The Guest Room by Chris Bohjalian
For Victoria.
For Grace.
For the girl in the lobby who was paying the bellman at three a.m.
I don’t think I’d love you so deeply if you
had nothing to complain of and nothing to regret.
BORIS PASTERNAK, Doctor Zhivago
Chapter One
Richard Chapman presumed there would be a stripper at his brother Philip’s bachelor party. Perhaps if he had actually thought about it, he might even have expected two. Sure, in sitcoms the stripper always arrived alone, but he knew that in real life strippers often came in pairs. How else could there be a little pretend (or not pretend) girl-on-girl action on the living room carpet? Besides, he worked in mergers and acquisitions, he understood the exigencies of commerce as well as anyone: two strippers meant you could have two gentlemen squirming at once. You could have two girls hovering just above two sets of thighs—or if the girls saw the right combination of neediness and dollar signs in the men’s eyes, not hovering but in fact descending upon each of the men’s laps. Richard wasn’t especially wild about the idea of an exotic dancer in his family’s living room: there was a place for everything in his mind, even the acrobatically tensed sinews of a stripper. But that place wasn’t his home. He didn’t want to be a prig, however; he didn’t want to be the guy who put a damper on his younger brother’s bachelor party. And so he told himself the entertainment would be some girl from Sarah Lawrence or Fordham or NYU with a silly, mellifluous made-up name making a little money for tuition. He didn’t completely believe this, but in some backward universe sort of way, he felt a little less reprehensible—a little less soiled—if he was getting turned on by a twenty-one-year-old sociology major with a flat stomach and a Brazilian who understood intellectually the cultural politics of stripping and viewed herself as a feminist capitalist.
Richard’s wife, of course, was not present that evening. Kristin had made sure that she and her daughter were at her mother’s apartment in Manhattan. The three of them, three generations of females, one with white hair and one with wheaten and one—the youngest—with hair that was blond and silken and fell to her shoulders, ate dinner at an Italian restaurant the granddaughter liked. It was near Carnegie Hall and had great plaster sculptures of body parts on the walls. Noses. Breasts. An eye. The three of them had theater tickets for a Broadway matinee the following afternoon, Saturday. They weren’t planning to return home until Sunday.
There were supposed to be no videos of the bachelor party. One of the women’s Russian bodyguards told the men to keep their phones in their pants. He said if he saw a phone, he’d break it. He said he’d break the fingers that had been touching the phone, too. (He was smiling when he spoke, but no one doubted his earnestness.)
So there were mostly just stories of what seems to have occurred. How it went from stripping to fucking. How it all went wrong. There is only what the gentlemen, including Richard Chapman, told the police. The talent’s versions? The talent was gone. And those bodyguards? They were dead.
…