle of champagne that I’ve been chilling in my room.”
“You have to excuse Ethan,” Coco says, shaking her head. “He’s our resident savant. Has an answer to everything.”
“What? I’ve given it a lot of thought. And it’s so slow, it would give room service something to do. If you came a month ago this place would have been packed. But now with the remodel—”
“And this weather,” Keith adds knowingly. He’s tilting back on his heels a little.
Ethan grins. “It spooks even the regulars.”
Kit stretches across the daybed. Coco and Ethan can’t be much older than Keith but they seem so confident, so self-assured. Coco especially. Kit mimics the tilt of Coco’s head, the arch of her back. Listens to her talk about the animals that have been coming down from the mountains in search of water. How at night bats swoop over the hotel pool. Coyotes calling in the canyons. They make house cats skittish, her voice drones. Dogs too.
“You’re perfectly safe,” Keith assures Kit, caressing her calf.
Had she looked frightened? Night soaks with coyotes in the distance, wind rattling the palms. It sounded exhilarating. But she’s missed the moment to object, to change the narrative. Ethan is telling them about mountain lions now.
“Groundskeepers saw one this morning.”
“Don’t tell Bungalow Sixteen,” Coco says. “She’ll flip out.”
“Who’s in Bungalow Sixteen?” Kit asks.
“Mimi Calvert,” Coco says, taking her empty coconut. “She’s been living here for twenty years.”
“Twenty-two,” Ethan corrects her. “Lives by herself with her pet capuchin, Norma Jean. Swear to god. She’s absolutely bonkers, but in a delightful way where she tips everyone in fifties. All summer she’s been convinced rattlesnakes are beneath her bungalow stairs. She only likes me bringing her breakfast so I have to check every morning.”
Keith is helping load Coco’s tray with their empty glasses and plates. “No one else can bring her breakfast?”
“He’s just trying to impress you because we’ve heard you might be our new boss.”
Kit blinks. “What?”
“Oh, it isn’t a sure thing.” Keith laughs, eyes shifting this way and that.
“Somebody should let Mr. Beaumont know,” Ethan says, pushing himself up from the sofa. “He’s talking like you’re already hired.”
Coco and Ethan are clearing out, taking the tray and wet towels with them. They’re chatting about Egyptian cotton and bespoke patio furniture but Kit is thinking about when she and Keith were swimming. How he dived into the pool, and she waded in from the steps. They met in the middle, which had seemed important, and when they went underwater there’d been music playing there, too. Now the Cabana Cafe is closing and the music has shut off. It isn’t even playing from the speakers hidden in the palms.
3.
The Collinses ride the elevator up in silence. It stops at the floor beneath theirs and the doors open to a girl barely nineteen, dressed in a Diane von Furstenberg dress, the silk sleeves long and billowing. Her hair the soft color of whipped egg whites, skin luminous from youth but also full-time dermatologists and aestheticians. The young men with her look up from their phones. Identical twins. Mirror images of each other in their casual luxury streetwear, their green eyes sweeping over the Collinses at the same time.
“Going down?” the girl asks. Keith shakes his head and the doors shut like curtains on a stage. The last thing Keith notices is that both men are wearing limited-edition Piaget watches that retail for six figures.
Their suite is uncomfortably warm. And Kit, in her indecisiveness, has left her bathing suits strewn across the room. Cover-ups and summer dresses lie crumpled on the floor. This emboldens Keith. He’s not the one in the wrong. Kit’s overreacting. He did not trick her. It’s still their honeymoon, but also he might have a few interviews. Why can’t she be happy for him? For them? Had she expected they’d live in Boonville forever? He picks up each item of clothing with dramatic flourish.
“Why is it so goddamn hot in here?” he says, throwing them onto her suitcase.
Kit switches on the air-conditioning. “I turned it off. Don’t look at me like that. It was freezing in here.”
She begins rehanging the clothes, aware of his displeasure. She hates when he’s upset with her. It’s as if the oxygen has been sucked out of the room. In the bathroom she slips out of the robe, peels off her bathing suit, which has dug into the meatier parts of her flesh—around the thighs, beneath her breasts. A red stripe cuts across one buttock. She fills one of the crystal tumblers with water from the sink and gulps it down.
“It’s cooler in here,” she calls to him, but he doesn’t answer. She turns on the shower, which hangs directly overhead. Her own little rain cloud. All the bath products smell delicious. She lathers her hair with grapefruit and mint, washes her body with geranium and pear.
“I just don’t understand why you didn’t tell me,” she calls to him, hoping that if he sees her naked body he might forgive her for the scene she made out by the pool. Our honeymoon is going to be one long job interview! Guests in the pool had stared openly; the pool attendants closing umbrellas exchanged glances with one another. The bridge of Keith’s nose turned white, then red, little blotches of pink appeared beneath his eyes. She embarrassed him, something she’s always afraid of doing. You’ve got to let me do the talking, he told her once after a dinner with the Old Boonville Hotel owners. Kit had rattled on about remodeling with tapestries and exposed beams, touches of gold and bold wallpaper. Like a chateau in the South of France, she told the owner and his wife. Have you been to the French countryside? they asked, and Kit had to shake her head no. But she’d seen films, images in magazines. I feel like I’ve been there, she told them, I can imagine it.
“So,” she tries again, the shower pulverizing her tender skin. “Has Mr. Beaumont offered you the job?”
Keith has gotten into the minibar and poured himself a whiskey. There’s no ice but he doesn’t want to leave the room again without showering and changing into his good suit. The gardens below are dark now, except for the gentle glow from Victorian-style lampposts.
It had been a good afternoon—the two of them fantasizing about their future like they used to, back in the beginning of their relationship, when he’d take her for dinner at an upscale Greek restaurant, which he couldn’t afford, not really. But he had a credit card and he liked stealing Kit away from her blond phlebotomist roommates, who’d been pressuring her to follow suit. I could do it, she’d tell him. I have very steady hands. And he liked how after a few drinks the restaurant’s whitewashed walls seemed to transport them; how the waiter brought little extras because they were young and good-looking and eager to learn how to pronounce things like moussaka and souvlaki and spanakopita. You’ve got to roll it around in the mouth. But most of all, Keith liked watching Kit transform from this unsure girl, an orphan really, to someone whose dreams matched his own. He’d listen to her talk about the Romantic poets on their Grand Tour, Hemingway and Fitzgerald, expats living abroad. How dreamy her face would become, her teeth stained purple from the agiorgitiko wine. Ah-your-yeek-tee-ko. He wanted her to have those things, to see those places, but that required work. Hard work. Planning, saving, growing. Once the wine wore off, the twinkling lights replaced with the regular blazing sun, he worried that Kit would never do anything more than dream.
“Keith,” she calls from the shower. “Did you hear me? Did you get the job?”
“He’s not going to offer me the job the minute I arrive,” he shouts at her.
* * *
It isn’t until after they’re seated in the Polo Lounge, when the waiter brings a bottle of prosecco—compliments of the restaurant—that the Collinses begin to relax.
“Happy honeymoon,” the waiter tells them, sabering the cork with a loud pop that makes the young couple jump and the tables nearby look over and smile. One or two raise their own glasses in solitary congratulations. Welcome to marriage!
Kit had a terrible time deciding what to wear, nothing looked right, nothing fit exactly as it should. The whole while Keith had been looking at his watch—which was not a Piaget but a simple Timex—mumbling that they’d be late for their reservation. Eventually he couldn’t stand watching another outfit change and retreated to the bar in the Polo Lounge. This further put Kit out of sorts. Then the blow-dryer wouldn’t work and she had to call downstairs for another. Is Coco there? she had asked the front desk, hoping she could bring it up. But no, of course Coco wasn’t working room service. She was back at staff quarters—she’d heard from Keith that they all lived on-site, working in shifts. Like paramedics, like firefighters.
When she finally came downstairs Keith was talking with a group of men in gray suits, all of them with highballs in hand. On the television reporters were chattering about windstorms, the chance of dry lightning. Images of fallen trees on Westwood Boulevard. Extreme red-flag warnings throughout the southland, they said.
The men beamed at Kit, congratulated Keith on his choice of bride. Kit, in a low-back dress, fingering a string of false pearls her aunt had given her. She could tell their attention pleased Keith, so she smiled her woman’s smile. She thought of Coco in the cabana, her mass of dark hair pulled over one shoulder to show off her neck. She turned her chin, angled her face so the light caught her jaw and cheekbones.
Keith was in a better mood, until they were seated and their audience of gray-suited men was replaced with sumptuously dressed and curious diners. The young blond girl from the elevator sucking down half a dozen oysters in the booth across from them, the twins on either side of her. Their eyes luminous in the low light.
The Collinses sat upright, their menus in front of their faces, Keith’s knees bumping the table so that the dinnerware clamored. This sudden awkwardness made them silent. They lingered over the menu. But this is nonsense, Kit thought. It’s only Keith, and she made some small talk.
Should we see if they have oyster shooters?
How quick his face changed to a frown. The blond in the booth craning her neck to try to overhear.
This isn’t that type of place.
Things got worse when it came time to order. Keith wanted steak tartare—Kit was aghast at the prices. We’ll be broke by Wednesday, she said, which made Keith angle his body so the giggling twins could not see his discomfort. Close your menu, Kit, I’ll order for us. What are credit cards for? A knot in her stomach, she asked the waiter for water but Keith insisted on a bottle of prosecco. He ordered the steak tartare, Bolognese for Kit, the filet mignon for himself, and a Caesar to split. What’s wrong now? he said once the waiter had left. I thought you’d be happy, I could have ordered a salad for each of us.
It’s too expensive, Keith. She drummed her bitten nails. I don’t like how our honeymoon is starting out.
Well, I could say the same.
I think you just did.
Then the waiter miraculously arrived with that life-giving bubbly, the word complimentary like a soothing balm. The flutes were crystal stemware, heavy and gothic, which to Kit meant romance and to Keith meant affluence. The bubbles loosened those tight shoulders, smoothed the worry lines that had begun to work their way in between Kit’s brows. She started to see Keith again as her rock, the one sturdy thing in her life she could rely on. Those curls, the thin mustache—such an angular, trustworthy face. Without his love she would be lost and alone. She had no one else, not really. And in exchange, she was privy to his secret. That beneath the golden good looks was an unsure boy. Look how he puts his hands on the table, then back at his sides, then on the table again. The way he tugs at his curls, how those blue eyes dart around the room, wondering who might be watching him. You have to find your best friend and marry them—that had been part of her vows. She remembers how Keith’s eyes glistened at the words.
“You are my best friend,” she says, leaning across the table, her face that becoming pink from her allergy to sulfites.
Keith gives in completely. All is forgotten. It’s travel fatigue. Journeys are difficult. And Kit is being a champ, agreeing to let her honeymoon be bogarted by a job interview. Such a pretty girl, the men at the bar had said. This pleased him, made him feel bigger than Mr. Beaumont, larger than really any man in the bustling restaurant. Kit had something that made other men look. Even the gawking twins with their Piaget watches are staring, the platinum blond too. The cherry stem from an ice cream sundae between her teeth.
“My wife,” Keith says, taking her hands. “Mrs. Collins.” He tells her how gracious and welcoming Mr. Beaumont had been when he saw him in the lobby this afternoon. How he met the concierge, hotel clerks, shift and sales managers.
“It was as if I already had the job,” he says, leaning back so the waiter can clear their dishes. “He’s really something else. I wonder where he gets his suits.”
Kit glances at the booth where the blond girl is shooing aside a group of friends who have just arrived, the gesture making her emerald ring splinter in the lamplight.
“I’m sure he’ll tell you,” Kit says, twisting her wedding band.
“I bet they’re tailored. Wouldn’t I look fantastic in a tailored suit?”
The chef sends out two more dishes, compliments of the house, and then brings the soufflé himself.
“For the lovebirds,” he says, his accent thick.
The Collinses are enveloped in the warm light of the Polo Lounge. The green and white stripes, the scent of old polished leather—the piano music lulling them into drunken bliss. Across from them the blond girl and the twins have left with their friends. The booth is cluttered with cocktail glasses and plates of half-eaten hamburgers, bowls piled with mussel shells and french fries. All of them cackling and drunk as they filed out, the twins saying Congratulations as they puffed on e-cigarettes and disappeared in the direction of the bungalow gardens.
“Mr. and Mrs. Collins,” the waiter says, bowing as he takes away the signed bill.
Keith’s eyes are nearly slits. “Don’t you love how they’re always calling us that? It’s so old-fashioned. You can’t fake class like that.”
They’re sipping espresso, the delicate cups clinking against their porcelain saucers. He takes Kit’s hand and touches it to his lips.
“Mrs. Collins,” Kit repeats, and she thinks of Keith’s mother. An elderly woman in upstate Washington unable to recognize her own son’s face. “Who is this Kit Collins?”
“Anyone she wants.”
In Suite 220 she lets him undress her. Their sex is familiar yet mysterious, like religious rituals and sacred rites. She stands naked before him. On the bed, he readies himself. Come here, he tells her. He isn’t rough, but forceful, and Kit makes her body as pliable as that calla lily.
Love is a kind of possession, Kit believes. So she lets him possess her, gives herself over completely. And Keith—faced with this utter openness—becomes a schoolboy. He’s a scientist after all, pinning open a butterfly. Examining its iridescent wings, the light soft fur of the body. If he could delve deeper he might discover some new unknown depth to this docile wife with her girl’s body lying naked beneath him. But hunger is eager, and climax is quick.
Afterward there’s dampness between her legs. She gets up quietly, Keith already gently snoring. In the bathroom she examines her body again. Gone are the lines from the bathing suit, there are other markings now. From her husband’s hands, his mouth. “My husband,” she says. I am his wife. She rinses again. When she’s toweling off, the wind beats against the window, the trees and plants in the gardens lash about beneath the lamps like wild limbs. She opens the balcony door. The smell of smoke hits her immediately.
Copyright © 2022 by Liska Jacobs
