Peyton and Tate passed through one of the back bedrooms, where a foursome had blossomed, all the participants naked or next to naked, a black-lace bra having been flung aside to catch on the corner of a framed Hirschfeld caricature of Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. A pair of boxers, patterned with red hearts, dangled from the ankle of one of the gentleman between the legs of one of the ladies on the daybed.
Peyton had found the booze in the glasses next to the Happy Hour game to be particularly potent. Just a few sips had made her feel small, her toes and fingers numb, and yet, though she seemed to be slipping fingertip by fingertip into a state of nothingness, nothing about the house made her nervous any longer. When she’d first walked into 14812 W. Josephine Lane, a house surrounded by streets with names like Edna Boulevard and Gertrude Drive, a regular little ladies’ sewing circle, Peyton had been intimidated by the emptiness of the front room. What kind of party so quickly went quiet so early in the evening? It suggested to Peyton a lurid weakness. Was there no time for idle chitchat at such things? No getting-to-know-you? Anything innocent?
Tate held on to the back of Peyton’s dress, and together they scurried up along the twist of a spiral staircase, into a hallway, and down another hall. They slipped through a small, dark room, a spinning multicolored strobe light madly sprinkling the bed and floor and walls with hectic dots, Barry White throaty and smooth on a stereo, a grandmotherly chenille bedspread rolling and roiling with lumps of activity beneath it.
Peyton held her hands over the eyeholes of her mask. “Daddy?” she said, but she didn’t know if she said it loudly enough for anyone to hear. Or maybe she hadn’t spoken the word at all, her lips still tingling, losing feeling, from the liquor.
At some point, Peyton lost Tate, but she didn’t turn around to look for him. She found a child’s room and was relieved to see its sanctity respected, no naked bodies beneath its pink canopy or its ruffled comforter. A winter garden party of polka-dotted stuffed animals carried on in the bay window, with decorum and nobility, as if nothing at all uncivilized was happening just a few doors down. Not even a tiny teacup was overturned. Only on the giraffe was there any sign of dismay, one tiny stitch torn on its long purple neck.
“My god, I’ve even had sex with her in our apartment.” Peyton recognized her father’s voice coming from another room. She crawled to a vent on the floor near the bed. She lay on her side, clutching a rag doll, twisting the doll’s yarn hair around her finger as she listened. “On the sofa in the living room. We knocked over an end table and broke a really, just really, beautiful blue bowl that Ashley had made in a glass-blowing class at the Hot Shops last fall. She would come home from that class looking so pretty, her cheeks still flushed pink from the furnace, her clothes soaking with sweat.”
Peyton plucked at the loose button eye of the rag doll. Could you show us, on this doll, where your father disappointed you?
A car passed on the street below, its headlights sweeping through the room and sparking on the brass of a doorknob. Peyton pushed herself up along the wall, then through this new door into a bedroom. The room was dark but for a thin line of light beneath a closet door. She neared it, following the sound of her father’s voice, slowly, the doll’s cloth foot clutched in her fist, the doll hanging limp at her side, its skirt up over its head.
Peyton opened the closet door and tore off her mask. The gesture, quick and dramatic, felt the most dangerous, most potentially damaging thing she’d ever done in her life. But she witnessed nothing. There stood her father and a woman, both fully clothed, leaning against opposite walls of the wide walk-in closet, their arms crossed on their chests, only the toes of their shoes touching. Troy leaned back against the bookshelves full of boxes of old board games—Clue, Life, Monopoly, Risk—their titles coyly accusing. The woman rested back against hanging negligees.
“Peyton,” her father said, standing up straight, holding out his hands, then bringing them back to press against his chest, over his heart. “I’ve been trying to call you all day.”
“I’ve been through this whole house looking for you,” Peyton said. “So you can hold yourself personally responsible for the things I’ve had to see tonight. And if I would’ve seen you, I wouldn’t have looked away, you bastard. You would’ve had to deal for the rest of your life with the fact that your daughter saw you doing something disgusting.”
“I’m just . . . I’m not . . .” Troy said, stammering, his voice low. “I’m writing a book. . . .”
“Mom fell down the stairs,” Peyton said.
“Oh, my god,” Troy said. “Where is she? She all right? What stairs? Here?”
“The stairs at home, you shit,” Peyton said. “Don’t panic, she’s fine. But she could’ve been not fine if she’d hit her head or something. But maybe that’d be better for you, if she was in a coma, huh? Because I think she might know about your affair. I’m not the one who told her.”
“Of course you didn’t tell her, because you don’t know anything,” Troy said. “There’s nothing to know. There’s no affair.”
“Oh, did I misinterpret that e-mail that you accidentally sent me? Should I forward it to Mom to see how she interprets it?”
“It would kill me if I ever hurt any of you,” he said.
Peyton leaned in a bit, slowly. “Then die, motherfucker,” she slurred, but saying it quick, like she was Samuel L. Jackson. She turned and rushed off, wishing she had pushed the rag doll into his chest as some nicely realized symbolic gesture. But she now clutched the doll to her own chest and looked to the floor to find her way out of the room and the winding hallways, following the crocheted roses that had fallen from the hem of her dress.