In Between Days (32 page)

Ever since it happened, ever since the morning before when he’d woken to the sound of a maid at the door, asking to change the sheets, he’d been able to think of little else. The room had been empty when he awoke. No sign of the man, or his bags, not even a note by the bed. Just a crisp stack of hundred-dollar bills pinned beneath a glass. He’d stood up quickly and dressed, then grabbed the cash and opened the door for the maid. He hadn’t even been able to look at her, hadn’t even been able to meet her eyes, he was shaking so much.

Later, on his drive over to Brandon’s, he had tried to reconstruct it in
his mind from what he remembered, had tried to replay it like a dream, but what he saw was only himself beneath the man’s naked body, crying. He remembered earlier that night their awkward conversation at the bar, a strange attempt at civility, and how he’d lied about just about everything, how he’d told the man that his name was James, that he had grown up in New York, and that he was currently studying internal medicine at Rice. He had told him that he was an only child, that both of his parents were dead, and that he was only doing this to repay a late tuition bill. About the only thing he’d told the man that was true was the fact that he’d never done this before, but the man seemed neither surprised nor excited to learn this.

Later, when they got up to the room, the man had taken off his wedding ring and placed it on the dresser; then he’d turned on a sports station and watched the tail end of a college basketball game while Richard had sat beside him on the bed, drinking scotch. The man had said very little, and Richard had wondered at one point whether this was all he’d have to do, just sit here with the man and drink scotch and watch a basketball game. At one point the man had even drifted off, had fallen sound asleep for almost half an hour, and Richard had felt himself relaxing, too, had even turned off the light and fallen asleep himself. But then at some point later—he couldn’t remember—he had been awoken by the sound of the man talking in his ear, yanking off his jeans, and then pushing himself on top of him. He’d felt the man’s callused palms on his face, and then his mouth, as he’d tried to stop him from crying.
Shut the fuck up!
the man had said at one point, and Richard had then bitten the inside of his cheek so hard that he could taste the bitter tinge of blood in his mouth.

Afterward, the man had taken a shower and then left the room, saying he needed a smoke. Richard had thought about leaving then, too, of just taking off, but that wasn’t part of the deal. If he wanted the money, then he’d have to spend the night, and so he’d pulled out the scotch and continued to drink, drinking to the point that he couldn’t remember anything else, not a single thing, from the rest of the night.

Now, standing up from his chair, he promises the man sitting beside him that he’ll be back in a minute, then starts around the side of the pool and wanders back toward the house. The back patio of Beto’s house is covered with empty wine bottles and hors d’oeuvres trays, the leftover debris
from an early afternoon party, it seems. On the outside edge of the sliding glass door is a sign that reads
WATCH OUT! GLASS!
in big bold letters, and as he opens the door he finds the kitchen filled with strangers, faces he vaguely remembers from other parties, people who he may have once spoken to but whose names he no longer recalls.

He fixes himself a gin-n-tonic, then starts down the hallway toward the library—the “book room,” as Beto calls it—a large, dimly lit room filled with leather furniture and antique bookshelves and Persian rugs that smell at all times of smoke. Here, slumped against the leather couch in the corner, he finds Brandon, paging through a book, a cigarette dangling from his mouth. He looks blitzed.

“You drunk?” Brandon asks.

“On my way,” Richard says, nodding at his glass.

Brandon smiles, then sits up on the floor.

“Pretty quiet round here tonight, don’t you think?”

“Yeah.” Brandon nods. “Has been all week. You know, ever since that girl cracked her head open.”

Richards nods. “That’s right,” he says, suddenly remembering the horrific scene. “Any word about that?”

“What do you mean?”

“You know, about what happened to her.”

Brandon looks at him, then shakes his head and ashes his cigarette. “Not that I’ve heard.”

And suddenly this strikes Richard as sad, even reprehensible, that no one has even bothered to check up on the girl, that nobody even cares. For all they know she could have died on her way to the hospital that night or be dead right now, buried six feet under the ground.

“So let me ask you a question,” Brandon says, leaning forward now. “How many of these books do you think are real?” He motions around the room at the enormous bookshelves along the walls.

“How many?”

“Yeah, how many.”

“I don’t know.” Richard shrugs. “I kind of assumed all of them were.” “All of them?” Brandon laughs. “Right. Try none.”

“None?”

Brandon stands up then and walks over to one of the bookshelves and then slides out an entire row of books like a drawer. “They’re all hollow,”
he says, tapping the covers. “Can you believe that shit? It’s all for decoration.”

Richard looks at him and shrugs. “Well, I never took Beto for much of a reader, you know.”

Brandon shakes his head and sits back down. “I know, man, but shit, why even bother to have a library if you’re not going to have any books in it?”

Richard shrugs again and puts down his drink, lights a cigarette.

“So you still feeling freaked out?” Brandon asks after a moment.

“Who told you I was freaked out?”

“Nobody,” Brandon says. “I can just tell.”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Richard says and looks away.

“You know, it’s totally normal,” he says.

“Normal?”

“To feel freaked out at first. You should have seen me the first time I did it. I couldn’t sleep for like a week.”

“Well, there’s not going to be a second time,” Richard says.

“That’s what I thought, too, but then after a while, you know, it just kind of starts to feel normal, you know, kind of like sliding your punch card in at work.”

Richard stares at him and suddenly feels the need to leave, to go back to the kitchen and pour himself another drink. This isn’t a conversation he wants to be having right now.

“Can we talk about something else?” he says finally.

Brandon stares at him for a moment, then shrugs. “Sure,” he says. “Whatever.” He steadies his glass. “What do you want to talk about?”

“I want to know where you took them,” he says finally, sitting down.

“Who?”

“My sister and Raja.”

“I took them down to the warehouse district,” he says, “like I told you.”

“I know,” he says, “but where exactly?”

Brandon throws up his arms. “Fuck if I know, man. I’d never been there before. Like I said, it seemed like they were just meeting a couple guys down there, and then they were probably going somewhere else.”

Richard nods and suddenly feels his deepest suspicions confirmed. He thinks of the passport he picked up for his sister that morning and
where she might be now. Maybe halfway down to Mexico or possibly on her way to Canada. It was impossible to say. All he knows now is that he has played a part in it, that he is now responsible, that he is now a complicit party. And he wonders then how he’ll possibly explain this to his parents or to the authorities, when they ask, what he’ll tell them.

“Why?” Brandon asks after a moment. “You have some idea where they might have gone?”

Richard looks at him and almost says something before he finally thinks better of it. “No,” he says calmly, picking up his glass and starting back toward the kitchen. “No idea.”

At the start of the night his goal had been to get obliterated, to numb himself to the point that any memory of the man who had assaulted him the night before would be eviscerated from his mind, and after several gin-n-tonics, and another several beers, he feels fairly close to attaining this goal. He is lying now in Beto’s bed, all alone, no trace of Brandon in sight, no trace of anyone for that matter, feeling more or less completely trashed. In the morning, he knows, he’ll have to make good on his promise to Michelson. He’ll have to work on his application. He’ll have to put together his transcripts. He’ll have to write out a statement of purpose. He’ll have to get all of these things together and in the mail by five, and yet at this moment he can think of nothing more disheartening than the idea of sitting in a room full of poets, listening to someone talk about this aesthetic or that, about line breaks and endjambs, knowing all the while that he doesn’t belong there, that he’s an impostor, that he’s not the type of person who deserves this opportunity, but rather the type of person who sells his body off to perfect strangers at three in the morning in some luxury suite at the back of the Hyatt Hotel.

It was like a large dark cloud that had come over him, and yet what seems strange to him now, what bothers him the most, is not the fact that he did it, but the fact that he’d taken the money. Had he just gone home and left the cash, he could have justified it to himself later, could have passed it off as just another drunken blunder, an unfortunate lapse in judgment, a one-night stand that had gone terribly wrong, but when he’d seen that money on the table, he hadn’t hesitated for a second. He had grabbed it quickly and then taken off, not realizing until much later that he had just taken payment for being assaulted, that he had just given the man who had assaulted him permission to do what he had done.

He wonders now where the man might be, what he might be doing, pictures him coming home to his wife and children, placing a kiss on their cheeks, then settling down for a family meal. He pictures him sitting in front of his TV, watching another basketball game, totally oblivious to what he’s done. And then he thinks about his own father and how oblivious he’d been during his own childhood, how unaware he’d been of his mother’s unhappiness, how wrapped up he’d been in his sports games and his work, and of course how surprised he’d been when Richard finally came out. Just as he’d been surprised when his wife finally left him. What was wrong with these men’s minds? he wonders. What prevented them from seeing the pain that they caused?

Thinking about this now, he feels suddenly disturbed, and as he opens his eyes and begins to sit up, he notices a person sitting across from him on the other side of the room, a vague silhouette, staring back at him. Startled, it takes him a moment to make out the person’s face, and then he remembers: it’s the girl from the week before, the girl he smoked pot with. Angel. She is backlit, sitting mostly in the shadows, smoking a cigarette and holding up a magazine between her knees.

“Hey,” he says, sitting up. “How long have you been there?”

She looks at him and smiles. “I don’t know,” she says. “Maybe an hour.”

“An hour?”

“Yep. Just wanted to make sure you didn’t pass out, or, you know, like die from alcohol poisoning or something.”

He looks at her. “What have I been doing?”

“What have you been doing?” She laughs. “Nothing. Just lying there.”

“Just lying here for an hour?”

“Yeah,” she says. “Pretty much. Maybe longer.”

“What time is it?”

She shrugs. “No idea. Maybe three or four in the morning.”

He looks out the window. The sky in the distance is lightening along the horizon, a cool, pale magenta.

“Anyway,” she says, “my job here is done, so I’m going to go now, okay? And you probably should, too. By the way, do you need a ride or something?”

He shakes his head. “How old are you?”

“Huh?”

“How old are you?”

“Why?”

“I’m just curious.”

“I’m seventeen.”

“You’re lying.”

“Okay,” she says. “I’m sixteen, but I’ll be seventeen next fall.”

“And your parents let you stay out like this?”

She looks out the window, but doesn’t answer, and he can suddenly see that her parents are a touchy subject.

“Look,” he says. “Can you do me a favor?”

She looks at him.

“Can you just come over here and lie next to me?”

“Lie next to you?”

“Yeah, just for like a couple minutes.”

She looks at him suspiciously, then finally stands up. And he doesn’t know why he asks her this, or what it means, but as she comes over and joins him on the bed and puts her arm around him, he feels for a moment strangely comforted, feels the layers of guilt and shame falling off.

“Is everything okay?” she asks finally, rubbing his chest.

He looks at her for a moment, then closes his eyes. He wants to disappear at this moment, wants to fade away into the night forever, or else to stay here in her arms forever, he doesn’t know which. Finally, he says, “Can I ask you something?”

“Of course.”

He pauses, props himself on an elbow. “Have you ever felt like you’ve lost a part of yourself because of something you’ve done?”

“What do you mean?”

“You know, because of like a decision you’ve made?”

“All the time.”

He looks at her. “And how do you deal with it?”

“Deal with what?”

“I mean how do you get it back, that part of yourself you’ve lost?”

“You don’t,” she says, looking out the window.

“You don’t?”

“No,” she says. “You don’t. You just have to figure out a way to live with it.”

“And what if you can’t?”

“Then you come here,” she says, smiling. “To Beto’s. You come here and you get shitfaced so you don’t have to think about it anymore.”

He stares at her.

“I mean, do you honestly believe that any of the people who come here on a nightly basis are here because they actually want to be?”

He leans back on the bed, but doesn’t answer, suddenly feeling the sadness of this place. Then he thinks again of the last time he was here, in this room, the gruesome scene below them, the blood floating around in the pool, the girl’s pale face.

“Remember the last time we were here?” he hears himself saying now. “That girl who cracked her head open on the side of the pool?”