“Girls, as in strippers? You mean there was more than one?”
“Yes. And they weren’t strippers. Maybe they were. I don’t know. But things got wild and some of the guys were…”
“Some of the guys were what?”
“It got crazy. I don’t know how it started. But some of the guys were having sex with them.”
“You can’t be serious. They were having sex in our house? What the hell happened? Sweetie, where are you?” A part of her understood that she had just rifled three questions at him, and so she took a breath to try and calm herself.
“Look, the point isn’t that some of the guys were having sex,” he said. “As bad as that was. As wrong as that was. The point—”
“Were you?” she interrupted. Something in his tone had caused her to flinch—something in the way he had said wrong—and when she uncoiled, she had asked the question reflexively.
“Was I what?”
This time, the question caught in her throat. “Were you having sex with them?” Her tone was more incredulity and fear than anger and accusation. Please, she thought, just say no. Tell me I’m being a crazy person.
“No. I didn’t. Not really…”
“Not really? What do you mean, not really?”
“The issue,” he said, not answering the question, “is that the girls…”
At some point, she had sat down on her mother’s bed. She wanted to shoo her mother from the room, but her whole body was collapsing in upon itself. Her husband had just fucked some stripper in their house. Perhaps in their living room. She was sure of it, and she felt her stomach lurch as if she were on an airplane trying to navigate wing-rattling turbulence. “The girls what?” she asked, her tone numb, her voice almost unrecognizable to herself. It was like when you listened to a recording of your own words: the sounds and the intonation were never what you expected. She glanced up at her mother, who had heard every word that she’d said. Her mother looked stricken.
“The girls killed the guys—the guys who brought them. They killed them. There were two of them—two guys—and now they’re dead. Both of them, Kris. The girls used a carving knife we keep in the cutting block in the kitchen to kill one of them. Then they took his gun and shot the other one. And now these two big Russian dudes are both dead.”
For a moment she said nothing, her mind trying and failing to process the oneiric horror of what he was sharing. People had died in her home. Men—including her husband—had been fucking strippers in her home. Somehow these travesties were connected, the umbilicus a bachelor party for a man, her brother-in-law Philip, who she didn’t especially like. Among the riot of emotions she was experiencing, she understood that fury—rage at Richard’s juvenile younger brother—was bubbling to the surface, subsuming even the despair and sadness and embarrassment that her husband had had sex with a stripper.
“Where are you?” she asked finally. There were so many things to ask. There were just so many things she didn’t know.
“I’m at the police station. We all are.”
“Oh, God. In Bronxville?”
“Yes. They’re taking our statements. We’re telling them what happened.”
“And the girls?” The word girls reverberated in her mind; suddenly it seemed like the wrong word. But, of course, that was the word for a stripper. When you passed places like the Hustler Club on the West Side Highway, the signs never boasted “Hundreds of Women.” They advertised “Hundreds of Girls.”
“They’re gone. They disappeared. They killed these two big assholes—handlers, bodyguards, thugs; I don’t know what you call them—took their wallets and wads of cash, and then drove away in the car they came in. But they’re gone.”
In the bedroom doorway, behind her mother, she saw her daughter. She was wiping the sleep from her eyes. She was wearing her Snoopy pajamas: pink-and-white-plaid flannel bottoms and the iconic dog surfing on the top. The word in the cartoon balloon was Cowabunga. She was asking her grandmother what was going on, what was happening, who had called.
This child, Kristin thought to herself, her husband saying something more on the other end of the line but the words merely white noise, was a girl. A girl doesn’t fuck other people’s husbands at a bachelor party and then take a knife to her bodyguards. A girl…