Page 20 of Nine Lives

She was trying to relax, but her mind was racing. Had been racing since she’d woken up two hours earlier. This was a periodic problem, a sudden and overwhelming panic that the life she was leading was utterly without meaning or purpose. She’d felt that way before, on and off, all through her twenties and her thirties, but now time was a factor. She was going to be forty-one years old in December, and that thought filled her with a cold dread, a tightening in her stomach. She’d moved to New York nineteen years ago after graduating with a fine arts degree from Mather College in Connecticut, and had immediately gotten a string of jobs that seemed promising but led nowhere. She’d been a nanny for a wealthy couple who lived on the Upper East Side, a yoga instructor, and a portrait photographer specializing in actors’ headshots. She’d also worked unpaid as an intern at a photography gallery in the Village, and she’d been taking her own photographs for as long as she could remember, shots of her friends mostly, and street shots of New York. Looking at some of those photographs now filled her with an almost sorrowful feeling of failure. They were like lesser copies of better photographs by better photographers. Some were okay, but none of them stood out. They were reminders that she wasn’t special. And they were also reminders of her freewheeling twenties, and how they were never coming back. Most of the friends she’d photographed had left the city either to start families or to follow promising careers. And she was still here.

A year earlier, with the free time afforded her by her relationship with Jonathan Grant, Alison had taken up collage, utilizing some of her own pictures, combining them with printouts of text messages and emails, and rearranging them on canvases, painting over them with oil sticks.

Jonathan said he liked them, and even offered to try to get her a gallery show, but lately when she looked at the dozen pieces she’d produced, it was like looking at a foreign script. They were unreadable to her. She had no idea if they were any good, or if they were terrible. She’d put them at the back of her walk-in closet.

On good days she told herself that she was living a happy, comfortable life, that she was one of the lucky ones. She had a spacious one-bedroom in Manhattan with no financial worries. She had time to create art, read, work out, see friends. Her only responsibility was to Jonathan, who paid her bills in exchange for weekly sex (sometimes not even that) and an occasional dinner out at a top-end restaurant.

She’d been Jonathan’s paid mistress for one year now. (Sometimes she told herself that she was his girlfriend, but she knew that wasn’t really what she was.) He’d approached her when she’d been working as a hostess at a subterranean steak house in midtown Manhattan. It had been a particularly bad time for her, both financially and emotionally. She’d split with her boyfriend of five years, a mutual separation, but then he’d immediately taken up with a younger woman at his law firm, and within one year they’d married, bought a house in New Jersey, and were starting a family. She’d also just lost the best job she’d had in the city, as a photo editor for a start-up literary magazine that was being backed by a dot-com entrepreneur named Bruce Lamb. Apparently, the magazine had lost so much money in its first two years that it was no longer useful even as a tax write-off. Her friend Lucy had gotten her the job as a hostess at the Lodge. She wore tiny skirts and halter tops, but it was an easy job, and the tip sharing included the hostesses, which meant she was making far more per week than she had in the entire time she’d been in New York.

Jonathan Grant was a semi-regular at the Lodge, coming in by himself around nine and sitting at the bar. He wore nice suits, and reminded Alison of an actor her mother used to like called James Mason, with his deep voice and rigid posture. He always ordered the bar steak, a petit filet mignon with crabmeat and béarnaise sauce. On slow nights she’d chat with him, often about the wine he was drinking. One evening he stayed at the bar until late, then asked Alison if she wanted to go to a place he knew two blocks over, a Spanish tapas restaurant that had the best glasses of wine in the city. She must have hesitated when he’d asked her because he’d immediately put his hands up, and said, “Please say no, and don’t feel bad about it. I just love talking wine with you and it would be nice to do it when you were actually tasting the wine yourself.”

“I’ll let you know how I feel at closing,” she said, and went back to her station. She wanted to go with him. He might be as old as her father, but he also seemed harmless, and he was attractive. Still, as soon as he’d asked her the question a strange chill had rippled over her skin, almost like a premonition. She’d had those her whole life, little flickers of knowing. Like the time she’d been talking with her grandmother on the phone, and she’d gotten so cold that she had to run for a sweater after they’d hung up. The next time she laid eyes on her grandmother was when she was in an open casket, looking as though someone had replaced her body with a terrible nonbreathing approximation. Her cold spells weren’t always about death, though. When she’d first met Mrs. Talbot, their new neighbor in Greenwich when Alison was thirteen years old, she’d actually begun to shiver. Within a year, her father had left the family in order to move with Marianne Talbot to a brownstone in Philadelphia. He’d always been a distant, unhappy father, but after abandoning his family, he’d become almost a stranger. Alison hadn’t spoken with him in a decade.

The way she thought about her premonitions was that they were mostly about change, but always change for the worse. And that’s what death was, of course: just a change for the worse.

But she went out with Jonathan Grant, despite the coldness she’d felt when he asked her. And they had a good time. He talked about his children and his work, asked her questions about her own life. He didn’t try to kiss her, even though she’d already decided that she’d probably let him. But on their third date, he offered her a proposition, starting off by saying, “I believe in straight talk. I think that’s how I’ve made all of my money. So I’d like to put an offer before you.”

She knew what the general idea of the proposition was going to be long before he got into the details, but it was the details that ultimately sold her. He owned an apartment near Gramercy Park and she could live there rent-free. In return he would like to see her once a week for a “physical engagement”—his unfortunate words—and he would also make sure that she received plenty of spending money and gifts.

“We haven’t even slept together,” Alison said. “How do you know you’d like it?”

“Because I like you. I’m not a fetishist, and don’t care what your breasts look like or what acts you’d be willing to do. I don’t care about any of that. I just want to be intimate with you, but I would entirely understand if you want to do that with me first before making a decision.”

So, they did, that night, in a room at the Greenwich Hotel. True to his word, there was nothing strange or kinky about Jonathan’s sexual behavior. He took a pill first, telling her it gave him his best chance of a successful erection, and then he took her to bed, gentle at first, a little boring, but before she knew it, he had taken control, changing their positions until he’d found the one that felt the best to both of them, and she had managed to easily have an orgasm. She lay on the comfortable bed, her body tired and relaxed, while he dialed down to room service for a cold bottle of white.

“So I’ll be your whore?” she said.

“I believe the preferred nomenclature is ‘mistress,’ but you can call yourself anything you want. I’ll understand if you don’t want to do this.”

“What if I meet someone else? What if I fall in love?”

“I’d be happy for you.”

This was fourteen months ago. Despite the premonition that night at the Lodge, she felt as though the change that Jonathan had brought her had been mostly good. Her life was full of pleasure. She no longer worried about money. But she did worry about the purpose of her life, and she worried that she’d entered a kind of trap in this relationship with an older, married man. It wouldn’t last forever, and what would she do after he was gone? How would she go back to a life without the steady income he provided?

The day loomed before her. She texted Doug to see if he was free for lunch, then remembered right after she texted that he had gone to upstate New York for the weekend with his boyfriend.

She paced her apartment, wondering why she was so shaky this morning, her limbs practically tingling. She’d felt strange for a couple of days now, and thinking back, she realized that it had started when she’d received that list in the mail with the names on it. It had been a while since one of her feelings had come over her, and that letter had done it. Which meant change was coming, and the bad kind.

She nearly fished through her kitchen garbage in order to look at the list again, but what would that accomplish? Instead, she called her favorite spa to see if she could get a pedicure appointment later in the morning.

2

Saturday, September 17, 8:21 a.m.

He’d left his bedroom window open, and it was cold in the room when he woke up. Despite that, Arthur was under his heavy duvet and was perfectly warm. He lay for a moment, drifting up into consciousness, enjoying the feel of the cold air and his own body heat under the covers, and the way the curtain was flapping in the breeze. Light flickered across half of the high ceiling and he was transfixed by it. Then, as happened every morning, thoughts flooded in: Richard’s death, a strange letter, the FBI agents. He was fully awake.

In the shower, he thought back on those few minutes of quiet bliss he’d had in bed that morning. It was happening more frequently these days, this lapse of time between waking up and then remembering that he’d lost Richard, and that he’d never be able to see him or talk to him again. He was conflicted. He loved these moments of time when he was able to just enjoy the fact that he was still alive, but he was also terrified that Richard was slipping away from him, becoming a half-remembered ghost of his past.

He forced himself to stop thinking about it and planned out his day instead. Saturdays were the hardest day of the week. He didn’t have work, and he didn’t have church, and the day stretched out before him like an endless, empty corridor. There was raking to do, and that would take up some of the day, and he’d been meaning to go see an exhibit at the Mead Art Museum, something called “A Collection of Medieval Devotional Objects,” right up his alley. Between those two things, and eating, of course, plus maybe a movie after dinner, he’d manage to get through this Saturday.

3

Saturday, September 17, 11:13 a.m.

“Why nine?” Jessica said to Aaron as he sidled up to her cubicle.

“Huh?”

---