22
“I WOULD STEAL a few minutes in each room, browsing, looking around to see what I could see, but only a few minutes in each room, because—”
“—it was so heady, so intoxicating, dizzying—”
“No—because I was so afraid of being caught. But you’re right—it was intoxicating. A heady mix of emotions. Partly fear. Partly the thrill of getting away with something.”
“Partly sexual—”
“Will you cut it out? Partly guilt. I had such a creepy, tingling feeling of guilt about snooping in people’s belongings, and there was something oddly exciting about that. I can’t deny it. It embarrasses me to say it now, but it was exciting to be doing something that I knew was wrong. You want to know how I found out that that was part of the pleasure?”
“How?”
“I realized that it wasn’t as much fun when I knew for certain that I wasn’t going to be discovered. I never really knew for certain, of course, but sometimes I felt relatively secure in some of the rooms. I would see someone headed for a walk on the beach or on the way into the village for lunch—since our dining room was closed—and I’d feel pretty safe. But that made it not quite as good. So I began doing things to make it riskier. Spending a little longer in a room and, especially—”
She hesitated.
“What?” I asked.
“Trying on clothes. That was—ah—the best. I began sort of holding them up, to see how I’d look. Dresses. Then I began—putting things on. Shoes were the first. The easiest. You know, they’re just—right there. All you have to do is step into them. Then I started trying the dresses on. I’d slip into the bathroom, lock the door, and slip into the dress. It wasn’t hard. Not even too risky. But then—”
“You started leaving the door unlocked.”
“Of course. And then I started coming out of the bathroom—just for a minute. I liked being in the room, in the dress, in the shoes.”
“You were sure to be caught.”
“But you know what—I never was. I think I expected to be caught. And I think I expected that it would be Guy who happened in on me, you know? He’d be feeling randy in the middle of the day, he’d find himself with some time on his hands, and he’d start checking the rooms until he found me, hoping he’d get to tumble me on a bed I’d just made, and he’d find me trying on somebody’s cocktail dress or pointed bra.”
“You wore their underwear?”
“Oh, yes.” She stubbed her cigarette out. “Sometimes. I wore their underwear. Yes. And sometimes—I would come into a room—a double bed—and I could smell the sex in the room—and I would—”
“You wouldn’t get into the bed.”
“Yes. I would get into the bed. Get undressed and get into the bed.”
“And you were upset with me for lying on your bed.”
“That’s why I was upset about your lying on my bed.” She turned and looked at me, narrowed her eyes. “When you were lying on my bed, did you—?”
“Did I what?”
She moved her hand between her legs.
“No!” I said. “When you got into those beds at the resort, did you—?”
“Oh, yes. Yes, indeed.”
It was my turn to light a cigarette.
“There was one room that I never did any snooping in, though,” she said.
I raised an eyebrow.
“Guy’s,” she said. “His movements were completely unpredictable. He roamed all over the resort. You never knew where you’d run into him. He was constantly surprising me, sneaking up behind me and giving me a squeeze, whispering in my ear, that sort of thing. And sometimes he would see me pushing my cart along and he would come over to me and follow me into one of the rooms—and take me.”
I said nothing.
She grew dramatic, opened her eyes wide, grinned fiendishly, and said, “One day my opportunity came, as I had presumed it eventually would. Guy was going away for a couple of days. Off to see his ailing mother in Pennsylvania, to hang her shutters for her or something like that. Heh-heh-heh. While the cat’s away. We, the staff, had a fine little time for ourselves while he was away, and we drank some of the liquor, and we had an impromptu party the first night, and we generally increased the level of neglect with regard to the guests, and I took the opportunity that had been given to me. I snooped his room very thoroughly.” She paused, she shrugged, she said, “I discovered that he was a thief, a petty thief, and a clumsy one. The things he stole—oh, junk. Mostly. One earring. A few dollars. A pin that even I knew was just nothing. Not that all of it was junk, but you could tell—I could tell—that it was just whatever he’d been able to put his hands on. He wasn’t even any good at hiding the stuff. I had devoted years of my girlhood to learning how to hide things from my parents. My girlfriends and I exchanged tips on hiding places the way our mothers exchanged recipes. I could have taught him a thing or two.”
[to be continued]
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