I pause, mid-clothing-trunk grab. My fingers tighten on the handle, the metal nubs on either side pressing into my palm. Unfortunately, I don’t think there’s anything I can say that will get Faust back on my side this time, so I start toward the door again. “Keep what you’re wearing. I don’t want it back.”
“Cat.”
My eyes find the back of the door. Paneled wood painted white.
“You dye your hair, don’t you?”
Even though it doesn’t make any sense, he sounds more excited than he has since we met. Excited in a bonfire way, crackling and consuming, jumping from tinder to log.
“Your freckles look like Bernard’s,” he continues. “They’re red. More orange when you’re wearing that lipstick, though. I noticed when we met.” Not responding to that. Absolutely not. I start walking to the door again, my nervous system alight with hot, panicked embers. “So I guess that’s all I know about the real you, under your character,” he says as I open the door. “You have freckles.”
The door clicks shut behind me, and I rush into my room, out of breath, the long handle of the trunk thumping against the wall as I try to find air.
Chapter 9CENTER CONTROL
I wrote a paper aboutFaust once, for high school. The character, I mean. From Goethe’s play. It isn’t a happy story. Once upon a time there was this really smart man, a certified scholar, named Faust. And like many scholars do, he gets depressed. And after he suffers operatically for a while, he rings up the Devil’s right-hand man, Mephistopheles. Because for some reason, Faust thinks that getting smarter will cure him of his sadness—questionable! But he agrees to the Devil’s bargain: Faust will get to learn about everything ever, but only for like twenty-something years. And then, at the end of all those years, smarting around, the Devil gets to take Faust’s soul.
I never got why he did it. Like, really. It’s a bad deal. At first, Faust uses his Devil-knowledge-skills to seduce a woman named Gretchen, and it goes about as well as you’d think a Devil-skills-seduction would go. Poorly! People die! In some versions, Gretchen’s soul is saved, and in others, Faust’s, and it’s really a whole mess that pretentious literary men have been reinterpreting forever. It’s theliteral classic deal with the Devil. Faust signed his life away on the dotted line for temporary satisfaction.
A bad idea.
That now I’m starting to understand.
Sometimes, we ignore the signs and ask the Devil himself if we can borrow his pen.
After I remember how to breathe, I flip that switch inside me, the one that stops caring about anything that isn’t work. Myrealwork. Getting the job done for Imogen so I can get paid and keep moving.
I spend that night with my noise-canceling headphones on, triangulating Bernard’s location from his sponsored Instagram content. He’d tagged a Marriott chain as his “Australian home away from home,” though according to his last post, he’s helping open up a new rooftop pool at some boutique spot. A quick chat with my concierge confirms that the big party is Wednesday, before the race weekend kicks off. “But my friend was over there all night, putting togetherlounge chairs,” he tells me. I’m sympathetic, interested, talk about my dad’s old union back home, American labor struggles, and my concierge slips me a one-day key card, “So you can see the nonsense yourself.”
“Thanks.” I pocket the Golden Ticket. “Think I could get a swim in?”
“Yeah, it’s technically open to their guests now.” He smiles. “You need company? My smoko’s in fifteen.”
“Maybe later.”
I spot him before he spots me. At the open white cement doorway, a splash of orange-red hair and yellow Leone Racing T-shirt and boxygold swim trunks, not his color at all. I don’t wave. In my blocky black sunglasses and spider-silk-fine bikini cover-up, I imagine he’d rather have the pleasure of thinking he found me on this lounge chair, waiting for him like Venus in an oyster shell.
Wearing my Stark-Benzin-gray bikini.
“Good afternoon,” Bernard says when he’s a few flip-flop thwaps away. “Don’t I know you?”
I feign surprise, lowering my magazine.Harper’s Bazaar, March issue, with Whoopi Goldberg on the cover. My little warning sign to him; as Whoopi said,I don’t want somebody in my house. “Hi?” I cock my head. “Wait… yeah. Bernard, right?”
“Guilty as charged.” He pushes his Ray-Bans up his head. Basic. Masculine. Insecure. “Are you helping with this party?”
I pout, my own sunglasses staying firmly in place. “What party?”
“Oh, sorry. I just…”Thought you were an employee everywhere I go.His eyes dip down to my stomach, which is covered by the magazine. They dart back up. “Are you all staying here?”
“No, don’t worry about that.” I smile, and he relaxes a bit—I’ve made us our first in-joke. “Want to sit? Seat’s free if you’ve got a second.”
“God, please. You’re saving me from this bullshit.” Bernard looks over his shoulder, shoots the hotel workers a little wave and afive minutes?gesture, and takes the lounge chair next to me. He misses the employee rolling her eyes as they poof out the door, just as relieved to get away from him.
I pull myself up, going for my pool bag and letting the magazine slide off my stomach. “Want a water? I’ve got…” I make a show of rummaging through the big Jacquemus straw tote, “Lemonade, mango, and plain.”
“Aren’t you prepared? Mango sounds good, thank you.”
I crack the drink before I hand it to him, just like a mother would. I go for plain, and tilt my water his way. “Cheers.”
