Four inches of snow had fallen by the time Felipe pulled up in front of her building. He climbed out, came around the back of the Escalade, and opened the rear curbside door. She slid into the familiar passenger seat. The SUV had been warmed to a stifling degree, and she immediately wished that she were still standing on the street in the arctic winds. She closed her eyes. As Felipe drove, each surge of the accelerator, depression of the brake, and jerk of the steering wheel vibrated through her body as if she were melded with the vehicle’s transmission. Why was she going back to Merchant when she’d promised herself that she wouldn’t?
At his Fifth Avenue building, the night doorman helped her out and escorted her into the lobby. I am like a FedEx shipment moving through a distribution chain, she thought. The doorman announced her arrival and led her to an oak-lined elevator. A few seconds later, the elevator doors opened directly into Merchant’s vast three-floor apartment and he received his “package” with a satisfied smile. “You see.” He kissed her cheek. “A little snow isn’t going to keep you from me.” His palms traced the outline of her waist and hips, and she felt a twinge of revulsion. He must have sensed it, she thought, because he lowered his hands, and his look turned harder. His voice seemed cool when he said, “Go get comfortable. I have to make a call. I won’t be long.”
She felt his eyes follow her down the corridor to the room they shared each time she came here. She had never explored the other corridors of his residence. He had never invited her into those passageways or up the stairs to different levels. He had always steered her—confined her, she thought now—to this one particular room. The first time she’d entered it, she had judged it to be twice as large as her entire studio apartment. To the right was an elegant sitting area with two inviting love seats facing a working fireplace. A fire was lit tonight, she noticed, and on the coffee table between the love seats, two facedown glasses sat on a tray next to a champagne bottle in an ice bucket.
Her eyes moved left. In a room of these dimensions, even the king-size bed looked small. She turned away from it uneasily and stared at the windows on the wall opposite the door. She walked to the center window and pressed her forehead against the cold glass pane. The snowflakes falling through the darkness seemed to have soundproofed the city below. The lanterns lining Fifth Avenue illuminated spindly black branches of the trees in Central Park. I shouldn’t be here, she thought.
But two months ago, Baiba had wanted to be here more than anything. She still vividly remembered the afternoon when Merchant had stopped her after his visit to Nostalgia and murmured, “Why don’t you have dinner with me tonight.” She could so easily have avoided that invitation by ignoring his smiles and subtle flirtations in the weeks leading up to it. But she had not ignored them. She had enjoyed his attention. She had encouraged it, she supposed. And by the time he extended the dinner invitation, she had already rationalized her acceptance. Yes, he was technically married, but he wasn’t truly being unfaithful. Lucy Merchant didn’t even know him anymore. And unlike some of the men with wives in Nostalgia, he had never attempted to make unseemly and inappropriate “conjugal” visits to a woman who couldn’t legally consent. For all intents and purposes, he was a handsome, eligible, sexually attractive—and wealthy—widower.
They had dined at a discreet corner table in the Pool Room of the Four Seasons. On her empty stomach, the crisp white wine had gone quickly to her head. They’d shared oysters and tuna tartare before their main courses. He had commented on the hypnotic blueness of her eyes and asked about her childhood in Riga, her education, and her ambitions. And all during the meal his knee had lightly touched hers below the table.
When the meal was over, he had dropped his Black Card onto the check and leaned so close that Baiba felt his breath against her ear as he whispered, “I want to take you home with me. Tell me you want to come.” She still felt that light touch of his breath after he sat up. For several seconds, she had stared at the glowing pool lights below the bubbling water in the center of the dining room. The wine and the warmth of those lights drowned out the warnings in her mind, and finally she met his eyes and said, “Yes. I want to come with you.”
An hour later they entered this room for the first time. He’d sat on the edge of the bed, fully clothed, and said, “Take your dress off for me.” And when her dress had fallen to the floor, he had gestured her over and pulled her face down across his lap in one practiced move, slipped his fingers under the edge of her panties, kneaded her buttocks, and murmured appreciatively. “You’re a walking sin. You need a spanking for being so sexy. Tell me you want me to spank you.”
For an instant Baiba had thought he must be joking. She tried to sit up, but he pressed her head back down. “Tell me,” he demanded, and then she’d felt the first prick of fear, but something else, too, swimming just below it. Curiosity. Excitement. Desire. “I want to hear you say it,” he repeated, and she heard herself say the words, and in saying them, she found that she did want him to do it. Her face had burned with deep self-consciousness and arousal as his fingers pulled back the fabric and his palm made contact with her flesh. Her arousal and her shame at it were so intricately entwined that she could not separate the two. Each sting of his palm against her skin had brought the two states closer and closer until the punishment was pleasure and the intensity of her desire was beyond anything she had ever felt. And in that state, it was suddenly so easy to rationalize what was happening. It was not strange at all, she told herself. Merchant was not actually hurting her. They were playing a sexual game. Everyone, she told herself as he ordered her onto her hands and knees and she heard the unzipping of his slacks, everyone explored their boundaries when it came to sex. How else did you ever really lose yourself to pleasure? How else did you reach a state of pure abandon in which you became nothing more than an egoless organism hooked to a high voltage cable?
But two hours later, curled into the backseat as Felipe deposited her home, her arousal and shame had uncoiled into separate entities again and she felt something more like self-loathing. I will never go back there, she had told herself. I will never let him do that to me again. But even as she’d made the vow, she knew she would go back, that she wanted to go back. And here she was yet again.
Baiba lifted her forehead from the cold windowpane. When Merchant came in, he would expect to find her undressed, she thought, and her fingers instinctively reached for the top button of her blouse, but they were like the numb extremities of a frostbite victim and would not cooperate. She should not be here, she thought again. Lucy Merchant had died less than twenty-four hours ago, and being here tonight was vulgar, tasteless, and unspeakable. He was unspeakable. He was not the same man she had dined with on that first night when he could not take his eyes off her. That night, she had believed she had a unique hold over him, that he wanted her—only her—and that Lucy Merchant’s disease, her move to Park Manor, her quick deterioration over the past eighteen months, had all been preordained so that she and Thomas would be together.
But what if she had never been the real object of his longing? What if she had only seen what she wanted to see that night in the Four Seasons? If he truly cared about her, would he sequester her in this room? Would he keep her waiting while he made his phone calls? The truth, she finally allowed herself to recognize, was that she—Baiba—meant nothing to him. She had probably never meant anything to him. He might be content with any attractive blond willing to submit to his fantasy requirements—requirements that had grown steadily more demeaning.
She heard his footsteps. She watched the doorknob turn. She put her hand to her throat as the door swung open. She saw him look at her, take in the fact that she was still dressed, and frown.
“I have to go,” she said quickly, reaching for her coat.
“Don’t be silly. You just got here.” He held out the glass in his hand and smiled. “Here. Drink this. Let’s sit by the fire.”
She stared at the clear, iced liquid in the tumbler. Her eyes darted to the two empty glasses on the coffee table.
“Go on,” he coaxed.
She shook her head, or she thought that she was shaking her head. She couldn’t be sure. Nothing seemed quite real. She did not feel quite real.
“Here.” He stepped closer. “Have a little drink.”
And then she felt fear in its undiluted form. Get away from me, she wanted to say. You can’t make me drink that. Get out. And in a sudden synaptic explosion that finally destroyed whatever force had been pulling her here, she realized that she had mentally uttered Lucy Merchant’s nightly refrain. The tips of her fingers tingled. Her legs felt weak. “I have to go. I really have to go.”
He grabbed her arm. “That’s fine,” he said, “but you don’t look well. Have this drink first. You’ll feel better. Then Felipe can take you home.”
He steered her to a love seat, placed the glass in her hand, and guided it to her lips.