Fiancée

I feel bad about the girl who died in my apartment. She was beautiful, a model, in fact, engaged to a television actor. She wasn’t from here, of course. Nobody is. Before she died it must have seemed to her that she had everything, and then, one night, she mixed alcohol with a prescription drug and slept forever.

Her fiancé gave up the lease and then Roger and I got the apartment. I never did figure out which room she died in. It seemed wrong to ask the other tenants for the sad details.

It was easy to forget about her. When you’re walking in a fog, it’s hard to remember how many others are lost. Sometimes you feel someone brushing against your fingertips, but when you reach out, they’re gone.

There are some things that can be seen and some things that are invisible.

Roger was paranoid, always, about me. It didn’t matter what he saw or what I did. Roger had his ideas, and because he made so much money off these ideas, everything he conjured had an outsized authority, even those things that were untrue.

It took me a while to realize I should fear Roger, but I came from the kind of family where the diamond engagement ring has the elegant, brutal force of a secret weapon. That ring shredded an acceptance letter from the graduate school of Columbia University. That ring rendered null and void the modest life I had cobbled together. You know why? Because, when all is said and done, even if I had been successful, I would have had to drop everything to raise Roger’s super baby.

But I am getting ahead of myself.

Roger’s wealth made him a member of another species. Yes, rich people walk among us. Don’t be fooled by the glamour. Be afraid. They are here and they are nothing like the rest of us.

My parents worshipped him.

How could I ever have said no?

I believe the word is sociopath, or maybe it’s psychopath. I can never remember the difference. Does the lexicon matter when you’re in danger?

You see, Roger was building me a house of dreams. I agreed to this plan even as my fears grew. Every time I mentioned my misgivings to my mother, she would say, But your big house!, like it was a magic spell or a quaint expression.

Roger never stopped suspecting me of cheating on him. I’m no psychologist, but I know the guy was paranoid. I would swear to it. He would fiddle with my phone, or peer over my shoulder into my uneventful computer screen. He didn’t want me to leave the apartment. Since I worked at home, it was easy to humor him, but it didn’t stop there. After a point he wouldn’t even let me go shopping alone.

Or go to the bathroom by myself.

This isn’t going to work, I said. I have to leave from time to time. I’m INFJ but this is ridiculous.

He didn’t see the problem, or he pretended not to. Don’t worry, he said, I can work from home, too. We never have to be apart.

Really? You can do everything on your phone?

Yes. That’s the beauty of it.

Nevertheless, Roger left, from time to time, usually when I was unconscious. I would get up at dawn and he would be gone, or sometimes, when I woke in the middle of the night, I would find no trace of him. It was easy to search our apartment because Roger kept it immaculate, like a place you would walk into at a Sunday Open House. If I put an empty teacup down on any surface, or tried to hang a picture, he would intercede. He was always there, lurking, until he wasn’t.

The apartment was the nicest place I had ever lived. Open concept, which is a fancy way of saying there aren’t very many doors once you step inside. There were two bedrooms and two bathrooms, and I was very interested in what was going on in that second bedroom, which Roger used as a den.

On one of those nights when I woke up alone in our cold Hästens bed, I found Roger in his den. The door was locked. I knew better than to knock, so I stood outside and listened. Roger was talking to someone.

I couldn’t make out the words, not exactly, but I knew his voice had never sounded so tender. Stunned, I lingered for a while, and then I heard that familiar gasping and grunting, an announcement of pleasure.

I wasn’t jealous. I wasn’t angry. I was relieved. At least he has someone, I thought, as I imagined myself packing my three little bags (because, despite my mother’s mantra about the riches waiting for me, I owned almost nothing). He has someone else and in the morning I will be free, I said.

She could have been a make-believe woman from a porn site, but my instincts told me he had replaced me with another potential fiancée. He was in the process of building something new before breaking our contract. It was the way Roger did business.

I slept deeply for the first time in a long time, and I felt so good when I woke up that I actually thought we would stay friends. Maybe I’ll become her friend too, I told myself. I’ll get my studio back and return to sanity.

But when I went out to the kitchen, Roger was standing there, on the formidable slate floor, making espresso. He turned to me with a genuine smile and announced that he had chosen the font for our wedding invitations. We were lucky, he assured me. Everything was falling into place. The baker had managed to fit us in that very morning, and we were going to choose our cake just as soon as they opened for business.

I wanted to delay the wedding but I didn’t know how.

We were turned out, in the end. The landlord told us we had to leave.

Termites. There were termites and the entire four-story building had to be tented. The procedure was highly toxic. Not only would we have to stay in a hotel for three nights, but we would have to clear out the kitchen. No food could be left behind unless it was in a can or a sealed bottle. Nothing we might ingest would be safe. No houseplants would survive. One of our neighbors was even planning to put all her clothes and cosmetics in storage.

A security guard was hired to make sure nobody entered the building.

I was able to fulfill my fantasy of packing my three suitcases.

We didn’t have much, both because Roger was so strict about our possessions and because the apartment wasn’t our real home. We were supposed to move on to the house of dreams, which we would fill with objects (expensive, rare, high tech) and babies (privileged, beautiful, genius). Roger and I were the first to leave the building while the other tenants were still rushing to exit on time.

This place will be filled with poison in a few hours, Roger said as we drove away in his Mercedes. Thorough, paranoid Roger had planned ahead and installed security cameras. It’s not that I don’t trust the exterminators, he told me. I simply want them to know I am watching them while they walk around in their hazmat suits. I have my eye on them. When people know they are being watched, they tend to behave.

Ah, the panopticon, I said.

What?

Nothing. It doesn’t matter. It will all be over soon, right?

Nothing will be left. No termites. Not a single spider. Not one fly.

Good, I said, though I had a feeling of doom. Are you sure it will be safe for us to return?

They’ll let us back in on Monday afternoon. Now for our little vacation.

We got on Wilshire and went into Beverly Hills. In the luxury suite at our hotel, I felt more claustrophobic than ever. I worried that Roger, inspired by the setting, would want to have sex all day, but he stayed on his phone doing business. I tried to work but gave up and took a bubble bath. By the time we went downstairs for dinner, I was starting to relax a little.

Not much longer now, I told myself.

Roger wouldn’t stop looking at his phone. I touched his arm to get his attention and he grinned at me. Check this out, he said, holding up the phone, you can see everything.

The eerie emptiness of that first glance has stayed with me. It’s strange to see your own space abandoned, in black and white. I leaned in to get a better look but it was all wrong. There should have been something in place of the horrible stillness. We should have been there.

I got drunk quickly, trying to unspool the tension that had been building for so long. When I’m drunk I like to pretend, and whenever I was sitting in public with Roger, this playacting became an obligation. People always stared at us. I imagined my diamond ring was sending signals as it caught the light.

That’s Ward Hatchet.

Who?

At the bar. He’s the C.I.O. of Space Next. I should go talk to him.

Do you want me to come too?

The question was a lie. I had no desire to meet Ward Hatchet and I knew this was one of those times when Roger preferred to leave me behind. Roger told me to relax; he would only be a minute. A moment of indecision disturbed his professional mask, but then he put his phone down on the table. Here, he said, keep an eye on the place.

I felt myself shrinking as he walked away. Soon I would go back to being a nobody from a blue-collar family, safely invisible.

I gazed into the phone.

When I saw the woman walk out of Roger’s den, my heart contracted in my chest, and a sharp pain shot through my whole body. She was tall, wearing only underpants and a sheer camisole. She was mathematically perfect, the definition of a model. I had never looked like her and I never would.

She both was and wasn’t supposed to be there. Her long hair moved like it was blown back by a breeze but that was impossible. I had shut and locked all the windows myself, as we were instructed.

I didn’t want to stop looking in case she disappeared. At the same time I wanted to run from table to table and share my discovery with the whole restaurant. Look at this! Can you see? Are her feet touching the floor? Is she crying? And the most important question of all: what is she crying about? I tried to zoom in but the phone went black.

When I looked over at Roger, he was staring at me. Ward Hatchet had disappeared. Roger’s face was like stone, immobile and unreadable. I knew we would never fight about his mistress. It would have been better if I had not seen her. I should have packed my bags back when I thought he was merely facetiming some living beauty.

I would have to slip away somehow, sometime. I would sober up, drink some coffee, and leave the hotel while Roger slept. Part of me wanted to return to the apartment, where I would open every door and check all the closets and cabinets. I knew I wouldn’t see her during normal daylight hours, but there would be a ritual satisfaction in the searching.

I knew what I had seen.

For the time being Roger and I kept staring at each other across the restaurant, and while I did not know who would break eye contact first, it felt as though our standoff could last into eternity.