She sets the menu down and chews on her thumbnail. She can’t, she thinks. Or can she? No—no, she can’t. This … it’s too vindictive. Paul vindictive. She doesn’t do things like this. She doesn’t order twenty-pound pieces of toast just so her sister will have to pay for them. She doesn’t consume as a means of revenge. Not even now, when she’s been wronged in such a profound and inexcusable way and she’s two Klonopin deep. There are still some standards she’s got to maintain. And besides—think of the calories.
There’s a chair next to the telephone, and she perches unsteadily on its left arm.
The operator at the restaurant answers on the first ring.
“Good morning, Miss. How may I be of service?”
Alice coughs. “I’d like five English breakfasts, please. All with scrambled eggs, all with white toast.”
“Certainly. And will that be all?”
“Yes,” she says. “Or, no. Five orange juices, five pain au raisins, and five orders of the Welsh Rabbit.” She glances down at the menu. “Can you add bacon to the rabbit?”
“Of course. Though, that’ll be an additional five—”
“Double the bacon, then.”
“Certainly. Anything else?”
“No. Not now at least.” She clicks her teeth, thinking. “You deliver room service all day?”
“Whenever you’d like.”
“Wonderful,” Alice says. “That’s really, really wonderful.”
“I’m pleased you think so.” An awkward pause ensues. “You can expect your breakfast to arrive in the next half an hour. I assume you’d like multiple sets of cutlery?”
“I—” She can’t possibly request a single fork, can she? No, she can’t. There’s something to be said for keeping up appearances. “Yes, please. Five sets.”
She hangs up.
This is absurd, she thinks, both grinning and grimacing. Does she actually think a thousand-pound room service charge will register anything more than a blink from her sister? Eloise’s father has clogged her trust fund with enough cash that Alice could probably buy the whole goddamned suite before Eloise suspected any suspicious activity. But it’s the principle of the thing, Alice thinks as she opens the minibar and unscrews the cap from a twenty-pound airplane-sized bottle of Grey Goose. If Eloise wants to taunt Alice with generosity, then Alice has a right to show her where such loathsome and self-serving generosity leads.
She finishes the Grey Goose in a determined swallow and reaches for the Tanqueray.
It doesn’t take her long to get drunk—thanks to the Klonopin, she’s already feeling good and wasted once she’s polished off the Tanqueray. Still, she’s driven by a sense of duty, so she swallows half a bottle of Kahlúa before deciding that she needs something to eat while she waits for her breakfast. Rummaging through the minibar, she finds a canister of almonds and, peeling away the can’s tinfoil top, pops a handful into her mouth. They’re salty, too salty, their rough skins coated with crystals, and despite all the alcohol she’s just drunk, her mouth is already bone dry. She eats them anyway and muses over how she feels simultaneously full and empty; each nut feels at once like a drop in the bucket and a stone in her gut. The drugs, she figures, must be really kicking in.
Three-quarters of the way through the container she reminds herself that she needn’t eat the whole thing to incur the full charge for it—she only needs to open the canister to rack up ten pounds. With a mixed sense of defeat and victory, she sets the almonds aside and unwraps three wheels of Brie. Using a wheat cracker, she breaks off a creamy glob from one of the wheels and scoops it into her mouth.
She leans back again, works the cheese over her gums and her teeth, and then swigs from a bottle of Perrier to rinse out her mouth. She tries to remember what she ordered from room service, but she’s having a hard time thinking of it. Typically this is her favorite part of getting high, the moment where her short-term memory, the events of the past hour, seem to blur into an unrecognizable nothingness somewhere along the horizon of her mind. The Forgetting, is what she calls it. Forgetting what Paul was just bitching about, or the strange way Jonathan just looked at her, or—in this case—how she just squandered her sister’s money. She tries to push the wall of short-term nothingness further; she wills it to consume her anger toward Eloise and her narcissistic altruism. It’s not that she wants to forgive her sister, or that she wants to dispel her own rage—rather, she’d prefer to feel nothing at all.
But her efforts are useless. She swallows the mouthful of cheese and, looking at the mess she’s made, is suddenly embarrassed and filled with a foggy, drunk sense of disappointment. Empty bottles are turned on their sides. Melted caramel glues torn candy wrappers to the glass table. She sinks further into the sofa and lets her shoulders slump. Crumbs form trails down the front of her shirt. Catching a glimpse of herself in the blackened television’s reflection, she thinks: This isn’t me. This can’t be me. I don’t know who it is, but it’s not me.
Or maybe it is, and maybe that’s the awful truth. Maybe instead of diluting her, the drugs actually coax her closer to a purer state. Her stomach clenches at the thought. Still, a question pesters her: Besides money, what does Eloise have that she, Alice, is lacking? She’s as pretty as her sister, isn’t she? Maybe not in some classic, Audrey Hepburn Waiting Outside of Tiffany’s sort of way, but certainly in an early Rita Hayworth in a Bikini sort of way, and didn’t men like that more, anyhow? And in terms of intelligence, it’s not like Alice is lacking. She graduated a tenth of a grade point away from summa cum laude, and her thesis advisor had told her, with undeniable sincerity, that she had been a very strong contender for Phi Beta Kappa, even if she hadn’t, ultimately, been selected. Granted, all of this occurred at UCLA, as opposed to Eloise’s Yale, but still—didn’t it count for something? Didn’t it provide some justification for her confusion when she considered how her sister was blessed with an easy, gilded life, while she was reduced to taking her (married) boyfriend out for tacos? Isn’t there some explanation for this gross inequality, other than the fact that Eloise had a rich dad and she had an accountant for a father?
No, there isn’t. This is where her thoughts veer, where they invariably and inevitably dead-end. Just look at how her mother treats them both: Eloise like a prize, and Alice like an employee. No, there’s nothing else but the wanton and slapdash workings of Fate.
There’s a knock on the door, and then a polite announcement of room service. She throws the empty Perrier bottle to the ground and, once again disappointed in herself, she buries her face in her hands. Her forehead feels clammy, damp, and her eyes ache when she shuts them. The world lurches, and her gut shifts and repositions itself. Another knock, another call for room service, causes her to blink and look up.
“I’ll be right there,” she calls out.
And she will. She’ll open the door, and invite the man in, and lift the warming covers from the army of silver trays, and eat eggs and ham and grapefruit until she makes herself sick. First, though, she reaches for her phone. Closing one eye to focus her blurry vision, she scrolls to her sister’s mobile number, opens a new message, and types: You’re 2 kind. This room is gorgeous. I’m the luckiest sister alive ?.
Eloise