The Guest Room Read Free

wondered if he might make a new friend at the party. She rather hoped so.
    She decided to text him to see how the party was going, unsure whether he would text back in five minutes, or ten, or not until morning. She had no idea if the stripper was there yet—for all she knew, the woman had already come and gone—and for the first time her mind wandered to what sorts of things a stripper did in a living room in Westchester for a bunch of guys, some married, some not, in their thirties and forties. She guessed lap dances, though she wasn’t honestly sure what a lap dance really was. She’d never been to a strip club. She had asked Richard—an intellectual question, not one tinged in the slightest with judgment—whether he thought the woman would be fully naked in their house or still clad in some sort of stripper thong.
    “Is there such a thing as a stripper thong?” he had asked in return, kidding, but also curious himself in a puerile sort of way. “I kind of think a thong is a thong.”
    “Is a thong,” she added, recalling the Gertrude Stein remark about a rose. But then she had thought more about it, the idea of exotic dancewear, and reflexively raised an eyebrow. “You know what I mean,” she added.
    “Thong,” he answered, but she could tell he didn’t believe that. Or maybe he was just hoping he was mistaken. She couldn’t decide from his tone. Heaven knows he liked the look of a woman in a thong; he’d certainly bought her plenty of them over the years. But, of course, she viewed them largely as sex toys. Foreplay. Date-wear. Sure, the girls in the high school insisted on wearing them all day long, but they didn’t know any better. They were still willing to sacrifice comfort for fashion. Because, of course, there was no more disagreeable panty in the world than a thong. As Richard himself had once joked, “Victoria’s real secret is that she’s into some seriously uncomfortable underwear.”
    In the bed behind her in her mother’s apartment, a queen with a mahogany headboard with Georgian corners, Melissa was watching an old episode of
Seinfeld
on her grandmother’s laptop. Kristin climbed back into bed beside her and started a crossword puzzle from the booklet on the nightstand. Not quite fifteen minutes later her phone vibrated, and she saw that Richard had texted back.
    “Bacchanalian,” he had written. “Not proud. But I am hoping everyone leaves by midnight or twelve-thirty. I expect to call cabs for at least two of Philip’s pals.”
    She smiled. It sounded like he was having fun. She was impressed that every word was spelled right, though she guessed the phone might have corrected
bacchanalian
for him. She shut it off for the night.
    A few minutes later, while her daughter was still awake and contentedly watching a sitcom that had been off the air for nearly two decades, Kristin fell asleep first. She would be awakened by the old-fashioned telephone landline in the apartment just before three in the morning.
    …
    Kristin knew firsthand that even now—perhaps especially now—well into a digital world of tweets and texts and tones that are personalized, the staccato, reverberating ring of an old-fashioned telephone is jarring. It is particularly jarring in the small, shadowy hours of the night. As three a.m. nears, the odds that good news awaits at the other end grow slim. Not incalculably slim: babies are born after midnight and parents learn that the child they have been praying to adopt has landed. Soldiers call home because this is the one moment when, nine or ten time zones to the east (or west), they have a moment to speak. But Kristin knew the odds are far higher that a call to a landline—to any line—at three in the morning is the ring tone of calamity. Life-changing calamity. That call is the raven. It was how she had learned that her father had died.
    Nevertheless, there was no telephone in Kristin’s mother’s guest room. And so although she heard the ring through her