The Children(95)

This is Guin Sharpe. Can I call you? I won’t take more than ten minutes of your time.



She was walking up Columbia when the reply came.

Let’s talk in person. You free tonight?





* * *




Eight p.m., a fifth-floor walk-up in Alphabet City. Guin clanged wearily up the stairs, wine bottle in her fist. Someone must’ve heard her coming; she was half a flight away when a voice called down. “Door’s unlocked!”

The stairwell was painted a peeling urine yellow. The bare bulbs in the hall set the perfect mood for murder. When she reached 4F she paused to catch her breath. Then she opened the door and stepped into another realm.

For a minute she stood there, arms hanging loose. The air smelled of peony and sandalwood. A Broadcast song drifted through it like dandelion fluff. The light had the filmy quality of an erotic 1980s music video, and the whole place was filled with young women.

Women drinking, talking, lazing, laughing in grand performative shouts, leaning forward to kiss or hug or touch each other’s faces, or to pet the cock-eyed spaniel who moved from lap to lap in an affectionate frenzy. On a table to Guin’s right, between two lit sconces, sat a white-frosted cake dressed in flowers and a blue bowl piled with kumquats.

Guin took one and rolled it between her palms, releasing its glossy oil. She felt like an alien from a less curated planet.

“Look who it is,” someone said. One of the trio of Graces sitting on the sofa with their legs entwined. “Arlene! She’s here!”

“Guinevere Sharpe.”

Her name sliced neatly through the aural haze. Guin turned toward the possessor of that loud, sweet voice, redolent of orange groves and traffic. Arlene Fitzpatrick. Former gallery girl and Ennis’s last known ex.

Before she could speak Arlene stepped forward and folded her into a hug. She had an ethereal vibe, but her body was thick, substantial. Guin’s nose pressed close to a neck scented of sweat and bakery.

Arlene was exactly the girl you’d pick out from a crowd and say, Muse. A skim-milk redhead built along the generous lines of a ship’s figurehead, veins strung like blue jewelry at her temples and wrists. She had small teeth and fey features, and she walked with a cane because of a degenerative bone condition. The one she was currently propped on could have been carved out of driftwood, cast up at her feet by a besotted mermaid.

Despite her look—evocative of rocky places, the waters and the wild—Arlene was the Encino-bred daughter of two entertainment lawyers. Four years ago, when she fell madly in love with Ennis, she was a twenty-two-year-old gallery receptionist and artist’s model living in LA. When he broke things off, she fixated on reaching him through his estranged sister.

Following that post-breakup era of tearful voicemails and light stalking, Arlene thrived. Since Guin last heard from her, she’d acted in two small-budget films, launched a magazine that ran for six issues, become the face of a queer-owned indie makeup line, and shown a derivative though not unsuccessful photo exhibit featuring landscape-style close-ups of her own labia, anus, and areolae.

According to Forbes—Guin googled her before coming here—she was most recently the creative mind behind the Lollipop Dream Shop, a social media thirst trap billed as “an immersive experience designed to help you reclaim your child’s-eye view of our magical world.”

Guin had clicked over to the website. Tickets to reclaiming your child’s-eye view of our magical world started at eighty-five bucks.

Now she turned so her back was facing the garden of girls and said, “You didn’t tell me you were having a party.”

“I did tell you to bring wine.” Arlene pursed a kiss at someone over Guin’s shoulder. “And it’s not a party, these are my roommates.”

“All of them? There’s a cake.” Guin shook her head. “Never mind. Can we talk somewhere private?”

“Love to. Drink?”

“Sure,” Guin said grudgingly, following Arlene into a kitchen cluttered with a Bacchanalian volume of bottles and cut fruit. She figured on a glass of whatever was open, but Arlene propped her cane against the stove, slid onto a green barstool, and reached for a Chartreuse.

She didn’t talk while she worked. It was nice. Guin let her eyes fall shut and listened to the soothing barroom sound of ice in a shaker. The voices in the other room were lost beneath the music.

“Wake up, sugar.”

Arlene stood before her, offering a coupe glass smoked over with condensation. The drink inside it glowed like chlorophyll and tasted—Guin took a tentative sip—exactly like it looked. Green. “Thank you.”

Arlene caught her tongue briefly between her teeth, catlike. “God, you look just like him. I’ve moved on, but all of this is messing with me. Ennis in the news. You in my apartment, with your pretty Ennis face.”

She didn’t look remotely messed with. She looked hungry and extremely alert, eyes like fresh-minted coins.

“I’m glad you moved on,” Guin said. “I knew you’d be better off without him.”

“Took me a while to believe it, as you might recall. I should probably thank you.” She sipped her cocktail, and didn’t.

“I don’t care about that. Arlene.” Guin ran a finger down the coupe’s beading side, then across the back of her neck. “Do you know where I can find him?”