But this was not the woman Rory had seen, she was realizing. Rory had not seen a woman at all. He had seen clothes. He had seen her shoes, high-heeled Christian Lacroixs that were hell on the cobblestones. And her bag, a Marc Jacobs slung casually over the shoulder of a woman who could afford to be casual about an $800 bag because she had far more expensive ones back home. Only “home” was Barry’s apartment, she realized, and lord knows what he had done with her things. Perhaps that was why he hadn’t yet alerted the credit card company, because he was back in New York, destroying all her things. He would be pissed about the T-shirts, she realized somewhat belatedly. They were authentic vintage ones, not like the fakes everyone else was wearing now, purchased at Fred Segal last January.
And then she had brought Rory back to this room, this place of unlimited room service and the sumptuous breakfasts and the “Have-whatever-you-like-from-the-minibar” proviso. She had even let him have the cashews.
“You think I’m rich,” she said.
“I thought you looked like someone who could use some company,” Rory said, stretching and then rising from the bed.
“How old are you?”
“Twenty-four.”
He was she, she was Barry. How had this happened? She was much too young to be an older woman and nowhere near rich enough.
“What do you do?”
“Like I said, I don’t worry about work too much.” He gave her his lovely grin, although she was not quite as charmed by it.
“Was I…work?”
“Well, as my dad said, do what you love and you’ll love what you do.”
“But you’d prefer to do men, wouldn’t you. Men for fun, women for money.”
“I told you I’m no cocksucker,” he said, and landed a quick, smart backhand on her cheek. The slap was professional, expert, the slap of a man who had ended more than one argument this way. Bliss, who had never been struck in her life-except on the ass, with a hairbrush, by an early boyfriend who found that exceptionally entertaining-rubbed her cheek, stunned. She was even more stunned to watch Rory proceed to the minibar and crouch on all fours before it, inspecting its restocked shelves.
“Crap wine,” he said. “And I am sick to hell of Guinness and Jameson.”
The first crack of the door against his head was too soft; all it did was make him bellow. But it was hard enough to disorient him, giving Bliss the only advantage she needed. She straddled his back and slammed the door repeatedly on his head and his neck. Decapitation occurred to her as a vague goal and she barely noticed his hands reaching back, scratching and flailing, attempting to dislodge her. She settled for motionlessness and silence, slamming the door on his head until he was still.
But still was not good enough. She wrestled a corkscrew from its resting place-fifteen euros-and went to work. Impossible. Just as she was about to despair, she spied a happy gleam beneath the bedspread, a steak knife that had fallen to the floor and somehow gone undetected. She finished her work, even as the hotel was coming to life around her-the telephone ringing, footsteps pounding down the corridors. She should probably put on her robe. She was rather…speckled.
“HOW OLD ARE YOU, THEN?” the police officer-they called them gardai here-asked Bliss.
“How old do I look?”
“You look about twenty-five, but the records require more specific data.” He was still being kind and solicitous, although Bliss sensed that the fading mark on her cheek had not done much to reconcile the investigators to the scene they had discovered. They were gallant and professed horror that she had been hit and insulted. But their real horror, she knew, was for Rory.
“Really? Twenty-five? You’re not just saying that?”
“I’d be surprised if you could buy a drink legally in most places.”
Satisfied, she gave her real age, although it took a moment of calculation to get it right. Was she thirty, thirty-one? Thirty, she decided. Thirty.
A GOOD FUCK SPOILED
It began innocently enough. Well, if not innocently-and Charlie Drake realized that some people would refuse to see the origins of any extramarital affair as innocent-it began with tact and consideration. When Charlie Drake agreed to have an affair with his former administrative assistant, he began putting golf clubs in the trunk of his car every Thursday and Saturday, telling his wife he was going to shoot a couple holes. Yes, he really said “a couple holes,” but then, he knew very little about golf at the time.
Luckily, neither did his wife, Marla. But she was enthusiastic about Charlie’s new hobby, if only because it created a whole new category of potential gifts, and her family members were always keen for Christmas and birthday ideas for Charlie, who was notoriously difficult to shop for. And as the accessories began to flow-golf books, golf-themed clothing, golf gloves, golf hats, golf highball glasses-Charlie inevitably learned quite a bit about golf. He watched tournaments on television and spoke knowingly of “Tiger” and “Singh,” as well as the quirks of certain U.S. Open courses. He began to think of himself as a golfer who simply didn’t golf. Which, as he gleaned from his friends who actually pursued the sport, might be the best of all possible worlds. Golf, they said, was their love and their obsession, and they all wished they had never taken it up.
AT ANY RATE, THIS CONTINUED for two years and everyone-Charlie, Marla, and Sylvia, his former administrative assistant-was very happy with this arrangement. But then Sylvia announced she wanted to go from mistress to wife. And given that Sylvia was terrifyingly good at making her pronouncements into reality, this was a rather unsettling turn of events for Charlie. After all, she had been the one who had engineered the affair in the first place, and even come up with the golf alibi. As he had noted on her annual evaluation, Sylvia was very goal-oriented.
“Look, I want to fuck you,” Sylvia had said out of the blue, about six months after she started working for him. Okay, not totally out of the blue. She had tried a few more subtle things-pressing her breasts against his arm when going over a document, touching his hand, asking him if he needed her to go with him to conferences, even volunteering to pay her own way when told there was no money in the budget for her to attend. “We could even share a room,” she said. It was when Charlie demurred at her offer that she said: “Look, I want to fuck you.”
Charlie was fifty-eight at the time, married thirty-six years, and not quite at ease in the world. He remembered a time when nice girls didn’t-well, when they didn’t do it so easily and they certainly didn’t speak of it this way. Marla had been a nice girl, someone he met at college and courted according to the standards of the day, and while he remembered being wistful in the early days of his marriage, when everyone suddenly seemed to be having guilt-free sex all the time, AIDS had come along and he decided he was comfortable with his choices. Sure, he noticed pretty girls and thought about them, but he had never been jolted to act on those feelings. It seemed like a lot of trouble, frankly.
“Well, um, we can’t,” he told Sylvia.
“Why? Don’t you like me?”
“Of course I like you, Sylvia, but you work for me. They have rules about that. Anita Hill and all.”
“The point of an affair is that it’s carried on in secret.”
“And the point of embezzlement is to get away with stealing money, but I wouldn’t put my job at risk that way. I plan to retire from this job in a few years.”
“But you feel what I’m feeling, right? This incredible force between us?”
“Sure.” It seemed only polite.
“So if I find a job with one of our competitors, then there would be nothing to stop us, right? This is just about the sexual harassment rules?”