The Chief of Staff

The long sofa under the west windows had three people on it, a man and his wife and a woman they had met two hours before. The lamps on that side were down to the second notch, which I had set myself at four o’clock, so the light came up off the floor and left half of every face in shadow. The wife had the woman’s dress shoved up over her hips and two fingers in her pussy, knuckle deep, working her slow. She was talking the whole time, low, right into the woman’s ear, telling her what she was going to do to her next and taking her time over every word. The woman’s hand was shut in a fistful of the wife’s hair. Her mouth was open and she was making no effort to be quiet. Her heels kept coming up off the floor and going back down. You could hear how wet she had gotten from clear across the room.

I stood in that doorway longer than the round allows. It was the talking. Not the fingers. The talking. That low steady voice in a woman’s ear telling her exactly what was coming. I felt it drop straight through me. My nipples went hard under a silk blouse I picked out at six in the morning, and I was wet before I got to the stairs, standing there in flats with a clipboard and my pen still capped, and nobody in that room knew I was there.

The husband sat at the far end with his trousers open and his dick in his fist, working it slow, watching his wife do that to somebody else. He had not been invited up. The look on his face said he knew better than to ask twice. I knew exactly how he felt.

I counted three. I wrote three. I moved.

The hall off the east wing smelled like a struck match, somebody’s cigarette out on the terrace coming back in on the cold. Somebody’s husband was asleep in the armchair with his shirt open and a drink balanced on his chest, rising and falling, not spilling. His wife was across the hall, on the rug, on her knees with a man’s dick in her mouth and her eyes shut. She was taking all the time she wanted. His hand was in her hair but not pulling, just resting there, and the only sound out of either of them was him breathing through his nose.

That one I walked past twice. The hand not pulling. A man with his hand resting in a woman’s hair while she sucked him, taking what he was given and not one thing more. I keep a list in my head of what I would want and that is high up on it, and I have never said it out loud to a living person. My heartbeat came up into my throat and stayed there for the rest of the night.

There was a dark ring on the carpet by her knee where her glass had gone over an hour before. Nobody had rung for the glass. I took it to the kitchen myself.

By the fire, two women on the rug. One of them on her back with her heels up on the other one’s shoulders and the other one’s mouth on her pussy, her tits shining in the firelight, sweat running down her breastbone, loud enough that the room next door had gone quiet to listen. The fire was doing most of the lighting in there. Every time it moved, the light moved on the backs of her thighs. The one on top had a forearm braced across her hips to hold her flat on the rug and would not let her come, not yet, and a woman in no hurry is the most frightening person in any of these houses.

I stood behind the pair of them where neither one could see me and I let myself look. The shine on her thighs. The sweat at the base of her throat. The sound she made when the other one finally let her come. My pussy was aching and I had my thighs pressed together inside my own trousers like a girl.

And it is not that I do not get mine. I get mine. A bar in a city that is not this one, a woman whose last name I do not ask for, the whole night and a good one, and I am dressed and gone before anybody has to decide what to say in the morning. I am very good at that and I have no complaints about it.

This was something else. This was two women on a rug with eleven hours of a weekend still on them, loud, in no hurry, with the whole of the next day in front of them and nowhere to be.

I lost a man in Miami over this job. That is the whole of what the word Miami means to me.

On the hearth, four feet away, a man sat with his back to the two of them, dick hard in his trousers, hands flat on the stone, where she had told him to keep them. I had watched him keep them there for twenty minutes. He was sweating at the hairline. He had not turned around once. I looked at his hands on that stone, and he and I were sitting in the same chair.

I went up the service stairs and finished the round.

That was one round. Main floor, pool house, east wing, back up the service stairs, terrace. I walked it every twenty minutes, and I had been walking it since four o’clock.

The bass out of the upstairs speakers came up through the floor into the soles of my feet and sat low in me. The house was too warm by design. I set it that way, seventy-four, cold makes people shy. My blouse was sticking between my shoulder blades. Nine years I have walked these rooms and my face has never once changed.

The woman in the green dress had her back against the glass of the west doors and a man on his knees with his face in her pussy, and I stood six feet away with a clipboard and asked her if she wanted the blinds open or closed.

“Open.”

“Then I’ll move the car.”

“Elise.” She got my name out around a breath. “You are unbelievable.”

“Open or closed, Mrs. Ardoin.”

“Open. God. Open.”

So I moved the car.

That is the job.

Nobody looked at me. That is not me being dramatic. I am staff, the whole arrangement runs on staff being furniture, and I spent a long time making myself into good furniture.

My name is Elise Marot. I own nothing here. Not one brick. I run three houses that belong to Adrien Cole and Cherie Amore and Zaira Lauron, and the cars, and the calendars, and the people who stand at the doors, and I have done it for nine years. Everybody in that building was having the best evening of their adult life. I was the reason it worked, and I had not sat down since four o’clock.

His name was Theo. He had a lease with my name written next to his and a drawer cleared out for me in a bedroom I liked, and when Adrien asked me to take the houses I did not ask for one night to think. The man waited five months. Then he stopped waiting.

I wanted the job more. I still want it more. Some mornings that scares me.

The party was in the Hudson house. Three floors, cedar and glass, built into a hill so the back of it hangs out over nothing. Twenty-two guests. Phones in the bowl at the door, sealed in numbered envelopes, Keyla on the bowl, nobody past her, not ever. Julian Cross on the gate from four, where I put him, where I have put him for six years.

Discretion is maintained inside.

That sentence is printed on a card in every guest room in all three houses. I wrote that card myself.

Downstairs they had Sade on, low, the album everybody puts on when they want to pretend they are not nervous. Upstairs somebody had switched it to something with more bass. The whole house smelled like woodsmoke and perfume and the orange oil the housekeepers use on the banisters, and under that, in the warm rooms, the smell of people fucking.

Perry Lindqvist caught my arm at the top of the stairs. Fifty, silver, in that house four times a year, and I had been waiting for this one all season.

“Elise.”

“Mr. Lindqvist.”

“Perry.”

“Not in this house.”

“You do this every time.” He was smiling. He let my arm go before I asked. “One drink. Not here. Anywhere you like, any night you say.”

“No.”

“No? One word?”

“One word.”

“You know what I think?” He leaned on the rail. “I think you’re the only person in this house who isn’t getting anything.”

“You and me both,” I said. “The bathroom at the end of the east hall is the quiet one. Your wife went that way.”

He laughed and let me go, and I went down the service stairs with my face hot and my hands cold.

Cherie caught me in the kitchen on the fourth round. Glass of water in each hand, barefoot, hair tied up, three months along and already walking like a woman who had decided the floor belonged to nobody else.

“Sit down.”

“I’m working.”

“Elise.”

“I’ll sit when they’re in bed.”

“Nobody in this house is going to bed.” She put one of the waters in my hand and did not let go of it until I drank. “You’ve walked this floor eleven times.”

“Twelve.”

“Mm.” She watched me over her glass. “Lindqvist put his hand on you.”

“He put it on my arm.”

“Do you want him gone off the list?”

“No.”

“Say the word and he’s gone off the list.”

“He asked. I said no. He took the no,” I said. “If I pull a guest every time a man asks, I’ve got no guests, and I’ve got a reputation for being somebody who can’t be in a room.”

“And if you say yes one time?”

“Then I can’t tell anybody no on Tuesday. And no is most of what I say.”

Cherie put her glass down. She has a way of taking her time that makes you want to fill the quiet, and I have known her nine years and it still works on me.

“When’s the last time somebody touched you.”

“Thursday.”

That stopped her with the glass halfway up, and I will take that small thing with me to my grave.

“Thursday.”

“A bar at the Carlyle. She’s in from Geneva twice a year with a family I will not name, she keeps the same hours I keep, and she has never once asked me a question about this house.” I put my water down. “Do you want the rest of it or are we finished.”

“I want the rest of it.”

“No you don’t.”

“Elise.” She was not laughing. “That is not what I asked you and you know it is not.”

And she was right, and she is always right, and I hate it.

“Miami,” I said.

“Miami.” She let that sit. “That’s a long way back.”

“I keep everybody’s dates in this household in a calendar.” I finished the water. “I have never once kept my own calendar.”

“That’s not an answer. That’s a job description.”

“It’s the one I’ve got.”

“Zaira’s asleep,” she said, and let me off. “Adrien’s on with Lisbon. And the gate camera’s been giving a bad return on the east post since Thursday.”

“I know. The service contract puts him here Monday.”

“Move him up.”

“It’s Saturday.”

“Elise.” She did not raise her voice one inch. “We do not wait until Monday. Call the man at his house. Tell him what the number is and let him decide whether he wants his weekend.”

Nobody in these houses has ever given me an order shaped like an order.

They mention things. Cherie says the gate camera has been giving a bad return since Thursday, in the same breath and the same voice she used to tell me Zaira was asleep, and what she has said is get a man up that hill before dark. It is conversation on her side of it and it is an instruction on mine, and if I ever hear the conversation and miss the instruction then I am no good at the job. Nine years of listening to the middles of sentences.

And wealthy people do not wait until Monday.

That is not a saying. That is the whole difference between that side of the counter and this one. I grew up waiting. You wait for the part, you wait for the appointment, you wait for the man to call you back, and you build a week around the waiting and call it being reasonable. Nobody in these three houses has waited for one thing since the day they could stop. They say it out loud in the middle of something else and it is done inside the hour, and not one of them ever watches it happen.

They speak things into existence.

That is what the money actually buys. Not the cars, not the house hanging out over the hill. A woman says a sentence in a kitchen with a glass of water in her hand and the world rearranges itself around that sentence before she finishes her drink, and she has lived that way so long that she cannot hear herself any more.

A sentence does not become a thing by itself. Somebody has to be standing there.

That is the job, and it is not the part people imagine. I do not decide anything. I am handed a finished wish and I run the whole distance between the wish and the thing: the calling, the paying, the waking somebody at six, the two other people who have to be moved so the first one can be where I need him, the van, the gate code, the receipt, and the sentence back to her that says it is handled. Nobody upstairs has ever seen one inch of that, and the trick of it is that they never should.

“I’ll call him at eight.”

“Call him at seven.”

I put the glass down and looked at Cherie. She reads a room and tells you what she sees and then lets you decide. In nine years she had never once told me how to run a camera.

“Why.”

“I don’t like how that envelope got here.”

Neither did I.

Two weeks ago a woman nobody knew walked up the drive of the main house in the middle of the afternoon and handed Zaira a photograph of the three of them. Not a snatched shot. A composed one. Adrien standing behind, Cherie beside, Zaira in the middle of the line, taken from outside the glass at an angle that put all three faces in frame at once.

Somebody set up in the trees and waited.

They did not send it to Adrien. They sent it to Zaira.

And it was taken off a property I secure.

Nobody in that household said it out loud in those two weeks. I said it to myself every night in the dark. That is my failure. Not Adrien’s, not Cherie’s. Mine. One person in that house has one job, and the job is that nobody is ever standing outside the glass.

The last guest went up at twenty past six. Keyla broke down the bowl and counted the envelopes back out, twenty-two in, twenty-two out, every seal intact, and signed the sheet. I signed under Keyla. We have done that every time for nine years.

Twenty minutes later she was face down on the long table in the laundry with a highlighter still in her hand and a community college textbook open under her cheek. I put my coat over her shoulders and left her sleeping.

The bunkhouse is the old caretaker’s cottage below the garage, two rooms and a stove and a table that seats six. Front of house smells like woodsmoke and perfume and orange oil. That cottage smells like coffee and wet coats and a pan.

I stopped outside the window.

Noor had eggs going for five people and the radio on, and Dessie was at the end of the table with her shoes off and her feet in Rueben’s lap, and Rueben had both thumbs working into the arch of her foot and was not even looking at what he was doing. Hollis came in behind Noor with the cold still on him and put his mouth on the back of her neck, and she let her head go over to the side to give him the room, and neither of them said one word about it, and she kept turning the eggs.

Thirty-one years Dessie has been married to a man who drives nights. Rueben is not that man.

I had scheduled every one of those five people’s shifts for nine years. I knew what they earned, what they were owed, which of them had a sister in Lowell and which of them could not work a Sunday. I did not know one thing that was happening in that room.

They were not being discreet. There was no card on that wall. Nobody had signed anything, nobody had handed anything to anybody at a door, and at a quarter to seven in the morning in a cold cottage under a garage those five people had more between them than twenty-two people upstairs had paid for the weekend.

I stood out in the dark with my arms crossed and watched it through a window like a woman watching a television in somebody else’s house, and I wanted it so badly I had to put my hand on the cold brick.

Then I went outside.

The sky over the lake had gone that colour it goes, not light and not dark, the trees standing black in front of the water. Cold enough that my breath showed. The bones in my feet were telling me what I had asked of them, and I did what I had done every morning since the envelope came, which is walk the line the photographer would have had to walk.

The house hangs out over the hill. To get a flat shot through that glass with all three faces in it you cannot stand on the lawn. The lawn is below the sight line. You have to be up on the slope behind the cedars, east side, which is nineteen acres of other people’s land and a township right-of-way nobody has maintained since the eighties.

I had walked it in the dark eleven times. At ten past seven, in daylight, I found the place.

A flat spot in the leaf litter the size of a dinner plate, where somebody set a tripod foot and set it again, twice, two inches apart. The cedars thinned in front of it into a gap you would not notice from the house. And when I crouched to the height a seated camera would sit at, I was looking straight down the throat of the east window, at the chair Adrien sits in every night of his life.

I was angry in a way I do not let myself be. My hands shook. My eyes stung and I was glad the hill was empty.

Somebody sat in those trees and watched my people.

“You found it faster than I thought you would.”

I came up off that ground so fast I nearly put myself down the slope.

She was standing thirty feet above me with her hands out of her pockets where I could see them, which told me more about her than anything she said. Dark coat, no logo. Boots that had done real walking. Hair cut short against her head, grey coming in at the temple, and a face giving me nothing.

I knew that face. I had seen it once on a security feed, walking up a drive with an envelope.

“You’re on private land.”

“I’m on the right-of-way. You’re on private land.” She tipped her head an inch toward my feet. “Technically.”

“Four seconds, then I call the gate.”

“Call the gate. It’s Saturday. Your man gets here in half an hour and I’ll still be standing right where I am, and we’ll both have wasted a morning.” She did not move. “Or you ask me the question you’ve been walking these trees two weeks trying to answer.”

The wind came up off the lake and went through my coat. I put my hands in my pockets.

“Who took the photograph.”

“Not me.”

“You carried it up the drive.”

“Yes.”

“Then who.”

“That’s the second question.” She came two steps down the slope, slow, the way you move when you think somebody might run. “The first one is why it went to a twenty-nine-year-old woman on a driveway instead of to the man who owns the house. You already know the answer. You’ve known two weeks and you haven’t told one living soul, and that’s the only reason I’m still standing here.”

My mouth was dry. Was she telling me she had been watching me watch the trees?

“Out loud,” she said.

“The photograph wasn’t a threat to him.”

“No.”

“It was a test of us.”

“Of you.” She stopped four feet away. Up close she was older than the feed made her look, and tired in the particular way I knew from my own mirror. “He has money and lawyers and a man on a gate. What he hasn’t got is any way of knowing whether the woman who runs his doors is bought.”

“I’m not bought.”

“I know.” She said it simply, like a thing she had checked. “That’s my problem.”

And she put her hand out, slowly, and I have no good explanation for what I did next, which is that I took hold of it and did not let go.

Her fingers were as cold as mine. I wanted her to keep hold of them, and I was ashamed of wanting it, and I did not let go first.

“Sabine,” she said.

“I know your name.”

“Then you’re ahead of most people.” Something crossed her face and was gone. “You haven’t sat down in two weeks either, have you.”

“I don’t sit down.”

“No,” she said. “Neither do I.”