The Hotel Nantucket — Chapter no 14

14. A Desk Thing

It’s the second Saturday of July and the hotel has three checkouts and four check-ins. (Alessandra can’t believe the hotel isn’t busier. If she’d known it was going to be this dead, she would have worked at the White Elephant.) One of the check-ins is, thankfully, a man traveling solo named Dr.

Romano; he has the chiseled good looks of a doctor on a soap opera. Dr. Romano is staying in a room, not a suite, and he’s wearing a black titanium wedding band, but Alessandra chooses to overlook these two unfortunate circumstances and slips him her number. He tilts his head at her upside-down name tag and says, “Thank you very much, Alessandra.”

Outstanding, she thinks. He’ll text her the second he gets to the room, she’s sure of it.

Edie, meanwhile, is trying to get the woman in room 110 a blowout at R. J. Miller. Forget it, they’re booked solid, Alessandra thinks; she hasn’t been able to squeeze anyone in there all summer. But then she overhears Lindsay at the salon granting a favor because it’s “Sweet Edie Robbins” calling. When Edie hangs up, Zeke wanders over to the desk and says, “How do you make room keys, anyway?

Is it like magic or something?”

Edie takes a breath, no doubt to explain that it’s magnetic not magic, but Alessandra pipes up first. “It’s a desk thing. You wouldn’t understand.”

“Yeah, it’s a desk thing,” Edie says. She beams at Alessandra so earnestly that Alessandra cringes. Edie is desperate to bond, but no, sorry, Alessandra can’t let that happen.

A couple enter the hotel, loaded down with luggage and baby paraphernalia—a stroller, a car seat, a bulging diaper bag.

“Gotta go,” Zeke says. “It’s a bell thing.”

Is it Alessandra’s imagination or has Zeke been lingering around the desk an awful lot? Before she can stop herself, she turns to Edie.

“I think he likes you.”

Edie’s eyes widen. “What?”

“He’s always hanging at the desk, asking questions,” Alessandra says. “Have you noticed?”

“Yeah, he asked you why you wear your name tag upside down and he asked you how to say checkout in Italian and he asked you the strangest place you’ve ever had sex,” Edie says. “He likes you.”

“I think he does that to make you jealous,” Alessandra says, and she believes this. She’s too much woman for Zeke, and he knows it.

“I’m old enough to be his grandmother.”

Edie laughs and grabs her bag. “I’m taking lunch.”

She’s leaving Alessandra with the onerous task of checking in the couple with the baby. They’ll need a crib; they’ll ask about laundry facilities and a babysitter, preferably someone with six references and four grown children of her own, so that they can have a nice quiet dinner at Galley Beach or the Chanticleer. Alessandra’s phone, which she keeps stashed at the back of the shelf under her

computer, buzzes with a text. That would be Dr. Romano.

Alessandra is so pleased that she’s able to give the approaching couple a nearly genuine smile. “Checking in?”

The woman, who is wearing a clingy green knit dress that shows off her breastfeeding boobs as well as her impossibly flat stomach, gasps. “Ali Powell?” she says.

Alessandra freezes like an animal in the wilderness confronted with a predator—because anyone who uses Alessandra’s childhood nickname is an existential threat. She focuses on the woman’s face.

Oh God, she thinks. It’s Duffy Beecham from high school, the friend whose father she seduced, Stanford professor Dr. Andrew Beecham.

To Alessandra’s knowledge, Duffy never found out about the affair. The reason why Dr. Beecham—Drew—was so eager to buy Alessandra a one-way plane ticket to Rome was that at some point, he realized Alessandra had the power to destroy his life. By the time Alessandra landed in Rome, Duffy was a sophomore at Pepperdine, lounging on the beaches of Malibu, dating aspiring movie execs.

Their friendship had been winnowed down to the occasional text (when one or the other of them was drunk and heard the Dave Matthews Band).

Every so often, Alessandra stalked Duffy on Facebook and Instagram (Alessandra had nominal profiles on both but never posted). Duffy had married a Silicon Valley executive. (Alessandra’s invitation to the wedding was delivered to her mother’s home, but Alessandra, who was then living in Ibiza, told her mother to decline; she realizes only now that she never sent a present, which was maybe forgivable, since she was overseas.) Alessandra doesn’t

know the husband’s name (though she’ll find out in a few short moments!). Duffy went to grad school to pursue a master’s in social work. She had always been a do-gooder; her senior service project was distributing blankets to the homeless in Oakland. There was a way, too, in which Duffy’s do-gooding extended to her friendship with Alessandra—Duffy saw Alessandra as a project, a girl with no father and a shabby excuse for a mother.

On her social media platforms, Duffy posted the predictable photos of apple picking with her husband (they wore matching sweaters; it was almost laughable), waiting in line at Swan Oyster Depot, a picturesque fog lying beneath the Golden Gate, a pork-belly banh mi in the stands at a 49ers game captioned Only in San Francisco! And then, later, she posted pics of their new apartment in Nob Hill, where she allowed her 537 followers to weigh in on decorating decisions. Wallpaper or paint for the powder room?

Salvaged wood floors in the kitchen or chicer epoxy?

Alessandra hasn’t heard about the baby, so it must have been well over a year since Duffy last surfaced in Alessandra’s consciousness. If she had been keeping track more closely, she might have been prepared for Duffy’s trip to Nantucket.

“Duffy!” Alessandra says, trying to tamp down all of these confusing thoughts. “I can’t believe it! You’re staying here?”

“Yes!” Duffy says. “For three nights. Are you…working here?”

“I am!” Alessandra says, brightly stating the absolutely obvious.

She won’t let this be awkward, she thinks, though it is—it is!

Alessandra was the far superior student in high school, the original thinker with the uncanny ear for languages. She should be the bigger

success, but as this situation painfully illustrates, she’s just not. “I’m the front-desk manager.”

Duffy pushes the stroller toward the desk and the husband jogs over after he finishes loading all the crap onto the luggage trolley that Zeke is holding steady.

“I thought you were in…I don’t know…St. Tropez or something, living on some rich guy’s yacht.”

That was the plan, Alessandra thinks. “I lived in Europe forever,”

Alessandra says. “Italy most recently, but also Spain and Monaco.”

“Honey?” Duffy says to the husband. “This is Ali Powell, my BFF from high school.”

Zeke is lingering over by the door with the trolley, listening to every word, Alessandra can tell. If Zeke tells Adam that she used to go by Ali, she’ll never hear the end of it.

The husband reaches across the desk to give Alessandra a strong Silicon Valley handshake with intentional eye contact. “Jamie Chung,” he says. “Nice to meet you, Ali.”

Alessandra, she thinks, but she can’t bear to correct him, because she doesn’t want to seem pretentious. “I’ll be checking you in,”

Alessandra says. “I’ll just need an ID and a credit card.”

Jamie Chung slides a California driver’s license and a purple Reserve American Express card across the desk. “So you know Duff from high school?”

Duffy swats him. “We were best friends!” she says. “We were inseparable. Ali practically lived at my house. She was the one who held my hair that time I got so drunk on tequila—”

“Aha!” Jamie says. “You’re the reason my wife can’t drink margaritas.”

I didn’t give her the tequila, Alessandra thinks. I held her hair! But again, she keeps quiet.

“My parents loved Ali, my mother especially.” Duffy lowers her voice. “She used to talk about adopting you. She wanted to give you a nice normal home.”

Alessandra won’t take the bait, won’t mention that she had both a mother and a home, and she won’t give in to her rogue impulse to lean across the desk and say to Jamie in a stage whisper, I had an affair with Duffy’s father the spring of our senior year.

Instead, Alessandra says, “I’m going to comp your first night.”

“Oh my God, thank you!” Duffy says. “Aren’t you just the summer Santa!”

Ho-ho-ho! Alessandra thinks. “I never got you guys a wedding

present, so…”

Duffy’s brow wrinkles. “You didn’t?”

Alessandra shakes her head. Of course Duffy wouldn’t keep track of things like wedding presents; she might not even have set up a registry, she might have just asked guests to donate to Rosalie House. Though from the looks of her diamond ring, the whopper diamond studs in her ears, and her Cartier tank watch (probably a push present—oh, how Alessandra loathes this term), she might be more materialistic now than she was then.

“How about upgrading us to a suite as well?” Jamie asks. “If you have one available?”

They have seven suites available but Alessandra is so taken aback by Jamie’s brazen request—it’s a Taser to her sensibilities— that she says, “It looks like the suites are all spoken for.”

“It’s just, with the baby…” Jamie says.

“This is Cabot!” Duffy says, pulling a cherubic little baby in a sailor suit from the stroller.

Cabot Chung, Alessandra thinks. He’s a beautiful kid, at that most photogenic age for babies—what is that, six months, seven?

Alessandra waggles her fingers at him. She’s so unmaternal that this feels campy, but she goes all in with her gushing while inwardly she fumes. She offered Jamie and Duffy a free night but Jamie asked for more, so it feels like she hasn’t given them anything at all.

She makes a show of tapping on her keyboard. “I’m going to work some magic and slide you into a suite after all,” she says. “I’ll have Zeke set up a crib and babyproof the room.”

“Thank you!” Duffy says. “You’re amazing! Can we take you to dinner one night while we’re here so we can catch up?”

Alessandra peeks at her phone; there are two texts from a number she knows is Dr. Romano.

“I’m tied up all three evenings that you’re here,” she says. She activates the keys for suite 216 and slides them across the desk.

“But I’m sure we’ll find time to chat.”

“I can’t wait to text my parents and tell them I saw you,” Duffy says. “They won’t believe it!”

“Please give them my best,” Alessandra says.

Alessandra can’t help but revisit the fraught months that she was sleeping with Duffy’s father. Alessandra had been eighteen, which she thought was old enough, though now, nearly the same number of years later, Alessandra realizes it wasn’t old enough at all. She had been a teenager and Drew a tenured professor in his mid-

forties. However, Alessandra can’t call herself a victim, even through the lens of 2022.

She had always loved Drew, crushed on him, idolized him, seeing him as somewhere between an unattainable celebrity and a father figure. The Beechams owned an entire Victorian on Filbert Street that they’d inherited from Mary Lou’s parents. Classical music always spilled from the tantalizing, slightly ajar door to Drew’s study.

NPR played on a radio in the kitchen, where Mary Lou made the girls crepes for breakfast; for a weeknight dinner, she’d whip up Dover sole and frisée salad with lardons. Both Beecham parents read copiously; they subscribed to The Economist and the New York Review of Books; they attended the symphony. Alice Waters knew the Beechams by name, and they were always taking trips to Lisbon or Granada, where Drew would lecture. They weren’t wealthy but they were rich—with intellect, with ideas, with experiences.

Duffy, however, shared none of her parents’ interests. She liked Britney Spears and Buffy the Vampire Slayer and she was as much of a troublemaker as Alessandra, if not more so. She was the one who became friends with HB, the guy who met them in the Presidio with a bottle of Don Julio that fateful night. Duffy matched HB shot for shot, but Alessandra tossed her shots over her shoulder because she didn’t like the look of HB and didn’t want to lose control.

When Duffy started vomiting, Alessandra held her hair away from her face. It was ten o’clock p.m. on a raw Friday in March and they were sitting on the damp ground of Crissy Field. Alessandra wanted to leave, but Duffy couldn’t make it three steps without doubling over and retching. Alessandra had no choice but to call Drew.

The Beechams had been in the middle of hosting a dinner party; candles glowed in the dining room, bottles of excellent Napa cabernet sat empty on the table, but the conversation and the laughing quieted when Drew ushered the girls past the dining room and down the hall to the kitchen. Mary Lou stood up from the table, making a joke about teenagers: We all remember those days, right, Barry? But when she saw the state Duffy was in, she flamed with anger, which she aimed at Alessandra (the unparented bad influence) until she realized that Alessandra was sober. For some reason, this served to make her even more livid and she snapped at Drew to get Alessandra “out of my sight.”

Drew drove Alessandra home. She was numb from Mary Lou’s words; she felt like she’d been slapped—until that moment, she had been something of a pet to Mary Lou. Drew tried to apologize; he thanked Alessandra for being a good friend. “You’re a special young woman, Ali,” he said. “You have a savageness to you—I mean that as a compliment. You’ll get what you want out of this life.” The street in front of Alessandra’s building was dark and quiet. Drew shut off the car, which Alessandra found strange.

“Don’t you want to get back to the dinner party?” she asked.

Drew leaned his head back against the seat. “God, those people are so dull!” he said. “Barry Wilson was talking about annuities.” He turned to Alessandra. “When did I become such an…adult?”

“Are you worried about Duff?” Alessandra asked.

“She’ll be fine,” Drew said. “Tequila is its own punishment.”

Alessandra was about to reach for the car door and say, Okay, thanks for the ride, but something about Drew was different. He was staring at her front door. “Your mom’s at work?” he asked.

They both knew the answer was yes. Alessandra nodded.

“Will you be okay by yourself?”

Alessandra had been staying by herself since she was seven years old. She got the crazy idea that he wanted her to invite him inside. She leaned over, rested her hand lightly on his (upper) thigh, and kissed him. The kiss lingered; it was, to this day, the most romantic kiss of Alessandra’s life.

“This is a bad idea,” Drew said, but the next second he was opening his car door and they were heading into her house.

As much as Alessandra wants to dislike Jamie for shaming her into giving them a room upgrade, she has to admit that he seems to be an excellent father, husband, and guest. Zeke let it be known that Jamie tipped him a hundred bucks for babyproofing the suite, and early on their first morning, Jamie comes down to the lobby with the baby so that Duffy can sleep in. Alessandra watches him chat with the other guests; Cabot falls asleep in his arms while Jamie plays Louie in chess. (Louie wins.) Alessandra is on high alert every time the elevator dings, and the instant she sees Duffy step off, she beelines for the break room. She feeds a dollar to the jukebox and chooses Kiss, Ozzy Osbourne, and Metallica and then takes her angst—she can’t believe Duffy Beecham is here, haunting her!—out on the pinball machine. She plays one game, then a second, then a third (high score)—and then she hears Adam’s voice sing out. “Alessannnnnnndra, are you in here?”

“Hello?” Alessandra says, tearing herself away from the machine, though she has already dropped a fourth quarter in.

“Girl, get back out there! Edie is three-deep.”

Alessandra hurries back out, and sure enough, Edie has a line at the desk, the first ever since the hotel opened.

“Sorry about that,” Alessandra says.

“It’s fine,” Edie says. “I understand.”

You don’t, though, Alessandra thinks.

Duffy stops by the desk a while later with Cabot, who’s wearing a tiny bucket hat and a little bathing suit printed with sharks. “We’re taking him to the family pool,” Duffy says. “I’ll put him down for a nap around one and then I’ll come chat.”

“Whatever works!” Alessandra says. She doesn’t want to chat with Duffy. She doesn’t want to talk about high school or hear about Drew and Mary Lou (from Duffy’s Facebook, Alessandra knows that they’ve both put on forty pounds and turned gray) and she doesn’t want to learn about Duffy’s fabulous San Francisco life with her successful husband and adorable baby. But what she really doesn’t want is to be asked questions about herself. What were her years abroad like? Well, some of them were better than others. Alessandra held a string of jobs in beautiful hotels and she’d dated different men, all of them wealthy, most of them married, one of them—the one Alessandra thought would be her husband—a financial criminal, none of them appropriate. And what is her life like here on Nantucket? Last night, she slipped into Dr. Romano’s room; they ordered room service (Alessandra hid in the bathroom while it was

delivered) and had (completely mediocre) sex, and Alessandra left at two in the morning, emotionally numb.

When Duffy swings by on her way back up to her room, she says, “I’ll be back down in a little while. Jamie will stay in the room with

Cabot so that we can talk.”

“Great!” Alessandra says.

Once Duffy is on the elevator, Alessandra releases a low moan and Edie says, “Why don’t you take lunch now? You can go for as long as you want, it’s okay with me.”

Alessandra blinks. “Why are you being so nice to me?”

“I grew up on this island,” she says. “I check the cars in the parking lot of the Stop and Shop before I go inside. There are old friends I would do anything to avoid.”

Oh my God, Alessandra thinks. Edie does understand.

She takes one of the hotel bikes, goes to Something Natural, and sits at a picnic table for two hours, reading the new Elena Ferrante novel. When she arrives back at the hotel, Edie says, “You’re safe.

They went to the Oystercatcher for a late lunch and they’re staying

through sunset.”

“Thank you,” Alessandra says.

Once Alessandra learns Cabot’s schedule, she’s able to avoid a conversation with Duffy on day two and day three as well. She owes Edie big-time because she takes some seriously long-ass lunches, telling Duffy she has a doctor’s appointment and then a Zoom meeting she can’t miss. She blows Dr. Romano off on night two— she needs sleep—but she visits him late on night three, and after

they’ve had more mediocre sex, Alessandra finds herself weeping uncontrollably. Dr. Romano—his name is Mark—thinks she’s crying because she’s become emotionally attached and he’s leaving in the morning. Gently, he wipes her tears away with the pad of his thumb.

He has lovely hands and even lovelier fingers; he’s a surgeon.

“Please don’t cry,” he says. “We had a nice time together and that’s what matters, right?”

Yes, of course Alessandra will never see him again—he has a wife and two little girls in Kansas City—but that’s not why she’s crying. She shrugs.

“Is there anything I can do to make you feel better?”

“Just hold me,” she says, snuggling into him. “And if you could write a review on TravelTattler and mention me by name, that really helps. Just say I was exceptional on the desk or whatever.”

He tickles her ribs. “You were exceptional on the desk.” He reaches for the remote control and turns on the TV. Caddyshack has just started. “Have you ever seen this movie? It’s a laugh riot.”

Is there a man alive who doesn’t think Caddyshack is a laugh riot?

If so, Alessandra hasn’t met him. “I’ve never seen it,” she lies. “Is it about golf?”

“Oh, just wait, just wait,” he says. “That’s the judge…” Alessandra closes her eyes. “You’re going to love it.”

When Alessandra awakens, it’s very late, nearly three a.m. The doctor is snoring beside her and Alessandra slips from the bed and gets dressed. She needs to get home. The good news is she can leave through the front doors rather than sneaking down to the lower

level and going out the back because both Richie and Raoul will be gone. But when Alessandra enters the lobby, she sees Raoul just heading out. She comes to an immediate halt and ducks behind the corner but he must sense something because he turns and sees her.

She’s caught.

“Hey,” he says. “What are you doing still here?”

She cocks an eyebrow. “What are you doing still here?”

He shakes his head. “There was a domestic issue in suite two sixteen. I had to call the police.”

Alessandra says, “Suite two sixteen? Did someone complain about the baby crying?”

“The baby was fine, it was the parents. They had dinner at the Galley tonight, then I guess they had drinks at Lola, whatever, they were all lit up, and they had a fight that got loud and suite two fourteen called down and I went up first but it was above my pay grade, so then Richie came up. The wife was crying and calling the husband a bastard, and he was calling her a psycho, and she said she didn’t want him in their room…it was a mess. They pulled it together a bit when the cops showed up. It’s fine now and they’re checking out in the morning, thank God.”

“You’re sure the wife is okay?” Alessandra says. “He wasn’t hitting her, was he?”

“The husband took me aside and said she’s not really supposed to be drinking since she’s nursing, but she made an exception because she’s on vacation, and then she bumped into an old friend

who really triggered her.”

“‘Triggered’ her?”

“That’s what he said, yeah. And don’t ask me to clarify. I’m forty- two years old, I don’t even know what that word means.” Raoul musses Alessandra’s hair, which she’s sure is already pretty mussed. Raoul is the only person on planet Earth she would allow to do this. “What are you doing here again?” he asks.

“Oh, you know me,” Alessandra says. “I can’t get enough of this place.”

Later that morning, Alessandra places the folio for the Chung family in an envelope and hands it over with a smile. Sorry we didn’t get a chance to catch up…Me too, so busy…The baby…This stupid thing called work, only get a day off every two weeks…So much fun, thank you for hooking us up with the suite, here’s my number, call if you ever get back to San Fran, and hey, friend me on Facebook!

“I will!” Alessandra says. She won’t. “Bye!” Jamie and Duffy stroll cute baby Cabot right out the door. And that, Alessandra thinks, is that.

Except it’s not. A few days later, Alessandra and Edie are powering up their computers and getting ready to start the day when Richie suddenly pops out of the back office, terrifying them both.

“Whoa!” Edie says. “I thought there really was a ghost!”

Richie doesn’t seem amused, which is strange because normally he’s happy-go-lucky and always has a dad joke ready. But he’s clearly been here all night. Alessandra worked the graveyard shift

her first few months in Lake Como; she understands how it splinters your nerves.

He shakes a piece of paper at Alessandra. “You comped a night in a suite for a guest named Chung? No code, no explanation, and no sign-off!”

“I…did,” Alessandra says. She was so happy to have the Chungs gone (Duffy was “triggered”—Alessandra still hasn’t processed that one; if either of them should have been triggered, it was Alessandra, and what was that crack about the nice normal home?) that she completely spaced on the fact that she would have to explain the comped night. The desk staff are allowed to comp a night if something goes wrong—if guests have an unusually bad experience or if they can’t check in until after five o’clock—but staffers are not allowed to do what Alessandra did and comp at will. Every single comp must be run past Lizbet. Still, Alessandra had expected Richie to let it slide. He has never said a word about her taking five or ten bucks every few days from petty cash to pay for her lunch, though it’s possible he doesn’t know she does this. “Is it really that big of a deal?”

“It was a six-hundred-and-forty-five-dollar room rate,” Richie says.

“That needs to be paid. By you. You made a unilateral decision to comp the room.”

“Okay?” Alessandra says. “I’ll point out that Edie upgraded the Marsh family for the summer without anyone’s permission. That adds up to a lot more lost revenue than six hundred and forty-five dollars,

and no one is making her pay.”

Both Richie and Edie are silent.

Richie huffs. “Fine. I’ll let this go but don’t do it again, either of you.” He disappears back into Lizbet’s office.

Alessandra turns to Edie. “I should have just gotten them a

toaster,” she says.

Edie gives Alessandra a withering look.

“I’m sorry, Edie,” Alessandra says. She pauses. “Is it a desk thing to throw your helpful, kind coworker under the bus?”

“Your desk thing,” Edie says, and Alessandra is more relieved than she can explain when Edie lets the tiniest smile slip.