The same was true of his feelings toward the mudroom and the powder room and the pantry, with its glass cabinet doors dating back to the 1930s.
And so while he knew that the men at the bachelor party would be wandering throughout the kitchen and the dining room and the pantry, he really didn’t care. They would be nowhere near the sanctum sanctorum of bedrooms upstairs. Mostly, he guessed, they would be reveling amid the bricks and mortar and magnificent exposed wooden beams in the family’s living room or the smaller den beside it. In those rooms, the paint was the colors of hyacinth and squash and brass and antiquarian brown, and the wallpaper was a series of meticulous renderings of garden flowers. (He had hung that, too. He was, he knew, clumsy; but he was also strangely gifted when it came to select home improvements. He was a virtuoso paperhanger, and it gave him ineffable pleasure to paper those rooms that mattered to his wife and his daughter. Only the front hallway had the home’s original wallpaper.) The house was a mannered world of very conventional domesticity. And if there was a stripper there? If Philip’s friend at the hotel did indeed dial one up? Not a big deal. When she left, when the furniture was moved back into place and the dishwasher had been filled with the men’s glasses, the house once more would be a domiciliary keep for his wife and his daughter and himself.
…
The autumn rain drummed against the slate roof, but the men were oblivious, the lower clouds soup and the higher ones columns of unseasonal, crepitating thunderheads. A few of the men, including Richard, were vaguely aware that somewhere in the room an ancient Madonna song was on the Bose speaker dock, but most had stopped listening to the strippers’ playlist back on Nelly, because that was when the two girls had started grinding against each other.
Brandon Fisher was sitting beside Richard on the living room couch and leaned forward, murmuring, “Where do you think these girls are from? They’re not American.” A few minutes ago, Brandon had had one of the girls straddling his lap, her breasts pressed hard against his face; she hadn’t seemed to mind when he slipped his fingers underneath the front of her thong. She had even pretended she liked it. And, much to Richard’s surprise, their bodyguards didn’t seem to care: when he’d seen what Brandon was doing, he’d expected their muscle—two large, terrifying Russian dudes, both with shaved heads—to swoop in and break the guy’s hand. But they hadn’t. Brandon had simply given the girl a fifty, which she, in turn, had discreetly slipped into the jacket pocket of one of her handlers. He’d licked his fingers and wolfishly raised his eyebrows. Some of the men had howled.
As soon as the girls had arrived, Richard had moved the coffee table into the kitchen. He had moved the coffee table and the wine rack and a side table with a luminescent glass bowl hand-blown by a Vermont artisan into the kitchen. He wanted to be sure that the girls had room to strip and do whatever else his brother’s best friends were paying them to do in his living room—because, it was clear to him now, these were not mere strippers. They were something more. Way more. He glanced once again at Brandon’s hand. This was not at all what he had expected and he felt a little…unclean. But he also couldn’t imagine being anyplace else right now and not getting to see this—though he was still unsure precisely what this was and where it was all going to end. He reminded himself that he was drunk and told himself he should be grateful to get to see a live sex show in his living room. But then he had a pang of concern for the Oriental carpet. Did he really want the sex stains of strange women and his brother’s friends forever marking the antique rug?
“Russia? The Ukraine? I don’t know,” he answered Brandon finally. “I mean, the guys who brought them here have Russian accents.”
One of the girls was blond, her hair cut into a bob. The other’s hair was creosote black and cascaded in waterfalls down her neck and onto her shoulders. She was still in her thong, but the blonde—whose hands were cupping the other girl’s ass, her fingers splayed, with such apparent force that the breath had caught in his throat—was absolutely naked but for the glitter that sparkled in the light from the wrought-iron floor lamp.
“Maybe the Middle East,” Brandon suggested.
“Not the blonde.”
“Hair’s dyed,” he said.
“I’m thinking Eastern Europe. Maybe Germany? Or, I don’t know, Estonia.”
Abruptly his younger brother, Philip, cuffed him good-naturedly on the shoulder, causing him to spill some of his beer on his lap. “Dude!” Philip told him, his voice happily, boyishly, boisterously hammered. “Seriously? You have two chicks about to go down on each other six feet away from you, and you’re trying to figure out where the fuck they’re from?” He laughed, tousled Richard’s hair, and then added, “You have been married way too fucking long, my older brother! Way too fucking long!”