Stacking in Rivertown Read Online Free PDF

hangdog look for my benefit.
    I hate lying.
    I guess you could say the last five years of my life were a great big fat lie. Except I didn’t always remember it that way.
    Violet lied. She’d get so mixed up she couldn’t remember the truth. Her lying put Ben in a real bad frame of mind. There was something between those two. I thought of it like watching one person trying to outcheat the other at poker. It’s not even the same game at some point.
    So here I am into the first five days of my “year.” Men are staring at me right and left as I’m strolling north along Fifth Avenue. I get a whiff of the old days as I turn west on Fifty-Ninth, walking beside the park.
    Kat would take me shopping for clothes here, in the Village, and in SoHo. She taught me New York, the delis, the shops, how to snag a cab. She hauled me into MoMA, the Metropolitan, and taught me how to use the library.
    I near the hotel, passing a line of waiting limos and cabs, hitting a wall of white panic. As I prepare for my entrance, I stop still, seeing a cab at the curb, empty and waiting. But then I remember what Ben said. I remember that whip. I shut my eyes and count one to five just like Kat taught me in the basement. I push myself forward.
    I swear I can smell the mud in the water. I can hear the blackfly drone and the willow leaves shake. I feel the sway of that river. Stacking in Rivertown comes to my mind. It makes me smile. That shoots me right in the hotel doors like I’m floating downstream.
    I feel plush. I flush out every square inch of my skin. As soon as I’m in the door, a bellboy jumps over and lifts the bag from my shoulder. Men turn to watch me. I walk like a writer, like I’m married to Jeremy, but powerful in need of a screw. Naive, Ben said. Innocent.
    At the check-in desk, I flash the young man a smile and say I’m Elizabeth Boone. As he hands my room key to the bellboy, he informs me that my husband checked in an hour ago.
    I cross the lobby like I own every man in the place, and catch sight of Ben leaning against a column and reading the
Times
. I search the strangers milling around him.
    Which one? No. The man in the car said they. God. Multiple screws. Ben’s going to teach me a lesson. He likes to make sure you know he’s the boss. I figure he’s going to go out of his way on that point this weekend.
    Jump back on that horse, I keep telling myself as the elevator doors close behind me. At the top floor, the bellboy leads me to a set of double doors at the end of the hall. He opens them inward, revealing a large anteroom. I walk through into a grand and gracious sitting room with a bank of windows dead ahead. The windows draw me over, and I look across Manhattan at night, the dark smudge of Central Park smack in the middle, just below.
    For that moment, I forget about everything. I think of the river at night, fireflies blinking a thousand deep in the tupelo and the sweetbush on the far shore. I can smell sweet bay nearby and woodsmoke from over at Grady’s. The rumble of the city beneath reminds me of the crush of water that scrapes between the banks and over the bed of the river.
    The bellboy makes a sound. Embarrassed, I turn, hand him his tip, and watch him flirt with his eyes once before he disappears behind the doors.
    I take in the room. A colossal arrangement of cut flowers stands in a vase on a table in the center. Walking over to them, I check the card.
    More instructions.
    The card says to eat dinner alone in the hotel restaurant, then have the valet bring around my car. A black Jaguar. I imagine myself wheeling down Central Park South in a cool, sleek Jag.
    Maybe this is going to be fun after all.
    That’s when I get out my stuff. After you’ve been in the business for awhile, you begin to get nervous. You watch the others disappear, fade away. You know it’s just a matter of time before the dangers get you. And like I said, Ben started getting meaner.
    Violet started our ritual. She stole a candle