The Guest

by Emma Cline

He had shown Alex photos on his phone of himself as a young man, handsome with an avid face. He was in his fifties now, but that full hair was still there, and he was in good shape.

he sounds hot. i like weird old men

She changed into an expensive T-shirt Simon had bought for her, then sat around, waiting, like the end of every day was a first date. Had Simon ever had to wait for Alex, did Simon ever anticipate her arrival? No. But who cared? These were small concessions considering what they allowed.

Alex had imagined what kind of person Simon would like, and that was the person Alex told him she was. All Alex’s unsavory history excised until it started to seem, even to her, like none of it had ever happened.

Among other duties, Lori was in charge of Chivas, Simon’s dog. Lori was always trying to train Chivas to wear a tiny hiking backpack so he could carry a water bottle when she took him for walks. Whenever they returned, Lori spent an hour cross-legged on the floor, eyes squinted, checking Chivas’s fur for ticks with unbroken attention that bordered on the erotic.

erotic? WTF

He told Alex he exercised so much because when he’d gone to business school in Europe, he’d gotten fat from eating hamburgers—that’s all he knew how to order. Since then, he was obsessed with never being fat again, up at six a.m. to work out on a machine where he climbed the equivalent of eighty flights of stairs, then to the pool where he swam feverish laps until the sun rose.

Simon is good thinspo

Like a lot of the other girls, Alex had found out quickly that she was not beautiful enough to model. The lucky ones realized this sooner rather than later. But she was tall enough and skinny enough that people often assumed she was more beautiful than she was. A good trick.

She would have to fix her makeup, after—though she couldn’t appear to care. Alex felt Simon surge in her hand.

hawt

Her first husband drowned, Simon told Alex on the drive over. While scuba diving, or something like that, he couldn’t remember. One of those freak accidents the rich suffer—too many people kept them in too good of shape for them to die from natural causes. Life had ceased to be dangerous, the oxygen tanks and hormone tests and syringes full of B vitamins warding off the old killers.

People just wanted to hear their own voices, your response a comma punctuating their monologue.

A headache winked in and out but didn’t fully announce itself.

i always experience this. beautifully put.

The situation must have been familiar to Lori—perhaps this happened regularly, some young woman, some girl, needing to be spirited away while Simon kept himself conspicuously hidden, deputizing Lori to clean up his mess.

he definitely has a pattern. Dude seems creepy (in a way that is unfortunately very hot to me)

The louder they talked, the more Alex felt her headache pulse, piercing the painkiller fuzz. You could occasionally be overcome by dislike for strangers: if these boys got zapped into nothingness, would the world really miss them?

very relatable

He was not very handsome, forcing a shape to his features with aggressive facial hair.

ugh… all the men nowadays think they look better with a beard

The magenta vein that seamed along the length of his dick. How he liked an index finger in his asshole. His orgasms that had always sounded mournful, alarmingly so.

WHAT

Alex was barely paying attention to the passing photos, the guy swiping through multiple images of a roan-colored deer until he swiped too far and suddenly a dick, like a big blurry finger, filled half the frame. “Fuck,” he said, “sorry.”

LMAO

And really, it was nice, having a strange hand on her. She had never minded that part.

The boy had a little rat face, pinched. “I said, do you want a beer,” he said, “because we, like, have some.” He was more confident than he should have been with a face like that.

Dom didn’t do things like that—well, actually, he did, he had. His hands on her throat. That time he’d stolen her phone from her purse, made her crawl on the floor to get it back.

well, his name is certainly appropriate

So much effort and noise required to cultivate this landscape, a landscape meant to invoke peace and quiet. The appearance of calm demanded an endless campaign of violent intervention.

So much of getting away with things was the outward insistence of normalcy.

And men did not, it turned out, mind being approached by a young woman—not usually, anyway. They did not immediately assume that her motives might be murky, their vanity allowing for the possibility that she had been drawn over by the sheer force of their personhood.

good to know

a teenager with a lush beard of acne.

that's a unique way of putting it.

“I’m a red meat guy,” he said. “I try hard not to be. But I’m a Midwesterner,” he said, “hard to unlearn that.” “Your parents moved to Bel-Air when you were, like, two,” Jack said. Robert acted like he hadn’t heard this.

That’s what they all wanted, wasn’t it? To see, in the face of another, pure acceptance. Simple, really, but still rare enough that people didn’t get it from their families, didn’t get it from their partners, had to seek it out from someone like Alex.

“My dad would be happy if I was gone. They don’t care.” “I’m sure they do,” Alex said, “I’m sure they care,” though, as she said it, she didn’t believe it was true. Even for people like Jack, with parents like his. Or the kids at the party the night before. Hundreds of years ago, their parents might have abandoned their babies in the woods. Instead, the neglect was stretched out over many years, a slow-motion withering. The kids were still abandoned, still neglected in the woods, but the forest was lovely.