*
The porter closes the trunk, and Alice watches as the cab lurches away from the curb. On the opposite side of Brook Street, an early-morning street sweeper churns up dust, chewing gum wrappers, and other detritus of the city. There’s a breeze—easy gusts that slice through the July heat. Above her, Alice hears the flags on the hotel’s awning whipping in the wind.
She turns to Dennis, who hasn’t stopped grinning since they escaped baggage claim at Heathrow.
“Uh, just wait here, I guess,” she says.
“What, on the street?”
“I guess that’s probably unnecessary.”
He takes a step toward her and lightly touches her arm. His bag balances on his left shoulder. It sways, and Alice worries that it might fall.
“Why don’t I get us a table in the Foyer? You can check in, and then we can have some breakfast. In fact, I’ll even expense it.” Flashing his corporate AmEx, he winks, and it’s awkward, painful. Still, Alice finds the whole mess charming. Or maybe it’s not the wink that’s charming, exactly, but rather Dennis’s flagrant desire to be charming that hooks her—like watching a puppy who can’t quite climb a set of stairs try, and try, and try, anyway. Whatever the reason is, she grins. She agrees to his plan.
But like so many of her resolutions, this confidence is short-lived. Once she’s inside the hotel lobby, once she’s got her neck craned back so she can gaze up at the gilded chandelier dangling above the sleek marble floor, she asks herself, in so many words, what the fuck she’s doing. What, precisely, does she expect to happen? What outcome is she trying to coerce into being? At the airport, she liked the way Dennis was so taken, so thoroughly impressed by her staying here, at Claridge’s. She’d impulsively reasoned that it would be fun to bring him here, to bask in his idolization of her as she threw down her credit card and checked in to one of the poshest hotels in a city of posh hotels. But now that he’s here, she doesn’t know what to do with him. Instead of Dennis bumbling around like an idiot, it’s Alice who feels out of place. Christ, is she planning on fucking him? She’d be lying if she said the thought hadn’t crossed her mind. In fact, twenty minutes ago, as they sat knee-to-knee in the back of the cab, she’d considered sleeping with Dennis a real and viable possibility. The sex wouldn’t be good; once she got him naked and exposed, his confidence would sink and she’d be left to direct him, rearranging his soft limbs into a series of positions that both prevented him from coming too soon and allowed her to maximize whatever minimal pleasure she was able to mine from the encounter. The alternative, though—sending Dennis away so he can jerk off to whatever porn he has stashed on his iPhone once he reaches his hotel—is too dismal for Alice to consider. And besides, she’s lonely. She can say that, right? Yes. She’s self-aware. She’s in touch with her emotions. She attends a support group with semi-impressive frequency. She can say that: she’s lonely.
A week before she left for London, she’d asked Jonathan to dinner, which was a first—he was the one who, up until now, had done the asking. Still, on a Wednesday afternoon, she’d put on some lipstick, gathered herself, and marched into his office. There was a Mexican place she loved in Venice, two blocks north of Abbot-Kinney. The décor was a little kitschy, but the chef served a mean tacos al pastor. A hidden gem, she told him. One of her favorite places in West L.A. And you know what? It would be her treat. (She left out the fact that it was the only place she could afford.)
And it was there, over greasy tacos and Mexican Cokes, that she’d floated the suggestion that, maybe, he’d like to be her date to Eloise’s wedding. The idea itself was one that she’d been wrestling with for the past three weeks. At first glance, she admitted it seemed preposterous: a married man flying halfway around the world to attend a wedding with the woman he was fucking on the side. But then surely in the grand history of affairs much crazier arrangements had been made. And besides, the last three times they’d been together, Jonathan had stressed, and then stressed again, how suffocating and beleaguered his marriage with Marissa had become. For fuck’s sake, he’d said—verbatim—that sometimes he thought it would just be easier to call it quits. So—no, Alice had finally decided. Her invitation to Eloise’s wedding wasn’t out of line. It was, in fact, perfectly logical.
She waited until his mouth was filled with pork and pineapple before she came out with it and asked.
“It’ll be fun,” she said, watching him chew. “Well, I don’t know if that’s totally true, ha ha. Really, I just don’t know how I’ll get through it without you, I guess.”
He swallowed and wiped his mouth with a paper napkin.
“Wow,” he said.
She’d doused her tacos with too much Sriracha sauce. She was starting to sweat. “I’m sorry. Too much, too soon.”
“No! That’s not what I meant by wow.” He picked up a lone piece of pineapple from Alice’s plastic basket and popped it in his mouth, before leaning across the table to kiss her—he didn’t need to worry about getting caught out in public; Marissa didn’t come to Venice. “I think it would be a blast!”
“But…”
“No ‘but,’” he said. “It would be great to get away with you. I’ve been actually trying to devise a way to do it myself. You just beat me to the punch.”
There was a but, though, and it came out once they finished their second round of tacos. The more Jonathan thought about it, he explained, the more he couldn’t help but think that—maybe—they should hold off. On traveling together, that is. What if he were to run into someone he knew (“It’s a terrible thing being the head of the company, Al—Big Data, Big Social Circle!”)? What if pictures were posted online? Yes, he repeated, this time with more reluctance, they should really wait before they take a trip together. At least until he’d taken some action on the Marissa situation (“which won’t be long now—you should have seen the way she acted the other night at dinner. The kids are terrified of her. I think, generally, she’s just an unhappy person”). That seemed only fair, didn’t it? He was having an affair, but he was still a good person, for Christ’s sake. He’d call Alice as often as he could, of course, and they could Skype whenever he was in the office. She understood, didn’t she?